H’WOOD’S NO.1 PIMP TELLS ALL
Meet the man who arranged secretet sex for HHepburn, Grant, royals and more
IF you were sexually adventurous in 1940s Hollywood, you needed to know gas station attendant Scotty Bowers. Handsome, polite and reliable, the freshly discharged Marine, then in his 20s, was the unlikely conduit between Tinseltown’s matinee idols and the sex partners they secretly craved.
Bowers claims that Spencer Tracy, Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, among many other famous names, counted on him to arrange down-low flings — often with members of thehe same sex, which would have scan-scandalized their fans. Discreet eet liaisons began at $20 and nd were often carried out, at least initially, in a trailer r parked behind a Rich- field gas station on Hol- lywood Boulevard, where e Bowers also pumped fuel. el.
“I fixed up Rock Hudson son with several $20 tricks outut of the gas station [with Hudson servicing paying johns].] Rock was not yet famous and didn’t have a dime,” Bowers, now 95, told The Post. His exploits are the subject of the new documentary “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,” based on his 2012 memoir, “Full Service.”
Outlandish as it all may sound — and as convenient as it is that the stars who might challenge Bowers’ assertions about them are dead — Bowers is not alone in his claims. Lee Shook, a fellow hustler whom Bowers set up with celebs, states in the movie: “It’s all true.”
Bowers grew up in Chicago and served in World War II. While on a weekend pass in Southern California, he took a 16year-old girl to an hourly motel for a quick bit of fun and ran into Tyrone Power in the motel’s lobby. When the movie star offered to join them in their room, the girl was thrilled.
But not for long. “He proved to be more into me than he was into her,” said Bowers. “I felt a little bad for the girl. You could tell she was disappointed at not being number one.”
He moved to Hollywood after wrapping up his military stint in 1945. During Bowers’ earliest days at Richfield, the Oscar-nominatedno actor Wal
terter PidgPidgeon pulled in to buy gas for his Lincoln Continental.
He invited Bowers back to his home “for a dip in the pool and things like that.”
Bowers got in the car, went for a swim and, as he recalls in the documentary, “pretty soon, one person is touching. Things just kind of happen.” He adds of his sex work, “[Through] word of mouth, everything flows automatically. You couldn’t believe how busy I was.”
Through the course of hustling, Bowers had sex with the secretly gay Cary Grant — in fact, there were threesomes with Bowers, Grant and the British actor Randolph Scott, right under the nose of socialite Barbara Hutton, who was married to Grant at the time — and regularly sold his body to horror star Vincent Price.
“Vinny was a sweetheart and very flexible,” said Bowers. “On the night he married his third wife, Coral Browne [in 1974], she spent the night with [English actress] Marion Davies and I spent the night with Vinny. It was very nice. Everything was buddybuddy. He was into it all, giving and receiving.”
BUSINESS got so good that he brought on some fellow ex-Marines to pick up the slack.
“Everyone got dumped out of the service after World War II,” Bowers said. “You could work hard for $10 per day [as a waiter] or make $20 in minutes [hustling].”
Since his guys were usually on the receiving end of pleasure, he would advise them, “If you want to close your eyes and pretend it’s your girl, do.”
When the great thespian Laurence Olivier came to town, it could be a bit of a mixed bag. The “Wuthering Heights” actor generally requested “a busty blonde” and a well-endowed male.
The women invariably rotated but once he found a guy he liked, Olivier requested repeat meetings. “Even though he was married [to ‘Gone With the Wind’ star Vivian Leigh]” Bowers wrote in his book, “he secretly harbored a liking for boys.”
Bowers made it his business to know what his clients desired: George Cukor — director of classics such as “My Fair Lady” and Judy Garland’s “A Star Is Born” — “was 100 percent” a giver of pleasure
Bowers sometimes put up with discomfort to keep other people happy. “Spencer Tracy would chew on [me]. That hurt sometimes, but I didn’t mind.”
Despite a string of movie roles opposite his real-life love interest Katharine Hepburn, Tracy was as uninterested in women as Hepburn was in men, according to Bowers.
“Hepburn was very butch,” he remembered. “Over the course of 49 years, I fixed her up with 150 women. But that was not unusual. I fixed up Cole Porter with 150 men in three months. He’d tell me to bring 15 guys at a time, [administer oral sex] to all of them in less than an hour, and say, ‘Too bad we didn’t have more.’ ”
Bowers admits he accepted money from satisfied clients for his own services, but said he never took a cut from any of the Marines he set up with Hollywood stars.
Unlike many of his recruits, Bowers was seemingly never a stranger to transactional sex.
As an 11-year-old, growing up in Chicago, he remembered, “I was out tricking every day . . . mostly with men but also with women. It started with a [male] schoolteacher who was hot for the little girl I went with, and the teacher’s brother was gay. I went with the brother and the girl went with the teacher.”
They received modest pay for their services, “and it was all very nice.”
In the documentary, director Matt Tyrnauer tells Bowers that some people would view such activities as child abuse.
Bowers then shoots back, “Being abused? Absolutely not. There’s no such thing as someone ruining your life when they [have sex with you].”
NOT all of Bowers’ showbiz clientele was gay. Errol Flynn, he said, had proclivities for women who were of legal age but looked pubescent. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor “went back and forth, both ways. They liked a three-, four- and five-way deal” — usually including Bowers. Howard Hughes demanded women who wore no makeup and were blemish-free.
“Howard would see a woman he liked and say to get her an apartment,” remembered Bowers. “The studio [RKO, owned by Hughes] would send two checks: one for her rent and one for her to [be on call]. Sometimes Howard would show up after four years and say to the girl, ‘Let me look at your [breasts].’ Then he’d disappear for another four years.”
Bowers pulled his own disappearing act in the 1980s; as AIDS ravaged his world, he pretty much dropped out of the hustling business. He made ends meet by bartending and through the kindness of old pals.
“A lot of people left things for me when they died,” he said. “My friend Beach Dickerson [a minor actor and major real estate investor] left me $300,000 and two houses in Laurel Canyon.”
Though the Hollywood hustler married cabaret singer Lois Broad in 1984, she currently lives in Texas. Meanwhile, Bowers is still going strong — and sexually driven.
“I’m not making money from it anymore, but I still have sex with a few different people,” he said.
“Men, women — why not?”
Vinny V was a sweetheart and very flexible. He was into it all, giving and receiving. — Scotty Bowers on longtime hookup Vincent Price