Lana Turner would later call Bautzer “Hollywood’s greatest escape artist” for his ability to disentangle himself from the arms of starlets. It was an apt description. In the sultry summer of 1949, while preparing the Lindström-Bergman divorce case, Bautzer was seen dancing with filmdom’s most famous hoofer, Ginger Rogers. Hedda Hopper phoned Bautzer for details and got the standard press release: he told her his dinner with Rogers was strictly business. His client, producer Walter Wanger, was planning a circus film, he explained, and Rogers was interested. Hopper didn’t believe it. “Greg Bautzer, who’s usually quite truthful, threw me a curve when he said that he and Ginger Rogers were merely talking a business deal,” wrote Hopper a few days later. “Their dancing at Mocambo was such a closed corporation, you couldn’t have squeezed in a bit of tissue paper.” It was the beginning of something big.
Like Joan Crawford, Rogers had first attracted attention as a teenager in the Roaring Twenties, when she won numerous Charleston contests. Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, in 1911, the same year as Bautzer. Her cousin gave her the name Ginger. Her mother Lela gave her determination. Two years of singing and dancing in vaudeville brought her to Broadway. Being at the right audition at age nineteen got her into George and Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, in which Ethel Merman introduced “I Got Rhythm” and Rogers introduced “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me.” Lela decided that the next move for her daughter was to Hollywood. For two years, Rogers was stuck in second-string movies until, once again, she found herself in the right place at the right time.
In 1933, RKO cast Fred Astaire, who was a Broadway star but a Hollywood unknown, as a second lead in Flying Down to Rio. Dorothy Jordan, who was not known for singing or dancing, was cast opposite him, but she opted to marry RKO boss Merian C. Cooper instead. After Jordan dropped out, Ginger Rogers got the part. The pairing of Astaire and Rogers was magical. Their dancing was elegant, graceful, and sexy. They stole the film from leads Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond and became overnight sensations. They were given their own film, The Gay Divorcee. “Ginger Rogers is the most effective performer with whom I’ve ever worked,” Astaire said. “She can sell a number in a unique way. She’s a showman.” Eight Astaire-Rogers films followed. Then Rogers did the unexpected: she tried straight dramatic roles. In 1940, she won an Oscar for her performance as a working girl in Kitty Foyle.
Bautzer was obviously attracted to Oscar-winning actresses, and Rogers was likewise attracted to the trim, tanned attorney. They were well matched. The fresh-faced blonde with the stunning figure had been married three times and had dated Howard Hughes, but Bautzer was in his own category. “Greg was Bachelor Number One in Hollywood,” wrote Rogers in her 1992 autobiography. “Not only was he tall, dark, and handsome, but he was also a prominent lawyer and superb athlete, one of the best tennis partners I’d ever competed with or against. He was a terrific dancer too, my social Fred Astaire.” In fact, he was such a good dancer that she said he was one of the three best dancers she had ever known and compared him to Astaire’s choreographer, Hermes Pan. Rogers also admired Bautzer’s self-assuredness. It reminded her of her mother, the most important person in her life. Bautzer was one of the few people allowed to call her Virginia.
The Bautzer-Rogers romance was followed almost as closely by the press as the Lindström-Bergman divorce. On September 2, 1949, Bautzer and Rogers attended the opening of Patti Moore and Ben Lessy’s burlesque show at Ciro’s. Also present was Rogers’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Jack Briggs, escorting actress Ann Miller. According to Hopper, Bautzer was “as nervous as a cat.” Two weeks later, Bautzer took Rogers to a party thrown by former law partner Bentley Ryan and his wife, actress Marguerite Chapman, at their apartment in the new Bel-Air Gardens. Lana Turner attended with her husband, Henry J. “Bob” Topping. Hedda Hopper wrote in her column that Bautzer and Rogers were thinking of marriage, because they were overheard discussing the purchase of a desert retreat. On November 20, Bautzer and Rogers won the mixed doubles Pimm’s Cup Tennis Match at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs, beating Gussie Moran and the ubiquitous Pat Di Cicco. Bautzer also made it to the men’s finals with partner Art Drummit, losing only to the club’s owner, Charlie Farrell, and his partner, Dr. Lew Morrill. “Greg Bautzer almost came out on top in BOTH mixed and men’s doubles,” the L.A. Times reported. “And that Ginger Rogers plays such a magnificent game that it’s almost symphonic in its rhythm.”
