Full Service

by Bowers,Friedberg, Lionel,Scotty

  By three o’clock the summer heat had become stifling. It was time for the party to break up. Everyone had adequately partaken of George’s hospitality, bid their good-byes, and was slowly starting to drift away. Hepburn was one of the last to leave. As I watched her go, George tapped me on the shoulder. He whispered that she didn’t know how to behave in public. When I questioned him about that he replied, “It’s not that she’s a dyke. I have no trouble with that. But the studio does. They’ve been pleading with her not to advertise the fact in public but she ignores them.”

  I waited for more. He fussed around with plates and leftovers and then went on, telling me that Hepburn was very arrogant. He said that she thought she knew best about everything. I wasn’t going to comment. What did I know of any of this? It was the first time that I’d met her and I really didn’t know anything about her behavior, her personality, or her lesbianism until that day. My first impression was simply that George didn’t like her very much. He went on to tell me that Hepburn had once been married to a guy named Ludlow Ogden Smith but the marriage had lasted just five years and they had divorced in 1934. He said he thought she ought to be more discreet about her sexual orientation.

  In time I was to be proved wrong about George’s dislike of Hepburn. During the years that followed I would remain close to both of them and throughout that period George and Hepburn would turn out to be the very best of friends. They understood one another. I would eventually also learn that Hepburn relied heavily on George’s opinions about her career. She hardly ever made a film without consulting him about her performance.

  After Hepburn had left, as the afternoon wore on, George suggested we take a dip in the pool. Afterward, I followed him upstairs to his bedroom. He closed the door behind us and we undressed, dried off, and flopped onto his bed. He moved over to me, began to fondle my balls, then rapidly stroked me to a full erection. In no time at all he started to suck on my erect penis. He was so good at what he was doing that before I knew it I was dizzy with ecstasy and simply lay back until I experienced an absolutely exquisite orgasm. As soon as it was all over George daintily hopped off the bed, disappeared into the bathroom, and took a shower. When he came out he politely asked me to take a shower, too, and then, putting it as nicely as he could, intimated that it was time for me to leave.

  I learned that this was George Cukor’s strictly adhered to modus operandi when it came to sex. There was never any foreplay or necking. There was no preamble, nor was there ever any form of penetration. Anal sex was out of the question. To put it crudely, just like my friend, Cole Porter, George just wanted to suck dick. And he would do it with a quick, cold efficiency. Unlike other men, including Cole, as soon as George had finished there was no time set aside for his partner to bask in the afterglow of orgasm or to reciprocate the favor. He also insisted on slipping me a few bucks when I left. It wasn’t long before I realized that George always paid for sex, no matter who his partner was. As the ensuing months and years went by we became extremely close friends and frequently had sex together. I would often fix him up with other young guys, too. He always paid them well but he seldom asked me to bring the same person over more than once.

  George was an early riser and usually went to bed at nine o’clock in the evening. He wasn’t a night owl at all. Whenever he threw a party it was either a luncheon or a small informal dinner for a select group. There were no midnight gang bangs or orgies for him. Sex was purely a brief diversion from his all-consuming passion, which was his work. His films included A Star is Born, the classic drama starring Judy Garland and James Mason. That 1954 production caused him untold headaches. Because of her erratic behavior on set it also fostered his intense dislike of Garland.

  “That dreadful woman!” he once confided in me. “What a bitch she is. I’ll never work with her again. Ever!”

