Read Full Service for Free Online Page B

blessed with a great sexual constitution. Why hide it?
    During my years at the gas station I would invariably spend the night with someone, either male or female, often not even going home to Betty and my daughter Donna. I was beginning to live a very gypsylike lifestyle. I would be out all night sleeping in a different bed, then go home, do my laundry, change my clothes, make sure my two girls had everything they needed, throw a sandwich together, and then head back to the gas station for my evening shift.
    A FTER THREE OR FOUR months working at the gas station I began to establish contact with many of my old Hollywood friends from my boot camp days, as well as those I had met during a month-long series of flings while on shore leave in 1944. Among them were Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. I saw Marion Davies—William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend—again. And I looked up many others with whom I had earlier been sexually involved. These included two wonderfully talented guys by the names of Sydney Guilaroff and Edwin B. Willis. Both men are unknown today but back then they were legends in their profession. Syd was the chief hairstylist at MGM from 1934 until the late 1970s. His hair styles graced stars like Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Hedy Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Lena Horne, Grace Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Kathryn Grayson, Ann-Margret, Marilyn Monroe, Claudette Colbert, Lucille Ball, and Judy Garland. He was the one who gave Judy her lovely braids in The Wizard of Oz . He had the distinction of making legal history in the United States by becoming the first unmarried man allowed to adopt a child when he became the legal father to a one-year-old boy he named Jon, after one of his favorite actresses, Joan Crawford. Later he adopted a second son, Eugene, named after his late father. The behind-the-scenes stories he would tell made it seem like nobody is as close to an actor as his or her hair stylist and makeup artist. Sydney could keep me engrossed for hours with his stories.
    Ed Willis was another MGM man, one of the top set decorators in Hollywood. During a career that spanned thirty-five years and over six hundred films he picked up no less than eight Academy Awards, including for Somebody Up There Likes Me, Julius Caesar, The Bad and the Beautiful, An American in Paris, Little Women, The Yearling, and Gaslight. Ed was very fond of me, primarily, I think, because I had been a Marine. He had been a Marine, too, in World War I. Although openly gay to gay men, he never publicly admitted it, and he always looked and behaved as though he were straight. He once told me that he had found it very difficult being in the Marines and had cultivated a very masculine image to avoid harassment.
    Another guy in town who had an absolute passion for Marines was the composer and lyricist Cole Porter, the man responsible for writing the hit musicals Anything Goes, Silk Stockings, Can-Can, and Kiss Me Kate, as well as some of America’s best loved songs such as “Night And Day,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “In the Still of the Night,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Just One of Those Things,” “Easy To Love,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” and “De-Lovely.” Cole was married to divorcée Linda Thomas from 1919 until her death in 1954 but it was a marriage of convenience, or what in those days was sometimes referred to as a “professional marriage.” Cole was openly gay and undeniably promiscuous. He never made any attempt to hide it. I don’t remember exactly when he called me out of the blue at the gas station one evening. He said he’d heard that I knew a lot of Marines and asked me if I could come over to his place with two or three of them at around midnight on the following Saturday night. He didn’t beat around the bush. He knew I had been a Marine myself and he wanted me to bring a few buddies around. Short and sweet. I knew exactly what he