The first offer of work that Greg Bautzer received out of law school was less than tantalizing: a firm in Los Angeles was prepared to pay him eighty-five dollars a month for his services. Although these were not exactly starvation wages, he felt he deserved better. His upper-class wife had introduced him to high society, and a salary of $1,020 a year ($16,500 today) would not underwrite the lifestyle he wanted. It would not even pay the dues at the Uplifters Club. He thought he could do better on his own. And there was another consideration: Bautzer was enticed by the bright lights of show business.
Bautzer’s interest in the entertainment industry came from witnessing the rise of the movie star and the establishment of Los Angeles as the moviemaking capitol of the world. In 1911, when Bautzer was born, the public did not consider movie actors to be celebrities. Movies were a cheap form of entertainment for the uneducated masses, viewed at tawdry storefront operations called nickelodeons (for the five-cent price of admission). Upper- and middle-class people looked down their noses at the new medium and those who worked in it. Movie actors were considered one rung on the ladder above prostitutes.
Even the idea of publicizing an actor’s name as a means of encouraging ticket sales had been unheard of until 1910. Florence Lawrence, who previously was billed simply as “the Biograph Girl,” because she worked for Biograph Studios, was the first movie actor identified by her own name on a movie poster. The shift came about when Lawrence left Biograph to work for a new company started by Carl Laemmle, who would go on to found Universal Studios. Laemmle could no longer bill her as “the Biograph Girl,” so he decided to use her real name.
As Bautzer grew up, he saw the moviegoing experience evolve from a disreputable novelty into a middle-class obsession. Nickelodeons were replaced by luxurious movie palaces. Actors became famous and admired; Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Greta Garbo were all household names. Charlie Chaplin, who released his first feature masterpiece, The Kid, when Bautzer was nine years old, was the most recognizable person in the world.
Studio executives also realized that the public had an insatiable appetite for details of the private lives of stars. Movie actors’ work seemed like play, and their exciting off-screen lives, whether real or fabricated, inspired fantasies of wealth, nonstop parties, and myriad sex partners. To the studios, gossip about their stars printed in newspapers and magazines was good for business—free advertising for their product.
Bautzer was enthralled by the movie-star lifestyle. The movie business was all around him, and it was booming. By the time Bautzer graduated from law school, the motion picture industry was America’s sixth largest. The average movie studio owned film plants and theater chains, an exemplary model of a vertically integrated monopoly. There were five major companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and the new Twentieth Century-Fox, which had risen from the bankrupt ruins of the Fox Film Corporation. The “major minors” were Columbia, United Artists, and Universal. The industry had weathered the Great Depression and emerged as the world’s primary manufacturer of leisure-time product. Its 1935 revenues totaled more than $556 million.
In the fall of 1936, Bautzer rented an eighth-floor office in the Equitable Building at 6253 Hollywood Boulevard. For his law partner he chose G. Bentley Ryan, who had graduated from USC law school the year before. Their office comprised two rooms: a waiting area with a secretary’s desk and, beyond that, the actual office with a desk, chairs, and a legal bookcase. To give clients the impression that there was an office for each partner, they put one of their name-plates on a closet door, switching them as necessary. If Bautzer had an appointment that day, his name went on the door to the real office and Ryan’s went on the closet. That was the easy part. The hard part was getting clients.
“I evaluated myself very carefully,” recalled Bautzer. “It sounds vain and egotistical for me to say it, but I knew I was good looking.” Bautzer enjoyed sports and maintained a health regimen. Tanned and trim, he did as much for a tuxedo as it did for him. There was something else. “I had presence when I walked into a room,” said Bautzer. It was true. He had an intangible star quality, the thing that makes people look twice. He also happened to be the best amateur dancer anyone had ever seen.
Bautzer was not angling for a screen test, but he wanted to crash Hollywood as badly as any aspiring actor. From his father, he had learned that a lawyer’s social life is the key to making connections that lead to legal work. “I needed to become known,” he said. “I needed to be recognized, and I needed to become prominent in the Hollywood community. You can’t do all that without money, and I didn’t have a nickel after splitting the first and last month’s rent with Bentley.” Nevertheless, he devised a plan based on dressing to impress potential clients. He thought that if he looked successful, it would bring in business.
“I decided to borrow $5,000,” said Bautzer, “not knowing for a fact that I could ever pay it back, but knowing that if my theory was correct, I could pay it back very quickly.” It is not known where the twenty-five-year-old found the money, but his wife’s family was a likely source. “I used the money to buy the best wardrobe in town.”
