Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017)

(On Cable TV, December 2019) Our understanding of Hollywood keeps changing over time, thanks to tell-all autobiographies that inform us about what really went on behind the scenes. The farther Hollywood chroniclers got from the glamour journalism meant to protect the studios’ investments, the closer they got to a fairer understanding of the era, affairs and abuse included. But for all of the richness that modern scholarship has accumulated about Golden-age Hollywood, it’s not a bad thing to keep a critical mind about the latest batch of revelations. Numerous anecdotes in even the most candid autobiographies have been disproven as fantasies, and now that most of the stars of the studio system have died, there’s still an appetite for anything new and salacious, no matter if it fits with everything else we know. Decades after the end of the Classic Hollywood era, any new revelation risks being mythology rather than fact. At the same time, there also seems to be a yearning from traditionally marginalized groups to reclaim some old-school stars that, in some cases, goes far beyond the evidence available. I am, in other words, quite skeptical of some of the assertions in Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. Adapted from a book by Scotty Bowers, who apparently acted as a pimp to the stars from the 1940s to the 1980s, this is a documentary full of salacious revelations about plenty of celebrities, most of them safely dead and unable to sue. According to Bowers, nearly everyone slept with nearly everyone, and the bigger the name the bigger the pansexual appetite. It’s all lewdly entertaining, but since I’m working on my own history of Hollywood I am desperately looking for a fact-check. After too much time spent googling around, I’m not exactly finding any—at best, some people vouch for Bowers as someone who lived an interesting life and had true stories to tell, but I have not been able to find any work of serious scholarship that corroborates or confirms some of his newest assertions. Most of the reviews of the film or the book faithfully repeat the assertions without confirmation, treating this as gossip more than historical documentation. (In fact, I’m finding more than a few LGBTQ scholars not being convinced by the assertions made here.)  Note that I am not discounting all of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood—I do think that Bowers was a first-hand witness to a hidden aspect of Hollywood history, and that there is still a lot of work figuring out what really happened. But I’d be wary of weaving most of the specific assertions into the official history of the times: We’re not going much beyond he-said-he-repeated, and extraordinary assertions require extraordinary corroboration.