J Edgar Hoover? “A drag.” Vivien Leigh? “A hot, hot lady.” Wallis Simpson? “A real ballsy chick.”īowers (second from left, back row) with friends. He burns with energy, as though he spent his retirement stoking gossip he vowed he wouldn’t spill while his lovers were alive. “Things he thought impossible, I came up with.” With his devilish blue eyes and thick white hair, it is easy to picture why he was popular. “ came looking for me,” says Bowers, now 95, on a hot afternoon in a Hollywood courtyard apartment. Guys, girls, spouses, kings, consorts – and a three-way with Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Years later, he startled sexologist Dr Alfred Kinsey by checking off every sex act on his list (and took him to orgies to prove it). Pidgeon was gay, claims Bowers in his autobiography Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, and that afternoon they became lovers. S cotty Bowers was a 23-year-old petrol station attendant on Hollywood Boulevard when the actor Walter Pidgeon pulled up to the pump and asked the dimpled blond to jump in his Lincoln.
