And then he would sway backward and forward once or twice and, in a mighty crash, fall face-first on the floor, out for the count, totally wasted. By then the poor girl was so horny after all the buildup, the sweet talk, and the kissing that she couldn’t wait to have sex. She was hot and ready, so I had no choice. I would carefully push Errol aside, get undressed, and oblige the lady myself!
Four or five hours after he had passed out Errol would wake up, crawl over to the bathroom, splash some cold water on his face, maneuver himself into the kitchen, pour a tumbler of vodka, down it in one gulp, and then drive off for his dawn shooting call at the studio. Amazingly, by the time he drove through the studio gates he was cold sober. I seldom knew anyone else who could manage such a feat. He hardly ever had a hangover on the set, or at least not one that anyone could detect. When he got to the studio the makeup people would shave him, then he’d take a shower, have his makeup applied and his hair styled, get into costume, quickly glance through his lines for the scenes scheduled for shooting that day, and nonchalantly strut onto the set as if nothing had happened the night before. Meantime, in his dressing room or his trailer there would always be a bottle of vodka, ready and waiting. He would pour himself shots from it all day long between takes.
When he was sober Errol was really great company. He was a wonderful conversationalist and very witty. But when he and his buddies got together they could drink up a storm. By the time he reached the age of forty-five he started to look awful. The lack of nourishment and the ravaging effect of all that booze turned him into a haggard-looking guy. His face began to get puffy. Blood vessels started to show. His skin started to become withered and wrinkled. It was awful to see his rapid physical decline. He married three times and had four children, but his career and his flamboyant lifestyle came to an untimely end. The alcohol eventually got him and he died of, among other things, sclerosis of the liver in 1959, just a few months after he turned fifty.
SHORTLY AFTER I MET Errol Flynn back in 1949 I met a lovely forty-one-year-old actress whose original name had been Margarita Carmen Cansino. Trained by her father Eduardo Cansino as a dancer, she made a few films under the name Rita Cansino, but when her true talents were discovered in a movie called Only Angels Have Wings, she was signed to a contract at Columbia Pictures and her name was changed to Rita Hayworth.
She was a very beautiful woman. She had light brown eyes, a fabulous complexion, classical bone structure, and, although her natural hair color was black, she usually dyed it red. Because she exuded an absolutely irresistible sexuality the world dubbed her the “Love Goddess.” She was slender and lovely and always stole the scene away from her costars, even when she played opposite Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra. When I met her she had just divorced Hollywood wunderkind Orson Welles and had married Prince Aly Khan, grandson of the Aga Khan II, a member of the Persian royal family and imam to more than fifteen million Muslims in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
Rita had a brother named Eduardo Jr., whom we all called Eddie. It was he who introduced me to his sister at a party one weekend. But Eddie was not in his sister’s league. He drove a beat-up old World War II Jeep and delivered the Los Angeles Times to subscribers in the Hollywood Hills. He used to pick up his papers from the printers at four in the morning and then drive up into the residential areas in the mountains to drop them off. He was married to a third-rate actress and they had two or three kids. He really struggled to make ends meet. Through him I also met his Dad, Eduardo Sr. He was a dancer and choreographer from New York and once he moved out to the coast and settled in L.A. he ran a popular dance studio on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bronson Avenue, not too far away from the gas station where I worked.
One day Rita and her dad got into a dreadful argument about some family matter or other, and for years after that she wouldn’t speak to him. Once I got to know her well enough, I begged her to patch up her differences with her father but no, nothing doing, she’d say. She was a hardheaded woman. Beautiful and talented, yes. Difficult, absolutely. She also had a mean and stingy streak. To put it bluntly, she was very selfish. Perhaps exposure to all that wealth from her marriages spoiled her. Who can tell? She knew her brother Eddie was having a hard time but she turned a blind eye to it, hightailing it from soundstages to glamorous movie premieres to the playgrounds of Europe and the French Riviera. I felt really sorry for Eddie. He didn’t deserve to be treated that way by his sister. I cannot recall how many times he got a flat tire while doing his newspaper rounds. The tires on his Jeep had virtually no treads left on them and he never had enough money for a spare. Rita could never find it within herself to give the poor guy a dime. Eddie would remove the punctured wheel from his Jeep and roll it down all those narrow, twisting streets in the Hollywood Hills to Hollywood Boulevard and then into our gas station, where Mac patched it up for him. If Eddie was too far away or if the roads were too steep, he would have to hitch a ride to the station and then have Mac drive up and collect the punctured tire. It was pathetic. I, of course, knew what it was like to have a newspaper beat. But I couldn’t imagine how tough it had to be for Eddie to deal with flat tires on top of the hassle of making his rounds. Even though the war had been over for about four years, back in those days it was still difficult to get good tires because of shortages. Besides, new tires were very expensive.
One evening I was at the gas station and a guy I’d never seen before pulled up in a delivery truck and offered me a set of four perfectly good used tires and inner tubes for a giveaway sum of only a hundred bucks. I bought them immediately and wheeled them into the station, hoping that I could sell them to Eddie. But, as usual, he was strapped for cash, even though I said I would sell them to him for exactly the same price I had paid for them. I knew he needed those tires and tubes desperately so I called up Rita and said, “Rita honey, Eddie really needs a new set of wheels and I’ve got an absolute bargain here. Won’t you help him out?”
