Mr Sex Scotty Bowers' memoirs to lift the lid on Hollywood's debauched underbelly

ACTORS, politicians and royalty are alleged to have used the services of Scotty Bowers.

Scotty Bowers

THE stories have circulated for years: tales of a prostitution ring that operated during Hollywood's golden age, a hush-hush network that specialised in servicing the biggest stars.

The thing was, the man at its centre - Tinseltown's fabled "Mr Sex" - had always refused to speak. Until now.

Sitting on a veranda outside his home high in the Hollywood Hills, Scotty Bowers's eyes are watery, but still piercingly blue. "I came highly recommended and I didn't deal with anybody I didn't know . . . I got to know pretty much everybody," he says.

He's not joking. According to Anthony Lane, The New Yorker's film critic, Bowers "made his reputation by sleeping with everyone in Hollywood who wasn't actually Lassie".

A former marine, now 88, he claims to have arranged thousands of illicit sexual trysts and to have partaken in many, too. He says Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Edith Piaf, Noel Coward and Vivien Leigh were among his lovers, and that he supplied "over 150 different women" for Katharine Hepburn.

He claims Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes, Laurence Olivier and Bob Hope were clients and that he knows, first-hand, J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual. Oh, yes - and he says he slept with the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor.

If you believe his story - it's a big if, but several of Hollywood's cognoscenti say much, if not all, of what he says can be corroborated - Bowers was the man behind one of Hollywood's most enduring illusions.

In the 1940s and 50s, the film studios made their stars sign contracts attesting to their moral rectitude. Bowers is said to have been the fixer who enabled scores of debauched double lives behind the scenes.

That role required discretion, but he is about to publish a ribald memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. The 286-page book is not for the faint-hearted. Vivid descriptions of how superstars, for the most part secretly gay men, performed in bed abound. So, having kept quiet for so long, why speak out now? "Most of the people involved are dead - it can't hurt them," he says, adding that much of what he alleges has been rumoured for years. "And I was hoping that people would understand people a little better by reading the goddam book. You know, lots of people are very narrow-minded."

One of the stories that has not been directly corroborated is his claim to have met the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor in the late 40s or early 50s at a house in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.

He says he was introduced through Cecil Beaton, the English photographer who became an Oscar-winning stage and costume designer, the English actor Peter Bull and the Irish director Brian Desmond Hurst. According to Bowers, the duke's marriage was a decoy to hide the fact both he and the duchess were bisexual.

"Essentially, he was gay and she was a dyke - who gave a rat's ass?" Bowers says. Within 20 minutes of meeting the man who could have been king, "Eddy" was in his arms in a guesthouse at the end of the garden, he claims. The relationship endured for years, he says.

His journey into Hollywood's sexual underworld began by accident in 1946. After fighting in the Pacific during World War II he got a job at a petrol station on Hollywood Boulevard. One day actor Walter Pidgeon, then a big star, arrived in a Lincoln coupe. He waived a $20 note and propositioned Bowers, who soon found himself arranging trysts between Hollywood figures and good-looking buddies from the corps.

The petrol station became a kind of brothel, with a trailer where men and women would slink off to be serviced. It also became something of a Tinseltown legend, and those who insist Bowers is telling the truth include the writer Gore Vidal.

"Scotty doesn't lie - the stars sometimes do - and he knows everybody," Vidal says.

Matt Tyrnauer, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and an Oscar-nominated documentary-maker, has researched the era during which Bowers was most active, and says his name frequently crops up. "He'll come up in conversation . . . They all knew Scotty; he was someone to go to arrange liaisons," Tyrnauer says. "He was trusted by a tight and exalted circle of people. He serviced them sexually . . . and kept them company."

In person, Bowers still makes an impression. He has a shock of curly white hair and a disarming smile. At one point he describes Leigh's "very nice little body" and then claims to have arranged "a three-way" for her husband, Olivier. James Dean, he adds, was "a spoilt little boy"; John Holmes, the legendary porn star, was always "wiped out of his mind" on drugs; Brian Epstein - who asked Bowers where the Beatles should stay on their first trip to Los Angeles - was a "nice, nice man".

He may revel in tales of debauchery, but he manages to carry an air of innocence. He has a savant-like quality: a result of his refusal to be embarrassed by sex. He makes a comment that he says could serve as his motto: "The moment you start making excuses you've screwed yourself."

He insists he was never a pimp, because he never took a fee for arranging trysts in which he did not partake. Instead, he lived off his own "tricks", charging those he slept with $20 a time.

Whether all his stories are true may never be known, but Bowers is assured of a place in Hollywood folklore. One big question, of course, is how, over the course of more than three decades, he managed to elude the clutches of the LAPD Vice Squad.

He smiles and shrugs. "Partly because I never had a little black book. It was all in my head."