In early 1950, the romance appeared to be turning serious. Bautzer and Rogers went to church together, first attending the Hollywood Christian Science Church and then moving to the Beverly Hills Church, the same one attended by Joan Crawford. Bautzer took Rogers out regularly to events such as the season opener of the Hollywood Stars minor league baseball team, and he was seen buying an Easter bonnet for her at Rex Clothiers by—who else?—Hedda Hopper, who was there with her granddaughter. Hopper complimented Bautzer’s taste in hats.
Rogers had four months to wait for her divorce decree from Briggs. It was shortly after her divorce became final that sightings of the couple started to dwindle. The romance had apparently cooled. Hopper saw Bautzer at one of those so-called business dinners in September. He was with another thrice-divorced Oscar winner.
Jane Wyman had recently won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a deaf and mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda. Prior to that she had been a well-regarded leading lady, married for eight years to a well-regarded leading man, Ronald Reagan, who was also president of the Screen Actors Guild. Wyman blamed their recent divorce on his politics, but her alleged affair with actor Lew Ayres while making Johnny Belinda may also have been a factor. There were only a limited number of stars in Hollywood, and lives intersected constantly. Ayres had been married to Ginger Rogers fifteen years earlier. Rogers was working with Reagan on a film called Storm Warning. Crawford’s second husband, Franchot Tone, was working with Wyman on Here Comes the Bride. There was no such thing as six degrees of separation in Hollywood.
By the spring of 1951, the Bautzer-Wyman romance was in bloom. The couple graced the premiere of her film The Blue Veil. Ronald Reagan attended with his future wife, Nancy Davis. Bautzer and Wyman also attended the Academy Awards ceremony together in March. Wyman wondered why a little boy across the room was staring at her and Bautzer the entire evening. She later learned that he was Joan Crawford’s son.
In the summer of 1951, movie magazines were speculating that Bautzer and Wyman would marry. Unbeknownst to everyone, the couple had taken blood tests in order to get a marriage license. It looked like Bautzer might finally wed a star. A journalist from Modern Screen magazine saw them at George Sanders’s party for British producer Gabriel Pascal. The writer printed a conversation between two female guests. “Look at them,” said the first. “They’re obviously in love. What a pity he won’t marry her.”
“How do you know they won’t get married?” asked the second.
“Come now. You’ve been around. Does Greg Bautzer marry any of them? Did he marry Lana Turner? Did he marry Dorothy Lamour? Did he marry Joan Crawford or Ginger Rogers? I admit he’s been married twice before, but that was when he was young.”
The July issue of Photoplay magazine carried an article examining Wyman’s relationship with Bautzer.
The guy has something, there’s no doubt about that. Ask any man what it is and he’ll tell you. “Bautzer’s a man’s man, virile, successful, a gentleman where he works, or where he plays. And he’s out to win, wherever he is, in the courtroom, at the poker table, or on the tennis court. Yet somehow, once he has won, he seems to lose interest—as though the fun were all in the battle, and the victory anticlimactic.”
Ask any woman what it is about Bautzer and she’ll tell you. “He’s a woman’s man … thoughtful, considerate, attentive. If you ask him to the most informal dinner party, he’ll send flowers the next day with a sweet note. If you go nightclubbing with him and are separated from him for so much as one dance, he’ll send a waiter with a scribbled message: ‘Miss you.’ When you’re with him you know that for him—at that moment at least—you’re the only woman in the world, and the most beautiful.”
Bautzer and Wyman never did become engaged. The only explanation came from Wyman, who simply said that Bautzer enjoyed his bachelor life too much to give it up.
