BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — “It’s hard to know where to begin,” said Matt Tyrnauer, a Vanity Fair special correspondent turned documentary filmmaker, as he dryly started to describe his new movie, which looks at closeted luminaries during Hollywood’s Golden Age. “There’s a story about Cole Porter and multiple carloads of guys, but it’s probably not printable.”
Oh, dear.
Best, then, to start in 2012. In an X-rated, best-selling memoir published that year, a former Marine named Scotty Bowers recounted how, between 1946 and the mid-1980s, he ran a type of prostitution ring for gay and bisexual people in the film industry, including A-listers like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Mr. Bowers also claimed to have personally shared a bed with J. Edgar Hoover and arranged wild sexual liaisons for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
It was hard to believe, to put it mildly. Mr. Bowers offered no proof, and everyone he named was conveniently dead. “Supposedly true,” wrote Janet Maslin, a New York Times book critic. Writing about the lurid, no-detail-too-excruciating memoir for The Washington Post, Charles Kaiser asked: “Can we believe all of this? Half?”
Mr. Tyrnauer — curious about the answers, as well as the notion of Mr. Bowers as a missing link in L.G.B.T.Q. history — decided to find out. He trailed Mr. Bowers for more than two years and found now-elderly men willing to talk on camera about working as gay prostitutes. He turned up supporting evidence (photos, explicit Super 8 footage from 1965) and filmed Liz Smith, the late gossip columnist, confirming the lesbianism of Ms. Hepburn, a longtime friend.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/movies/scotty-bowers-hollywood-sex.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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