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

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Any straying from that hard-won conceit by the people who perpetuated the image — even in their private lives — would undermine all of their efforts.

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. That is a trick we are all learning that is gradually undermining the pursuit of – or the hope for – history.Still it is an interesting book about a guy who made his own way in life and isn't ashamed to be frank about his sexual exploits. Although the book largely reflects the joyful feelings of a libertine, it is not without sadness - and some of that sadness comes from real tragedy. Full Service opens the doors of the closeted, X-rated underworld of old Hollywood through three decades. However, the big draw of this book is Scotty's tawdry times running a makeshift queer brothel out of a gas station on Hollywood Blvd. Surprisingly, since Scotty does not stint on details for the most part in this book, he doesn't get around, in the whole chapter devoted to this event, to telling us whether he himself did Hoover.

These exploits included not just gay and lesbian members of the community, but bi ones as well — And Scotty "tricked" with them all. He didn't fall in love because of looks (in fact he describes one of his loves as being slightly mousy) or because of sex (he has wilder times with other people, and continues to have sex with lots of people at the same time as being in a committed relationship. And did he wait until all of his subjects were dead out of respect for them, or did he do so because there's nobody left to refute his tawdry stories about them? I wished this had been a biography, with collaborating or contradictory views from other people, to flesh out the narrative.

Störte mich beim lesen aber gar nicht :) Sehr viele Details, die einen manchmal grinsen oder auch rütteln lassen. Joanna Walters, in The Guardian, wrote that the book was a "titillating catalogue of sexual intrigue. An important content note: There is shit in this book (not just figuratively; be prepared to have the aforementioned Laughton and Power ruined for you forever) that is not fun or frisky at all.

I felt like I was reading the trashiest, cattiest tabloid out there, only it was about stars of the 1950's. The earlier stories about the famous people who just wanted to have free and easy sex with someone are positively quaint in comparison. People who tend to believe propaganda, such as those manufactured Tracy/Hepburn romance stories, may be surprised. Brooks Barnes, New York Times "A jaw-dropping firsthand account of closeted life in Hollywood during the '40s and '50s. Bowers never talked publicly about these experiences before but decided to do so because most of the people involved are now dead and can no longer be affected by his revelations.Directed by Matt Tyrnauer and released in 2017, the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood recounts the book's themes, expanded by additional recollections from Bowers and those in his life. But what surprised me, and really seemed to set up Scotty's attitude for the rest of his life, was noting how that grief and loss made him embrace life and do so without judgment or reservation. If they had had the chance to be out and in the open like their contemporaries today, I don't think most of them would have stayed in the closet.