Film showcases procurer of closeted Golden Age

Matt Tyrnauer first heard about Scotty Bowers long before making a film — one that’s sure to raise eyebrows — about the genial provider and purveyor of sex for some of Hollywood’s most famous and closeted Golden Age celebrities.

Five years before Bowers released his infamously titillating 2012 memoir, Full Service, about his sexcapades spanning decades, Tyrnauer wrote a Vanity Fair profile about former talkshow host and entertainment mogul Merv Griffin.

“(Griffin) told me about a gas station (where Bowers worked) on Hollywood Boulevard and the cars used to line up around the block and I remember thinking that’s a story I should pursue,” said Tyrnauer, director of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, now at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Tyrnauer heard from others too, including author/essayist Gore Vidal, who became a good friend. (Tyrnauer became Vidal’s literary editor after his death.)

When Vidal said he wanted to see Bowers again after so many years, Tyrnauer took the opportunity to reach out just as Bowers’ 90th birthday was approaching.

“I was lightly pursuing this story for a long time but I just never thought that (Bowers) would be alive so I was in no rush. Finding out that he was alive was the most scintillating thing ever,” Tyrnauer recalled in an interview with the Star.

The result is a revealing and ribald documentary with an engaging and genial protagonist whose revelations are sure to bring consternation to many fans of late Hollywood stars, such as Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and director George Cukor.

“Someone said, ‘well, no one will watch Turner Classic movies the same way again,’ ” Tyrnauer said, with a laugh.

“This is a bigger story than ‘I slept with Cary Grant’ plus about a hundred other people who were famous. There’s something so refreshing and . . . enlightening about (Bowers) and that’s a big part of why I wanted to make the movie,” Tyrnauer said.

“When you think ‘pimp,’ you think ‘sinister’ immediately, but (Bowers) was not that at all. He was someone who was a helpful person, someone with a passion — an obsession, almost — with making people happy, often through sex but across all aspects of life.

“There’s a kind of forthrightness and simplicity to (Bowers). Clearly he was born without shame and never adopted the paradigm of shame that almost every other human being on Earth falls victim to,” he added.

The director is a Los Angeles native whose father worked in television as a writer/producer, including the well-remembered ’70s detective series Columbo, starring Peter Falk.

“This primed me, I think, to be interested in a story like this, which shows Hollywood from a completely different angle and is very much a counter-narrative to the packaged image of Hollywood,” Tyrnauer said.

“And Hollywood, if it’s anything, is the greatest packager of images that the world has ever known,” he added.

Tyrnauer is unconcerned about potential outcry from aggrieved fans.

“I think films should challenge people’s perceptions. Why do we have films, books and art? To have it be a kind of archival clip show that’s a gentle tour through the Golden Oldies that will make the occasional lady clutch her pearls is the least I wanted to do,” Tyrnauer said.

“A grand lady of New York society asked me what I was working on and I told her about this movie and she’s said, ‘that’s terrible, you’re ruining my image of Cary Grant.’ We then proceeded to speak of nothing else but Scotty Bowers for the next three hours. I rest my case.”

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood has its final TIFF screening on Saturday.