A few years into their marriage, Dana Wynter found herself embroiled, first in disagreements and then in arguments. When they were over, she could not remember how they had started. She sometimes felt confused, sometimes guilty. Bautzer was thoughtful and generous, and had that wonderful sense of humor. He was never petty or resentful of her spending. He could be delightful. This was when he was getting his way—and when he was sober. When he was vexed or imbibing, he was given to behavior that Wynter could not countenance. These breaches of decorum more than anything pointed out the differences in their backgrounds. Wynter believed that disagreements should be settled in a civil tone of voice and never in public. She was mortified when Bautzer argued in a restaurant, whether with her or someone else. She was brought up never to raise her voice, least of all in a public place.
Wynter hoped to change some aspects of his behavior. She thought that if she spoke to him calmly that he would hear her out. He would not. He took her constructive criticism as an attack. First his debater’s mind would start working. Then he would find something that implied that she came from a better class than he. Once this reaction was triggered, there was no hope of an intelligent discussion.
Wynter tried putting her suggestions on paper. This was slightly more effective, but only if Bautzer read the note in private. He would then respond in a reasonable manner, and she would feel there was hope.
The behavior that Wynter found most insensitive, however, was his flirting. He would flirt with a woman not only in the same room with Wynter but right in front of her, almost under her nose. It embarrassed her, her friends, and even people who did not know them. Wynter wondered if Bautzer had ever been taught not to do these things. She was subjected to it at the party celebrating their return from their honeymoon, when Jeanne Crain threw herself at Bautzer on the dance floor and he did nothing to discourage her. Wynter burst into tears and left the party. When he got home, he confronted her. “What’s the matter with you?” An argument ensued, and Wynter found it impossible to make him understand why she was offended.
Bautzer’s relationship with his son, Mark, was also a source of concern. He had never been around children. When Mark was a toddler and afterwards, Bautzer was at a loss to relate to him. The debating champion could not shift gears. His child needed him to sit on the floor with him, to talk and draw, but Bautzer was incapable of this kind of interaction. He was not entirely inattentive, though. When he took two-and-a-half-year-old Mark to the Marineland amusement park in Palos Verdes, Hedda Hopper wrote that Mark was thrilled and wanted to return. “Well,” said Bautzer, “why don’t we take Eric, Jackie, or Wendy, or all three?”
“Let’s take Wendy,” said Mark, forgetting the boys. Hopper made a joke of Mark’s interest in girls, saying “Like father, like son.”
Perhaps Bautzer was spoiling Mark in an attempt to compensate for his parental shortcomings. “The day after I returned from a San Francisco meeting,” said Bautzer, “I was called on the carpet by my son’s nursery school and told that my three-year-old needs more discipline.” But Bautzer wanted his son to enjoy special privileges and have the things he didn’t have growing up. When Bautzer won a motorcycle at a charity ball in New York, he told Hopper he would save it for Mark.
That was when Bautzer was sober. When Bautzer was drunk, he behaved very badly toward his son. When Mark would try to talk to him, his father would twist the boy’s words and look for hidden meanings, as if he were cross-examining him on a witness stand. When Mark became confused and tongue-tied, Bautzer would take it as a sign of guilt. Usually Mark had done nothing to deserve the accusation. The lawyerly attack would have bewildered an adult, let alone a child who did not understand what his father was doing. “Greg didn’t win thirty-one personal injury cases when he came home from the war by not knowing exactly how to manipulate emotions and reactions,” said Wynter. Mark found these incidents hurtful until he grew old enough to realize that alcohol was talking and not his father.
There was one particularly bad episode when a drunken Bautzer locked himself in the nursery with Mark. Wynter tried to get him to open the door. “Get out of this house!” he shouted through the locked door. “Don’t ever come back! You just get out!” Mark was no more than five at the time and fully believed that he would never see his mother again.
Waiting for Bautzer’s return from work was a stressful ritual. The entire household was tense, wondering if he would be cheerful or angry, sober or drunk. For the few minutes after he arrived until his current state made itself known, everyone walked on eggshells. The anxiety was hard to bear, and Wynter was concerned that it was damaging Mark. The boy sometimes told her that he wished he had the kind of father other boys had. “My father never took me fishing,” Mark recalled. “We never went camping or did things that other people did.” Wynter told her son that his father had good qualities. He was a brilliant man who helped other people and loved to laugh.
His son inherited those qualities. Mark worked hard in school and brought home good grades. As he grew older, he learned to hold his own in arguments with his father, which few people could do. Despite Bautzer’s inability to show it, he was proud of his son and loved him.
