The Butler did it

By almost any account, the adjective best describing the late Jack Kent Cooke is “colorful.” Born in 1912 in Ontario, Canada, Cooke began his business career by buying and selling newspapers and radio stations. In 1951, however, he made his first foray into the arena for which he became most famous: sports teams.

How colorful was he? Well, unable to buy a U.S. baseball team to bring the major leagues to Canada, he turned his attention to U.S. radio and television stations. But blocked by a law prohibiting ownership of American broadcasting stations by foreigners, Cooke became a U.S. citizen — by getting Congress to pass a law waiving the normal five-year waiting period.

Just for him.

Cooke would go on to own football’s Washington Redskins (during the years the team won three Super Bowls), basketball’s Los Angeles Lakers, and hockey’s Los Angeles Kings. Frustrated at being unable to use an existing arena for his basketball and hockey teams, Cooke built his own — the Los Angeles Forum, which became his teams’ home for more than 30 years.

The one area in which Cooke was not as successful was in love — he was married five times, including twice to the same woman. This led to his most noteworthy legal legacy: a 1978 Los Angeles appeals court decision, involving his first wife, Barbara, to whom he was married from 1934 until their 1979 divorce. The couple had separated in 1976, and Cooke moved from Los Angeles (where the divorce proceedings were pending) to Las Vegas.

By this time, of course, Cooke was extraordinarily wealthy. How wealthy? Well, when he needed to discuss matters involving his divorce, he didn’t go to his lawyers’ office — his lawyers came to him. Cooke also brought with him to Las Vegas various staff members, including a servant later identified only as “H.G.,” and described as a combination “houseman, butler and chauffeur.”

As the court that had to sort this out went on to explain, H.G. turned out to be faithless — faithless to Mr. Cooke that is, but still deeply loyal to Barbara. Beginning in April, 1977, H. G. began to eavesdrop on conversations between Cooke and his lawyers, and on dictation by Cooke to his secretary. In September, 1977, H. G. copied (on a copier belonging to Cooke) a document having implications for the financial aspects of the divorce, which he then mailed to Barbara. She, in turn, passed it along to her attorneys. H.G. eventually transmitted ten such documents to her, which each made their way to Barbara Cooke’s law firm.

When her lawyers attempted to use these documents in the court case, Cooke’s lawyers fought back, obtaining a court order that any of those pilfered documents in the court’s files were to be sealed, that all copies in Barbara’s or her attorneys’ possession were to be given to Cooke’s lawyers, and that none of the documents could be used in the divorce case. (An interesting footnote is that the trial judge presiding over this dispute was Joseph Wapner, who went on to fame as the first judge appearing on television’s “The People’s Court.”) Cooke, however, had unsuccessfully tried to disqualify her law firm (because her attorneys had already seen the documents), so both sides appealed the decision. Barbara’s lawyers tried to overturn the restrictions on using the documents, while his lawyers again tried to disqualify her law firm.

The court of appeal, however, left Judge Wapner’s order mostly intact. Except for some minor changes, it decided that the documents were privileged communications — disagreeing with her argument that they proved that Cooke engaged in “a fraudulent and criminal conspiracy” by reorganizing his business affairs to gain an advantage in the divorce.

As to the “fraud,” the court said that Cooke, “understandably anxious to obtain as favorable a property settlement as possible, took steps to organize his business and other records in support of his contention that much of the property involved was his separate property “— and so, that it wouldn’t be subject to the divorce proceedings. And as to the “conspiracy,” the court explained that Cooke simply “enlisted mutual friends in an effort to persuade Mrs. Cooke to agree to a favorable settlement.”

That “favorable settlement,” incidentally, eventually brought Barbara Cooke what was at the time the largest divorce settlement in U.S. history — more than $42 million.

And so she could have afforded to hire a certain combination houseman-butler-chauffeur who, most likely, had lost his job in Las Vegas.