by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
The ideal solution would be to locate a wealthy partner, someone who could fund drilling that might produce enough oil to repay the banks. For most of 1933 loan officers from both banks queried their largest customers, but none proved interested in backing Richardson. Then, in late 1933, Eugene McElvaney, a vice president at First National of Dallas, came up with a new name: Charles E. Marsh, co-owner of several Texas newspapers, including the politically influential Austin American. Marsh, like his Austin neighbors Herman and George Brown of the Brown & Root contracting company, was using his spare cash to bankroll several Texas wildcatters. When McElvaney sent him a telegram at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Marsh consented to a meeting. “Mr. Richardson, the party I had in mind, seems anxious to get together with you,” McElvaney wired Marsh on November 27, “and I see no reason why you couldn’t work out an advantageous deal.” g
It is a measure of how totally Sid Richardson cloaked his business in secrecy that the name of Charles Marsh, the man whose backing made Richardson’s fortune possible, remained unknown to Richardson’s family until they learned it during research for this book. In all likelihood, in fact, Marsh’s name would be lost to history were it not for his subsequent sponsorship of an obscure Texas congressman named Lyndon Johnson, a relationship chronicled by all of Johnson’s biographers. A large man with an even larger ego, Marsh was by every account a self-important blowhard who expected his lessers to endure endless lectures on his favorite topic, politics. “Marsh was a high-rolling, J. Rufus Wallingford type,” a Johnson aide named Welly Hopkins told an oral historian for the Johnson Presidential Library. “He could be very rude at times because of his overweaning ego. Charles Marsh, to himself, would think he could do anything…. He always wanted to be the great manipulator behind the scenes.”
That Marsh and Richardson were polar opposites was obvious. Richardson didn’t care; he just needed money. Marsh’s initial commitment was modest, at least to him. He guaranteed a thirty-thousand-dollar line of credit at First National of Dallas. Like a starving dog, Richardson drew the money in gulps, ten thousand dollars in February 1934 and another ten thousand a month later. “He wants an additional ten now against same commitment feeling that he can deal more advantageously with his creditors,” a bank officer then wired Marsh. “We are willing to make the advance … but would like to have your permission and approval beforehand.”
When Richardson drew down that first thirty thousand dollars, he wanted more. In fact, if he was to pay off his debt and renew drilling, he might need close to one million dollars. Marsh resisted, finding himself in the same quandary as the banks: risk losing more money, or losing his investment to date. In a search for capital he began canvassing the New York banks, several of whom were opening oil-lending departments. Years later the young bank officer Clint Murchison had befriended, Rushton Ardrey, recalled an incident that probably took place in 1934.
Charles Marsh, who owned a newspaper in Austin, came to see me in New York, said he was doing a little oil business on the side, and that he needed $1,000,000. He had an interest in what Sid owned.
“How much does Sid owe? ” I asked.
“Come on down to Texas and talk with Sid” [Marsh said]. “I don’t think Sid knows what he is doing.” I knew what he meant. Sid owed a total of about $1,000,000 to everybody in the area. “If he has the reserves—let me check the reserves—I will lend him $1,000,000.” I came down to Fort Worth [and met with Sid. But] Sid was [drilling] wildcats. I wouldn’t lend the money on wildcats, but if the well came in, I would make a loan.2
Unable to entice the New York banks, Marsh took a deep breath and decided to raise his bet. By August he had begun negotiating a complicated deal involving First National of Dallas. From what fragments of legal documents remain, it appears that Marsh agreed to guarantee Richardson’s debt to the bank. In return, the bank agreed to loan Richardson an additional $210,000, followed by another $150,000 the following spring. Much of the money went to pay First National of Fort Worth, which, Rushton Ardrey recalls, was under pressure from banking regulators to reduce its exposure to Richardson’s wells.
