Not long after I returned to L.A. from New York I got a note from Sheila telling me that she was pregnant. Neither of us were certain how to deal with the situation. Then I got another note. She told me that she would be moving out to California within a couple of months. Apparently she had talked Jerry into relocating to Hollywood, where new opportunities in film and television were opening up for his musical talents. I could hardly contain my excitement.
As soon as she arrived back in town she took an apartment at 1125 North Kings Road, between Fountain and Santa Monica Boulevard. The day after she moved in she told me that she had undergone an abortion before leaving New York. In a way we were relieved, but then again, to be truthful, I know that she deeply regretted terminating the pregnancy. Long after we had separated, for years and years afterward, she used to call me up on the approximate date that the baby would have been born and remind me that it would have been time to celebrate the birthday. This went on for fifteen or twenty years. She would call up and say, “Our kid would have been ten years old today, Scotty.” Or twelve or fifteen or eighteen or whatever. The abortion broke her heart. She never got over it. And I never really knew how to deal with it, either. The pain was intense. In fact, it probably played a role in our eventual separation.
Sheila and I shacked up together for almost four years. I hardly ever slept at home anymore. If I wasn’t out all night bartending or tricking somebody I would sleep over at Sheila’s place. She was quite a gal. Apart from being great in bed, she had a heart of gold. She was utterly giving and forgiving. She was not in the least bit possessive, jealous, or controlling. She was so generous, open-minded, and considerate that on Christmas Eve or on my birthday I would come home to her and she would tiptoe me toward the bedroom, slowly open the door, and then show me a gorgeous young girl that she had in bed for me as a gift for the night. She believed in variety. She was convinced that surprises and the odd adventurous foray with other people kept a relationship alive, sizzling, and at its peak. She was determined to keep boredom at bay, no matter what.
There was only one impediment to our relationship. And the name of that problem was Judith Moore.
HERE’S HOW IT HAPPENED. At the time that I was living with Sheila I had a good friend by the name of Al Grossman. Al was a sweet man who was immeasurably wealthy. He came from a highly successful family of industrialists and had inherited a fortune. He never had to work. He socialized a lot and moved in the most elite circles. For years he had been fixing me up with beautiful, moneyed women, many of whom had tipped me generously for sexual services. But he also found me a lot of really good personal dates.
One day in 1968 he left me a message at home and insisted that I call him urgently. In fact, it was Betty who took the call. When I popped in to see her and Donna she gave me the message. I called Al Grossman immediately.
“Get over here tonight, Scotty,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“My place. Seven o’clock.”
“Okay,” I answered, thinking he was having a party that evening and wanted a bartender. “How many are you expecting?”
“Just you,” he replied.
This made no sense to me.
“What are you talking about, Al?” I asked.
“I met this broad at a dinner last night,” he answered. “I want you to meet her.”
What could I say?
At seven that evening I knocked on the door of Al’s West Hollywood home. He showed me into the library and standing in the middle of the room like an object on display in a museum of fine art was one of the most magnificent creatures I had ever laid eyes on.
“Judith, Scotty. Scotty, Judith,” said Al.
I studied her, dumbstruck by her beauty.
“I see you two are gonna get along just fine,” Al chuckled.
I hardly remember anything else about that evening. Judith was exactly the same age as Sheila. She was also the same height. But she was a beauty beyond description. She had long, soft, dark hair, brown eyes, magnificent facial features. Her prominent cheekbones made her look like a portrait created by some classical Italian master. Her skin texture was so perfect that she wore only the tiniest hint of makeup. She was thin and trim, yet had just enough bulges in the right places to give her the figure of a fashion model. As she sat down and crossed her legs I was struck by her dainty, sensitive body language. This woman was all sex, a goddess from a far-off, mythical place. I could not take my eyes off her. She was the most captivating and magnificent woman I had ever seen, and that included Sheila plus all the hundreds of others who had preceded her. For once in my life I was speechless. She was perfect in every way.
