Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars

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Maybe a self-protection mechanism kicked in, but he found his own way to deal with things and didn't let it get him down. Everything in his story rings true, in part because he doesn't seem like the kind of person who truly cares about celebrity, fame or money. An important content note: There is shit in this book (not just figuratively; be prepared to have the aforementioned Laughton and Power ruined for you forever) that is not fun or frisky at all. Eventually, a trailer was set up in the gas-station parking lot where gay, lesbian, and straight trysts were arranged discreetly by Scotty--not, he insists, for money but because he enjoyed helping people find sexual gratification (though he is careful to point out that the participants were free to exchange money among themselves; one wonders why he is so eager not to define himself as a pimp).

Sexually promiscuous yet able to compartmentalize his life, Scotty has a wife and child at home, but spends days, even weeks away from home, working as a bartender for friends’ parties, setting up tricks, and tricking himself. As a result - and his book reflects this - people more or less just drifted in and out and sometimes back into his life. After I bedded him at least a couple dozen times and spent long nights with him, he pretended that he didn't know me! Surprisingly, since Scotty does not stint on details for the most part in this book, he doesn't get around, in the whole chapter devoted to this event, to telling us whether he himself did Hoover. I'm not going to blindly accept everything he says as gospel, necessarily, because he didn't come out with his tell-all until almost everyone involved was dead.In the book Bowers claims he arranged gay or bisexual encounters for many actors and notable persons. After WWII, the studios realized how important/profitable it was to convey an image of success — and for America, that meant a squeaky-clean, conservative, hetero-normative image. I think that's enough time, and his stories give a huge insight into a cultural touchstone of American history that would have otherwise been lost to the sands of time. If it pretended to be a fiction book, I might be able to understand some of the things you can read in this piece of residual debris. Most of these celebrities were not publicly out during the prime of their lives and careers due to a "morals clause" written into their contracts.

Even the person on the field who told him the news that his brother had died soon died himself in the same way (cut in half by flying shrapnel). Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. That during his life he provided the STARS contact with, must have been at his own word, THOUSANDS of young men and women for sex and for that service alone he did not get a cent.

So one should dip into "Full Service" as not as if it was true or not (does that really matter) but the fact that one can go into Scotty Bowers world with a full appreciation of a life that was well-designed and in many ways beautiful. Even more troubling — especially in light of the current allegations about teachers at the Miramonte Elementary School — is Bowers matter-of-fact account of his childhood activities, which included his introduction to sex by his adult male neighbor, having sex with not one but several Roman Catholic priests, and arranging a lesbian tryst between a 13-year-old classmate and his own grade school teacher. usually the stories that are more fleshed out and less "We did this and that and I don't remember when". They would lose their contract, their reputations and even some would end up in jail, Scotty believes, if he hadn’t been such a ‘good guy’ by catering to their every desire or perversion.

There is so much in Full Service I have not even touched on — and that's just the way a book review should go, in my opinion.He shows no regrets and rationalizes that his life was dedicated to bringing ‘joy’ to a multitude of people.