  One day, during the making of A Star is Born, George and his crew were shooting a very difficult scene on one of the biggest soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot. There was a huge interior set and the lighting and camera work were unusually complicated. It was ten o’clock in the morning and they had just done one run-through of the scene. There were at least a hundred technicians involved and Sam Leavitt, the director of photography; Gene Allen, the production designer; Malcolm Bert, the art director; and various members of the lighting, camera, grips, sound, and construction crews had a lot of minor tweaking and last-minute alterations to take care of before George could call for a take. Despite the amount of work that needed to be done, the delay was expected to take no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. As everyone knows, when it comes to motion picture production, time is money. Lots of money. Long delays could cost the studio a small fortune. The assistant director announced to everyone over the megaphone that there would be a short wait. Judy Garland plopped down on her chair, sighed, fanned herself with her script, then got up and told the assistant director that she needed to go to the bathroom. She promised that she wouldn’t be away for more than ten minutes. Her dressing room and private bathroom were just off to the side of the soundproofed studio. So, off she went. Fifteen minutes later when the assistant director called out, “Places, please, everyone!” there was no sign of Judy.

  Major stars always have what are known as stand-ins on the set. It’s their job to take the place of the star while camera crews and lighting technicians make adjustments to ensure that the lighting and lens focus on the actors are exactly as the director and the director of photography want them. Judy’s stand-in was immediately dispatched to Judy’s dressing room to make sure that she was all right and to ask her to kindly return to the set. But a couple of minutes later she returned with the disturbing news that Miss Garland was neither in her dressing room nor her bathroom. Panic rippled through the entire cast and crew. Where could she be? Three assistant directors ran off in various directions to look for her. But Judy was nowhere to be found. Pandemonium broke out. Frantic phone calls were made to other soundstages, to the administration building, to the makeup, hairdressing, and wardrobe departments. But no one had seen Judy. George Cukor was the only one who suspected what might have happened. From past experience he knew that Garland occasionally exhibited moody and erratic behavior. And there was a story behind that. As a seventeen-year-old, during the filming of The Wizard of Oz at MGM in 1939, she had been kept on what amounted to a starvation diet to maintain her trim figure. She had also been pumped up with caffeine and amphetamines to sustain her energy level. This had kept her wide awake at night so she was given barbiturates to help her sleep. As a result Garland had become addicted to tranquilizers and other drugs. She became unstable, moody, and prone to depression.

  “Call all the gates,” Cukor ordered. “Ask anyone if they saw her go out.”

  Sure enough, the guard at one of the main studio security gates reported that he had seen Garland come out of the soundstage, walk over to her car, which was parked in a private bay nearby, and get into it. She had driven up to the gate smiling broadly and waved as the guard opened it to let her out. She had turned onto West Olive Avenue and drove away from the studio, disappearing into traffic. No one could reach her anywhere for the next two days. She wasn’t at home and she wasn’t with friends; nobody knew where she had gone.

  On the third day after her sudden departure she returned to the set. No explanations were given and no apologies were made. She pretended as though nothing had happened. Meanwhile, her absence had caused havoc on the production. Hundreds of people were kept on tenterhooks and the studio absorbed costs that ran into multiple thousands of dollars. As no other sets were ready, the unit could not shoot anything else and the production was now behind schedule. Even when executive producer Jack Warner hauled Garland over the carpet in his office she refused to acknowledge that she had done anything wrong. George told me that this was only one of her many misdeeds during the shooting of the film. He said that she was never on time for her call.

  “That cow was never, ever on time. She always kept us wai
ting. She never explained herself and she never said sorry. Not once. She was an unpredictable, unreliable, untrustworthy, and unrepentant bitch!”

  IT WAS AROUND this time that I began seeing quite a bit of an old Marine buddy of mine, Tyrone Power. He had just completed what was probably one of his best films, Captain from Castile, for Twentieth Century Fox, and was between marriages. He and I would get up to quite a few sexual shenanigans together, and I began arranging tricks for him and some of the other more sophisticated members of the upper echelons of society who were either coming into the gas station or calling me up. These men were not all Hollywood people; some came from the corporate and banking community. I can’t think of anyone who would not have jumped at the opportunity to have a fling with Ty Power. He was scandalously handsome. My circle of friends was constantly widening and he was never one to shy away from meeting new people. Women swooned over him and he bedded quite a few of them, but he much preferred men. He would often call me up and ask me to send over a young guy. Some of his sexual tastes were rather odd and offbeat, but none of the guys seemed to mind. He was always meticulously careful about who he saw. He fiercely guarded his reputation at the studio and his position as a highly visible actor, so few outside of a very tight circle could point a finger at him and accuse him of indiscreet behavior.

