Full Service (18 page)

They visited the United States many times. I cannot remember the exact year—it must have been during the late forties or early fifties—but when Cecil Beaton told me that they were going to be visiting Los Angeles and were to stay at our mutual friend Albert Brown’s home in the Pacific Palisades I looked forward to meeting the couple. Then Cecil came out with a bombshell. He told me that the Duke’s sexual inclinations leaned not only toward his beloved Wallis Simpson, but to men. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that. This was the romance of the century, for crying out loud. And now I’m told that the guy is
gay
!

I could hardly believe it. But Cecil had more to say. He said that Edward—the duke—was a classic example of a bisexual man. He was equally drawn to the delights found in both a heterosexual and a homosexual world. According to him, the whole myth of the great royal romance was a fabrication, a giant cover-up by the royal family and the British government to conceal the truth about Edward’s sexual preferences. A king could not possibly get away with living the kind of lifestyle as that favored by Edward. It would have stifled him. Apparently Wallis Simpson shared similar bisexual urges. Because of that she was the ideal candidate to become Edward’s wife. Although she was portrayed as the great love of his life and the person behind his reason for abdicating from the British throne she was in actual fact the perfect partner to share his double life with him. He liked boys. She liked girls. Occasionally they even had sex with each other but, essentially, he was gay and she was a dyke. What better way to save face and ensure that they would have the freedom to live their lives in peace and out of the public spotlight than to marry one another?

Frankly, I cared not one iota whether they were gay, straight, or bi. And I cared even less about the controversy surrounding their marriage or, indeed, why they even married at all. What business was it of mine? And who cared a rat’s ass whether they preferred men or women outside their marriage? If that’s what made them happy, what else mattered?

One day Albert called me and invited me over to his home in the Palisades.

“They’re here, Ducks,” he said, “and they’re dying to meet you.”

On the following Saturday my aging Plymouth coughed its way up to the Pacific Palisades. A butler welcomed me at the door and showed me into the library, where Albert and two of my other British friends, actor Peter Bull and director Brian Desmond Hurst, plus a couple of other people I didn’t know, were chatting with none other than Edward the Duke of Windsor and Wallis the Duchess of Windsor. It was quite a gathering of the aristocracy. Apart from the duchess I think I was the only American there! But before I could even begin to feel out of place Albert beamed at me and called out, “Ah, here he is! Do come in, Scotty!”

The very first person to grab my hand and shake it warmly was the duke himself. I wasn’t sure what to call him. He must have sensed that because he smiled and said, “Please, call me Edward.”

“Hi Eddy,” I said. I’ve always had a habit of shortening people’s names to catchy nicknames. Why should Edward be different, ex-king or not? Fortunately, he didn’t seem the least bit offended by my informality and then introduced me to his wife, who he referred to as Wally. So that’s what I called her, too.

With the ice broken we all began to get to know one another. There were no pretentious charades or aloofness in their behavior toward me whatsoever. Edward gently pulled me aside and said, “You know, Scotty, a lot of people have told me about you, long before Wally and I came to California. Albert, Peter, Brian, and Cecil all said that I ought to look you up when we got here.”

He was referring of course to our mutual friends, his host Arthur Brown, as well as Peter Bull, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Cecil Beaton. He went on to tell me how highly they had all spoken of me to him in London and how much he had been looking forward to meeting me. It was obvious that his relationship with those four men transcended mere platonic friendship. This became patently clear less than twenty minutes later when he and I slipped into the guesthouse at the bottom end of the large garden, stripped off, and began making out. Eddy was good.
Really
good. He sucked me off like a pro.

I spent about an hour and a half at Albert’s place that afternoon and did not leave until Wally explained exactly what sort of young lady she wished me to send over for her. Over the next few days I would send up a nice young guy for Eddy and a pretty, dark-haired girl for Wally. Each time I sent somebody different. The royal couple enjoyed variety and, to be frank, I never told the kids I sent over what their real identities were. Besides, most of the guys and gals were too young to remember the great scandal of the thirties. In all the years when they visited California and I arranged tricks for them no one ever really knew who they were. Even though I became a very busy man in later years, I often tricked Eddy myself. We became good friends and were very attached to one another.

After I’d left the gas station and my bartending days really began in earnest, I would get to know many of the top hotel managers, restaurateurs, and chefs in town. One of them was a guy named Hathaway who, for a time, was the manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I once got Hathaway to set aside one of the more plush garden bungalows of the hotel for Eddy and Wally without revealing their true identities to him. While they were there it was easy for me to bring over a bunch of new young people for them. We would have a mixture of half a dozen males and females engage in a display of gay and straight sex in the bungalow and then Eddy, Wally, and I would each pair off with the one we fancied most. Eddy liked a three-way with a girl, too, now and again, and occasionally he wanted a woman only, and there were indeed occasions when he got involved in a three-way with Wally and another woman. But his preference was definitely for the boys.

There was an extremely good-looking, well-groomed fellow who loved to take it in the “back door,” meaning, of course, that he was the passive partner, or the bottom, in anal intercourse. Edward was particularly fond of giving it to him that way while slowly sucking on my dick. That invariably ended up in an orgiastic eruption by the three of us at the same time. Eddy was a gentle lover. In fact, he was a gentleman through and through. He was considerate, very thoughtful of all his partners’ physical and emotional needs, and he was a damn good lover. He was a well-mannered, kind-hearted, and very decent man.