The Equitable Building stood at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, a hub of activity in the motion picture business. The building was full of attorneys, advertising agents, talent agents, brokers, illustrators, lawyers, and publicists. Everyone who was anyone ate lunch at the Brown Derby, located just across the street at 1628 North Vine. Executives from Paramount or RKO discussing a script at lunch began to notice the striking young man at the next table as he nodded courteously over his menu. “Greg had a flair for befriending people,” recalled publicist Paul MacNamara. “Important people took a liking to him.” It was only a matter of time before introductions were made. “Greg was ambitious and aggressive,” recalled his future law partner Bernard Silbert. Bautzer wore a different suit each day and lavishly tipped the maître d’. “He always managed to be seated at the best table in the house,” said Silbert. “It wasn’t long before he knew everyone of importance who came to the restaurant.”
The introductions led to work. Bautzer was at this point a trial lawyer. “I took any case that walked in the door,” he recalled. This could be a criminal matter, personal injury, divorce, or anything else. When the volume of work picked up, Bautzer would invite Silbert, who graduated from USC one year after he did, to join him and Ryan in the now very cramped suite 803.
Bautzer’s lunch appearances were soon augmented by nightclub entrances. On Hollywood Boulevard, in the Roosevelt Hotel, there was the Cinegrill, and on Vine, in the Hollywood Knickerbocker, there was the Lounge. On Sunset there was the Café La Maze, the Café Trocadero, and the Casanova. When Bautzer walked into a nightclub, resplendent in black and white, he was not with his wife. By early 1937, just two years after the wedding, the marriage was on its way to dissolution. The union of unformed personalities had not withstood the competing pressures of Pasadena and Hollywood. The gossip columns reported that Marion was vacationing without him in Hawaii “under the wing” of “Brit” Britton, purser of the luxury liner SS Lurline, and Greg was seen squiring a socialite named Roberta Swaffield Weber. “Friends say it’s serious,” noted one writer. It was not.
Bautzer had other things on his mind. On February 10, 1937, he got his first mention in the Los Angeles Times for a legal case. He was representing an actress named Margaret McKay in a divorce suit against a Chicago singer, Alan Rice.
On April 3 Bautzer celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday with a party for three hundred. It was, of course, as much a marketing event as a social occasion. Bautzer’s efforts to attract clients continued to pay off. On April 8, less than a year out of law school, he had his first reported legal victory. He was representing theatrical agent Freeman Bernstein, who was known internationally as the King of Jade for his love of the stone. Bernstein had allegedly tried to bilk Germany’s government out of $250,000 by passing off a boatload of pressed tin cans as a shipment of steel and nickel. New York wanted Bernstein extradited to stand trial. Bautzer fought extradition, pleading the case directly to the governor of California, Frank Merriam, by pledging that Bernstein would become a permanent California resident. Merriam granted Bautzer’s plea and denied extradition. True to his word, Bernstein opened a jade shop in Beverly Hills.
In May, Bautzer won another kind of victory. The actress Isabel Jewell, memorable as the sad little blonde in Lost Horizon, went out with him. While there is no question he enjoyed dating the beautiful actress, it was also part of his far-flung plan to gain publicity for himself. “I met beautiful women whom I escorted to the best restaurants and nightclubs in town,” he recalled. “And I introduced myself to the columnists who frequented these places.” There were dozens of minor columnists in Hollywood. They were only too happy to print an item about an intriguing young attorney who danced with starlets by night. Before long, he had gained the attention of the gossip columnists who really wielded power. Louella Parsons wrote for the Hearst papers. Jimmie Fidler was syndicated in 187 newspapers. Both found Bautzer’s dating life a worthwhile topic.
Years later, Bautzer would succinctly describe the success of his publicity campaign: “Presto! I was a celebrity.” His legal career soon gained celebrity status also. In July, he found himself on the team of Hollywood’s most celebrated lawyer.
Jerry Giesler was fifty, and fresh from a major triumph. In 1935, he had represented Busby Berkeley, the renowned director of numerous Warner Bros. musicals. While driving from a studio party, Berkeley had crashed into two oncoming cars on the Roosevelt Highway (now the Pacific Coast Highway). Three people had died, and Berkeley had been indicted on charges of manslaughter. It was obvious that Berkeley was drunk at the wheel, but Giesler was a miracle worker. Two trials resulted in hung juries. In the third trial, one year after his indictment, Berkeley was found not guilty.