By May 1951, Bautzer and Ginger Rogers were dating again. They attended Lena Horne’s show at the Cocoanut Grove and were reported to have danced “like a couple of school kids” and “looked like love in bloom.” The romance continued into 1952. In April, Rogers threw a surprise forty-first birthday party for Bautzer in Perino’s private dining room. Guests included Van Johnson, Edgar Bergen, and Dore Schary, the new head of MGM. But Bautzer’s relationship with Rogers had turned prickly. “Our dates would go from pleasant to tepid to cool to argumentative,” wrote Rogers. Actress Ann Savage lived down the street from Rogers. “If they were getting along,” recalled Savage, “they would drive down the hill together in his car. If they were fighting, he would fly down the hill about ninety miles an hour by himself. She would fly by even faster a few minutes later in her car.”
In late July, Rogers went to France for an unplanned vacation. She met a twenty-four-year-old actor named Jacques Bergerac. “It’s a little premature to speak of marriage,” she was saying two weeks later when asked about her relationship with Bergerac. When she returned to Los Angeles, Bautzer went to her home to find out her intentions. “What about this fellow Bergerac,” he asked. “Is he important?”
“I don’t know exactly. Why?”
“Look, do you want to get married? Is that it?” In a moment Rogers realized that the elusive bachelor was actually proposing marriage. She was taken aback, unable to formulate a response when she thought she should. There was an awkward silence, and then she caught her breath.
“Well, Greg, you’re just three years too late.”
It was Bautzer’s turn to be surprised. He gathered himself. “You’ve changed, Virginia. Yes, you’ve changed. That episode with that, that … [she thought he was going to say ‘frog’] … that Frenchman, had more meaning to you than appears on the surface.”
Rogers didn’t respond.
“Well, I hope you will be very happy,” he said. And that was the end. He stormed out.
Rogers knew Bautzer as well as any of his previous girlfriends. Her appraisal was perhaps the most perceptive. She saw a complex individual who was as warm in private as he was dazzling in public. But there was a dark side. “Greg liked to get his own way,” wrote Rogers. “If he didn’t, he’d flare up. I had had a few experiences with him when he lost his cool, and these episodes stuck in my mind. If we had married, I would always have suffered the disadvantage of being an adversary to one who earns his living by winning arguments. I always hated to see Greg angry. It changed his handsome demeanor.” Six months later, Rogers married Bergerac. The marriage, like her others, lasted about four years.
The next star to enter Bautzer’s life was Peggy Lee, who had achieved fame in 1943 singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. Bautzer would often come to Ciro’s to watch Lee perform. He sent her unusual gifts, including a small sculpture of an ostrich that had a ruby eye and a black-pearl-and-diamond tail. She felt that the most romantic thing he ever gave her was a book of her poetry that he had privately printed, entitled Softly, with Feeling. After dating Bautzer for a time, Lee considered Bautzer “running first” in her affection, but when he asked her to marry him, she turned him down.
She had grown tired of having their dates, whether in a restaurant or at home, interrupted by calls from Howard Hughes, who by 1952 had become one of Bautzer’s clients. “I am so sorry,” Bautzer would say. “I have to leave.” Lee surmised that the billionaire aviator disliked her because she had once insulted the Constellation, one of his planes. She was traveling with actor Burt Lancaster when an engine caught fire. Hughes had also tried to date her when she was still married, but she rebuffed him.
Years later, remembering Bautzer, Lee felt pangs of regret. “What a fool I was!” she wrote, citing low self-esteem for her failure to marry him. Hughes felt that he had ruined the relationship. To apologize he gave Bautzer a white Cadillac convertible, which Bautzer promptly drove onto Lee’s front lawn in a rage over her dating another man. Once the anger had cooled, he and Lee agreed to stay friends, which was the pattern of Bautzer’s breakups.
In late 1952, Bautzer and actress Mari Blanchard became an item. A former fashion model, Blanchard had dark curly hair and a body so voluptuous that she reportedly inspired the character of Stupefyin’ Jones in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. Stupefyin’ Jones is so gorgeous that men become paralyzed at the sight of her. Blanchard was also the alleged cause of Marguerite Chapman’s 1950 divorce from Bentley Ryan.
