In an era before Twitter, paparazzi, gossip websites and the voracious appetite for the scandal and sex lives of the rich and shameless, Hollywood was swinging with the kind of wild sexual liberation that can still seem shocking today. Post-war Hollywood was churning out the family-friendly, conservative-values movies that chimed with the politics and repressed sexuality of the '40s and '50s. But the unacknowledged irony was that these motion pictures were being made by actors, writers, directors and studio chiefs who were engaged in lifestyles that could not have been more different from those they created on screen. Two decades before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Los Angeles was already a sexual playground for movie stars and the international jet set, who were protected...