Scotty Bowers: The Gas Station Attendant Who Claimed to Run Hollywood's Secret Sex Ring
- 30 minutes ago
- 7 min read
For most of his life, Scotty Bowers was nobody in particular: a gas station attendant, then a bartender, a man who mowed lawns and did odd jobs around Los Angeles for decades. In 2012, at 88 years old, he published a memoir claiming that behind that ordinary front, he'd spent nearly 40 years secretly arranging sex, gay, straight and everything between, for some of the biggest names in Hollywood's golden age. The claims were explosive, largely unverifiable, and impossible to ignore. Many of the people he named were already dead and unable to respond. His book split Hollywood's remaining old guard into those who backed him up and those who called him a liar.
A Rough Start in Illinois and Chicago
William Bowers, later nicknamed Scotty, was born in 1923 on a small farm in Ottawa, Illinois. By his own account, he moved with his mother to Chicago around age 11 and began a sexual relationship with a Catholic priest living across the street, who paid him a dollar each time. He later said the arrangement expanded to include, in his words, most of the priests in the neighbourhood. Whatever the full truth of that claim, it set a pattern he described continuing for the rest of his life: a precocious, business-minded approach to sex that started as survival and eventually became a livelihood.
A Marine at Iwo Jima
Bowers enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in the Pacific during the Second World War, fighting at the brutal battle of Iwo Jima. He rarely spoke about combat in detail later in life, but friends and interviewers who pressed him described a man who'd clearly seen the worst of it and preferred not to dwell there. He returned to civilian life in 1946 and made his way to Los Angeles, where he took a job pumping gas at a Richfield station on Hollywood Boulevard.
The Man in the Lincoln
Bowers said his first encounter with Hollywood's hidden world came almost immediately. A well-dressed man pulled up to the pump in a Lincoln, introduced himself as Walter, paid for his gas, added a $20 tip, and asked Bowers to climb in. That man, Bowers later revealed, was the actor Walter Pidgeon, and the two reportedly spent the afternoon together along with Pidgeon's male partner, both of whom were married to women at the time. Bowers said the encounter opened his eyes to just how many of the industry's biggest names were living carefully hidden double lives, trapped by studio morality clauses and a Los Angeles vice squad Bowers described as more interested in blackmail leverage than actual law enforcement.
From the Pump to the Trailer
What started as one man's personal arrangement grew, by Bowers' own account, into something closer to an informal referral network. He installed a trailer behind the gas station with a bed, and began connecting the stars and closeted studio figures who approached him with a rotating cast of attractive young men and women, many of them fellow veterans or friends down on their luck. Bowers insisted for the rest of his life that he never took a cut of any money himself, framing what he did less as pimping and more as simply solving a problem nobody else could solve safely. He claimed to have arranged something like 15 to 20 encounters a day at his network's peak, on top of two or three of his own.
The Names He Named
Bowers' memoir, and the 2017 documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood that followed it, named an extraordinary list of alleged clients and partners. He claimed Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were a genuine couple who lived together for years, and said he'd slept with both of them individually and, on at least one occasion, together. He claimed Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's decades-long public romance, one of the most enduring myths of the studio era, was a manufactured cover story, insisting he'd personally slept with Tracy and had arranged partners for Hepburn on roughly 150 separate occasions over nearly four decades. He said he'd arranged liaisons for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor after their abdication scandal, claiming the Duke preferred men and the Duchess preferred women. His list of other alleged clients and partners stretched to Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Cole Porter, Vincent Price, Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, Rock Hudson, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, and even J. Edgar Hoover, whom Bowers claimed to have seen in women's clothing.
Alfred Kinsey's Star Subject
Bowers' connections apparently extended into legitimate research too. He said pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey sought him out directly, and that he became one of the only subjects able to answer yes to every single item on Kinsey's exhaustive sexual behaviour questionnaire. Bowers claimed he brought Kinsey along to Hollywood orgies to observe first-hand, supplied him with willing subjects, and even helped arrange for Egypt's exiled King Farouk to lend part of his private pornography collection to Kinsey's research. Whatever else is disputed about Bowers' account, his relationship with the Kinsey Institute is one of the few parts of his story that outside researchers have been able to independently corroborate.
