Howard Hughes occupied a great deal of Greg Bautzer’s time in the 1950s, but the attorney had a lot of other work on his plate. By this time, when Bautzer negotiated a talent deal, he worked directly with the head of the studio, such as Harry Cohn at Columbia or Barney Balaban at Paramount. Darryl Zanuck at Fox and Jack Warner at Warner Bros. were close friends of Bautzer’s, and business with them was often done during off-hours.
Bautzer used his relationships to do more than just negotiate deals for clients; he also used them to make new stars. Robert Wagner was one of the actors whose career Bautzer helped launch. In 2011, Wagner recalled the push Bautzer gave him: “I was just getting started, earning $75 a week at Fox doing screen tests and small parts. Dana [Wynter] and I worked on some films together, and when I met Greg he took a liking to me and decided to promote me. He would give me a call out of the blue and say, ‘Drop by Joe Schenck’s at six o’clock. We’re going to be playing cards, and there are going to be some people there that I want you to meet.’ When I got there, the house would be filled with all the heavyweights in the industry like Zanuck and Charles Feldman. He would introduce me to each of them and say, ‘This kid’s got it. He’s going to be a big star.’ He created an atmosphere of success around me, and I loved him for it. When Natalie [Wood] and I got married, he started to represent her too. When her career took off he handled everything for us.”
Motion picture pioneer Sam Goldwyn was still making movies, and Bautzer enjoyed doing business with him. Their wives were friends, and Goldwyn was always good for a laugh, intentional or not. English was Goldwyn’s second or third language, and his mangling of it produced legendary “Goldwynisms” including “An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on” and “Include me out.” Bautzer experienced one of these malapropisms firsthand. He was in Goldwyn’s office negotiating a deal for client Farley Granger, who was in Italy spending time with his platonic friend, the brassy actress Shelley Winters. Granger refused to speak to Goldwyn on the phone, letting Winters do the talking for him. As Bautzer sat on the couch, Goldwyn pled with Winters to let Granger come back to work on a picture. She kept teasing and refusing. Finally, when everything he tried failed, he slammed down the phone and said to Bautzer “That woman is a cunt—and I mean it in the unfriendly sense of the word.”
Divorce cases were still the mainstay of Bautzer’s law practice, and after the Bergman case, he hit another jackpot representing Nancy Barbato Sinatra in her breakup with Frank. In 1950, Sinatra’s career was slipping. He had been a cultural phenomenon in the early 1940s, but the teenage bobby-soxers who screamed in ecstasy at his singing had grown up and moved on. To make things worse, he was having vocal problems. He had a wife of eleven years, Nancy, and three children. He also had a girlfriend, the oversexed, uninhibited Ava Gardner. After a year of romance with the star, he asked his wife for a divorce, but she refused. On February 5, 1950, in Houston, Sinatra made a scene when a photographer wanted to take a picture of him and Gardner eating spaghetti. Nancy saw the item in the papers and locked him out of their house. Then she hired Bautzer and had her day in court, the first of many.
“Unfortunately, my married life with Frank has become most unhappy,” said Nancy. “I have requested my attorney to attempt to work out a property settlement, but I do not contemplate divorce proceedings in the foreseeable future.” Nancy said she was not seeking an end to her marriage, simply control over part of Sinatra’s income. “Mrs. Sinatra has no plans for divorce,” Bautzer explained to the Los Angeles Times. “The separate maintenance suit is just her way of making Sinatra save his money. She’ll put it away as a nest egg. Then, when nobody else wants him, she’ll take him back, and they’ll have something to live on.”
On April 26, 1950, Bautzer and cocounsel Arnold Grant filed for separate maintenance. This would require Sinatra to pay Nancy alimony while they lived apart, even though they wouldn’t be divorced. The complaint charged Sinatra with extreme cruelty and inflicting grievous mental suffering without provocation. Nancy claimed that Sinatra had earned $934,740 in 1949 and that the value of their community property was $750,000. Bautzer sought permanent alimony, saying that Sinatra had extreme wealth and was in a position to justify a high standard of living. He was seeking a “reasonable amount” for her and their three children: Nancy Jr., age nine; Frank Jr., age six; and Christina, age two. The court awarded her $2,750 a month temporary alimony. To put pressure on Sinatra, Bautzer obtained a restraining order forbidding MGM from paying him $85,000 it owed him for a lapsed contract. The company was one of several that were dumping him.