Blanchard was not a star. When she met Bautzer, she had only played bit parts and a supporting role in Overland Telegraph. She soon progressed to leading roles in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars and Destry. Never a studied actress or model, she was nine units short of earning a degree in international law at USC when she dropped out to pursue an acting career. Hedda Hopper asked Blanchard why she had done this. “Because,” answered Blanchard, “most men would rather look at a girl than listen to her.”
“Since Greg’s an attorney and you almost became one, who wins the arguments?” asked Hopper.
“We don’t argue,” said Blanchard. “I do my huffing and puffing alone. When I become irritated, I go home and beat my head against the wall.”
“Gal, you ought to marry and get some masculine touch around the house,” said Hopper. “Why don’t you put the old clamps on Bautzer?”
“We’re not getting married. We seem to fit each other’s plans nicely.” Blanchard tried to be philosophical about Bautzer’s unavailability. “Dogs and men are very much alike. The trick is to catch them young and train them.”
“You’re not going to train Greg.”
“No, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that.” Fortunately, she did not, because Bautzer was soon off and running.
In October 1952, Bautzer represented actress Arlene Dahl in her divorce from actor Lex Barker. Since suffering the embarrassment of Joan Crawford pouring a glass of wine on her in retaliation for flirting with Bautzer, she had gone on to star in such films as Reign of Terror with Robert Cummings and Three Little Words with Fred Astaire. Born in Minneapolis, red-headed Dahl was known for her Nordic beauty. She worked at MGM for several years before marrying Barker, who had succeeded Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Barker was a direct descendant of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, and played football at Fessenden and Phillips-Exeter Academy. When he left Princeton to become an actor, his family disowned him. He ordered Dahl to give up acting and keep house. This she would not do. “When I needed a divorce from Lex, my first husband,” said Dahl, “I called Greg.” Bautzer suggested that he introduce in court some unflattering things he knew about Barker. “I don’t want to say anything bad about Lex,” said Dahl.
“Then how are you going to get a divorce from him?” asked Bautzer. “Let’s go to dinner to talk about the case.” Though Bautzer was still involved with Blanchard, he saw nothing wrong with treating Dahl to one of his famous “business” dinners; this one took place at Perino’s restaurant. Bautzer impressed the actress.
“He was such a good-looking man. He could have been a movie star if he wanted to. He had a wonderful deep voice and he would talk softly to get you to lean in and listen. He really knew how to make a point. Well, at the end of our dinner he said, ‘Arlene, I would like to date you.’ I was uncomfortable dating my attorney, and so I said: ‘Greg, I don’t like to mix business with pleasure.’ He laughed and said ‘I always do!’ He had a wonderful laugh.”
Today, dating clients is strongly discouraged. The American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct expressly prohibit sexual relations between a lawyer and client unless the sexual relationship existed prior to representation. In California, sex between a lawyer and client is deemed to impair the lawyer’s professional judgment and can be used as evidence against the attorney in a malpractice lawsuit or disbarment proceeding. However, during the first thirty years of Bautzer’s career, lawyers were rarely sued for malpractice, and dating a client was not considered much of an ethical problem.
In court, Bautzer coaxed Dahl to tell Judge Stanley Mosk that Barker had called her a “hick from Minnesota” when she refused a cocktail. Barker was often sullen, refused to speak to her, and had once locked her out of their home on Fox Hills Drive. His behavior made her so nervous that she required medical care. Bautzer called her sister, Evelyn Rolin, to the witness stand to corroborate Dahl’s story. Barker did not contest the divorce. In the property settlement, Dahl received the house and furnishings, but no alimony.
Barker was another celebrity with very few degrees of separation from Bautzer. After Bautzer handled Dahl’s divorce, Barker went on to marry Lana Turner. Barker later starred with Mari Blanchard in Jungle Heat.