SE P T E M B E R/ OC T O B E R 2 0 1 2 V I D E O • A G E 14 It’s not an earthquake you’re feeling; it’s some of Hollywood’s most noteworthy alum rolling in their graves, because the private things they did between the sheets have been exposed by former gas station attendant/bartender/ handyman Scotty Bowers in Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, 286 pages, $25.00), written with producerdirector Lionel Friedberg. Beginning in the 1940s, Bowers —now 88 — arranged sexual liaisons for the Hollywood elite. He began this alternative career quite by accident. In 1946, when he was 23 years old, fresh out of the Navy and working at Richfield Gas Station on Hollywood Boulevard, actor Walter Pidgeon invited Bowers to his home for a little hanky panky. Thereafter, Bowers became the “go-to guy in Hollywood for arranging tricks.” Friends Bowers met during his service in the Marines were happy to be “rented” out to perform all sorts of sexual acts (either heterosexual or homosexual) for money, regardless of their sexual persuasion. The network of people Bowers had at his disposal gradually expanded to include friends of friends and even girlfriends of his Marine buddies. The majority of the stars Bowers exposes are male, and most (both male and female) are either gay or bisexual. The people who came looking for tricks weren’t all Hollywood men, either, “some came from the corporate and banking community,” he tells us. Bowers doesn’t mince words; he describes the encounters, particularly those between people of the same sex, in graphic detail. Bowers reveals the sexual preferences and recounts numerous excursions of big stars fromoldHollywoodwhohave passed away, including Katharine Hepburn; Spencer Tracy; Vivien Leigh (with whom Bowerswas involvedwhileshewasmarried to Laurence Olivier); Olivier himself, who was gay, according to Bowers; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; director George Cukor; Cary Grant; Walter Pidgeon; Desi Arnaz (whose wife, Lucille Ball, confronted Bowers at a party, demanding he stop setting her husband up with other women); Noël Coward; Tyrone Power; Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein; J. Edgar Hoover (who reportedly dressed in drag when Bowers met him one weekend in the late 1950s); Errol Flynn; Cole Porter; Bob Hope; William Holden; William Somerset Maugham; Rock Hudson; Phyllis Gates (Hudson’s lesbianwife);MontgomeryClift, and James Dean, to name a few. Despite the host of names Bowers mentions, one can’t help but wonder: Did he — for one reason or another — leave anyone out? He debunks the myth of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s love affair, calling it a “nonexistent fairytale romance that the studio publicists and the spin doctors had concocted to conceal [Hepburn’s] lesbianism.” His take on the romance illustrates the power the studios had (and by all accounts still have) over their stars and the public. The author backs up his claim by revealing that, “in the course of time I would fix [Hepburn] up with over 150 different women.” Another example of the studios’ power is their ability to keep Rock Hudson’s homosexuality under wraps. His sexual orientation was, as Bowers writes, one of the “most closely guarded secrets in Hollywood,” until his death of AIDS in 1985. But Bowers claims that this type of fabrication extended past Hollywood and into Britain’s royal family. According to Bowers, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were both gay, and their controversial love affair, which led to Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne, was simply a ploy to hide his homosexuality from the public. The fake love story is still believed today, and fans of Madonna’s 2011 filmW.E., whose premise rests on the notion that the Duke and Duchess had a great love affair, will no doubt be disappointed after reading Bowers’s book. Bowers ran a booming business. “In the height of my tricking days…I was setting up an average of 15 to 20 tricks a day. This was a 24/7 operation, extending over a period of, say, 30 to 40 years. As for tricks that I performed personally, I was often seeing two or three people a day,” Bowers writes. Throughout the book, he constantly reminds us that he never took money unless he performed the trick himself, calling his activities “match-making,” rather than pimping and insisting, “what really drove me was a desire to keep people happy. And the way I did that was through sex.” With business booming as it did, it’s a wonder the operation was never shut down by the police. Bowers was able to keep his so-called “match-making service” under wraps, despite the expansive network of people involved. But this wasn’t an easy feat, in large part due to the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) vice squad, which “mercilessly hounded members of the gay and lesbian communities.” Fear of the vice squad may have helped keep Bowers’s activities secret, as those involved would have dreaded the potential consequences if the police caught on. In 1950, Bowers considered discontinuing his service, in part because “the tricking business was getting totally out of control. The number of calls that I was receiving…became too many to handle.” But people continued to come to him for tricks, even after he left the gas station to become a bartender, and Bowers continued to set them up. Still, Bowers was “increasingly fearful of being busted by the ever-lurking vice squad,” and he thought the jig was up one night in the mid-’50s, when he was pulled over by an LAPD officer. However, much to Bowers’s surprise, instead of booking him, the officer brought Bowers to a secluded area, where he made a pass at him. Ultimately, Bowers put an end to the operation in the ’80s due to the spread of AIDS. But behind the gossip are a host of ethical questions. Bowers writes, “For whatever reason, people have always found me easy to trust.” But in writing this book, he has betrayed their trust, and it is up to readers to decide how much to believe. According to the author’s note, “This manuscript is based on my memory and, to the very best of my ability, reflects actual incidents and personalities as I recall them.” This is quite a disclaimer: The stories in Bowers’s book are only as accurate as his memory. And yet he writes with such authority about personal matters regarding people who have died and can neither confirm nor deny the allegations. If we’re to believe him, Bowers explains his motivation for writing the book accordingly, “I have always been reticent to reveal details about what I have done, mainly to respect the privacy of those whose lives have intersected with mine. But…over the years many people have told me to write about my experiences and share them with others…Now, as I take stock of myself in my twilight years…I feel compelled to share my story.” But is Bowers justified in revealing these secrets simply because the subjects have passed away? Or does he still owe them — and even their fans — the secrecy he promised when they were living? Or, is he doing some of these stars a service by revealing their true selves as he saw them? After all, in many cases the studios may have presented these stars falsely. Is Bowers’s motivation for writing this book truly, as he says, to tell his story? Or is it merely to make money? Perhaps it’s even a form of damage control, to avoid being painted in an unfavorable light if someone else were to tell his story first. No doubt, Bowers has crafted an interesting story, and if you’re a gossip hound, you’ll want to pick this book up. But in terms of literary value, or even historical value, this may not be a story that had to be told. SA Kiss and Tell: The Clandestine Sex Lives of Hollywood Stars B o o k R e v i e w
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