Bautzer tried to negotiate a property settlement of the Sinatras’ community holdings, including an office building in Los Angeles, homes in Holmby Hills and Palm Springs, and the home Sinatra had purchased for his parents Marty and Dolly in Hoboken, New Jersey. By June, all Nancy and Sinatra could agree upon was conveying ownership of the Hoboken house to Sinatra’s parents. Many friends thought Nancy was delaying the negotiations in the hope Sinatra would leave Gardner and return to her. “She’s miserable about all his gallivanting,” Bautzer told reporters, “but she’s still very much in love with him.” Nancy was hoping in vain; Sinatra was besotted with Gardner.
Eventually, Nancy realized that divorce was inevitable and changed her request from separate maintenance to terminating the marriage. The Sinatra court hearing was set for September but postponed by the attorneys’ mutual agreement when a settlement appeared likely. Ultimately, Sinatra agreed to pay Nancy one-third of his gross income up to $150,000 and one-tenth of the gross above that figure until her death or remarriage, with payments never to fall below $1,000 a month. Nancy also got the Holmby Hills house, stock in the Sinatra Music Corporation, their 1950 gray Cadillac, and custody of the children. Sinatra got the Palm Springs house and a 1949 Cadillac convertible.
Even though Bautzer put Sinatra through the wringer in his divorce, they became friends. Twelve years later, Sinatra was back on top, more popular than ever, and spending his new wealth at the Hotel Las Brisas in Acapulco. Bautzer was there with Wynter, relaxing in a rented cottage. Sinatra needed a kitchen. He thought of Bautzer. “Hey, would you mind if I came down and cooked some Italian food?” he asked over the phone. “I’ll send my man ahead of me.”
“No, I don’t mind,” Bautzer replied. “You don’t mind, Dana? Dana doesn’t mind.” It was a decision Wynter would come to regret.
Sinatra always brought an entourage to their place in Acapulco. It might include the Maharani of Baroda, playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, or actor Yul Brynner, his wife Doris, and son Rocky. One day Sinatra brought a man whom he introduced as Sam Mooney. The short, swarthy man never opened his mouth, but every time Bautzer and Wynter saw him, he was with a different young girl. These girls appeared to be only fourteen or fifteen, which Dana found disturbing.
One night Sinatra gave a dinner party at Teddy Stauffer’s La Perla restaurant in Acapulco and invited the Bautzers. Wynter found herself seated between Sinatra and Mooney. When photographers showed up, Sinatra grew peremptory. “You can photograph from Dana past me down the table,” he said, “but you can’t photograph up the table.” Dana was perplexed. Later that night she learned that Sinatra didn’t want Sam Mooney in the picture. Sam “Mooney” was really Sam Giancana, head of the Chicago Mafia.
The next night Sinatra brought a group of people to the Bautzers’ cottage in Acapulco. When Dana saw Giancana, she went to her room and closed the door. Bautzer came to look for her and found her in bed. He asked her to come back to the party. “No,” she said. “Don’t you know what this is? Sinatra is bringing hoodlums to our house. Somebody could be shot on our doorstep and he hasn’t even the courtesy to say who this man is. I think it’s appalling. I’m not coming back. The staff is there. You’re there. You can cope with it if you want to.”
One Christmas, she and Bautzer were at the airport in Mexico City. They spotted Giancana. He was tearing his hair in frustration. He could not board a flight to Chicago because the airlines were all overbooked. He rushed up to Bautzer. “For God’s sake,” said Giancana, “can’t you get me a seat on a plane? I’ve got to get back. I’m stuck in this place. I don’t know anybody.” Wynter was pleased to see the criminal bereft of his power.
In the spring of 1965, Giancana was subpoenaed by a grand jury. To prevent him from invoking the Fifth Amendment, the government gave him immunity. He had to answer questions about the mob or be held in contempt. He decided contempt was better than testifying and was jailed for a year. After his release, he spent years hiding in Mexico, but was finally deported. Upon his return to the States, he became an FBI informant. In 1975 he was frying sausages in his Chicago kitchen when he was murdered execution-style.
