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Looking Back
By the time the mideighties arrived things had changed dramatically in Hollywood. The mysterious illness that first went by the ominous name of “gay cancer” or “gay plague” was making a lot of people sick. Many were dying. Eventually, the insidious thing was identified as the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the first stage of the killer disease that was wiping out an entire generation of people, not only in the gay community but also in heterosexual societies worldwide. AIDS had launched itself in a vicious war against humanity. It brought an end to the sexual freedoms that had defined much of life in Tinseltown ever since the birth of the movies. I, too, underwent a major change. Tricking—whether for others or doing it myself—gradually slowed down to a snail’s pace. Sex used to be about having fun and a good time. The advent of AIDS didn’t change that per se, but now sex could come at the cost of your very life. So, things changed. A lot. The wild and wooly days were over. The drag parties and gang bangs and swingers’ evenings and orgies became a thing of the past.
But life went on.
One evening in 1981 I was with some friends at Alberto’s, a fancy little piano bar on Melrose Avenue between Doheny and Robertson in West Los Angeles. A very attractive woman with a lovely voice was on stage singing “Looking Through the Eyes of Love.” She was no spring chicken, probably in her midforties, but she was trim, with a very appealing figure, a finely chiseled face with an infectious smile, pearly white teeth, and gorgeous blue eyes. She had soft, silky blonde hair. I was immediately taken with her. After she got off stage I cornered her and was surprised to learn that she was unaccompanied. I took her over to a table in a corner and we began to chat. Her name was Lois Broad. It turned out that she wasn’t a professional singer but was simply at the bar that evening to while away a couple of hours. She had beautiful diction—which was not surprising because, as she explained, she was a professional speech therapist. She had come out to California from New York eighteen months earlier to teach in the public school system. She was clearly a very smart and educated lady, a graduate of Cornell and Columbia universities. While living in Manhattan she had been teaching and working in speech clinics. Lois, a divorcée with a daughter in Texas, wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Holly wood type. Ten years younger than me, she wasn’t in the least bit extravagant and was simply a sweet, uncomplicated woman with no ambitions of a career in show business. She was real. She was genuine. She was undemanding and easy to be with. And so we began to date.
Breaking a pattern of committed bachelorhood that I had zealously guarded for over sixty years, Lois and I got married on a summer day on July 8, 1984. The ceremony took place in a park overlooking the Pacific Palisades, not too far from the ocean. A Protestant minister officiated and about fifty or sixty guests attended. Lois was renting a comfortable apartment in Brentwood and so I moved in with her. Needless to say, Betty knew nothing of this new arrangement. Lois, on the other hand, knew all about Betty and was very understanding of the fact that I needed to put in regular appearances at my house on North St. Andrew’s Place where Betty was living.
My life remained as gypsy-like as ever because I divided my time between Lois and Betty, still spending many evenings sleeping over at friends’ or at the homes of clients after a dusk-to-dawn party. I also spent the odd night at the homes of people I knew well and continued to trick. In addition, I often slept in the guest cottage at Beech Dickerson’s place on Kew Drive. Despite my marital status I maintained my bartending schedule and continued to serve dinner and repair picket fences and fix roofs. I also fed the wild raccoon and the cute little skunk and the itinerant feral cat that lived in the bushes of the St. Andrews Place property. As I had long ago entered the twilight of my life, my friends became more important to me than ever. Even though AIDS loomed over us, there were many who still asked me to arrange tricks for them. For a while I continued to do so, but I was never sure whether adequate protection and safeguards were being used. I always insisted that a guy assure me he was going to use a condom with his trick, be they male or female, but who knew whether or not he did so? It was all becoming too risky, too dangerous. As we inexorably headed toward the nineties I knew far too many people who had become HIV-positive or who had died of AIDS. It was obvious that my days of arranging tricks for others were over. It was too unsafe a game to play anymore. That wonderful era had come to an end. Period.
IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1999, Momma died in her little house in the town of Ottawa, in Illinois. She was ninety-nine years old. Now there was just my sister Phyllis. She was seventy-four and chose to remain in Ottawa. I continued to send money to help support her and we kept in regular touch with one another. Before I knew it the calendar had shed more pages and we had entered the bold new world of the twenty-first century.
Five years into the new millennium, on December 7, 2005, my dear friend Beech Dickerson passed away. A week or so after the funeral I was summoned to his lawyer’s office. As I sat at his desk he read Beech’s will and I was stunned to learn that he had left two of his prime properties to me. One was a home on Stanley Hills Road in the Hollywood Hills and the other was the Kew Drive property that I loved so much. According to the stipulations of the inheritance I was permitted to sell the Stanley Hills Road home, which I did. I received a substantial payment for it but most of the income from the sale was swallowed up by Uncle Sam in the form of back taxes and estate duties. However, the magnificent Kew Drive property was now mine. I was given permission to live in it for the rest of my life. According to Beech’s will, on my death the property will go to Corbin Bernsen, the ruggedly good-looking actor who is Beech’s godson and who appeared in TV shows like Ryan’s Hope, L.A. Law, and The West Wing.
