In our October 2006 issue, in an article excerpted from Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, Vanity Fair outed Spencer Tracy. William Mann, the book’s author, told me his source for this information was a man who says he had sex with Tracy on numerous occasions at the cottage the star leased from George Cukor on the director’s estate. (The received explanation was that Tracy, a Catholic separated from his wife, shared the cottage with his lover, Katharine Hepburn.) Mann said that the man in question, whose name was Scotty, had become a well-known figure in certain Hollywood circles. He worked at a gas station on the corner of North Van Ness Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, out of which, he says, he and a cadre of his male and female friends serviced Hollywood celebrities—many of them closeted homosexuals. Mann was assured he could totally trust Scotty by the late Cukor’s longtime secretary. Scotty agreed to cooperate with Mann on the condition that his last name be withheld, because he was married.

His full name, Scotty Bowers, appeared in 2012 on the cover of his autobiography, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, co-written with Lionel Friedberg and produced by literary agent David Kuhn, a former V.F. editor under Tina Brown. The book alternated chapters of Scotty’s valiant service in the Marines during World War II with chapters of his sexual exploits with his clients and close friends in the film industry. His long, startling list included, in addition to Tracy and Hepburn, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Rock Hudson, Charles Laughton, Raymond Burr, Vincent Price, Cole Porter, and Vivien Leigh.

Scotty in Arizona in the 1940s and in L.A. during World War II. Courtesy of Scotty Bowers archive.

Someone else who could have been on that list was Gore Vidal, whose editor at V.F. was Matt Tyrnauer—before Tyrnauer turned full-time to directing and producing documentary films. Vidal encouraged him to option Scotty’s book, because everyone in the know, he said, knew that every word in it was true. Dominick Dunne also vouched for Scotty’s veracity to Tyrnauer.

The resulting product is Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, which was a hot ticket at the Toronto Film Festival, and which opens at the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles on July 27 and at the IFC Center in New York on August 3.