I remember one time [Sid] was in so damned deep to the Fort Worth National Bank that they were just worried to death. It had reached the point where the Federal Reserve Bank was giving them hell about having Sid’s paper. They said, “Well, we’ve tried to get him [to pay] off, but we haven’t had any luck.” Sid was one of the most skillful conversationalists I have ever known. The guy really had charm. The bank told the Federal Reserve guy, “You go talk to him and see what you can do.” So this guy came over with fire in his eyes and went to work on Sid, and he wound up by agreeing that it’d be all right for the bank to extend some more credit to him!3
While it kept his creditors at bay, the new partnership with Charles Marsh coincided with the most brazen gamble Richardson had ever made, what amounted to a Hail Mary pass for his career. It was in far northern Winkler County, two miles from the New Mexico border. One or two wells had been drilled in the area; they found natural gas but only a trickle of oil. In the spring of 1935 Gulf Oil began trucking in rigs for a major drilling effort it planned on leases just east of Kermit. While the majors generally refrained from aggressive drilling during the Depression, Gulf was facing the expiration of hundreds of ten-year leases it had signed during the West Texas rush of the mid-1920s; it had to drill the Winkler leases or lose them. Gulf’s plans—and what it knew about the area’s geology—were cloaked in secrecy. The land itself was godawful, patchy sand and scrub crisscrossed by cactus-strewn gullies, but Richardson knew it well. As Gulf moved forward, he began buying up every available lease nearby. He even took a train to Washington to wangle one from the Pure Oil Company.
Where Richardson found the confidence to place such a massive bet remains a mystery to this day, even to his family. While tales of H. L. Hunt’s and Roy Cullen’s first major discoveries became oil-patch legends, there is not a single anecdote celebrating Richardson’s—not one. In later years there would be whispers he had bribed someone, maybe his close friend Jay Adams, head of Gulf’s West Texas operations; it’s also possible Adams gave Richardson a tip for free. Perry Bass, who was to serve as Richardson’s No. 2 man for twenty years, once told the Old Friend that Richardson had devised a more creative way of gathering intelligence. In the 1930s the main switching station for long-distance telephone calls made from West Texas was in the dusty town of Mineral Wells. According to Bass’s story, Richardson became friendly with two of the telephone operators there. In Bass’s words, he performed “stud service” for these young ladies in return for information they overheard. “He would get a call from one of the operators, you know, saying, ‘Oh, Sid, a Mr. Moore from Gulf Oil is calling his headquarters in Pittsburgh, would you like to listen in?’ ” says the Old Friend.
However he learned details of Gulf’s plans, by the summer of 1935 Richardson had used most of Charles Marsh’s investment to buy land all around Gulf’s drill sites. In July the first of the Gulf wells struck oil, one hundred barrels a day—not much. But each succeeding well found a bit more. That autumn Richardson began drilling nearby, on land he leased from a rancher, and in October his well came in strong, as did the next ten or twelve he drilled all around it. They were the first wells in what became known as the Keystone Field, not the largest oil field in Texas, but a good one, big enough to produce a half million barrels of oil in the first two years. Even after splitting profits with Marsh, Richardson was able to begin repaying his debts. What cash he had left over he plowed back into the earth; of the eighty or so wells he drilled in the Keystone over the next five years, he later swore every single one hit oil. He wasn’t a millionaire—not yet—but he was well on his way. By early 1936 he was actually able to reopen a Fort Worth office and pay rent.
One day Richardson plunked himself down in his old “office,” the downtown Fort Worth drugstore, and faced the soda jerk, Jack Collier, the man who had been taking his phone calls for years. Without Col
lier’s help, Richardson felt, he might never have recovered. As the Old Friend recalls, “Sid said to Collier, ‘If you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?’ And Collier said, ‘I’d like to own this drugstore.’ And Sid said to him, ‘You do.’ He had bought it for him.” The story is not apochryphal. Many years later, after Collier’s death, Richardson took ownership of the drugstore, and another he bought Collier. He would own them until the day he died.
SIX
The Big Rich
The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant Avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing Town in Texas that was the biggest State in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest People and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl.
JOHN DOS PASSOS, 1919
I.
