The true story of Howard Hughes’s playboy lawyer who seduced scores of Hollywood’s leading ladies

Open any movie magazine from the 1930s, ‘40s, or ‘50s and you’ll find a photo of attorney Greg Bautzer with a beautiful starlet. Columnists dubbed him “Hollywood Bachelor Number One,” and for good reason. His long-term relationships and momentary conquests were a who’s who of leading ladies—Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Jane Wyman, Dorothy Lamour, and Peggy Lee, to name just a few.

Yet Bautzer was more than a movieland Don Juan. In addition to representing nearly every major star of his era, he was also the personal lawyer to the richest man in the world—Howard Hughes. Plotting all of the billionaire’s business moves, he also handled Hughes’s shadier deals, including writing checks for a harem of kept women and quashing potentially embarrassing tell-all biographies.

No other lawyer has achieved the movie star–like fame and glamour that Bautzer enjoyed, and more than two decades after his death his legend still looms large in the entertainment industry. The Man Who Seduced Hollywood tells, for the first time, the amazing story of a self-made man who for fifty years used his irresistible charm and prodigious legal talent to dominate the courtrooms, boardrooms, and bedrooms of Tinseltown.