Bautzer did not love his in-laws. Dr. Wynter had divorced and remarried. When he brought his second wife to California for Christmas 1960, there was friction. At the time, Wynter was working on a Danny Kaye film called On the Double and had no time to make peace. The situation worsened. One night, fueled by alcohol, Bautzer began needling Dr. Wynter. The older man lost his temper and raised his fists. The gesture, coming from a small, usually reserved man, startled Bautzer. The strain began to tell on Wynter. She spent many a night sobbing. She consulted a specialist who warned her that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Wynter later said that nothing had prepared her for life with an alcoholic. She had never seen alcoholism. In Europe people tried to hide intoxication. She herself did not drink; she disliked the taste of alcohol. At first she thought that loving support could help Bautzer overcome his problem. It did not. He grew resentful of her concern, seeing her as an unwanted conscience. He thought she was counting his cocktails. The incidents became too ugly to ignore.
Wynter finally confronted him about his drinking. “Look,” he told her, “I like it. That’s why I drink. I was drinking with sailors in San Pedro when I was fourteen. I’m not going to give it up. I’m going to drink till the day I die.”
The origins of Bautzer’s alcoholism were a mystery to Wynter. Bautzer was a private individual. He did not talk about feelings. He did not talk about his childhood. She did not know that alcoholism ran in his family—that his uncle Paul had died of it. He never told anyone that his mother had remarried after his father’s death when he was ten. Wynter suspected that he was fighting something. She felt there was insecurity beneath the bravado. Why else would alcohol affect him in that manner? “People do not carry on like that if they are easy in their skin,” said Wynter years later.
Bautzer excused his drinking by saying that it did not affect his work. He claimed that it never gave him a hangover or prevented him from answering a complicated question after being awakened by a client in the middle of the night. Bautzer’s tolerance for alcohol may have covered a multitude of sins, but Wynter was well aware that anger was not one of them. She witnessed his unwarranted confrontations with strangers. “Why don’t you come outside for a fight?” he would say to some unsuspecting restaurant patron, someone who had not looked at him, much less provoked him. Wynter coped with these scenes as best she could. She said that she believed her husband was doing it to get attention and he knew that most of the time the person he accosted would not take him up on his offer. She said that she wished someone could film him trying to start a fight and then run the film for him when he was sober. Perhaps if he saw himself in that state he would stop drinking. His behavior made him look unattractive and gave others an advantage over him, which was something he had avoided all his life.
Bautzer would not admit to insecurities about his work, but Wynter knew that it put a tremendous strain on him, one that he sought to relieve with alcohol. He was constantly being approached by people with problems. He was expected to calm them, to reassure them, to fix their problems, as if the fees they were paying him entitled them to all of his time. He worked long, punishing hours on very little sleep. His briefcase sagged with documents that he had to review before his next workday. He was consumed by work. He could not even sleep without being assailed by duty. The telephone would jar him awake in the wee hours.
One night a call came from actor Robert Mitchum. “Greg!” he yelled into the phone. “Greg! I want you to sue the Beverly Hills Police Department!”
“Bob,” said Bautzer groggily. “What is it? What happened?”
“A motorcycle cop just drove off with my license! Damned cops!” Bautzer went back to sleep and nothing more came of the drunken call.
On another occasion, Howard Hughes called in the middle of the night to seek his assistance with a problem he was having with his giant transport plane, the Hercules H-4. Commonly known as the “Spruce Goose” for its wooden structure, the plane was the largest ever built.
“Greg, you know the harbormaster wants that damned thing out of there and he said if it isn’t moved out he’s going to do something drastic.”
“What sort of deadline did he give you?”
“In about six hours,” said Hughes.
“For God’s sake, Howard, couldn’t you have given me just a few more hours than this? It’s practically impossible!” For Bautzer little was impossible, and he managed to keep the harbormaster from harming the plane.*
Only once did Wynter see her husband lose patience with Hughes. Bautzer and Wynter were dining at the Bel-Air Hotel when they were told that there was a telephone call. The waiter brought the phone to the table. It soon became obvious that Hughes had crossed some sort of line. “Howard, that is not what you represented to the man,” said Bautzer. “You know that perfectly well, and if you are now changing the story and you are reneging on that, I will have no part of it. All right. If you insist on standing on that, you can take your damned files back. I don’t want any part of them. Yes. That’s right. They’ll be there in the morning.” And with that, Bautzer slammed down the phone.
