For those that have an interest in the golden age of Hollywood, when the greats such as Garbo, Hepburn, Wayne, Grant and co. ruled the movie world, there has always been, lurking just beneath the surface, Scotty Bowers.
He has been mentioned in numerous biographies and Hollywood tell-alls as a rent boy, pimp or simply a highly sexed bar tender. His conquests were said to include Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh and Cary Grant.
Decades of interview requests were politely declined by Bowers, and even the pieces that mention him are always apt to state that Scotty was so popular because he was discreet and trustworthy. Until now.
Close to 90, he decided to finally lift the lid on his most astonishing of lives. From his childhood where he became victim of paedophiles (which he saw nothing wrong with), to a World War II verteran and eventual rise to the number one go-to-guy for whatever sexual desires and perversions the Hollywood set could devise.
Never have I read a book that evokes such a range of emotions from envy, distaste, sadness, disbelief, incredulity…and the list goes on. While America went to the movies, the movies went to Scotty Bowers.
At first Bowers is refreshingly honest ” I was proud of my dick and happy to share it” but as the book goes on the confessions get extremely uncomfortable – put it this way, you really don’t want to know what Charles Laughton liked in his sandwiches.
Even though the majority of those Bower’s discusses are dead, their fans should steer clear of this particular memoir. Though they were far from perfect, Bower’s goes far out of his way to cheapen their memory with explicit detail.
His own personal life was a mess. He had a wife in name only, whom he cheated on for years. Their daughter died tragically after a botched abortion at age 23. Perhaps he was a product of the damaged childhood he has tried to rationalise in his own mind.
Despite setting up thousands of sexual encounters, Bower’s claims that he never made any money from his operation, and this is where the his credibility begins to slip a little. Was this really the case?
Whatever you may think of Bower and his motives, you have to admire his sheer openmindness to, well, absolutely anything really. He judges no one by their sexual proclivities, even when they are illegal. He saw a side of Hollywood that few others did, the only difference is that he decided to share it with the world while he was still here.
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