Harvey Silbert, brother of Bautzer’s former partner Bernard Silbert and later Bautzer’s partner himself, did legal work for Sinatra. Bautzer may have tolerated Sinatra’s mob connections to protect the firm. Though Wynter disliked the criminal atmosphere, she was grateful for one very important thing Sinatra did for her husband. Bautzer was watching a show in Las Vegas. Sinatra was sitting at a nearby table. Four men came in and sat directly behind Bautzer. One of them put his feet on the rungs of Bautzer’s chair. Bautzer turned around and told the man to take his foot off. The man didn’t. Bautzer pushed his chair back, stood up, and delivered his usual challenge. “Listen, you. Do you wanna come outside?” At that point, Sinatra shot from his seat and grabbed Bautzer by the arm.
“Greg,” he said firmly, “we’re late for the meeting. Come on. Hurry up.” Bautzer didn’t know what Sinatra was talking about. Sinatra gave Bautzer a steely-eyed stare and clenched his jaw. “Come on.” He steered Bautzer outside the theater. Once out of earshot, he said, “Greg, don’t you know who they are?” It turned out that Bautzer had been spoiling for a fight with the toughest Mafia guys in Vegas. He later admitted that Sinatra had saved his life. Bautzer really liked Sinatra. Both his wife and son remembered him playing Sinatra records constantly at home.
Another high-profile celebrity whose divorce Bautzer handled in the 1950s was Jeanne Crain. The case made headlines around the world, delivering lurid details of spousal abuse and infidelity for the times. The redheaded actress was universally popular and had given solid performances in many important films: State Fair, Leave Her to Heaven, and Pinky—she received an Academy Award nomination for the latter. She was married to Paul Brinkman, who acted briefly in the 1940s under the name Paul Brooks and was now manufacturing plastic aircraft parts. A devout Catholic, Crain had borne him four children. On March 29, 1956, she filed for divorce, represented initially by the distinguished lawyers Martin Gang and Milton A. Rudin. On May 16, she filed an amended complaint charging that Brinkman beat her, broke down her bedroom door, and raped her, almost in front of their children. Brinkman hired attorney Arthur Crowley to represent him. Crowley often represented celebrities, but not as many as Bautzer. Crain’s attorneys filed motions to obtain a restraining order against Brinkman to keep him from molesting her. Crain said that her husband had threatened to kill her and take his own life. On June 14, Crowley filed a cross-complaint, accusing Crain of adultery with Homer Hoch Rhoads, a family friend. Rhoads owned an airline parts manufacturing business that sold supplies to the US Air Force. Motions were also filed to have Brinkman held in contempt of a prior restraining order and to issue a new restraining order, to have him turn over his guns to the court, to have his child visitation rights limited, and to forbid him from using jointly owned funds to employ detectives in connection with the case. Crowley threatened to take Crain’s deposition and make her answer questions about her relationship with Rhoads.
Crain’s motions for contempt and a new restraining order were scheduled to be heard in court on June 25, but before the hearing, Crain fired Gang and Rudin and hired Bautzer and his partner Gerald Lipsky. The switch was likely due to Crain’s desire to hide the truth about her affair with Rhoads. Crain feared that revealing the truth about her affair with Rhoads would cause irreparable damage to her career, but lawyers are forbidden from assisting their clients in committing perjury. When Crain told Gang and Rudin that she was going to lie about her adultery, they undoubtedly told her that they could not continue to represent her. When Crain hired Bautzer, she was wiser and likely did not tell him the whole truth. Of course, Crain’s choice of Bautzer as a replacement may also have had something to do with her dancing cheek to cheek with him at his wedding party the week before the switch.
Whatever the reason, Bautzer and Lipsky were not sufficiently prepared to argue the motions previously filed by Gang and Rudin and did not appear in court on the hearing date, so the motions were dropped. “We have just recently been substituted in this case,” said Bautzer to the press. “We consider it a wiser strategy not to pursue these motions.” On June 28, Crain gave a deposition at Crowley’s office denying the infidelity accusations but admitting that she had been alone with Rhoads in his secretary’s apartment. While Bautzer did not help her commit perjury, he found a way to guard her reputation by simply having her refuse to answer certain questions. She testified that Rhoads had been dressed the entire time she was with him and that they had done nothing more than talk about how her husband had helped Rhoads achieve sobriety. She admitted that she had visited Rhoads another time and kept both visits from her husband for several weeks. With Bautzer at her side, Crain refused to answer sixteen of Crowley’s questions. Crain refused to say whether she ever told anyone that she loved Rhoads and she refused to answer questions about an alleged meeting with Rhoads at the intersection of Doheny and Hillcrest Drives, where a private detective reported that he saw Rhoads enter her car and embrace her. She also refused to answer questions about conversations with Rhoads’s mother in which Crain said the woman was “acting like a cruel witch.” When asked by the press for a description of what went on at the deposition, Bautzer demurred, saying only, “With four children involved in this case, I think it is advisable to make no comment.”