By 1962, Wynter knew that her marriage was disintegrating. She had tried to change Bautzer and had failed. It was not just that he had bad habits. He had become his habits, and they made him unavailable to his family. His friends were a coterie of hard-drinking high rollers. One night, Bautzer went to a card game at the home of comedian Ernie Kovacs. When Wynter awoke in the morning, she was alone. “To hell with it,” she said, and got into her car. She drove to San Francisco to find a lawyer, because she feared a Los Angeles lawyer would be subject to Bautzer’s influence. She found a reputable lawyer and drove back to Los Angeles. She returned home to find her husband, for the first time ever, distressed and vulnerable. “Dana, don’t leave me,” he pleaded. “I need you.” To see him like this was so unusual that she lost her resolve.
Later in the day a box of long-stemmed red roses were delivered. The card read: “To Mrs. Bautzer from Ernie Kovacs. It’s my fault. I’m the one you should be cross with. Anyway, I’ll be around a little later to explain everything.” When Kovacs arrived to apologize, he looked at the flowers. He said there was some mistake. They weren’t right. “But Dana, I ordered long, long-stemmed roses.”
Winter was touched. “Surely the stems are long enough,” she said. “They’re lovely.”
“No,” he said. “I’m really cross with the florist.” An hour after Kovacs left, another box arrived. It contained three dozen stems without blossoms—and a bottle of glue.
Wynter confided her problems to a friend. She was advised that the situation would not improve and was certainly affecting Mark. One evening in 1965, without warning or fuss, Wynter spoke to her husband. “Greg, I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m going to leave, and that’s the way it is.” Bautzer was startled. He did not know what to say. There was no drama. Wynter did not want to sue for large sums of alimony. She only wanted adequate support for Mark and a house for them to live in.
Because her requests were modest, Wynter expected the separation agreement to be amicable. But she was taking on the best celebrity divorce lawyer in Hollywood. He earned his living by fighting. She was astonished when her husband offered only ten years of child support, until Mark’s sixteenth birthday. She found a lawyer through the Bar Association. He insisted that they examine her husband’s finances, but she refused. “Mrs. Bautzer, if I may say something,” he began. “Either you are a very nice woman or you are an extremely stupid one.”
Although Wynter’s refusal to investigate Bautzer’s finances cost her most of her leverage, her lawyer convinced Bautzer that his offer would be a public embarrassment. Bautzer saw the light and agreed to $90,000 for the purchase of a home in Mandeville Canyon for Wynter and Mark, $2,000 per month tax-free alimony, and Mark’s schooling and medical expenses. After signing the separation agreement, Wynter took her son with her to Europe and began work on a television series, The Man Who Never Was.
Wynter did not realize until years later, when Mark found a private investigator’s report hidden in their Palm Springs home, that Bautzer had suspected her of infidelity. The document contained descriptions of her actions and phone conversations over a four-year period in the early 1960s, but it contained nothing incriminating or even unusual. When Wynter learned about it she became extremely upset. Just because Bautzer had witnessed rampant adultery among his colleagues and clients, he had no reason to suspect her.
Bautzer tried to be a good ex-husband, though. He never disparaged his ex-wife to son Mark. He saw Mark regularly and celebrated Christmas with them. Bautzer expended a lot of effort. He meticulously planned the event, carefully selecting gifts. Unfortunately, the champagne cork would pop and he would start drinking. Before long he would be upset over some trifle and storm out of the house.
Despite the separation, Bautzer never stopped caring for Wynter and Mark. When she needed something, he provided it. He repaired landslide damage to her house, even though it was not his responsibility. When property taxes in Mandeville Canyon became too much for Wynter and she had trouble selling the house, Bautzer bought it from her and rented it out so that she could buy a house in Benedict Canyon. When it was time to close escrow he made sure that the papers were signed even though he was in the hospital. When Wynter expressed a love of Ireland, he helped her finance the construction of a house there.
Although the couple separated in 1965, they did not legally divorce until 1981. Bautzer and Wynter remained cordial. His calls would come out of the blue. He would tell her amusing stories and make her laugh. They felt like old friends. At these times, she could enjoy his kindness and generosity without having to deal with his dark side. Sometimes they attended social functions together, such as the 1970 premiere of Airport, in which Wynter starred.
Wynter acted primarily on television through the early 1980s, appearing on such classic shows as Marcus Welby, M.D., Hawaii Five-O, Ironside, McMillan & Wife, Fantasy Island, The Rockford Files, Hart to Hart, and Magnum P.I. When Mark entered college, she moved to Ireland and became a journalist, contributing to Cosmopolitan and Country Living. She was a lifetime member of the National Union of Journalists in England and the Foreign Press Association. She never remarried. At the time of her death in 2011, she was living in Ojai, California, with son Mark.
*Robert Maheu relates a similar story in his book Next to Hughes. According to Maheu, the government owned the plane and wanted to scrap it. Whether this is the same incident and whether it was Bautzer or Maheu who saved the plane is unclear.