Full Service (14 page)

As far as the media and the public were concerned there was really only one person in Kate Hepburn’s life, and that was Spencer Tracy. But as far as I could tell it was a nonexistent fairy-tale romance that the studio publicists and the spin doctors had concocted to conceal her lesbianism. Their fabrications were fed to the press, the gossip columnists, and the public, and everyone swallowed it. As people later knew, Kate romanticized her relationship with Spencer in order to confer with industry standards and ideals. In time, I would eventually get to know Spencer very well, too.

I
REALLY DON’T RECALL
the details anymore but long before I met Spencer Tracy I got a call one evening at the gas station from someone who said they were contacting me on behalf of a well-known Hollywood personality whose name they were reluctant to provide. I had received calls like that before and I had little patience with them. I preferred to know exactly who I was dealing with. If they wanted me to set up a trick for them I had to know who the person was. I tried to match people carefully. I wasn’t a pimp or a dating and escort service. Sex is a very personal thing and I wanted to make sure that I hooked the right kind of people up together, people with mutually attractive attributes, energy, and chemistry.

“Who are you calling for?” I asked.

There was silence on the line for a moment as the caller slapped a hand over the mouthpiece. I could hear muted mumbling in the background. Then there was the sound of the phone being handed from one person to another.

“Scotty Bowers?” I heard a new voice ask.

“That’s me,” I said. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Errol Flynn,” the voice said.

There was no doubt about it. It was definitely Flynn. I recognized that distinctive voice immediately.

“That gas station of yours has gained quite a reputation, you know,” he laughed.

I got a thrill whenever I heard a comment like that.

“How about lunch on Wednesday?” he asked. “We could talk then.”

For the life of me I cannot recall exactly where we arranged to meet but I think it was at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. When I arrived on the appointed day Flynn was already seated at a table. A pretty attendant was placing a fresh glass of vodka on the rocks beside one that was almost finished. He was a dashingly handsome man. Though only forty years of age, his best films were already behind him. These included
Adventures of Don Juan; Objective, Burma!; They Died with Their Boots On; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex;
and the one for which he will perhaps always be best known,
The Adventures of Robin Hood.
He stood up as I reached his table, gave me the famous smile that set women’s hearts aflutter, and invited me to sit down.

Though born in Australia, Flynn had a beautifully cultivated British accent. He seemed like a very nice guy, a real gentleman. He told me that he was looking for some new talent. By that he meant women. I said that I would do what I could to help him out. I asked him, “What sort of lady are you looking for?”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” he said. “I like my booze old and my women young.
Very
young. That always makes for a pleasant combination, wouldn’t you say?”

He gave me a wickedly teasing smile. This was a man who was a connoisseur in all things delicate and fine, and that included women. He loved them young. In fact, the younger the better. I pointed out that there was a legal age restriction when it came to sex.

“Oh, tut, tut, dear boy,” he said, downing the glass of vodka. “I don’t care if she has to
be
eighteen, just as long as she
looks
and
behaves
like someone between, well, let’s say fourteen and sixteen. All right?”

He told me that he was working on
That Forsyte Woman
over at MGM. His costars were Greer Garson, Robert Young, Janet Leigh, and Walter Pidgeon. He was most intrigued to hear that I knew Pidgeon personally, as well as the gentlemen in charge of set decoration and hairstyles, Edwin B. Willis and Syd Guilaroff. Suddenly I wasn’t just a kid from a lowly gas station anymore. I really
knew
people. This impressed him no end. By the time we were on dessert I really liked him and I knew the feeling was mutual.

When I later gave up my job at the gas station and had my evenings free, I would take many pretty and very obliging young ladies over to Errol Flynn’s place. He was especially pleased when I brought a girl over and then stayed to have dinner with the two of them. Although he was passionately fond of women, he enjoyed my company. I got the impression that it was a relief for him to be outside the orbit of the rich and famous. He used to cozy up to the woman I had brought over, talking pretty and smooching with her while I mixed drinks for him. He always thought I was crazy to be a teetotaler.

“Life without alcohol is like life without color, without music, without women, without sex,” he said to me once.

Unfortunately, Errol had a problem, a very big problem. He could not control his drinking habit. It always got the better of him. I remember a number of occasions when the evening would start out pleasant enough but then he would slowly sink into alcohol-soaked oblivion. It’s a shame that he was such a boozer. He drank all the time and ate very little. I always tried to persuade him to enjoy a good meal but the booze always won. By one o’clock in the morning he would have already consumed an entire bottle of vodka. Then he would stagger over to the girl and, slurring every word, he would sweetly whisper to her, “I’m going to fuck you now, baby. I’m going to make love to you like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”

And then he would sway backward and forward once or twice and, in a mighty crash, fall face-first on the floor, out for the count, totally wasted. By then the poor girl was so horny after all the buildup, the sweet talk, and the kissing that she couldn’t wait to have sex. She was hot and ready, so I had no choice. I would carefully push Errol aside, get undressed, and oblige the lady myself!

Four or five hours after he had passed out Errol would wake up, crawl over to the bathroom, splash some cold water on his face, maneuver himself into the kitchen, pour a tumbler of vodka, down it in one gulp, and then drive off for his dawn shooting call at the studio. Amazingly, by the time he drove through the studio gates he was cold sober. I seldom knew anyone else who could manage such a feat. He hardly ever had a hangover on the set, or at least not one that anyone could detect. When he got to the studio the makeup people would shave him, then he’d take a shower, have his makeup applied and his hair styled, get into costume, quickly glance through his lines for the scenes scheduled for shooting that day, and nonchalantly strut onto the set as if nothing had happened the night before. Meantime, in his dressing room or his trailer there would always be a bottle of vodka, ready and waiting. He would pour himself shots from it all day long between takes.

