Most stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood kept up chaste public personas, but their private lives were often another story—at least according to the accounts of some who were there. Among those who've shared some scandalous stories about the biggest actors and celebrities of the day was the late Scotty Bowers, a gas station attendant who fell in with a glitzy crowd. In his shocking 2012 memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, Bowers not only claimed he slept with some of the most famous men and women of the '40s and '50s, but also ran a clandestine service procuring other partners for them discreetly.
Although he maintained discretion until after most his friends and lovers had died, many of Bowers' accounts were easily corroborated (according to The Guardian, details of his life were so familiar to those in the know that famed sexologist Alfred Kinsey had sought him out for an interview and he was the subject of a short story by Tennessee Williams) and soon became the subject of a 2017 documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. He was particularly known for making arrangements for stars to quietly have same-sex affairs, and according to Bowers, those stars include Katharine Hepburn, who he claims he set up with 150 female escorts during their long friendship.
Read on for all the details he spilled on Hepburn's love life and the lie he claims she sold Hollywood.
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Bowers claimed Hepburn wasn't keen to be closeted.
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWhen Bowers first met Hepburn at a gathering at the home of director George Cukor, she hardly matched the femme persona he had expected based on her role in 1940's The Philadelphia Story, according to his book. At first he didn’t recognize the makeup-free, suit-wearing “woman with a severe short hair cut, tightly cropped and combed with a boyish side part.” He was nonetheless enraptured, spending the evening in conversation with Hepburn. Bowers claimed that, upon her departure, Cukor told him she was a lesbian the studio was concerned about, because she ignored their admonishment to be discreet about her sexuality in public. Hepburn had been married to businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith from 1928 to 1934 and never wed again after that.
She asked him to find her “a nice, young dark-haired girl.”
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIt was at another of Cukor’s dinners when Hepburn was filming the 1949 movie Adam’s Rib with frequent co-star and real-life love Spencer Tracy that Bowers said she turned to him with a special request. "I know about your reputation, Scotty,” she said, according to his memoir. “When you get a chance, do you think you can find a nice, young dark-haired girl for me? Someone that's not too heavily made up."
Bowers said that he and Hepburn thereafter grew close, in a relationship that would last the next fifty years with Hepburn frequently requesting escorts from Bowers. "In the course of time I would fix her up with over 150 different women," he wrote. “Most of them she would only see once or twice, and then tire of them.”
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One affair lasted longer than all the others.
Getty ImagesBowers claimed that one those encounters led to a long-term arrangement. He supposedly arranged a meeting between Hepburn and an escort named Barbara, who was 17 years old at the time. Shortly after they began seeing each other, the actor gifted Barbara a new two-toned Ford Fairlane, according to his memoir. He also said that the two continued seeing each other off and on for the next 49 years and, shortly before Hepburn died in 2003, Barbara received a letter from the star's lawyers along with a $100,000 check.
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He claimed "Hepburn and Tracy" was a cover.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAlthough rumors that Hepburn was having a longtime off-screen affair with her frequent costar Tracy were already circling by the time Bowers met them (and confirmed by Hepburn herself after Tracy's death), he was sure “nothing could be further from the truth." He wrote, "For one thing, Hepburn was a lesbian and I could not imagine this incontrovertibly butch lady having an affair with a man, any man.” And as for the married and Catholic Tracy? Bowers claimed the actor among his own lovers, writing that he would approach him when drunk and then pretend nothing happened the next day.
Although Hepburn would famously take a five-year break to care for Tracy before his 1967 death, according to Bowers, the romantic front was merely a ploy to cover up both actors’ sexuality.
Read the original article on Best Life.
