Telling Hollywood’s secrets

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This article was published 15/12/2018 (2832 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As reportage, the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood follows in the tradition of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books, revealing shocking truths behind the facade of Hollywood wholesomeness of bygone years.

Scotty Bowers was in a position to be privy to many secrets. After he returned home from the Second World War, where he saw brutal action in Iwo Jima, Bowers landed in Los Angeles in 1946, manning the pumps at a Hollywood Boulevard gas station. Unashamedly pansexual, the all-American-handsome Bowers found himself fielding and accepting sexual offers from the gay, bisexual or sexually adventurous elite of Hollywood’s ranks, including Walter Pidgeon and My Fair Lady director George Cukor. Soon thereafter, Bowers also acted as an intermediary, providing willing players to discreetly gratify the desires of stars and filmmakers for whom the whiff of non-heterosexual activity could end careers.

Bowers’ memoir Full Service was the basis for this film by journalist-filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer (Studio 54, Valentino: The Last Emperor) and on its own, could have been a pretty explosive piece of work at this point in history, when populist politicians love to sell their bases a vision of a white-picket-fence heteronormative past when men were men and women were women and the only scandal was when a man fooled around with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

That, of course, is what we were led to believe about the titillating relationship between frequent co-stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, suggesting their on-screen chemistry occasionally combusted in their private lives. Bowers says he himself slept with Tracy and set up Hepburn with dozens of women, implying that even the naughty Tracy-Hepburn affair was a piece of PR misdirection — a lie within a lie.

That exposé dynamic might have been the focus of the documentary, but Tyrnauer chooses instead to focus largely on Bowers living his somewhat eccentric life today. He is clearly a hoarder, prowling the streets of Hollywood to accumulate junk and store it in his various properties. The film doesn’t explore that particular peccadillo, but Tyrnauer’s cameras are there when Bowers finds a treasured item among the stuff, such as a photo of the brother who didn’t come home from the war, or a possession of his only daughter, who died as a result of a botched abortion, the only two occasions when Bowers shows cracks in his own happy-go-lucky facade.

Tyrnauer does not skip over other troublesome aspects of Bowers’ life, which include turning tricks with priests in his youth, which Bowers refuses to frame as child abuse.

Primarily, though, the film impresses as a necessary footnote to Hollywood history and a wake-up call to those who still cling to the illusions the movie industry sold us. That was the mission of the Hollywood Babylon books, too, perhaps, but here it is delivered without cattiness or cruelty. Bowers comes off as a benign witness to that history… and, of course, an all-too-willing participant.

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