Full service My adventures in Hollywood and the secret sex lives of the stars

A memoir about the author's role in the secret sex lives of Hollywood's Golden Age stars. Bowers, a long-time Hollywood hanger-on, delivers a bizarrely upbeat, frequently stomach-churning chronicle of profligacy and perversion that frankly beggars belief. Presenting himself as some unholy amalgam of a pimp, prostitute and Jiminy Cricket, Bowers maintains an unfailingly aw-shucks tone as he details the erotic peccadilloes of dozens of iconic actors, including a coprophagous escapade with Charles Laughton that will haunt the nightmares of most readers. In Bowers' telling, the author, a good-natured Midwesterner freshly discharged from the Marines, became the center of a prostitution underground almost immediately upon his arrival in Tinseltown, cheerfully arranging trysts by the thousands to suit any and all tastes, however outr, while being relentlessly seduced by every homosexual connected to the film industry. Bowers protests continuously that he sees nothing wrong with facilitating adultery and all manner of deviance on an epic scale, as sex is a natural drive that shouldn't be beholden to social mores. This point becomes harder to defend as he glowingly describes his childhood sexual abuse involving a friend's father, customers along his paper route, and various Catholic priests. Bowers' largesse extends to these predators, who are unfailingly described as sweet, kind, gentle, lonely souls looking for a little harmless comfort. This attitude suggests an insane level of denial or merely denotes the fevered musings of a fantasist with no regard for the reputations of dozens of prominent figures in American popular culture. A singularly off-putting and seamy reading experience.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Cary Grant was as suave in real life as he was on the screen. He was the quintessential Mr. Smooth. He was 40 years old when I met him and everything he did was executed in precise, dapper and debonair style. Although she wasn't around when I met him, he was married to Barbara Hutton at the time. Which did not surprise me. The day I was introduced to him he was actually sharing the house with another actor, Randolph Scott. It was patently clear to me that he and Cary Grant were more than mere friends. The proof arrived that first weekend that I spent with them. The three of us got into a lot of sexual mischief together. *** Over the next 50 years Katharine Hepburn and I would become the very best of friends. In the course of time I would fix her up with over 150 different women. Most of them she would only see once or twice, and tire of them immediately. But there was one exception. There was a very cute little 17-year-old trick that I set Kate up with early in our friendship. The girl's name was Barbara. Shortly after they started seeing one another Kate bought Barbara a brand new two-toned Ford Fairlane as a gift. Kate saw Barbara off and on for just over 49 years. Three months before dear Kate passed away in June 2003 Barbara received a letter from Kate's attorneys. With the letter was a check for $100,000. *** Another guy in town who had an absolute passion for Marines was the composer and lyricist Cole Porter. I don't recall exactly when he called me out of the blue at the gas station one evening. He said he'd heard that I knew a lot of Marines and asked me if I could come over to his place with two or three of them at around midnight on the following Saturday night. When I arrived at Porter's place with three ex-Marines a party was already in progress. There wasn't a woman in sight. Most of Porter's guests were younger men, all of them strikingly handsome. I soon learned that his passion was oral sex. He could easily suck off twenty guys, one after the other. And he always swallowed. Excerpted from Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars by Scotty Bowers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.