A minor controversy in the normally placid classic movie world accompanied the 2012 publication of the randy memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg.
The book was a highly detailed (sometimes nauseously so) tell-all about the sexual preferences a gaggle of Hollywood stars (many British) in post-World War II Hollywood. Many of the book’s assertions were not new but some were. In any case, it’s fascinating reading.
Well, here we are a half dozen years later, and Full Service is now the subject of a newly released ‘documentary feature’ by Matt Tyrnauer — Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood — featuring the 95-year-old Bowers expounding on his tell-all tome in what critic Joe Morgenstern calls a “cheerfully matter-of-fact voice.”
Morgenstern is direct about Bowers: Simply put, (he) was during a good part of Hollywood’s golden age, a pimp to the stars. Less simply put, he was a pansexual pimp and an unquenchable hustler.
Bowers came from the Midwest, served with the Marine Corps. in the Pacific and settled in Los Angeles immediately following his WW II discharge. He found himself pumping gas at a filling station at the corner of Van Ness Ave. and Hollywood Blvd. (near the Paramount studio).
One day, he claims, Walter Pigeon drove by, and invited Bowers to parttake in a sexual triangle involving the actor and another man.
Bowers accepted, and thus, according to his book, began the formation of a secret prostitution ring catering largely to gay and bisexual men and women, many familiar stars. For a selection of big names in the Forties and Fifties, Bowers was the go-to guy to arrange that illicit rendezvous.
For the record, he insists that he was never a pimp. And, despite his personal involvement in countless homosexual “tricks” over decades, he maintains he always has preferred sex with women.
Bowers says he arranged multiple gay liaisons for director George Cukor, composer Cole Porter, and even the Duke of Windsor. He numbers character actor Franklin Pangborn as regular client. There are by-now familiar assertions in his book about the household sharing of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, and more information on Rock Hudson.
Here’s a item from the book about Vivien Leigh. At the time working as a bartender-caterer of celebrity parties, Bowers claims to have had an assignation with Vivien in a guest house on the estate of her close friend, director Cukor, just as A Streetcar Named Desire was going into production in the early Fifties.
She was a hot, hot lady, reports Bowers. She was very sexual and very excitable…That night we screwed as though the survival of the world depended on it…She had orgasm after orgasm and each one noisier than the last.
Reading an explicit account of an encounter with Charles Loughton requires a sturdy stomach to digest. That kind of behavior may seem disgusting but, you know, it’s surprising how much of it goes on, writes Bowers in his Happy-Hooker prose style. So who was I to judge? To each his own.
Tyrone Power and Laurence Olivier are depicted as harboring “unusual fetishes.” Bob Hope is said to have preferred paid heterosexual encounters with older women that were efficient — short and presumably sweet.
The book’s most controversial claim is that Katherine Hepburn was a confirmed lesbian with complexion problems, and that Spencer Tracy indulged in sex with men. Bowers dismisses the time-honored image of the pair as longtime lovers, virtually an old-married couple.
Interestingly, according to Morgenstern, Bowers comes across in the new movie as companionable, disarmingly likable, honorable by his own lights, unfailingly amiable and kind to animals.
Now this subject that Joe & Frank have introduced should get a whole load of COMMENTS…
Not really… Well, I’ll start off by saying that SCOTTY and his SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD was well known to the industry at the time, and the public got educated to it starting in the 1950’s with the scandal sheets like Confidential magazine and others.
In Britain, it was standard fare for the Sunday newspapers like Rupert Murdoch’s News Of The World.
Author Kenneth Anger’s HOLLYWOOD BABYLON lead the parade of “exposure” back in the 1970’s, and a lot of what he detailed thought sexed up fiction at the time, has since been well confirmed as fact.
The question is, do you really want to know the sordid details of your favorite stars. Do you really want to know that Danny Kaye was gay, let alone he was not the most pleasant person to be around?
Does finding out change your perceptions of these people when you watch their movies?
