Hollywood 'fixer' Scotty Bowers dies; he wrote tell-all book

Scotty Bowers, a self-described Hollywood "fixer" whose memoir offered sensational accounts of the sex lives of such celebrities as Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has died.

He was 96.

Bowers' agent, David Kuhn, said he died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles.

A native of Ottawa, Illinois, Bowers was a Marine who served in the Pacific during World War II and moved to Los Angeles after the war ended.

He found work in 1946 at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard, and later contended his life changed when the actor Walter Pidgeon drove up in a "shiny" Lincoln two-door coupe and asked, "What are you doing for the rest of the day?"
In "Full Service," he told some of the industry's most shocking stories since Kenneth Anger's notorious "Hollywood Babylon."
At a time when Hollywood nicknames included "Duke" (for John Wayne) and "Bogie" (for Humphrey Bogart), Bowers was known as "Mr. Sex."
"His idea of good clean fun included drilling a peephole in the gas station's bathroom," The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote in 2012, "exercising his healthy libido so fully that he sometimes needed an ice pack to recuperate, and providing fake college girls to serve as the real college girls cited in Alfred Kinsey's scientific sex studies."
Critics were skeptical, and Tracy biographer James Curtis dismissed Bowers as "full of glib stories and revelations, all cheerfully unverifiable."
"Scotty doesn't lie," Vidal wrote in a blurb for the book, "the stars sometimes do and he knows everybody."