The fortunes forged during the Depression created a new top layer of Texas society, what came to be known in later years as the Big Rich. This was wealth on a scale entirely new to the state, and during the 1930s Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and H. L. Hunt, soon to be known as the “Big Four” oilmen, laid the foundations of a flamboyant lifestyle that would come to define the image of Texas Oil. There were mansions to build, presidents to meet, European vacations to take, islands to buy, and children to raise; between them, the Big Four now had four families to support. Unfortunately, two belonged to Hunt.
Murchison, the first to earn his fortune, was the first to begin gathering the trappings of serious wealth. In 1927, two years after his wife’s death, he had taken an apartment in Dallas, the city closest to his hometown of Athens. A year later he acquired a two-hundred-acre polo club on Preston Road in a rural area fifteen miles north of downtown. The rolling fields and woods teemed with wildlife, and Murchison, in an effort to reproduce the country life of his boyhood, trucked in hundreds of new animals, cattle, pigs, and goats, as well as chickens and dairy cows for milk and butter. The clubhouse was a shack, but Murchison fixed it up, adding two wings with staff quarters and hiring a squadron of governesses and Negro servants. When finished, they called it “The Big House.” Preston Road Farm, as Murchison dubbed the compound, was so vast that the Athens high school football team accepted his invitation to use it for summer training camp.
Murchison wanted his three boys to grow up as he had, trapping, riding, and fishing, and once he retrieved the boys they did just that. Already a primitive layout, the boys transformed Preston Road Farm into a backwoods paradise, their pet raccoons, skunks, and squirrels scrabbling over the furniture and unnerving the governesses. Murchison loved it; for the first time since Anne’s death he began to relax. He was lonely though, and began reaching out to his old chums in Athens. They came in droves, along with Murchison’s oil-industry pals, turning weekends at the farm into one long rollicking party of whiskey, poker, and dice games, the pots overflowing with not only cash but oil leases and royalty vouchers. The parties usually kicked off on Friday evenings when a dusty maroon Chrysler pulled up the long gravel drive, heralding Sid Richardson’s arrival from West Texas. The gambling and drinking lasted late into the night, when the guests would wobble into the bunkhouse Murchison had erected just for his friends, a dozen beds arrayed in one large room, cowboy-style.
“Murk,” as his buddies called him, blazed the trail for a generation of oilmen just learning how to be rich. He was among the first to begin traveling by private plane, a twin-engine four-seater that took off and landed on the old polo fields. He was among the first in Dallas to dig a swimming pool, an Olympic-size model that when finished in 1930 served as the focus of his entertaining, card tables splayed around its periphery as a haunch of beef or maybe a goat grilled on a spit by the cabana. Because his boys couldn’t swim well, Murchison had the pool lined with extra ladders. He adored the boys and paid tuition for them to attend public schools in University Park; most days they arrived at school in a chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow. Weeknights they all piled into one bed together with their father. Murchison swore he wouldn’t remarry until they were grown.
In time Murchison began itching for more land, a place where he and his pals could hunt and fish. In 1933 he was trolling for tarpon in the Gulf when he noticed Matagorda Island, a thirty-eight-mile sandbar that lined the coast southwest of Houston. Its eastern half was a wildlife refuge—the island abounded in shore birds, white-tailed deer, and rabbits—but the western half was a sheep ranch, and Murchison hit on the idea of turning it into a personal retreat. He had American Liberty buy it in 1933. Construction on the compound began immediately. Because there was no causeway to the mainland, building materials were ferried to the island by barge. By 1936 Murchison’s new spread was complete: a water tower, servants quarters, and a long, low clubhouse lined with bunks for thirty-five men. A veranda in front faced the beaches. It was a primitive layout in those early years, as if a dude ranch had suddenly been plunked down in the Hamptons.
Even before construction was finished, Murchison began leading hunting expeditions to Matagorda, the men sleeping on rented yachts as the clubhouse was built. While there was deer aplenty, the most prevalent animals were rattlesnakes, so many, in fact, that the Murchison boys weren’t allowed to visit for months while their father and three of his old buddies, Dudley Golding, his lawyer Toddie Lee Wynne, and Sid Richardson, mounted a four-man eradication effort. Murchison designed a hunting car, a stripped-down Ford with bucket seats, for the task. The men laced on hunting boots, hoisted shotguns, and hopped in the car. Murchison drove. The ranch manager and a guide led on horseback. If the horses reared near a cactus patch, they knew rattlers were inside. The guide would dismount, fish out the snake with long prongs, and Murchison and the men would blast it with shotguns. Afterward everyone would repair to the yachts and, over tumblers of Wild Turkey, argue over who earned the most kills.