At the beginning of 2006 I moved into the house overlooking the great City of Angels with Lois. I was eighty-three and Lois seventy-three. We settled into our new Kew Drive home together with my beloved dog, a border collie mix named Baby. It was instant domestic bliss. Lois and I still sleep together, with Baby curled up at our feet. Lois and I still have sex regularly. Provided you are blessed with good health and share mutual affection for one another you cannot put a good man or woman down!
During all the years that I had been married to Lois it is doubtful that Betty ever found out about her. Certainly she knew I lived a multitiered life. She was always aware of the fact that I was screwing around with a lot of people and arranging tricks for hundreds more. The phone at our home at St. Andrews Place had rung incessantly. Exactly how much she really knew about my other life—or lives—will remain a mystery, but to some degree or another she was very much aware of it.
Betty never mentioned the subject and she continued to live alone in our house at St. Andrews Place while Lois and I made our home up on Kew Drive. However, I saw Betty just about every day. I went down to St. Andrews Place to check on her, to pick up mail and messages, and to feed the wildlife in the garden. And then, in 2008, something terrible happened.
One afternoon Betty slipped on the stairs outside the kitchen and shattered her hip. She was in agony but by some miracle she managed to crawl back inside the house. I arrived that evening to pick up the mail and to check on her, only to find the poor woman writhing on the kitchen floor. Trying to be as gentle as I could I picked her up, took her to my car, and rushed her over to Glendale Memorial Hospital. She was there for about a week and then they released her to another facility where she remained for a month. Following a short recuperation she returned to the house but it quickly became evident that she was too incapacitated to live alone. She was going to need constant care and supervision. After trying a couple of places I eventually found her a clean, comfortable, and efficient retirement home in North Hollywood. She was well looked after there and all was well. Until pneumonia set in. On August 5, 2008, precisely on her eighty-seventh birthday, she slipped into a deep sleep and never woke up.
Betty and I had not had a normal life together for longer than I could remember. But we had been t
ogether for sixty-three years, ever since I met her when I came ashore as a young Marine in Seattle after the war. She was the one who had come down to California with me. She had been the mother of my late darling daughter, Donna. I hurt deeply because I still cared for Betty. How could I not? I had spent two-thirds of my life with her. You don’t just walk away from something like that without feeling anything. Though our paths had meandered far from one another she was part of who I was. Even though Lois and I had officially and legally tied the knot—Lois diligently filed away and locked up our marriage license—Betty was a part of my being. She must have known more than she ever let on about my double life, my sexual life, my tricking world, my other world. We had not been to bed together or had sex with one another for decades, not since Donna died from the botched abortion. And yet we had remained together. She was part and parcel of who I was. Her death hurt.
Now that I have reached my late eighties, Lois and I continue to live on Kew Drive. I’m still as busy as ever. During the day I keep on doing odd jobs around other people’s houses. I repair roofs and drainpipes; I take care of plumbing, carpentry, and simple electrical problems; I trim trees. I’ve been in this town so long now that I know scores of people who call me up regularly to do handyman chores for them. And hardly an evening goes by that I don’t don a nice clean white dress shirt to serve dinner and bartend at parties at people’s private homes. In that regard, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the canyons remain my main beat. However, my clients are no longer only Hollywood personalities. Among those I work for now are doctors, lawyers, museum directors, art collectors, accountants, corporate executives, and industrialists. But show business people still make up a large proportion of those who employ me. In fact, I’ve been around for so long that I now do gigs for the second, third, and even fourth generation descendants of original clients who have long since passed on.
Even though I’ve been a bartender, caterer, waiter, handyman, general repairman, and, at the start of my career, a gas station attendant, most of what I did for six decades was to keep people happy. And, as I have revealed to you, I accomplished that by arranging sexual liaisons. Starting with that initial group of guys and gals who used to congregate at my gas station on Hollywood Boulevard I went on to develop a long list of wonderful, attractive men and women who were available to trick folks for fun and for profit. Whatever tip, gratuity, or financial transaction that may have passed hands was of no concern to me. I never made or wanted a dime out of the tricks that I set up for others. I just wanted to see people enjoy themselves. I wanted folks to experience what we as humans were naturally designed to do. In other words, to derive pleasure by being the sexual beings we are.
Oh, they were good days and I do miss them so!
At the height of my tricking days—in other words, during the gas station period and the years following—I was setting up an average of fifteen to twenty tricks a day. This was a 24/7 operation, extending over a period of, say, thirty to forty years. As for tricks that I performed personally, I was often seeing two or three people a day. How many sexual encounters does all that add up to? Who knows? The statistics aren’t important. To be candid, I think of myself as being blessed. And I have to admit that I enjoyed every single one of those experiences. In retrospect I hope I provided as much pleasure as I derived myself. Starting with that little session back with my neighbor, old man Joe Peterson, I look back on it all with warmth, gratitude, and affection. I had fun. I enjoyed it. I regret none of it. Not once have I felt shame or guilt or remorse about what I did. Quite the contrary. It’s been a fantastic life.