Shortly after the deposition, Brinkman surprisingly withdrew the adultery charges, and an interlocutory (not final) divorce decree was granted in August. Brinkman got into a vicious public fight with Rhoads after Christmas, but on December 30, Crain and Brinkman reconciled. They went on to have three more children and remained married until Brinkman’s death in 2003.
By the late 1950s, Bautzer wanted to stop handling divorces. His work for Hughes was thriving and he was tired of the typical acrimony. “Divorces are messy,” he would later say. “It’s a hand-holding business. In any divorce there are three sides. Hers. His. And the long view, standing off and looking at it all. But divorce clients want to be constantly reassured. They want you to hold their hands and keep telling them that they’re right. All the way.”
Yet when Rock Hudson came to him in 1957 and asked him to handle his divorce, Bautzer couldn’t turn him down. The thirty-two-year-old actor was a box office sensation. According to the Motion Picture Herald, Hudson was Hollywood’s top moneymaker. Tarnished Angels, Written on the Wind, and Giant had combined to put him on top. In 1955, when Hudson was still a Universal player on the way up, he had married Phyllis Gates. It was an odd match; she was not an actress but a secretary working for his agent, Henry Wilson. “I was very much in love,” said Gates. “I thought Rock would be a wonderful husband. He was charming, his career was red-hot, and he was gorgeous. If I had heard things about his being homosexual, I just put them in the back of my mind. So what if it was true? We were having an affair and he asked me to marry him.” Mere minutes after the Santa Barbara ceremony, Hudson called Hedda Hopper and Gates called Louella Parsons. Friends and family had to find out for themselves.
The honeymoon took place in Jamaica. Gates remembered a wonderful week and no problems. Hudson remembered a terrible week and a huge fight. Gates went to Kenya with Hudson in 1956 when he filmed Something of Value with Dana Wynter, but did not go to Italy with him in 1957 when he spent five months with Jennifer Jones and her husband David O. Selznick on A Farewell to Arms. Gates was hospitalized with hepatitis; when she got out, she began to feel neglected. She did not know that Hudson was having affairs with men on location.
There was talk that Universal had forced Hudson to marry Gates in order to kill an exposé in Confidential magazine, but most people who socialized with the couple thought them well adjusted. “Phyllis and Rock were at our house constantly,” said their friend Roger Jones. “You get a feeling about people. They were happy together. They clicked.”
Gates said Hudson changed after he returned from Italy and realized how popular he had become. He was suddenly in thrall to his own power. “He was out every night,” recalled Gates. “During the day he was in a bad mood. You couldn’t talk to him. You’d say, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ and he wouldn’t answer. He would start an argument at the drop of a hat, then slam the door and not come back until the next morning.” Gates became depressed, so she went to a psychiatrist, who suggested that Hudson also come in for a session. Hudson stopped going when the psychologist told him he had the emotional development of an eight-year-old. Hudson told Bautzer that his apartment on Crescent Heights Boulevard was bugged. Investigators found freshly cut wires, but no culprit.
In the divorce settlement, Gates was given alimony of $250 a week for ten years, plus a house on Warbler Place valued at $35,000; Hudson would continue to make mortgage payments. She also got 5 percent of Hudson’s production company, 7 Pictures Corporation, and she got to keep a new Ford Thunderbird. For such a short marriage, the settlement was exorbitant. It smacked of a payoff.
Bautzer continued to represent Hudson in other matters. At Hudson’s request he terminated the star’s contract with Universal and got him a sizable block of stock in its parent company, the Music Corporation of America. Gates kept quiet for nearly thirty years. Only when Sara Davidson, Hudson’s authorized biographer, approached her in the mid-1980s did she break her silence. Hudson was dying of AIDS. Gates finally admitted her doubts about the reasons for the marriage. “I used to believe the marriage started with good intentions,” she said, “but now I don’t believe it was genuine. I’ll bet you my marriage was arranged by Universal.”