Free Republic

The industry's genial sex fixer — who claimed to arrange liaisons for everyone from Rock Hudson to Bette Davis — challenged Golden Age Hollywood's baseline-heterosexual conception of itself. Scotty Bowers, whose explicit, best-selling 2012 memoir revealed a covert realm of Golden Age Hollywood sexuality, died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Laurel Canyon, documentary director Matt Tyrnauer told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 96. The former U.S. Marine and gas station attendant turned erotic fixer to the stars (including, he said, Katharine Hepburn and Rock Hudson) was the subject of an acclaimed 2017 documentary, Scotty and the Secret...

Like many motorists, Albert Menaster has watched with alarm as gasoline prices zoomed past $3 a gallon. But when he drives his 1998 Ford Windstar into Silverlake 76, Menaster stops at the lone full-serve nozzle, where customers can bark a command heard mostly in old movies: Fill 'er up! ADVERTISEMENT In a world gone self-serve, Menaster belongs to a pool of full-serve holdouts who pay as much as 50 cents more per gallon than their self-serve brethren. If he pumped his own gas, Menaster could save $4.50 with each fill-up. But he and others say not even the unrelenting rise...