The next night I took her out to dinner. Judith Moore was her name. She was a divorcée and had been single for a couple of years. She had two young kids. They were both at boarding school. Judith came from a wealthy Wisconsin family. It wasn’t dysfunctional in the contemporary sense of the word but its members were fragmented, detached, out of touch with one another. Her mother had divorced her father and moved to Switzerland. Her father lived in Chicago. She didn’t see much of either of them. She had a brother who lived in Portland, Oregon, and another brother who lived in Hawaii. There were years when they didn’t even send so much as a Christmas card to one another.
Judith had money. Lots of it. Her grandfather had invented, patented, manufactured, and sold machines that produced paper from pulpwood. The family had become one of the wealthiest in all of the Midwest. She told me she had an apartment here in town, but she also owned homes in Wisconsin, Rome, and London. She made it very clear from the get-go that there were indeed many men in her life and that marriage was remote from her mind. She enjoyed her freedom and she loved to play hard. But, despite her aversion to settling down, she said she also had the capacity to love hard. And it was not long before I began to experience precisely what she meant by that.
I quickly discovered that Judith was the most original person I had ever known. She exuded passion. Her heart was fathomless. She could love with an intensity that eclipsed even that of my dear Sheila. She was kind. She was sweet. She was gentle. She was funny. She was intelligent. She was worldly. She was unique in every way.
But she was never truly mine.
There were times when she went off to be with other men for weeks or months at a time. I never questioned that. She had warned me about it and so I accepted it. I had a key to her apartment and whenever she was back in town all she had to do was snap her fingers and I would be there. When I crawled into bed beside her it was like there was absolutely no one else in her life. She loved unconditionally and intensely. When I entered her it was like I had never known another woman in my entire life. Every time we made love it was like the first time I had ever experienced the sheer wonderment of woman.
Not once did I know her to be moody or downbeat. She never chided me for anything. She didn’t know the meaning of cynicism or criticism. She had no clue what malice meant. She sparkled with life. She welcomed every day, every hour, every minute. She celebrated the mere act of being alive.
I loved her so. There was a strange vacuum in my life every time I spent more than an hour away from her.
But I still had to work. One night I was bartending at a party and the hostess was in a foul mood because she had caught her husband having an affair with his secretary.
“That son of a bitch,” she said after the party, “I told him to fuck off.”
And then she threw herself at me and whispered, “Scotty, stay with me tonight.”
Which I did.
The next morning, long after dawn, I went back to Judith. She opened the door, smiled, welcomed me into the apartment, hugged and kissed me, ran a hot bath for me, and asked me what I would like for breakfast. She never asked where I was or what I had been doing. She accepted everything without question. And she was always game to try new things. She, like Sheila, believed that a little adventurous sexual play involving others now and again didn’t weaken a rel
ationship but strengthened it.
She enjoyed the swinging scene. We would go to a restaurant, meet another couple, strike up a rapport, and then go home with them. Judith would happily spend the night with the guy while I was with his wife. Foursomes were okay with her, too. No questions were ever asked. There were no hassles, no hang-ups. Anything was all right, just as long as she knew that whatever we did made me happy.
I was a lucky guy. The years between 1965 and 1973, the years that I was seeing Sheila and Judith, were the happiest and most complete of my life. When I was staying over at Sheila’s place I spun a little white lie by telling Judith that I was out with some trick or other. The same applied the other way around. When I was with Judith she knew nothing of Sheila. As far as she was concerned, I was out working somewhere. Fortunately, neither of them prodded or probed. They accepted everything. So there I was, occasionally at home with Betty at North St. Andrew’s Place, but spending most of my time with either Sheila or Judith. Plus, of course, one or two other ladies tucked away here and there and, on top of that, there was my very busy tricking life, involving both men and women. I was a busy man. And I was totally happy.
But I have learned that, for me anyway, few things in this world last forever. Both Sheila and Judith eventually drifted out of my life. But life—and my way of living it—went on.
