Best-kept secret

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This article was published 13/12/2018 (2835 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Scotty Bowers is a Hollywood legend. Chances are, you have never heard of him.

And even in a town where fame is a marketable commodity, that’s the way Scotty liked it.

Scotty Bowers was in the people-pleasing business in California, starting in the years after the Second World War. That’s when Bowers, having seen brutal action in Iwo Jima with the U.S. marines, landed in L.A. to work at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. Unashamedly pansexual, the handsome Bowers was amenable when invited to the houses of celebrities such as Walter Pidgeon and George Cukor.

Soon, Bowers was hooking up, or facilitating hook-ups, with the cream of Hollywood elite — or at least those elites who preferred to keep their sexual preferences secret at a time when the whiff of scandal could terminate a career.

His life is the subject of the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. Director Matt Tyrnauer brought Bowers to the Toronto International Film Festival, where the two unveiled the sometimes-shocking documentary at what is arguably the epicentre of film culture in North America. Well, it’s shocking for those who may have believed, for example, that Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester were a happily married couple, or that Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn were each other’s secret lovers. The film tells a different story even as it focuses on Bowers, now 95, as he goes about living an eccentric hoarder’s life in Hollywood. The film was conceived as a mix of verité and Hollywood history, Tyrnauer says.

“Scotty is with us and very active, so the opportunity to film him as a verité character was irresistible,” says Tyrnauer, who cites Grey Gardens as one of his favourite films. “At the same time, he’s talking about people who were immortalized by film. And I’m a film fan and a student of old Hollywood and a native of the city.

“So as a filmmaker, to take these film clips which feature the people who Scotty knew — in every sense of the word — and show them was also an irresistible opportunity,” he says. “So what we did was a kind of blend between hopping around in the present and the archival past, in no particular order. I always wanted to make it that way.”

Bowers had gone through his life being discreet about his many lovers, which include serving as the apex of a ménage à trois with Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. He was unashamed then and is unashamed now, even at the risk of exposing longtime secrets.

“I think it is necessary,” Bowers says.

“Why go through life pretending? This is the way I am.

“And what way is that?” he adds. “All ways.”

Tyrnauer started the film on Bowers’ 90th birthday and shot for 2½ years. He says he showed the movie to Bowers just a few weeks before its TIFF première.

“And I’ve never shown a movie to a subject who accepted it with more equanimity and calmness,” he says. “His response after seeing it was: ‘The music is peppy and the words are peppy, too.’

“Clearly, I think he liked it, but he had no comments. He was nude on screen in all the archival photos, left and right. And it shows scenarios that, I think, someone might not be comfortable with, seeing his whole life unspooling before him.

“But Scotty is the most comfortable-in-his-skin person I’ve ever met,” he says. “I wish I could be as calm and well-adjusted as he is.”

It’s not the kind of description one expects for a person who was considered a pimp.

“You hear the word ‘pimp’ and you immediately think sinister and L.A. Confidential,” Tyrnauer says. “And yet he’s the least sinister man I’ve ever met.

“You realize that ‘pimping’ in the Scotty way was not a sinister profession. It was actually more of a protection of people’s lives and identities — people who had no other options because they were constrained by Hollywood contracts,” he says. “They couldn’t have authentic lives and Scotty enabled them to have those lives.”

One of the secrets of Scotty’s success may have been the fact that he was never inclined to be star-struck.

“I was always so busy with show-business people, I never had time to go to the movies,” Bowers says.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing