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

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In 2006, William Mann published Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, which is the best book written on Hepburn and her dream of herself.

It seems Scotty had a lot of friends, a lot of good friends and a lot of very good friends; much of Hollywood. Not many of the names outed in this book have not been outed before, and now that they are all dead it is hard for the ordinary stargazer to know what to believe or trust.Scotty Bowers] made his reputation by sleeping with everyone in Hollywood who wasn't actually Lassie, and now he tells all. As much sex as you assumed the famous, influential and powerful in Hollywood were having, quadruple that number. The pacing of the book is a bit uneven in places, choppy in others, and full of purple prose throughout (it's unclear, for example, why an account of his childhood on the farm needed to include a sentence like: "As my fingers tugged on the cow's soft teats, her warm milk squirted into the pail. The strangest aspect here was the vitriol Bowers exhibited towards those few celebrities who somehow managed to not sleep with him.

The structure hops around on the timeline, too, so be prepared to recalibrate where in time the story is taking place.

We can take this as a warning to be careful of whom we choose to be intimate with, and a reminder that you can never really trust anyone. Then he moves over to bartending (he’s a lifelong teetotaler, by the way) and general hobnobbing, which is where he’s still at today, dedicated in his vocation of bringing pleasure to all those around him. According to Bowers it wasn't abuse in the slightest; it was affection, it was natural, it was sex ed, and it led him to have a wonderfully high libido for the rest of his days. A good deal of this was done for closeted homosexuals at a time when the gay element in Hollywood lived with the threat and the thrill of exposure, while working in a medium that encouraged all of us to fall in love with male and female role models.

To others who reviewed the book and questioned why sometimes Scotty has a lot of details and sometimes he doesn't - gee, I'm 51 and I can remember some things in my past really clearly and others not so clearly. I recommend it to those who enjoy perusing the headlines in the most scandalous tabloids while in the supermarket lineup. And he was this young, handsome, sweet, strong, sex addicted, bisexual Marine working at a gas station in the middle of Hollywood post WWll. That's one of the weirder parts of reading this book: the depraved sex acts aren't the most incredulous things in it.

That may not be the kind of style everyone can read in one sitting because it could infuriate those looking for a through-line plot, but it's quite enjoyable. Gossip is an important social function in the world, and "Full Service" is not afraid to go into that territory.

By the time Bowers has finished sharing anecdotes about fighting on the island of Iwo Jima in World War II and once assisting Beatles manager Brian Epstein (one of his tricks) in whisking the Fab Four out of the hands of groupies during an August 1964 visit to Los Angeles, he's been less than one degree away from so many people and events in popular culture one starts to wonder if "Forrest Hump" might have been a more appropriate title. I recommend the memoir with few reservations — especially if you are looking for a light read about a man whose free relationship with sexuality helped others live their lives to the fullest, outside of the limelight. If his very good friends were alive I would hazard a guess that would say they knew Scotty and would not go much further. In the mid 1970s, when the film Deep Throat was popular, Bowers claims to have arranged for Linda Lovelace to give instruction on deepthroating at parties. Tennessee Williams once wrote an account of my life and adventures in Hollywood, but I told him to burn it -- it was beautifully written, but made me sound like the mother of all queens!

Adam Tschorn, writing for the Los Angeles Times, described the book as having an uneven, at times choppy, pace and much purple prose, highlighting a passage in which Bowers describes how he milked a cow. It's not my place to characterize these events, obviously, but I found it really disturbing to read such a cavalier account of what was, legally, at bare minimum, repeated statutory rape.