  In addition to seeing to the needs of people in their private homes I was now arranging quick tricks for folks at the gas station itself. This meant that I had to be resourceful. The washroom was situated off to one side of the building, sandwiched between the office, a storeroom, and Mac’s service bay. The walls were made of wood and corrugated metal sheeting. I had drilled a little quarter-inch hole about halfway down the wall of the washroom, just below the toilet paper holder. On the other side of the wall was the storeroom. It was a comfortable place to sit and peek through the hole. You could see everything. For five dollars I would allow someone to watch a guy pee or jerk off in there. Penis watching became quite popular and occasionally led to guessing games among voyeurs about who had the longest dick. Sometimes I would arrange for two guys to go into the washroom together and suck each other off, or I would send in a guy with a girl and, unbeknownst to them, while they were enjoying themselves I could make a buck or two on the side by charging folks to watch them perform. I had something for everyone. I catered to them all, be they participants or onlookers.

  The single most important component in my growing bag of tricks came as a total surprise. One evening in late 1949 a middle-aged guy by the name of Gene someone-or-other—I can no longer recall his full name—drove into the station. It was just before Bill Booth, the proprietor, took off for the weekend. Gene worked as a lighting technician for Warner Bros. He was constantly on location and was making really good money. He had a wife and nurtured ambitious plans for retiring one day and touring the United States with her. As a treat he had bought himself a big, custom-built trailer, a truly luxurious affair with all modern conveniences. It had a bedroom at either end of it, each equipped with a big double bed. It also boasted a bathroom, a kitchen, a comfortable little living room area, and an entrance in the middle. The trouble was that Gene was away on location so often that he was getting little use out of the trailer and, as an even more pressing problem, he lived on a narrow street high in the Hollywood Hills and had nowhere to park the monster. He realized that he had no option but to store it somewhere. But where? And then he thought of our gas station. Behind the main building and the service bay there was an empty field. It backed up to the lot next door and had been set aside for future development. But for now, it was empty. Was it available for him to park his trailer, he wanted to know. He would be happy to pay us. Would we object to having a trailer parked out there? After he asked Bill Booth about it Bill shrugged his shoulders and looked at me. He said he saw no reason why we couldn’t accommodate the guy’s request. Bill had already handed over to me so much responsibility in running the gas station that he said he’d leave it to me to decide what to charge the guy. A sum of fifty dollars a month was agreed upon, we shook hands, and that was that.

  Gene was overjoyed. Just before he left he pulled me aside and said, “Scotty, I know there are going to be nights when you feel tired or when you work very late and you just don’t feel like going home. Well, here’s the key to the trailer. Use it whenever you want, pal.”

  Those words were magic to my ears. A brand-new venue for covert sexual activity had been delivered directly into my hands! The potential was mind-boggling.

  In later years many people told me that some of the best memories of their lives were created in that trailer. Once it had been parked on our lot it became one of the busiest places in town. In it I arranged tricks for guys with guys, guys with girls, girls with girls, you name it. There was hardly a night when it wasn’t being used.