26
Friends
One of my dearest friends during the sixties was the playwright Tennessee Williams. We were introduced at a party and became very good buddies. In fact, we took an immediate shining to one another and I began tricking him. Tennessee was already into his fifties and was a heavy smoker and drinker, but he was still in good health and proved himself to be a horny devil once we got to know one another. He wasn’t exactly good-looking. In fact, he often looked quite disheveled. When I met him he was still grieving over the loss of his long-time companion Frank Merlo, a sailor he had met in 1947 and who passed away from cancer in 1963. That loss, compounded by Tennessee’s unhappy childhood, his sister Rose’s mental illness and institutionalization, his fractured relationship with his younger brother Dakin, his own battle with depression and alcoholism, and his eventual addiction to prescription drugs, all took a heavy toll on him. Tennessee was a brilliant writer but an insecure, complex man. He suffered many failures and rejections during his career as one of America’s most famous playwrights but, despite the disappointments, he was the creator of some of the most extraordinary works ever written for the American theater.
Whenever he came to L.A. he and I would always get together. He loved the Beverly Hills Hotel and the management always made sure that he got his favorite room in the east wing when he stayed there.
One afternoon I got a call from him. He invited me over, saying that he had something to show me that evening. To be honest, Tenny was quite a time-consuming guy. He was smart and he loved to talk. And talk. And talk some more. He was like Spencer Tracy in some ways. He’d consume a lot of alcohol and hours would pass before we’d get down to business. Anyway, I didn’t know what he meant by wanting to “show” me anything that particular evening. I guessed it was just another term for a night of sex with him. That evening I arrived at his room. He invited me in, told me to sit down, and then tossed a manuscript in my lap.
“That’s for you,” he said. “Take a look at it while I go downstairs for a drink.”
I settled back and began to read.
I was shocked at what he had written. In his most beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent Tennessee Williams style he had penned a biography of me. But, in effect, the piece was little more than a revealing exposé of my role in arranging tricks for the homosexual community of Los Angeles. He had painted a vivid picture of me as the fairy godmother of the entire gay world in the City of Angels. The piece made it look like I was flying over Hollywood Boulevard directing all the queens in town. It made it seem that if I didn’t exist there would be no gay life at all in Hollywood. He had turned me into a maverick, a renegade, a star, a hero. The article was meant to flatter me, to celebrate what I had done, but what it really did was make me look like the mother of all queens. It was way over the top.
When he returned an hour or so later he asked me what I thought and I just said, “Tenny, I know you’re a sweetheart, baby, and I know you meant well but, please, tear that up.”
At first he was disappointed at my reaction but he soon realized how unhappy I was about it and we just hugged and laughed about it. As for the manuscript, it never did see the light of day and I have no idea what he did with it.
A REALLY GOOD FRIEND of mine during the midsixties was Raymond Burr, the lead in the long-running TV crime series, Perry Mason. Born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, Ray was one of the nicest guys around. He was a pleasant person as well as one of the most generous and kindhearted human beings I have ever known. He always dug deep into his pocket and his wallet to share with those less privileged than himself.
Ray was gay and I tricked him very often. He behaved in a very masculine manner. There wasn’t anything about him that made it obvious he was gay. In fact, he attracted women like moths to a flame. Because Ray played a lawyer on TV he was once invited up to Seattle to address a group of big-shot attorneys at a fund-raising dinner. Because we were really very fond of one another he invited me along on the trip with him. Oddly, we stayed at the same Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle where I first met Betty after I had completed service as a Marine, only this time we stayed in one of the hotel’s luxury penthouse suites.
One evening over dinner we met two gorgeous airline cabin attendants. One was blonde and the other a dark-haired beauty. Both were blessed with great boobs. I invited them up to the penthouse I was sharing with Ray but I had to fuck them both because Ray, bless his soul, wasn’t up to it. He just couldn’t do anything. He could only get it up with men.
When working on movies or on his TV shows in Los Angeles Ray and I often got together for a meal at night and then retired to his dressing room in the studio. Ray frequently slept over at whichever studio he was shooting. Sometimes, after a heavy bout of sex, I would spend the night in his dressing room with him. Annoyingly, at five o’clock in the morning, the unit production manager or assistant director would burst in on us, turn on all the lights, clap his hands, wake us up, and get Ray going with rehearsals for the day’s shooting. By then we would probably have been asleep for only an hour or two at most. Those early-morning disruptions were really awful but Ray was a true professional and dealt with it like a pro. Within an hour he was in character and within two hours he would be in costume, made up, and on set, fresh as a daisy.
Years ago I arranged a quick trick for Ray. I introduced him to a very nice, good-looking but totally down-and-out young man thirteen years his junior. The guy’s name was Bob Benevidez. He was living in a hole above a store on La Brea Avenue with no job to speak of and only a mattress on the floor for furniture. He also owned an ancient clapped-out car that seldom ran. The next thing I knew, Ray had fixed Bob up with a small role in one of the Perry Mason episodes. Then Bob moved in with him. Ray owned two houses in town and loved throwing dinner parties. I was often there, sometimes as a guest and sometimes as a bartender. Within a year of Bob and Ray getting together as lovers Ray bought two houses for Bob, one for him to live in and one for him to derive income from as a rental property. Ray knew a great deal about the cultivation of orchids and he and Bob eventually established nurseries in Fiji, the Azores, and Hawaii. They cultivated and hybridized over 1,500 new orchid species and, many years later, just before Ray became ill with kidney cancer, they started their own vineyard at their Dry Creek Valley ranch in the Sonoma Valley near San Francisco. Ray passed away in September 1993 and Bob continues to run the winery.
ONE OF THE MORE eccentrically interesting people I knew well was Harold Lloyd. He was one of those immensely talented “kings of comedy” during the era of silent movies. Harold was also one of the original thirty-six founding members of the A
cademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He owned a spectacular property called “Green Acres” on 1125 Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. The gates and driveway to the grounds had first been pointed out to me by Walter Pidgeon the day he picked me up way back in 1946. The property boasted no less than forty-four rooms, twenty-six bathrooms, fourteen fountains, and at least a dozen individually tended gardens. Today it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The place originally consisted of nineteen acres but that was eventually reduced to twelve. Harold even had a stream on the property that he used as a canoe run. He built the place over a period of five years, between 1927 and 1931. It was a formidable undertaking. There was an enormous swimming pool, a multicar garage, a large movie theater with plush seating, a wine cellar, a hothouse, and a gymnasium. There were fabulous glossy green tiles everywhere, all handmade by an Italian glazer in Los Feliz, right here in Los Angeles.
I fixed Harold up with many girls over the years. They were all beauties and, I might add, all hookers. But he never touched any of them physically. All he wanted to do was photograph them in the nude with his special 3-D camera. The movies had made him very rich and he had a fabulous assortment of the finest photographic equipment. His nudie stereoscopic 3-D pictures of pretty girls were famous all over town and even became collector’s pieces in New York, London, and Paris. Green Acres lent itself to the kind of photography he did. Dripping vines, beautifully carved stonework, carpets of living color, and a rich variety of wildlife all made for spectacular backgrounds. His pictures were breathtaking.
One day, at Harold’s request, I brought a dozen young beauties over to Green Acres for him to photograph. While I was waiting for him to finish shooting them against groves of trees, amid beds of flowers, against waterfalls, or at the poolside, I was invited inside the house by his wife, Mildred. She always glided about the place in skimpy outfits. She liked her booze and by midday she was already as high as a coot. There was an enormous year-round Christmas tree inside the house festooned with fancy, expensive ornaments. I screwed Mildred at the base of the tree, in the parlor, and in her bedroom, and was invited back many times to repeat the favor. Harold was never the wiser and, even if he was, he was far more interested in his three-dimensional nude photography than he was in sex with his wife.
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