Matt Tyrnauer’s new documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood begins at the Chateau Marmont, where a penis-shaped cake is being wheeled into the 90th birthday party of Scotty Bowers—the infamous ex-Marine who says he set up trysts for closeted Hollywood elites from the 1940s through the ’80s.
Bowers’ stories might seem outrageous, but then, his whole life has been pretty outrageous: After serving in World War II, he left the Midwest for Los Angeles and got a job at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard, where he claims to have met (and, uh, serviced) actor Walter Pidgeon. Bowers quickly became the sexually liberated epicenter of what one party guest giddily describes as “the Gomorrah of Hollywood,” and built a business out of hooking up gay celebrities—who, at the time, had their personal freedoms severely restricted by roving vice squads and the morality clauses of the movie studios’ Motion Picture Production Code.