Animal instincts of homo sapien Hollywood are given a good airing in Scotty Bower’s unabashed biography, FULL SERVICE, MY ADVENTURES IN HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF THE STARS (GROVE PRESS).
Bi-sexual octogenarian Bowers outs many famous names, all fortuitously deceased and therefore unlikely to press for libel.
Discharged from military service at the end of World War II, the ebullient Bowers was a 23 year old bowser jockey pumping gas on Wilshire Boulevard.
As Hal David and Burt Bacharach said, ‘L.A. was about to become a great big freeway/Put a hundred down and buy a car/ In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star/ Weeks turn into years/How quick they pass/And all the stars that never were/are parking cars and pumping gas’.
Scotty Bower’s may never been a movie actor but his star was in the ascendency as a partner or procurer for studio types who swang both ways or wanted straight anonymous sex.
According to his Tinsel Town tell all, Walter Pidgeon was his entrée into the secret sex shenanigans, browsing Bowers at the bowser, gauging his boredom and bribing him to participate in a poolside petting session with Jacques Potts, movie milliner, or Hollywood hatter.
Not a movie star but certainly a Hollywood heartthrob, Bowers boasts of bedding Tyrone Power, Spencer Tracy, Vivian Leigh and Rock Hudson.
By his own admission, “living in Hollywood meant that you were never far away from a world of fantasy and make believe. Reality and fiction often blurred, even in the way people lived their lives. There was a wonderful duality about it all, a kind of mixing of personalities, times, eras, events.” So just how much is real or imagined or when you wish upon a star stuff, is a moot point.
The tone is not vindictive or muck raking, if anything it’s celebratory, a vivre la difference/ laissez faire tome.
“The truth is I never cared one iota about how people got their rocks off in private, just as long as they weren’t hurting anybody.”
Scurrilous, salacious, and as Noel Coward would say (he’s mentioned in the book) “I couldn’t have loved it more!”
© Richard Cotter
25th March, 2012
Tags: Movie Book Review- FULL SERVICE: MY ADVENTURES IN HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF THE STARS (GROVE PRESS), Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter.