Willie’s great love had been a man named Gerald Haxton. They spent many years together before Gerald died in 1944. I don’t think Willie ever got over his death. Nevertheless, once he met Alan Searle, a good-looking but rather opinionated and scandal-mongering fellow quite a lot younger than Willie, he took him under his wing and they became inseparable.
I found Willie and Alan to be delightful, and the three of us got along splendidly. They were also avid sexual voyeurs, seldom if ever getting involved in the action themselves. They had interesting and varied tastes and I would often fix up tricks for them in their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sometimes they wanted to watch two men who were lovers. Occasionally they wanted to see a guy and a girl together. At other times they wanted only two girls. Now and then I would bring three or four young couples to their bungalow and each pair would do something entirely different. One couple would be in the sixty-nine position, two gay males would take turns sucking one another off, two lesbians would perform cunnilingus on each other, a straight duet would be having sex in the missionary position, and so on. Willie would sit in an armchair fully dressed in jacket and tie, his legs elegantly crossed, sipping wine, and watching while Alan sat close by, observing everything with a deadpan expression on his face. Alan seldom showed his emotions. He was always as stiff-upper-lipped as an eccentric Englishman could possibly be. The lights were always turned down very low during these little sessions. I would cover all the lamp shades and reading lights with pillowcases or towels to keep the room very dim. Willie was generous to the young performers. The shows would go on for an hour or two and then conclude with him giving each of the performers a substantial tip.
Another fine talent from across the pond whom I got to know extremely well was Britain’s master of mirth, myth, and music, Noël Coward. In fact, he was often referred to by his nickname, the “Master.” During conversation, his fellow Brits and many of his American friends would easily switch between calling him Noël and Master. I cannot recall where I met him, though it must certainly have been at a private Hollywood dinner party where I was working.
I remember his engaging British accent as he removed his long cigarette holder from his mouth, flashed his white teeth at me, firmly shook my hand, and said, “How utterly splendid it is to meet you, Mr. Bowers. I have heard so much about you.”
I knew he meant it. I was proud of the fact that my reputation was preceding me. Just as things used to be at the gas station a few years back, if any kind of tricking was involved, people knew that all they had to do was call me.
I must have been introduced to Noël sometime around the midfifties because I clearly remember him talking to the dinner guests about his upcoming cabaret debut in Las Vegas and about a series of planned CBS television shows with Mary Martin, fresh from her role as Ensign Nellie Forbush in Rogers and Hammerstein’s smash hit Broadway musical, South Pacific. Noël was in town often, usually staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was always jotting down notes and scribbling things on pieces of paper. Like so many other talented and successful British artists and performers at the time, Noël had left his native England to avoid the country’s excessively high taxation rates. He first settled in Bermuda and later bought homes in Jamaica and Switzerland. He was highly critical of Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor, for abdicating in order to marry Wallis Simpson. He thought it “irresponsible.” Oddly, he never mentioned anything in my presence about Edward’s homosexuality. I’m certain he must have known about it.
Noël had many lovers in his day, including Prince George, the Duke of Kent; actors Alan Webb and Louis Hayward; and playwright Keith Winter. His longest relationship was with the South African actor Graham Payn, who featured in a few of his London stage productions. But he was usually alone when he was in Los Angeles. We were attracted to one another and so I tricked him often. However, for the Master, penetrative sex was out. It was strictly oral, with lots of bodily touching, caressing, and kneading in between. We had many long steamy sessions together. I knew exactly what he liked and he always commended me on my skills. When it comes to sex every single person is different, but those differences are usually so slight, so subtle, that unless you’re really tuned in you can overlook them or not even be aware that they exist. Good sex is all about how much is too much, how little is too little, about that thin dividing line between consistency and variety, between meeting the expected and surprising with the unexpected. It is about that delicate moment of touch in exactly the right place at the right moment to heighten the experience, to create a sizzling electrical charge that permeates the full body from head to toe. Noël had distinct likes, dislikes, and preferences and I quickly learned which of his buttons to press. On one of his visits to town he tried to get me to return to his home in the Caribbean with him. He even handed me a first-class return steamer ticket but I had to turn down the enticing offer. There was just too much going on in L.A., which prevented me from being away for that long. On another occasion Noël asked me to spend a vacation in Tahiti with him but, again, I had to refuse. Instead, I sent quite a few young guys down to the Caribbean for him. They would stay at his home with him for a few weeks, keeping him happily distracted as he continued to write. He paid all their expenses and fares, no questions asked.
Noël had an incredible intellect. He was witty, wise, and had an infectious sense of humor. When he was in stimulating company he always had something new to say. He never repeated himself. His command of the English language was astonishing. One night Noël and the actress Tallulah Bankhead were at a party where I was working. Tallulah was a very bright lady who had once been a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. The guests at this particular party were having a lively competition to determine who could come up with the cleverest, wittiest, most incisive statement about a subject that everyone had agreed upon. Try as she might, Tallulah could not beat Noël at the game. He would always top whatever she said.
One evening Noël was a guest at yet another party where I was bartending and Maxene Andrews walked in, arm in arm with a girlfriend. Maxene was one of the three famous Andrews sisters who had boogie-woogied their way to the top of the hit parade and sang to the troops during World War II. Maxene was a lesbian, and quite open about it.
As they swished past the chair where Noël was sitting he closed his eyes, raised his eyebrows, flicked the ash off the end of the cigarette in his long cigarette holder, and uttered quite loudly, “Good gracious me. How odd of God to waste three cunts on the Andrews sisters. He could have done well enough with two.”
And then he turned to his companion and continued whatever conversation they had been having. Everyone in the room exploded with laughter. Fortunately, Maxene and her companion were out of earshot.
As time went by my circle of friends continued to grow. My services as a host and bartender at private dinners, cocktail parties, birthdays, and all sorts of social gatherings were in ever greater demand. I became well-known for a special little trick that I started performing. I can’t remember when I first did it but people began demanding that I do it, especially at gay parties. This was my “Swizzle Stick Trick.” Since nature endowed me with a cock of which I have always been proud I would often whip it out and stir drinks with it. Folks loved that. At mixed parties where the women knew me well enough I would also do it. People loved to order cocktails and watch me stir them with my flaccid penis. Needless to say, I would always add ice to the drink only after I’d stirred it!
Those were wild and wonderful days. Often just before I drifted off into sleep I would stare up at the ceiling and simply count my blessings, feeling overwhelmingly grateful for my lot in life. There was no doubt about it, Hollywood was simply the most marvelous place in the world for anyone to be.
19
Finding Out
I was working at a party in the Hollywood Hills in the early fifties when I first met him; few people knew who he was. Yet he was to make an indelible impression on the science of human sexual research an
d become a household name. He was biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey, then in his late fifties. He had shaken the very foundations of science, sociology, and medicine in 1948 with the publication of his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. At the time we met he was writing his second ground-breaking tome, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. He was discussing it with a group of friends and medical associates at a party and was complaining about how difficult it was to gain access to young women who were prepared to freely share stories of their sexual experiences with him.
Toward the end of the evening when the conversation around the table had grown louder, and as groups of diners broke off into different discussions, I leaned over his shoulder to remove his dessert plate and whispered into his ear, “I think I might be able to help you in your research, sir.”
Later in the evening he took me aside and told me all about the Institute for Sex Research, known as the ISR, which he had established as a nonprofit organization on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research associates were Clyde Martin, Wardwell Pomeroy, and Paul Gebhard. Nothing like the ISR had ever existed before. However, Kinsey said he was getting frustrated over the difficulties he was having gaining access to young women to interview because there was a longstanding social stigma against open discussion of female sexual behavior. He wanted to investigate the subject as deeply as possible, just as he had done a few years earlier with his report on males. He wanted to know what I meant when I said I might be able to help him. I told him that I thought I might be able to introduce him to some of my female friends who may want to share their stories with him. To discuss it further we arranged to meet a couple of days later. That was when my close and utterly fascinating relationship with Alfred Kinsey began.
At our next meeting I told Kinsey all about what I had been doing ever since I got out of the Marines. He was intrigued. No, he was more than that. He was utterly fascinated. Because of the new book he was working on he was particularly interested in what I knew about the female of the species, most specifically with regard to lesbianism. His aim was to focus on numerous aspects of female sexuality: marital sex, extramarital sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, oral sex, masturbation, and prostitution. He was fascinated but not surprised when I told him how prevalent I had found lesbianism to be in society. Up until then researchers were much more aware of gay sexual activities among men but not much was known about lesbian behavior. Kinsey wanted to break through those barriers. He wanted to prove that there was just as much homosexual activity going on among women as there was among men and that it ought to be classified as a normal part of human sexual behavior. He explained to me what he was looking for and I expressed an interest in showing him not only how much lesbianism there was but also the degree of variation there was in the many forms of lesbian sexual activities. After our meeting he made enquiries around town about my credentials and within a week he enthusiastically embraced me as a member of his team. But everything would take place in confidence. I would never be credited for any assistance I might bring to the project and all the young ladies I recruited to help his institute in its research would remain nameless. Their identities would not be revealed.
And so began a number of trips to Bloomington, Indiana. Over a period of about two months Kinsey flew me and a group of young women whom I had handpicked, from Los Angeles on United Airlines to Chicago and then from there on Lake Central Airlines to Bloomington. To remain within the boundaries of the law the girls I had chosen were always eighteen or older, but we were especially keen to recruit those who looked about seventeen, simply because that is the average age at which females became sexually active, especially those commencing college. To accurately reflect that group we wanted them to look like typical bobby-soxers of the time, replete with pom-poms, ribbons, saddle shoes, white socks, and short skirts.
We shot hours of 16mm and 8mm film of them on the Indiana University campus, portraying them as typical college students. We followed them around in groups of two or three, observing them in class, coming out of class, chewing gum, giggling, and wiggling as boys made passes at them, and then eavesdropping over their shoulders as they retired to their rooms and dormitories. There, behind locked doors, prevailing myths were shattered as the girls undressed, made out with one another, and engaged in various forms of sex. They practiced cunnilingus, played with dildos, masturbated, and did everything that college-aged kids did in real life in the big wide world. There was nothing abnormal in any of this. That’s what young ladies did, even back in the fifties. The people we had chosen for these scenes were not necessarily lesbian but they were more than happy to experiment, discover, and explore their sexuality for the cameras. And that was the point of it all. We wanted to show the sexual variety expressed among young females. At that time most doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, educationists, academics, and certainly religious leaders and parents refused to accept the idea that young college girls engaged in sexual experimentation of any kind, let alone—heaven forbid!—lesbian activities. Kinsey wanted to pull off people’s blindfolds, provide them with the truth, and open their minds to reality.
Because of strict antipornography laws in Indiana we had to take extra precautions when processing the film that we had shot. Kinsey and I made contact with a guy who I will simply refer to as Bob because he asked me never to reveal his name to anyone. Of course, it would be safe to do so now, but a promise is a promise. Bob worked as an industrial chemist for the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. Once filming was completed Kinsey used to fly Bob to Bloomington, together with big metal cases full of processing and laboratory equipment, and Bob set it all up in a darkened warehouse beside a local film processing laboratory where we had established discreet local contacts. There the motion picture film was processed and printed and then brought over in unmarked cans to the institute.
Behind the bolted doors of meeting rooms and lecture halls we showed the material to groups of researchers and counselors. Middle-aged women were always the most resistant. They were especially doubtful about our work or simply wanted to deny that lesbianism existed on American college campuses. But Kinsey quickly managed to dispel their myopic thinking. When Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out in book form in 1953 it caused an outcry. However, people gradually simmered down and began to grasp the validity and extensive range of Kinsey and his team’s research. Women’s clubs and other organizations were the last barriers to fall as they reluctantly came to accept the fact that lesbianism indeed existed and was practiced in American society, from college age upward. Prior to that, as I said earlier, the thinking was that only men engaged in homosexuality. Some hard-liners still clung to the belief that lesbianism was only to be found in prisons, where women were alone, or in places where they were deprived of heterosexual relationships. Kinsey and his team overturned all that thinking. Lesbianism was as prevalent as gay sex. It was part of human life. Amazingly, once the book came out the sluice gates opened. Counselors at colleges and universities all over the country began to be inundated by questions from female students who admitted that they were confused about their sexual orientation or who came out of the closet and openly stated that they were lesbian.
I got to know Kinsey and his partners Martin, Pomeroy, and Gebhard really well. But the better I knew them the more I realized that they were actually surprisingly square and out of touch with things. They didn’t really have the full picture of what was going on in the alternative and counterculture tiers of society. Despite all of Kinsey’s work he was still rather naive in some ways. I wanted to help him. I wanted to expose him to what he was trying to find out. I wanted to contribute to the database of knowledge of what really went on in the big wide world.
I brought the subject up with Willie Somerset Maugham one day and was thrilled when Willie said, “Well, dear boy, arrange a little soirée of a mixed bag of, say, half a dozen at my bungalow on
Saturday night and bring this Kinsey fellow along with you. I’d love to meet him.”
So I did. I arranged for a straight couple, plus two gays and two lesbians to give us a little performance at Willie’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I dragged Kinsey along with me. Actually, dragged is the wrong term. He was only too happy to be there. He was also thrilled to meet Willie and Alan. As Kinsey stared at the young people getting up to their antics I watched him. He was mesmerized. I don’t think he expected anything like what he saw that night. It was raw, open, unfettered, uninhibited, totally indulgent sex. At times I wanted to laugh out loud as I watched the expressions on his face, but I managed to stifle the urge by convincing myself that this little spectacle wasn’t meant for fun but, for want of a better term, “wholesome scientific research.”
Over the years, Kinsey continued to conduct extensive interviews for the ISR. He often told me that some of the most revealing information came from prisoners. Inmates at state and local penitentiaries were only too happy to spend a day in the prison library talking to him about their sex lives. Prisoners would delve into the minutest detail about their personal histories and sexual experiences, often spending hours at a time with him. Kinsey found their help invaluable. They provided a captivating window into the sexual mores of society.
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