When he was sober Errol was really great company. He was a wonderful conversationalist and very witty. But when he and his buddies got together they could drink up a storm. By the time he reached the age of forty-five he started to look awful. The lack of nourishment and the ravaging effect of all that booze turned him into a haggard-looking guy. His face began to get puffy. Blood vessels started to show. His skin started to become withered and wrinkled. It was awful to see his rapid physical decline. He married three times and had four children, but his career and his flamboyant lifestyle came to an untimely end. The alcohol eventually got him and he died of, among other things, sclerosis of the liver in 1959, just a few months after he turned fifty.

S
HORTLY AFTER I MET
Errol Flynn back in 1949 I met a lovely forty-one-year-old actress whose original name had been Margarita Carmen Cansino. Trained by her father Eduardo Cansino as a dancer, she made a few films under the name Rita Cansino, but when her true talents were discovered in a movie called
Only Angels Have Wings,
she was signed to a contract at Columbia Pictures and her name was changed to Rita Hayworth.

She was a very beautiful woman. She had light brown eyes, a fabulous complexion, classical bone structure, and, although her natural hair color was black, she usually dyed it red. Because she exuded an absolutely irresistible sexuality the world dubbed her the “Love Goddess.” She was slender and lovely and always stole the scene away from her costars, even when she played opposite Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra. When I met her she had just divorced Hollywood wunderkind Orson Welles and had married Prince Aly Khan, grandson of the Aga Khan II, a member of the Persian royal family and imam to more than fifteen million Muslims in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Rita had a brother named Eduardo Jr., whom we all called Eddie. It was he who introduced me to his sister at a party one weekend. But Eddie was not in his sister’s league. He drove a beat-up old World War II Jeep and delivered the
Los Angeles Times
to subscribers in the Hollywood Hills. He used to pick up his papers from the printers at four in the morning and then drive up into the residential areas in the mountains to drop them off. He was married to a third-rate actress and they had two or three kids. He really struggled to make ends meet. Through him I also met his Dad, Eduardo Sr. He was a dancer and choreographer from New York and once he moved out to the coast and settled in L.A. he ran a popular dance studio on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bronson Avenue, not too far away from the gas station where I worked.

One day Rita and her dad got into a dreadful argument about some family matter or other, and for years after that she wouldn’t speak to him. Once I got to know her well enough, I begged her to patch up her differences with her father but no, nothing doing, she’d say. She was a hardheaded woman. Beautiful and talented, yes. Difficult, absolutely. She also had a mean and stingy streak. To put it bluntly, she was very selfish. Perhaps exposure to all that wealth from her marriages spoiled her. Who can tell? She knew her brother Eddie was having a hard time but she turned a blind eye to it, hightailing it from soundstages to glamorous movie premieres to the playgrounds of Europe and the French Riviera. I felt really sorry for Eddie. He didn’t deserve to be treated that way by his sister. I cannot recall how many times he got a flat tire while doing his newspaper rounds. The tires on his Jeep had virtually no treads left on them and he never had enough money for a spare. Rita could never find it within herself to give the poor guy a dime. Eddie would remove the punctured wheel from his Jeep and roll it down all those narrow, twisting streets in the Hollywood Hills to Hollywood Boulevard and then into our gas station, where Mac patched it up for him. If Eddie was too far away or if the roads were too steep, he would have to hitch a ride to the station and then have Mac drive up and collect the punctured tire. It was pathetic. I, of course, knew what it was like to have a newspaper beat. But I couldn’t imagine how tough it had to be for Eddie to deal with flat tires on top of the hassle of making his rounds. Even though the war had been over for about four years, back in those days it was still difficult to get good tires because of shortages. Besides, new tires were very expensive.

One evening I was at the gas station and a guy I’d never seen before pulled up in a delivery truck and offered me a set of four perfectly good used tires and inner tubes for a giveaway sum of only a hundred bucks. I bought them immediately and wheeled them into the station, hoping that I could sell them to Eddie. But, as usual, he was strapped for cash, even though I said I would sell them to him for exactly the same price I had paid for them. I knew he needed those tires and tubes desperately so I called up Rita and said, “Rita honey, Eddie really needs a new set of wheels and I’ve got an absolute bargain here. Won’t you help him out?”

The phone went silent for a moment and then she said, “You’re a sweetheart, Scotty, and I love you for that, but fuck Eddie. Why should I? What has he ever done for me?”

Rita made more than sixty movies, including
The Lady from Shanghai, Separate Tables, Pal Joey, Salome, Gilda,
and the epic Cinerama adventure with John Wayne,
Circus World,
but she wouldn’t lift a finger to help her own brother.

T
he vice squad division of the Los Angeles Police Department was the bane of many people’s lives during the forties and fifties. They mercilessly hounded members of the gay and lesbian communities, turning whole sectors of society into criminals. Its members were always in civilian clothes, never in uniform. They resorted to undercover skulduggery to trap, arrest, and condemn their prey, no matter how devious their methods. They would use any ploy to corner their victims. Just about everyone they arrested had money, was well-known, or had a good job. Their prime targets were successful professionals, members of the business world, and, of course, movie people. Many were married. Some were bisexual. What united them was the fact that they often had to come up with exorbitant sums of cash to keep their names out of the papers and to avoid going to court. People were arrested en masse in gay bars, or just as they came out of a bar, or after being followed by cops from a bar. If a guy came out of a bar and suddenly had an urge to pee and innocently went into an alleyway next to the bar to relieve himself he would be asking for trouble. The vice squad would pounce on him. Handcuffs would be slapped on him and he would be accused of exposing himself in public. If he tried to explain that he was only taking a piss the cops would instantly throw another charge at him for resisting arrest. It was ruthless.