‘Hollywood’: Dylan McDermott’s Ernie is Based on Scotty Bowers

On Netflix’s new show Hollywood, Dylan McDermott plays a man named Ernest “Ernie” West, who runs a prostitution ring out of a gas station. Wealthy patrons pull up and say they want to go to “Dreamland” and they whisk away with one of the service attendants, returning later to pay Ernie and let the service attendant find his next job.

This may seem far-fetched, but actually, it is based on a real sexual hot spot from the Golden Age of Hollywood, run by a man named Scotty Bowers.

Scotty Bowers Was a Marine and Sex Provider to the Stars

Netflix

As detailed in his 2012 memoir “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” Bowers was a Marine who served in World War II and arrived in Hollywood in 1946. He started working at the Richfield Oil gas station at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue. The description of the book reads:

Young, charismatic, and strikingly handsome, he quickly caught the eye of many of the town’s stars and starlets. He began sleeping with some himself and connecting others with his coterie of young, attractive, and sexually free-spirited friends. His own lovers included Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, Cary Grant, and the abdicated King of England Edward VIII, and he arranged tricks or otherwise crossed paths with Tennessee Williams, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson, Noël Coward, Mae West, James Dean, Rock Hudson, and J. Edgar Hoover, to name but a few.

Bowers died in 2019 at the age of 96, but McDermott isn’t the only way Bowers has been immortalized on screen. There is a documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer that details Bowers’ exploits that you can buy on the official site or rent through Netflix’s DVD rental program.

The New York Times called the film ” A salacious tell-all about the hidden sex lives of postwar movie stars; a peek at the underbelly of the repressive moral dictates of the studio system; a breezy biography of a self-described Hollywood prostitute and procurer; and a psychosexual study of a possibly damaged victim of extreme childhood abuse.”

Warning: Light spoilers ahead for Hollywood.

The Hollywood Version

On the show, Ernie is a failed actor who started his sex business to make ends meet, and suddenly, it became his life. But as he becomes involved in the making of Meg, the fictional film at the heart of the show, he ends up retiring from the business and finding love later in life with Ellen Kincaid (Holland Taylor).

It’s a happy ending for a man who in actuality, had to stop his free-wheeling ways in the 1980s when the AIDS crisis hit Hollywood.

“The disease brought an end to the sexual freedoms that had defined life in Tinseltown. My days of arranging tricks for others were over. It was too unsafe,” he wrote in his memoir (via The Mirror).

But Bowers did eventually find love as well. He married his wife, Lois Broad, a former cabaret singer, in 1985 and retired to the Hollywood Hills. She passed away in 2018.

Hollywood season one is available now on Netflix.

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