Scotty Bowers – the less savoury face of Hollywood

Scotty Bowers, for decades the secret procurer for Hollywood celebrities of both sexes, has died. His memoir in 2012 named reams of names, all dead – Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Vincent Price, Vivien Leigh, Edith Piaf, Tyrone Power, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward and George Cukor. Although many thought his lurid tales were exaggerated, Gore Vidal said he hadn’t lied and his services were an open secret in Hollywood, particularly among closeted gay men and lesbians, who had to keep their romantic lives under wraps. He also reminisced about Prince George, Duke of Kent and “Eddy and Wally,” the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: “Like her husband, she definitely preferred homosexual sex.”

Born 1 July 1923 in Ottowa, Illinois, he had a farmer father, forced out in the depression to become a prison guard, who divorced his mother. He fought in World War 11 as a paratrooper indulging his bisexuality along the way which he turned into a lifelong career after he demobbed, though he improbably said he never received money for his services either as a prostitute or a pimp.

He had an extraordinarily tough-minded, bleak and lucky chart with his Sun in a controlling conjunction to Pluto with both in an unyielding square to Saturn; and both also were in a fantasy-bubble and ‘healing’ Water Grand Trine to Jupiter in Scorpio and Uranus in Pisces. He may also have had an Air Grand Trine of Saturn trine Venus Mercury in Gemini trine an Aquarius Moon, so he would be able to detach his feelings from his lifestyle. An Air Water chart is difficult to balance, often ending up in a wobble between feelings and thoughts.

His Uranus was not only in a flirtatious and inconstant square to his social-butterfly Venus in Gemini, it was also on the focal point of a Yod to Neptune sextile Saturn. Such a Yod marks him out as a libertarian and a catalyst, a trailblazer in his way, always fighting against convention and at times the law. He was never arrested since he kept all the information in his head.

A different kind of life, for sure.