Now, almost in my eighty-ninth year, I share my life and my home with Lois and my dog, Baby. The other evening, just before I set out for a bartending job, I said good-bye to Lois. As I left the house I looked up at a sky that was so beautiful it took my breath away. I walked over to the edge of my Kew Drive property, leaned on the fence, and gazed out at the twilight view of the great Los Angeles basin. From the skyscrapers downtown to the beaches and ocean in the west, a wash of golden light brought a magic to the city that I have grown to know and to love so deeply. I leaned on the fence and stared at the panorama before me. Down in the south an endless line of twinkling lights that looked like glittering diamonds in the sky snaked from the east towards LAX, Los Angeles International Airport. Each one of those little shimmering dots was an airliner on a path heading toward one of the busiest airports in the world. It was captivating. Just south of the airport lay Long Beach, the largest and busiest port in the nation. The Los Angeles area is now one of the most culturally diverse and cosmopolitan places on earth. Billboards proclaim it the “Creative Capital of the World.” With the vastness of the movie, television, and music industries centered here, there is undeniable truth to that statement. And then there is publishing and software and fine art and theater and opera. Not to mention heavy industry and science and manufacturing and aerospace. Compared to when I took my first tenuous steps here as a rookie Marine during my boot camp days back in World War II, the City of Angels has certainly come of age.
I took a deep breath, glanced at the skyline one more time, ruffled the fur behind Baby’s ears, yelled out another good-bye to Lois, and got into the car. Moments later I was negotiating those winding, curving, treacherous twists and turns of Kew Drive as I headed down the mountain to my party.
I thought some more about myself, about my life, about the people I was going to see that night. No doubt I would know them all. They were probably folks I had seen and served for longer than I can remember. The hostess was a widow of a successful stockbroker who had lived in the same house for over forty years. She was a pretty woman and she would be dressed in all her finery, as she always was. I could even smell her French perfume already. I had no idea what brand it was but she had been using it for as long as I had known her. She was in her late seventies, perhaps even her early eighties. She was still an attractive woman. A ripple of excitement tingled in my loins as I pictured her and I felt myself getting hard. Admittedly I’m not sixteen anymore. I’m not even twenty-six or thirty-six or forty-six. But for me sex is as alive and important as ever. However, unlike the old days, I knew I would not be spending the night with the hostess. When the party was over I would help pack things up, put away the booze, assist the maid in tidying up the kitchen, stash away the glasses and the dishes, say good night, get into my car, and drive home. To Kew Drive. To Lois. And to Baby. They are my family. That is where my life now lies. And I am content.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have seen the light of day were it not for our mutual friend, Joan Allemand. She was responsible for initially hooking us up and coercing us to collaborate on the project. We are deeply grateful to her.
Our thanks go to Gore Vidal who provided so much encouragement and for introducing us to Jeff Sharp. Jeff’s enthusiasm was infectiously helpful and he, in turn, linked us up with our agent, David Kuhn, to whom we owe so much. David was supportive and constructively astute throughout the process of refining the manuscript. Whilst many publishers balked at the prospect of taking on a subject as potentially controversial as this, Morgan Entrekin was the exception. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for bringing the book to fruition, thereby continuing the long tradition of Grove Press for braving new frontiers where others feared to tread. We are thankful to our editor, Peter Blackstock, with whom it was always a pleasure to work. Thanks go to Lee Silton for reading an early draft of the manuscript and for her inspiration and creative insight. Thanks also to Diana Friedberg who was always patient, tolerant, and understanding during the many hours and days that we spent recording and documenting the many memories and recollections that form the nucleus of this book.
Scotty Bowers
Lionel Friedberg
Los Angeles
LIST OF PLATES
1. Me at the age of nine months.
2. Me at the age of three, with my brother Donald (five) and sister Phyllis (one).
3. Walt
er Pidgeon, a well-known actor in the ’40s and the first guy who picked me up at the gas station.
4. Sadly, I don’t have a photo of the Hollywood Boulevard gas station, but it looked much like this one.
5. Syd Guilaroff, hairstylist to Garbo, Taylor, Monroe, and others, shown here with Lana Turner; and Bill Haines, actor turned interior designer – two of the first guys I tricked in Hollywood.
6. Cole Porter was a great friend of mine back in the ’40s – and he loved the Marines I used to send over to his place.
7. George Cukor with Greta Garbo. Cukor’s pool parties were legendary – anyone who was anyone would be there. I first tricked him in the ’40s and he introduced me to lots of future friends.
8. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott – these guys were both married when I got to know them, but that didn’t stop the three of us from becoming very closely acquainted.
9. Me when I enlisted for the Marines at age eighteen.
10. Even though she didn’t get along with everybody, Hepburn and I enjoyed a great friendship. The studios claimed she was madly in love with Spencer Tracy, but I never saw any evidence of that. Kate preferred the company of women, and I always found her the young brunettes she liked best.
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