The street date of Scotty Bowers' "Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars," written with Lionel Friedberg, was Valentine's Day, but the eagerly anticipated memoir has been generating buzz for several weeks, and will most likely encounter a firestorm of criticism from some segments of the Hollywood set.

It offers the former Marine paratrooper, pump jockey and bartender's accounts of three decades of having sex with — or arranging others to have sex with — some of the biggest names of Hollywood's Golden Age: Cary Grant, Vincent Price, Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy and the Duke of Windsor.

The title is a not-so-subtle reference to the job that was Bowers' entree into his career as a sexual "fixer," pumping gas at 5777 Hollywood Blvd., where he began to connect former Marine Corps pals and other acquaintances with Hollywood elite looking for secretive sexual encounters — gay and straight — in an era when the studio system and the mores of the day kept a lid on sexual activity and orientation.

He says his first "trick" came in 1946, with actor Walter Pidgeon and milliner-to-the stars Jacques Potts. Others named along the way include composer Cole Porter, director George Cukor, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh.

When he wasn't crossing paths with the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and porn star John Holmes, Bowers writes, he acted as stud service for infertile couples in Colorado, assisted one Hollywood star in a custody battle and helped Alfred Kinsey research his book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," as well as connect Kinsey with former Egyptian ruler Farouk I and his legendary stash of pornography.

By the time Bowers has finished sharing anecdotes about fighting on the island of Iwo Jima in World War II and once assisting Beatles manager Brian Epstein (one of his tricks) in whisking the Fab Four out of the hands of groupies during an August 1964 visit to Los Angeles, he's been less than one degree away from so many people and events in popular culture one starts to wonder whether "Forrest Hump" might have been a more appropriate title.

This doesn't mean that "Full Service" is an easy book to read. It isn't — for several reasons. Chief among them is the gnawing question about the book's veracity, especially given the fact that virtually all of the people he mentions in the book are long gone and unable to challenge his account. (Asked about this in a recent phone interview, Bowers' response was: "Not only did I do all the things I said I did in the book, I did even more.")

If you're looking for a morality tale — a neat and tidy story arc in which Bowers reaches an epiphany or realizes the error of his ways — you'll be sorely disappointed. But if you're looking for an unvarnished account of the closeted sexual shenanigans of Hollywood's Golden Age — and a good trashy read at the same time — then "Full Service" is the full enchilada.

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'Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars'

By Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

Published by Grove Press, 300 pages, $25