Hollywood Gas Station Pimp Tells All

We first meet Scotty Bowers in a bookstore where he is signing copies of his 2012 book, “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Sex Lives of the Stars,” which fascinated documentary film director Matt Tyrnauer and led him to make the surprisingly touching “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,” which has just been released.

Bowers is 95, with a weathered face and a head covered with masses of thin gray curls. Irrepressibly cheerful and still active — at one point he climbs a ladder to examine a roof  — he does not fit the  stereotype of a pimp, with its racial overtones and suggestions of violence. Yet that is what many people would call Scotty Bowers.

Bowers came to Hollywood after serving in the Marines during World War II. Handsome and outgoing, he got a job at a service station on Hollywood Boulevard, where one day Walter Pidgeon stopped for gas. Pidgeon then invited Bowers to his home for “a swim.” Pidgeon introduced the ex-Marine to his friends, and soon Bowers says he was running the movie world’s best-kept open secret: the town’s biggest and most discreet gay brothel. He even set up a trailer behind the station where trysts were consummated on two beds separated by a partition. “I created the rainbow in Hollywood,” he declares.

Yet Tyrnauer is not interested in presenting a film exposé. Instead his story — or Bowers’ self-narrated story — is about what it meant to be young and gay in midcentury America, and how a farm boy became first a Marine and then Hollywood’s go-to procurer for men and women such as Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (they lived together off and on for nearly 12 years), Charles Laughton (who only wanted Bowers himself), Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Cole Porter, Rock Hudson and even one former king.

Bowers maintains that Hollywood was a town of open secrets. When an actor was a confirmed bachelor — Hudson was 30 when he suddenly married his secretary after magazines threatened exposure of his homosexuality — or an actress lived with a female roommate in her mansion, everyone knew what it meant and no one cared. Bowers says he provided an outlet for gay men and women who otherwise would have been repressed. “Everyone had fun,” he declares.

Much of “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” is taken up with Bowers puttering around the incredibly cluttered house — he is a hoarder of paper, trash, books, photographs, even discarded toilets — he shares with his second wife of 35 years. (His first wife and his daughter both died within a year of each other.) As Tyrnauer pulls details of Bowers’ life out of him, we learn the troubling fact that he had his sexual initiation at 11 with a male neighbor. Some would call that abuse, the director says off camera; “No, I knew what I was doing,” responds Bowers.

The ethics of outing people posthumously will rightly bother some people. And Bowers’ take on clerical abuse scandals will bother everyone. But when Tyrnauer concentrates on Bowers’ giggly, salty-tongued recollections of a life of consensual pleasure, the film is fun. 

(Be aware: This is the most body-explicit film I have ever seen. There are images of full frontal and rear male and female nudity. No one at the showing I attended seemed bothered by a group of naked soldiers marching straight at the camera.)

“Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” was released this month. It is playing for only one week in Millerton. It may soon be in other area theaters.