Eddy and Wally had spent some time in the Greek Islands after they got married. They loved the Aegean and the freedom it offered them. One day while they were in L.A. a rather unusual coincidence occurred. A good friend of mine, a set decorator by the name of John Austin, had been over to Mykonos on location for a movie and had brought back an extremely good-looking nineteen-year-old Greek boy by the name of Damien. John’s intention was to have him here for a few months as a boy toy and then send him back home to Mykonos. He took the guy with him to many parties just to show off his great looks and physique and perhaps to foster a little envy among his friends. He also spread the word around that he would be grateful if anyone could find some part-time photographic modeling or film work for his young Adonis, to help him make a few bucks while he was out here. He called me about this one day and confidentially told me that even though the boy offered him great sex the kid was actually straight. In fact, he had a gorgeous dark-haired, brown-eyed Grecian goddess of a girlfriend back home. I tried to do what I could to help Damien earn a bit of money by arranging tricks for him with various men and women around town. He obliged them all and was grateful for the generous tip each of them provided.

One day while I was driving him from the gas station to a trick at someone’s house he was telling me about his life back home in Greece. In his broken, heavily accented English he told me that he had met Edward and Wally during one of their trips to Mykonos. He said he knew that Edward was supposed to have been the king of England but that he had changed his mind in order to run away with the woman that he married. Oddly enough, Damien told me, both Edward and Wally preferred people of their own sex. He admitted that he would bring his girlfriend over to keep Wally happy while he and Eddy got up to mischief together. I told Damien that the couple were in town and asked him if he would like to see them. He was very keen to renew his friendship with them so one evening I surprised Eddy by walking into Albert’s guesthouse with Damien at my side. I thought Eddy was going to wet his pants with the sheer joy and excitement of seeing his handsome young Greek lover again. I had seldom seen such unbridled happiness. It was wonderful. However, I don’t recall whether they spent anymore time together or whether Eddy and Damien even became sexually involved again.

Wally always behaved like a perfect lady. In public she was consistently sweet, charming, and exceptionally feminine. Unless I was personally involved in a three-way with her I never observed her alone with a woman but from what I could tell she was very much at ease letting her hair down and being completely relaxed. She was not in any way inhibited. She was very fond of dark-haired women, usually those with hair color similar to her own. Often I asked her if there was anything or anyone special that she needed and she would just smile, tilt her head slightly, and, with a twinkle in her eye, say, “Scotty, I totally trust you. You bring along whomever you please. I know she’ll be fine.”

During threesomes, and certainly when she had sex with Eddy, she was fine with men but, like her husband, she definitely preferred homosexual sex. I brought a slim, trim little number over to her at Albert’s guest cottage one evening and when I returned later to take the young lady home she enthusiastically told me that she had never had such incredible sex in all her life. She couldn’t even remember how many times she had had an orgasm that night. Wally really knew what she was doing. She did it in style and with intense passion. As I said, I never told any of the girls I fixed her up with who she really was, and none of them ever found out her true identity.

I
was still seeing a lot of George Cukor. One member of his very extensive circle of friends was that great vixen of the silent era, Gloria Swanson. Other than a few exceptions, her career had foundered after the advent of sound, or the “talkies.” I think I met her while serving at one of George’s Sunday brunches and she and I became buddies. It was 1950, the same year that she was approached by writer-director Billy Wilder to play the lead of a has-been silent movie actress in
Sunset Boulevard.
She invited me to visit her on the set and, although it was great to watch her work, I have to confess that I found the whole experience boring. None of us at the time realized that this was a classic in the making. Perhaps if we did we might have been more respectful of it.

Gloria was a tiny thing, barely five feet tall. She never wanted any of her costars to get too close to her, as that made her look too short. She felt especially intimidated by the height of William Holden, her tall costar in the movie. Whenever the two of them appeared in the same shot together Wilder would have cinematographer John Seitz lower the height of the camera slightly and place Gloria closer to the lens than Holden so that she would not be dwarfed by him. On some of the camera setups when they were alongside one another, Wilder and Seitz would choose a composition and lens that excluded the actors’ feet so that Gloria could stand on what was known as a two-by-four or an apple box to make her look a few inches taller. It was fascinating to watch all these cunning devices in use but I cannot help admitting that, to me, the pace of the movie-making process was excruciatingly slow. On one occasion during the filming of
Sunset Boulevard
I spent an entire night on the set on a location near Wilshire Boulevard. Most of the time it was dark, confusing, noisy, cold, and, from my perspective, little happened.

My good friend Alex Tiers, the fellow who had surprised me with a hand job in the park, was infatuated with Gloria. There was nothing physical or sexual about it at all. He was simply obsessed by her star quality, her personality, her character. He would often invite her for dinner at his home. I would come along and prepare the food for them. He would rent a tuxedo for me and I would play the butler, waiter, and bartender, just for the two of them. Due to his substantial inheritance, Alex was never short of money. He gave Gloria expensive gifts: luxury items like diamond earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, rings. During dinner the lights had to be turned down low, and there were candelabras on the table. I had to make sure that there was a nonstop flow of romantic music in the background. Gloria arrived by chauffeur-driven limousine in flowing furs and fancy gowns. She was not a meat eater and was always on a strict diet. She usually toyed with her food, drank little more than a glass of champagne, accepted the gift from Alex, and then, after allowing Alex to kiss her on the hand or subtly on the cheek, she would have me summon her chauffeur. In a flourishing swish of fur, stole, silk, and lace she would laughingly disappear into the night.

A
S MY TWENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY
neared I decided it was time to take stock of my situation. The moment was right for me to reassess my lot in life.
Where are you heading, Scotty Bowers?,
I asked myself. It was 1950. I’d been in L.A. for just five years since I’d come back from the war. I was receiving more and more offers to bartend, and that was beginning to bring in much better money than I was making at the gas station. Besides, the tricking business was getting totally out of control. The number of calls that I was receiving at the station became too many to handle. It was getting out of proportion and more than I could deal with. And I was increasingly fearful of being busted by the ever-lurking vice squad. Perhaps it was time to move on, to change careers.