  One person who got good mileage out of that trailer was an extremely good-looking young executive who worked at Warner Bros. I can only recall his name as Dale. He was a well-heeled, important, good-looking guy and had an absolutely gorgeous young wife. A real beauty she was but, alas, not very intuitive. Dale would often call me up and ask me to arrange a quick trick for him in the trailer. He gave me his approximate arrival time and when he got to the gas station I would have a nice girl spread-eagled on one of the beds, raring to go. The thing that makes Dale’s story especially interesting is that he would invariably have his wife with him in the car when he came in for his little trick in the trailer. He would pull into the drive, get out of the car, spin a quick tale to her by saying that he was either going to the washroom or to check out some new tires or look at the latest spark plugs in my office, and I would busy myself by washing the windscreen, cleaning out the ashtrays, checking the tires, battery, oil, and water, and generally messing around while he was away. The wife would be preoccupied with her makeup or fiddling around with her compact or brushing her hair and I would be making small talk with her. This always took about ten to fifteen minutes. Meantime, unseen, her husband Dale had quietly slipped behind the gas station and crept into the trailer, eager for the girl he knew was waiting there for him. He was already as hard as a rock and ready to explode by the time he pulled off his trousers. She was so worked up and excited that boom, bang, boom, it was all over within ten minutes. Then he would put his trousers on again, slip the lady twenty bucks, and meander back to his car as if nothing had happened. His wife was none the wiser about what had just occurred. He did this dozens of times and never once did his innocent wife pick up on it!

  That trailer proved itself invaluable. But it wasn’t always available. If someone was using it when there was more tricking to do in the immediate area I had other venues up my sleeve. Across the street was a bowling alley and next door to that was a two-story brick motel where a sweet, fat old queen was the night manager. If someone came in and picked up one of my young male or female friends while the trailer was occupied, I could call him up and request a room. He would always give me a good discount and I would simply pass the rate on to the evening trick.

  Sometimes when business was brisk he would call me up and say, “Hi, Scotty. I see you’ve got a lot of cars pulling in there tonight. Room three’s empty if you want it. It’ll be five bucks.” Or he’d say, “You can have room seven tonight. Six bucks.” I could always send people over there for a half hour. When they were finished he would change the sheets, freshen up the room, call me up, and say, “Three’s ready again if you need it.”

  And so, soon enough, I had quite a slick operation going. I’d always had an entrepreneurial spirit, I guess—I suppose that’s what comes from growing up in a household without a lot of money.

  7

  Turning Tricks

  As I reached my teens in Chicago I had become quite a little businessman. My shoe-shine service and newspaper beat were doing well. I had built up a large, steady clientele and people were recommending me to their friends. But admittedly it was not all about shining shoes and selling newspapers. I
often went into bars and pool parlors with other objectives in mind. In some of the fancier places a guy would have me buff his shoes until they were gleaming, toss me a two-bit gratuity, and then invite me to come back to his place with him. I never refused and, of course, I always knew that the sole purpose of those little excursions was sex—which meant money. To use the slang term for it, I had begun “turning tricks.” The word had many definitions. It could refer to a prearranged sexual encounter, or it might simply imply a casual sexual acquaintance. It could also be used to refer to the person you were having sex with, especially when there was no emotional or romantic bond involved. The word could even be used as a verb, as in a sentence like, “Are you tricking that guy?” or as a noun, as in, “She’s my trick tonight.” I was learning fast.

  Exposure to the effects of alcohol and the heavy drinking of some of the guys in the bars where I plied my trade induced in me a profound distaste for alcoholic drinks. That’s when I became an avowed teetotaler.

  Momma remarried in 1935. Her new husband was a good-natured Welshman by the name of John Davies. At first he worked in a soybean processing plant owned by the Spencer Kellogg Company, but he subsequently became a truck driver. He was a nice guy and we kids all got along fine with him. However, his income wasn’t nearly enough to support us all, so the tips I was making from tricks served our family well. We had already moved twice by this time and after our new stepdad entered the picture we settled in a little apartment at 3801 Ellis Avenue in the South Side. While many people in our neighborhood were struggling during the long years of the Depression our stepdad, Momma, Don, Phyllis, and I always had enough to eat. Our kitchen shelves were fully stocked. In fact, all of our basic needs were met. Momma was able to stop working as hard as she had when we first arrived in the city and, under the difficult circumstances of the prevailing economic climate, things were really not all that bad for us. Amazingly, despite the late nights and other distractions, I never once missed a day of school and I still managed to get pretty good grades. I kid you not. I’ve always been diligent about everything I do. Sex, science, and shoe-shining all received equal attention!