The phone went silent for a moment and then she said, “You’re a sweetheart, Scotty, and I love you for that, but fuck Eddie. Why should I? What has he ever done for me?”
Rita made more than sixty movies, including The Lady from Shanghai, Separate Tables, Pal Joey, Salome, Gilda, and the epic Cinerama adventure with John Wayne, Circus World, but she wouldn’t lift a finger to help her own brother.
11
Vice Squad
The vice squad division of the Los Angeles Police Department was the bane of many people’s lives during the forties and fifties. They mercilessly hounded members of the gay and lesbian communities, turning whole sectors of society into criminals. Its members were always in civilian clothes, never in uniform. They resorted to undercover skulduggery to trap, arrest, and condemn their prey, no matter how devious their methods. They would use any ploy to corner their victims. Just about everyone they arrested had money, was well-known, or had a good job. Their prime targets were successful professionals, members of the business world, and, of course, movie people. Many were married. Some were bisexual. What united them was the fact that they often had to come up with exorbitant sums of cash to keep their names out of the papers and to avoid going to court. People were arrested en masse in gay bars, or just as they came out of a bar, or after being followed by cops from a bar. If a guy came out of a bar and suddenly had an urge to pee and innocently went into an alleyway next to the bar to relieve himself he would be asking for trouble. The vice squad would pounce on him. Handcuffs would be slapped on him and he would be accused of exposing himself in public. If he tried to explain that he was only taking a piss the cops would instantly throw another charge at him for resisting arrest. It was ruthless.
When some queens were arrested, especially if they were loaded with booze, they would kid around with the arresting officers by jokingly saying, “Jail? You’re going to send me to jail? With all those lovely men in there? Oh, I’d love that. Take me. Handcuff me. Arrest me. Throw me in there, please!”
The arresting officer
s weren’t always amused by this lightheartedness, and the fines would be doubled.
At the conclusion of the war a handful of Los Angeles lawyers made their living exclusively off queens, lesbians, and anyone else who had anything to do with the gay world. It was a lucrative business defending them. All their energies were devoted to arguing their cases in court. Two attorneys in particular handled most of the cases: Harry Weiss and Sheldon Andelson. Weiss’s trademark was a large white panama hat that he always wore, no matter where or when. Because he was so effective in getting guys off the hook, he was known by the nickname of “Mr. Fix It.” Both Weiss and Andelson were gay and were hardworking champions of the early gay rights movement in the city. In fact, Harry Weiss himself owned about three or four gay bars in town.
I first met Harry just after the war when he was living with his mother just beyond Western Avenue, off Santa Monica Boulevard. He had a lover by the name of Glenn McMann. They eventually moved up to Argyle and Franklin. Harry finally ended up living on Tower Road in Beverly Hills, in a palatial house, replete with an elevator that connected the upstairs rooms with the entertainment area downstairs. It also had an enormous bar, where I worked for him on a number of occasions. Harry was smart. He was cunning. He was determined to never lose a case. He had a bunch of runners working for him: people who ran errands, delivering messages, picking up packages, that sort of thing. He often employed a brilliant gambit. He got his runners to track down the two arresting police officers who were due to appear in court to testify against the defendant (Harry’s client). The runners would diligently track the officers down before they went to court and subtly slip each of them an envelope containing a typewritten note asking them to please avoid appearing in court, plus $500 in cash. Police officers didn’t earn much in those days, and $500 was an awful lot of money. Harry never signed the note or included his business card with the cash so that if the arresting officers ever thought of pressing charges against him for obstructing justice no one could ever prove that the money or the note came from him. Usually on the day of the trial the officers would simply not show up in court. When the trial got underway and the prosecuting attorney or the judge called for them as witnesses they were nowhere to be seen. When asked where they were the judge would be informed that they were suddenly called out on another important assignment or that they were in the process of apprehending a criminal somewhere. The judge would angrily retort, “Couldn’t make it to court, eh? Well, stop wasting my time! Case dismissed!” I was in the public gallery one day when the judge dismissed no less than fourteen separate cases simply because the cops had been paid off by Harry Weiss.
The vice squad continued to hound, victimize, and harass people who dared overstep the line of what society and the law regarded as normal or acceptable behavior. I was by no means immune to their persistent pursuits. During that time of my life, I was still young with a lean, firm, muscular body, so a photographer friend of mine by the name of Lenny Robertson took three sets of pictures of me having sex with three gorgeous young girls. The pictures were shot in Lenny’s bedroom. Each set depicted me with a different girl. One set showed me with a dazzling Oriental beauty, one with a stunning black lady, and one with a lovely white girl with blonde hair. It was during the days when nudie pictures were hard to come by and when pornographic images—whether of the soft- or hard-core variety—were virtually unobtainable. Lenny knew there was a healthy market for explicit porn so why not make a few bucks out of it? He photographed the images so that my face was never distinguishable. You could clearly see every other part of my anatomy but never my face. I was photographed having intercourse with the women in various positions, with my head buried in their crotches performing cunnilingus on them, with my face smothered by their boobs, kissing them, in the sixty-nine position, doggie style, you name it. Fortunately I had no tattoos, moles, or bodily markings that could be used to identify me. Lenny sold the pictures to mutual friends and to people we knew for ten dollars a set. I never saw a cent from the sales but it didn’t matter. I was happy to oblige.