All in all, Murchison’s was a splendid life, especially considering how most Americans endured the Depression. But it was not entirely free of sadness. On a chill morning at Preston Road Farm in April 1936, his youngest son, ten-year-old Burk, went out to check his animal traps, slipped, and fell into a creek. He went to school in wet clothes and by the next day had a high fever. By the time Murchison arrived home from a business trip, the fever had become pneumonia. Burk was rushed to a hospital, but his lungs, weak since birth, gave out. He died on April 11 and was buried beside his mother in Athens. Murchison was devastated. Friends said they never heard him, or any of the other Murchisons, mention Burk’s name again the rest of his life.
The following year, as if to punctuate the family’s loss, the boiler in the Big House exploded, burning much of the structure and all of Murchison’s books. Murchison decided to replace it with a manor home he had begun to envision, and he moved his lead maid, Jewel Pfifer, and his two remaining boys, John and Clint Jr., now teenagers, into the Stoneleigh Hotel. When construction began in January 1938, Murchison oversaw every detail. It was to be the largest private home in Texas, thirty-four thousand square feet, a red-fieldstone colossus longer than a football field, its veranda overlooking White Rock Creek a half mile away. The master suite alone had eight full-sized beds for Murchison, his two sons, and whatever pals were staying over—“so we can stay up all night talkin’ oil,” he explained to his decorator. Murchison had seen the kitchen at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and wanted something bigger. He got it. A single first-floor hallway measured 256 feet long. A friend cracked, “Jewel’s gonna need roller skates.”1
The new home’s centerpiece was the two-story game room. Murchison designed it himself. A mezzanine encircled the room, to stow his books, and for musicians at parties. Projection equipment was stored in a special closet, giving Murchision a 1930s-style home theater. Above the giant fireplace a motto was carved, “Sportsmanship above Pleasure.” A local painter was hired to paint wildlife murals on each wall, the wildlife of North Texas on the north wall, East Texas whitetail deer on the east, West Texas muledeer, mountain sheep,
and prairie dogs on the west wall, South Texas waterfowl on the south. Murchison’s homey touches continued into the adjoining bar, where he banished wallpaper in favor of wall-to-wall tarpon scales.
The Murchisons and their Negro servants, now numbering nine, moved into the mansion in early 1939. Murchison was now forty-four. His eldest son, John, was in his second year at Yale, Clint Jr. at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey. Friends noticed their father was mellowing. Though the weekend parties continued, they were tamer, in large part because Murchison had quit serious gambling and cut back his drinking. The reason was a twenty-three-year-old blue-eyed blonde named Virginia Long. Clint called her Ginnie; he thought she looked like a petite Lana Turner. They met when a girl named Effie Arrington, who was soon to wed Murchison’s pal Wofford Cain, brought her to a pool party. Ginnie was Murchison’s dream girl, a spontaneous, energetic East Texas tomboy who could shoot ducks, reel in tarpon, and play gin rummy with the gusto of an oilman. Though clearly in love, they waited four years, until Murchison’s sons were away at school, before marrying in a quiet cememony at a friend’s home. For their engagement, Clint gave Ginnie a 16-carat diamond marquis. It cost $125,000.
For Murchison, it was pocket change. Cash from East Texas and the Southern Union pipelines was gushing into his accounts, and he leveraged his growing fortune fivefold by using every penny as collateral for new and ever-larger bank loans. He had been among the first oilmen to capitalize on the banks’ new energy-lending practices in the early 1930s, and in the ensuing decade, years before any of his peers attempted it, he was the first to begin diversifying outside oil. Fearing inflation, he purchased his first non-oil asset, an Indianapolis insurance company, in 1939, then added another in 1942.