The Stories Behind the Names
Beyond the roll call of famous names, Bowers' memoir is thick with specific, oddly vivid detail that reads less like a highlight reel and more like the kind of thing you'd only remember if you'd genuinely lived it, true or not. He wrote about arranging women for Desi Arnaz on the side while Lucille Ball, well aware of it, once fixed him with a cold stare across a party rather than saying a word. He described Bob Hope's visits to actress Barbara Payton lasting a brisk 20 or 30 minutes before Hope headed home to his own family. His account of Charles Laughton is one of the strangest in the book: Bowers claimed the actor, married to Elsa Lanchester in what both of them apparently understood wasn't a conventional arrangement, had developed an obsessive infatuation with Tyrone Power and had genuinely unusual personal habits, including an aversion to bathing that Bowers described in blunt, uncomplimentary detail. Tennessee Williams, according to Bowers, once wrote his own manuscript documenting their friendship and asked for it to be destroyed once he read it back, worried it made him sound like, in Bowers' retelling, the mother of all queens. Howard Hughes and Errol Flynn both turn up too, Flynn reportedly a willing participant in heterosexual orgies with young actresses Bowers helped arrange.
Not Everyone Believed Him
The backlash to Full Service was immediate and came from multiple directions. Skeptics pointed out that a huge share of the people Bowers named were already dead and unable to confirm or deny anything, and that virtually none of his most explosive claims came with any documentary evidence beyond his own memory. Cary Grant's own family pushed back specifically on the Randolph Scott claims; his fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, publicly maintained she'd seen no evidence of it, and his daughter Jennifer Grant, while acknowledging the persistent rumours in her own memoir about her father, stopped well short of confirming Bowers' account. Others, including longtime Hollywood insiders like Variety editor Peter Bart and the late gossip columnist Liz Smith, said publicly that Bowers' broader picture of the era's hidden sexuality rang true even if individual details couldn't be verified. Matt Tyrnauer, the director who spent years with Bowers making the documentary, said he'd tried to independently support every major claim in the film and came away convinced, describing Bowers as having an almost photographic memory. Whether that amounts to proof or simply a persuasive storyteller remains, by design, unresolvable. Most of the men and women named in Bowers' book left this world without ever addressing his claims directly.
A Wife of Nearly 40 Years
For all his stories about Hollywood's stars, Bowers' own domestic life was comparatively conventional. He was married to his second wife, Lois, for close to 40 years, until her death in 2018, and the two of them appeared together throughout the 2017 documentary living in a famously cluttered house in Laurel Canyon. The couple's daughter died at 23. Bowers rarely discussed her death publicly.
Full Service, the Documentary, and a Fictional Afterlife
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars was published in 2012, co-written with the help of writer Lionel Friedberg and, according to some accounts, with informal input from Bowers' longtime friend Gore Vidal, who'd first met him at the gas station back in 1947. The book became a bestseller almost entirely on the strength of its scandal value. Matt Tyrnauer's documentary followed in 2017, built around Bowers attending book signings and reuniting with old friends and clients well into his 90s. His story later inspired the character of Ernie, a gas station pimp played by Dylan McDermott, in Ryan Murphy's 2020 Netflix series Hollywood, a fictionalised reimagining of the era Bowers claimed to know better than almost anyone alive.
Death and Legacy
Scotty Bowers died at his Laurel Canyon home on October 13, 2019, at 96, survived by his sister. No cause of death was specified. Whatever the exact truth behind any individual claim in his memoir, and much of it will likely never be independently confirmed one way or the other, Bowers left behind an unusually vivid, first-person account of just how much energy Hollywood's golden age spent hiding the private lives of its biggest stars, and how far people were willing to go, and to trust one gas station attendant, to keep those lives hidden.