One day the vice squad dropped in to see me at the gas station and produced the photographs. They were always prowling around, always suspicious. They often drove past the station at night, obviously curious as to why there were so many cars and young people around, especially when other gas stations in the area were much quieter than mine.
“This you?” they asked, showing me the photographs.
“Nope,” I said. “Never seen them in my life.”
Because my face was not visible, they could not physically identify me and pin anything on me. So, reluctantly, they left. Lenny Robertson, on the other hand, managed to avoid a jail sentence but had to pay a steep fine for taking and selling the pictures. The whole thing was a travesty, a farce, a mockery of what went on in the world. We did no harm. We polluted no minds. We just showed three beautiful females doing what comes naturally with a male; what was criminal about that?
Not all law enforcement officers were the enemy. I had a good customer at the gas station who was a member of the traffic department of the LAPD. His name was Officer Calvin someone-or-other but we all called him Cal. He was a big muscular guy who lived in a rooming house just up the road from the gas station. He was always working out, lifting weights, jogging around the block, getting into shape. He was in his midtwenties, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and not your typical cop. He used to come down to the station sometimes and hang around with the other young guys. The problem was that he wasn’t too bright. He never spotted a gay man in a crowd. Even if one or two of the guys were limp-wristed and lisped, he wouldn’t pick up on it. We all liked Cal. He had a pretty Italian girlfriend who lived across the street from him. He had never managed to take her to bed and thought that she was still a virgin. I used to kid him about it.
“When’re you going to make love to her, Cal?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he would say. “Not yet. She’s still pure, buddy, and I ain’t gonna do nothin’ until she says she wants it or until we’re married.”
But I knew otherwise. I had been fixing up tricks for her for a long time; blow jobs, hand jobs, straight intercourse, whatever. She did it all. My trailer in the backyard had seen a lot of her.
Cal rode a nice Harley-Davidson motorcycle for the traffic department and he was very proud of it. Every now and again he would bring it down to the station for some gas or to give it a wash and polish. One night he was in the service bay cleaning and buffing it to a gleaming finish. He was off duty and dressed in casual clothes. All of a sudden three or four guys from the vice squad walked into the office at the station and the head honcho said to me, “Okay, now listen, pal, we’ve spent the last two nights on the roof of the bowling alley next to the motel across the street watching this joint and we just can’t figure out why so many cars pull in here compared to other gas stations in the area. What’s going on? You fellas up to somethin’?”
Apparently they had been watching the gas station for a couple of weeks already and could not figure out why the place was so popular.
“This is Monday night,” the cop said, “and no other gas station in Hollywood is as busy as this one. They’ve all got good pump attendants and their prices are the same as yours, yet they get maybe one or two cars every half hour. Here you sometimes get as many ten or fifteen. What’s the deal? What’s goin’ on?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I guess we just give good service.”
This irritated the cop. He walked right up to me and thrust his face into mine.
“Are you hiding somethin’ from us, pal? You up to no good?”
I just shrugged and pointed to Cal cleaning his motorcycle in the service bay.
“Ask him,” I said. “He’s LAPD. He should know.”
So the vice squad marched over and questioned Cal, but he couldn’t tell them anything. He was so unobservant and unaware of what was going on that he had absolutely no idea what I was up to, even when I had people slipping in and out of
the trailer in the backyard. He merely told them that Richfield Gas was a real fun place to pop into and spend a while. He said there were always a lot of guys with their girlfriends around to talk to, that most of them knew about the latest sports scores and the current music scene and that the place was harmless enough. He said young folks just gathered there because it was convenient, always open till late, and people had got used to meeting and hanging out there. It was all innocent enough, he assured them. I’m not sure what the vice squad made of what he told them but they left. The kid was utterly clueless about what was really going on. And just as well, because I had a lesbian trio in one bedroom of the trailer that night and a gay guy sucking the dick of one of my Marine buddies in the other.
The demise of the vice squad was a long time coming.
To tell the happy ending to the story, we have to briefly fast-forward to 1972. A lawyer friend of mine by the name of Burt Pines was campaigning to become Los Angeles city attorney. Pines was straight, married, and had two kids but he was sympathetic to the gay rights movement.
Another good friend of mine, a very wealthy gay guy by the name of Lloyd Rigler, for whom I had set up innumerable tricks over the years, was very respectful of Burt Pines’s efforts to secure better conditions for the gay community.
One day Lloyd approached Burt and said, “Burt, I’ll help with the financing of your election campaign on one condition.”
“And what’s that?” Pines asked.
“That if you’re elected into office the first thing you’ll do is pull the LAPD’s vice squad off the backs of the queens.”
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