Giesler had learned his craft from Earl Rogers, a turn-of-the-century Los Angeles lawyer famed for both his theatrics and his lack of scruples. “If you are guilty, hire Earl Rogers,” ran the slogan. Rogers won more than 180 acquittals, but died of self-loathing alcoholism in a downtown flophouse. Giesler had no such compunctions; he was flagrantly ruthless. “Jerry Giesler was a hero to me,” recalled Bautzer. “When I was in school I used to go to court just to watch him in action.” Bautzer managed to meet Giesler and flatter him into friendship.
When Giesler was hired to defend a mysterious character by the name of John Montague, Bautzer took special interest. Montague was a golfer, and like many a Hollywood character before and since, he had come from nowhere and had no visible means of support. The stout fellow with the baby face and curly hair did, however, show a talent for golf. He made trick shots through barely opened windows. He introduced an oversized driver that could hit the ball three hundred yards down the fairway. He dressed well, drove fast cars, and became friends with celebrity golfers such as singer Bing Crosby. Montague was impressive, but he had a quirk: he was inexplicably shy of publicity. He stopped at the eighteenth hole rather than beat a course record. He refused to have his picture taken. It turned out that he was wanted by the police in Essex County, New York. Seven years earlier, under the name LaVerne Moore, he had allegedly robbed a restaurant and speakeasy. Now he was fighting extradition.
Bautzer got in touch with his idol and made an irresistible offer to work on the case. Bautzer knew the precedents for extradition and could write the briefs. He needed experience and he wanted the exposure. Payment for his work would be entirely within the master’s discretion. Realizing the benefits of a hungry young apprentice, Giesler accepted.
The team secured affidavits as to Montague’s character from celebrity golfing buddies including Crosby and actors Andy Devine and Oliver Hardy (Montague had lived in Hardy’s home for a time), and submitted them to Governor Merriam. Giesler then took an unusual tack. Rather than deny the charges, he made a public plea for sympathy. “LaVerne Moore is legally dead!” he shouted to the press from the courthouse steps. “A new man has been created. He is John Montague. By your pen, Governor Merriam, you have the power of life and death. You can disinter the body of LaVerne Moore and send him back to face ruin and dishonor, or you can breathe life into this new man and christen the soul of John Montague.” Giesler’s legally irrelevant argument was followed by a brief presentation by Bautzer in which he summarized the purposes of punishment for the reporters present.
Despite his statements to the press, Giesler knew that the governor would not deny extradition in such a high-profile case and advised Montague to face the music. The accused man dropped his fight against extradition. On August 21, 1937, he was escorted by three officers to the Union Pacific Los Angeles Limited. He was tried in Elizabethtown, New York, where attorney James M. Noonan, who had been hired by Crosby, gained him an acquittal. Montague was carried from the courtroom on the shoulders of his supporters, but the judge was appalled by the verdict.
Bautzer continued his nocturnal publicity campaign. In October 1937, he was reported dating an eighteen-year-old actress named Mary Maguire. In November, he and the popular actress Claire Trevor were seen together so often that a Los Angeles Times columnist named them as a “new couple.” Trevor was a cherub-faced blonde with sparkling brown eyes and a sly smile. She was also a bona fide leading lady at Twentieth Century-Fox. Her most recent work was in a loan-out to Samuel Goldwyn for William Wyler’s Dead End, starring Humphrey Bogart. Her portrayal of a slum girl forced into prostitution would earn her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Trevor was the most mature and sophisticated woman Bautzer had dated, yet the romance ended quickly. Trevor married another, and Bautzer moved on to the next beauty. Nightlife was his natural habitat, and he was making the most of it. Every week he had new friends.
In January 1938, a headline-making case landed in Bautzer’s lap. A well-educated screenwriter from New York named Emanuel “Buddy” Adler was arrested and charged with grand theft for issuing bad checks. When he claimed it was all a misunderstanding, the press labeled him a “playboy” and questioned his character. Bautzer stepped in. “The investigation which authorities are conducting will itself entirely absolve Mr. Adler of these charges,” said Bautzer. He was right; the charges were dropped and Adler became a lifelong friend. In years to come, the friendship would be mutually beneficial. Adler would go on to become a distinguished producer, winning the Oscar in 1953 for From Here to Eternity. With Bautzer’s help, he would also one day become president of Twentieth Century-Fox.
Bautzer’s career was on the right track. He was getting publicity and meeting important people, and business was coming his way. Soon his efforts would bear fruit in more ways than he could have possibly imagined.