HOLLYWOOD has NEVER been just about entertainment alone. It’s always been a powerful tool of the “powers-that-be” to control your perceptions of everything. Whether it’s politics, sex, morality, it’s an easy to swallow propaganda weapon that’s so much more dangerous and devastating than mere bombs and missiles.
The studios knew from the very start what their stable of stars preferences, fetishes and other vices were. Their police departments weren’t just their to stop the fans from coming through the gates without a pass or climbing over the fences to get autographs. The studios had their own detectives, their own connections with the local police, FBI and the CIA.
The studios always knew what actors were ‘on’ and what their addictions needed, they kept them well supplied, as that made controlling them a whole lot easier.
Scotty Bowers was just one of many who scratched out a living pimping for the stars, he just happened to ‘write’ a book.
Today in HOLLYWOOD, the street hustling tradition is still going strong, the girls work Sunset boulevard, the boys work Santa Monica boulevard and the transgender work both.
Of course now it’s not so much stars as businessmen and women, politicians, clergy and alike who do the “picking up.”
Forget “Orange Is The New Black,” the new normal is abnormal.
Family values and morality are outlawed and ridiculed in this new all-PC world, and HOLLYWOOD leads the way, spreads the word.
There’s nothing wrong in being gay… What’s wrong is how it is used as an agenda, how it is literally being rammed-down-our-throats as the new trend we should all subscribe to.
As I’ve detailed before, it’s all about social engineering, messing with our mind, distracting us, but above all dividing us!
The rich and powerful always play both sides… They love left against right, black against white, christian against muslim, and straight against gay.
Scotty’s book is purely aimed at the ageing baby boomers who remember and worshiped the old stars. It’s written to burst their bubble of their heroes and role models…
Unfortunately, we’ve all had our bubbles burst way before his book came along… We’ve all been fooled, lied to, traumatized and used to the point, that does anything we see or hear today really SHOCK us anymore?
I agree with Humphrey Bogart’s remark: “The only thing that you owe the public is a good performance”.
Well, in the absence of any other comments…
The fascinating, mind-blowing irony of Scotty’s book FULL SERVICE, which went on to become a best seller and fully distributed and well received documentary playing at numerous festivals, is just how well, how widely promoted and heralded it became, for just being a very graphic, pornographic dirty book.
It vividly shows just how times, and the social engineered agenda have changed.
I’m sure that Scotty is very truthful, certainly very open with his book… And having been born and raised in Britain, knowing just how kinky, dirty and downright perverted our leaders, politicians and Royal’s are, it’s no surprise or great revelation to discover that the same is true for HOLLYWOOD.
Remember a few years back, noted author Gay Talese’s titillating
THE VOYEUR’S MOTEL, about the motel owner who spied on the lovemaking of his guests for decades, and which also was made into a documentary…
Well, Scotty Bowers now at age 94, is continuing to revel in being a hero and superstar of the gay community, a cause celeb indeed, and who came blame him for not enjoying it. At last he is a HOLLYWOOD star just like those he “serviced.”
What an irony… And at his age, what does he care. Is he going to get sued or suicided by the rich and powerful?
Of course not, he’s actually being used by them, and like so many other, the term is “useful idiots,” he probably doesn’t even know it, and wouldn’t care if he did.
I’ve read his book, and seen parts of the documentary, and his genuinely open and likable personality really stand out… But the way he has been given such widespread promotion and applause, the way he so quickly made it to the NY and LA Times bestseller lists, the CBS Sunday MorningTV and other mainstream media interviews, you have to wonder why NOW all of a sudden?
You get a good sense of Scotty and his pimpy life, in a YouTube video where he was interviewed by an old HOLLYWOOD insider reporter Skip E Lowe.
The documentary is slickly produced, and will probably make it to Netflix where it’s porno-chic appeal will garner even more profits for the rich and powerful… It’s all kind of like the 1976 award winning NETWORK movie, and Scotty is the kinkier version of that great prophet of the airwaves Howard Beal.
I agree with Humphrey Bogart’s remark: “The only thing that you owe the public is a good performance”.