Bryan Burrough

by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

  It wasn’t just the rest of America that was tiring of the Big Rich’s gaucheries. The George Bushes and Hugh Liedtkes of the new Texas were frankly embarrassed by the Silver Dollar Jim Wests and Glenn McCarthys and D. D. Feldmans. By the late 1950s, while ranches and airplanes and exotic wildlife were still prized, the days when they were brandished with unabashed pride were fast falling away. “Evidence of individual Texas wealth was being secluded by the middle 1950s, and there are fewer anecdotes to feed the ‘Big Rich’ legend,” George Fuermann wrote in 1957. “The legend has become obnoxious; being from Texas has become a distinction for some to worry about.”

  But for Texas Oil, the real problem wasn’t image. It was economics. The days of Texas fortunes “hatching like mayflies,” as Time memorably observed in 1950, were quickly fading. Never again would one man working alone find a major oil field in Texas; they had all been found. By 1960 costs to drill in the continental United States had risen so high, a solo operator could barely afford to sink a wildcat well. A number of deep-pocketed wildcatters had begun looking overseas, John Mecom in Honduras, Colombia, Jordan, and Yemen, H. L. Hunt’s son Bunker in Pakistan. Worse, competition from Middle Eastern oil was slowly strangling the industry. The majors saw little reason to buy more Texas crude when they could buy Saudi oil for half the price. European demand, long a foundation of Texas sales, peaked during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and fell sharply thereafter. In a bid to buoy prices, the Railroad Commission ordained that no Texas field could pump oil more than twenty-one days a month. It reduced this allowance again and again, until in 1962, Texas wells could operate only seven days a month. Needless to say, no one was looking too hard to find new oil in Texas.

  The titans of the golden age, meanwhile, had begun passing from the stage. Sid Richardson’s close friend, Amon Carter, the Fort Worth newspaper publisher who struck the Ellenberger Lime, died in 1955; some said Richardson was never the same after that. Patillo Higgins, the man who started it all, died in 1956. Silver Dollar Jim West died of diabetes in 1957. They found $290,000 in a vault beneath his River Oaks home, much of it in silver dollars; it took seven armored cars to haul it all out. The old West family ranch, sold to Humble years earlier, was deeded to the federal government as the new headquarters of NASA’s manned space program. Big Jim West’s Italianate mansion on Galveston Bay became the new Lunar Science Institute. Outer space, not oil, appeared to represent the future of Texas.

  VIII.

  Nothing marked the end of the golden age so much as the dimming of the men who had created it, the original Big Four oilmen. Clint Murchison was the first to retreat. In February 1956, while visiting Bob Young’s Palm Beach mansion and spending his days with Ginnie at Hialeah, Murchison began complaining he didn’t feel well. He had trouble maintaining his balance, and his speech was slurred. He and Ginnie flew to New Orleans, where he checked into the Ochsner Clinic. Doctors there deduced he had suffered a slight stroke, the result of a partial blockage of an artery in his heart. Afterward Murchison went to Baylor University Hospital in Dallas to have the artery cleared.

  The stroke signaled the end of Murchison’s active business career. In the months to come, while he remained engaged in the day-to-day supervision of his investments, his memory began to fail. He asked his secretary to listen in on his phone calls and take notes, in case he missed something. It was embarrassing, and by 1957, when he turned sixty-two, Murchison was spending more and more time away from the office, all but moving to his East Texas ranch, Gladoaks. There, splayed before a card table in his pajama bottoms, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he began each morning around five with a call to Sid Richardson. “What’s the dope?” were usually Murchison’s first words, and the two would spend an hour discussing everything from investments to the Gladoaks peach crop.

  There was a second stroke in 1960. At that point, Murchison passed his last management duties to his sons, John Dabney and Clint Jr., and moved into Gladoaks full-time, where he busied himself buying cattle, a dozen more ranches nearby, and the odd company, a chain of supermarkets one year, a group of feedlots the next. He and Ginnie still traveled, spending the summers in La Jolla and betting the horses at Del Mar. But after another series of strokes in 1965 Murchison was relegated to a wheelchair. He stopped flying down to Acuna then; it was too cold. Instead they bought a cliffside mansion in Acapulco, but in time even that became a burden. Murchison spent his last years mired at Gladoaks, many days sitting in a battered old station wagon as a chauffeur drove him through the fields and orchards of his many ranches. He finally died, of pneumonia, in June 1969.

  They buried him in Athens, next to his parents. There was a massive funeral at the Methodist church, a thousand mourners or more. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon called with condolescences. The New York Times ran his obituary on page 1, terming Murchison a one-man conglomerate. “His entire life was devoted to making money,” the Times wrote, but it wasn’t really true. Clint Murchison had torn through life with gusto, and those he left behind were uniformly thankful to have known him. At Acuna the peasants built a fifteen-foot cross of solid ebony and hauled it to the ranch’s tallest peak, where they anchored it to the rock and bowed their heads. Then they buried a pair of Big Clint’s mangy old boots, and returned down the mountain.

  IX.

  Sid Richardson spent his twilight years alone, shuttling between a new bungalow at the Thunderbird Club in Palm Springs, his retreat at St. Joe’s, and his rooms at the Fort Worth Club. Wherever he was, his routine rarely varied. He arose around five and spoke to Murchison, a talk that inevitably began with one saying he had been awake for hours waiting for the other to get up. Mornings he lolled around, typically attired in boxer shorts, pajama tops, a ratty gray sweater, and a bathrobe, sipping coffee between calls. In Palm Springs he would retire after lunch to a lounge dubbed the Snake Pit, where he spent the afternoon playing poker with a group whose members included the actor Phil Harris and Ray Ryan, the gambler who had played with H. L. Hunt.

  There was scant new business to be done. The glut of Middle Eastern oil meant there was little need to drill, but he did some anyway, at one point partnering with John Mecom on what was then the deepest well ever drilled, a dry hole bored nineteen thousand feet beneath a Louisiana swamp. The growing aversion to American oil, in fact, almost cost Richardson his Louisiana fields. He couldn’t sell all the oil, and his leases, even in the giant Cox Bay and Port-la-Hache fields below New Orleans, remained alive only so long as he pumped: if the fields stopped producing, the leases could be voided. In the late 1950s, his Old Friend says, Richardson avoided disaster only by cutting a deal to sell all his Louisiana production to Ashland Oil at cost. In 1957 Time magazine reported speculation that he was poised to cash out, selling his empire to one of the majors. “A damn lie,” Richardson snapped.

  His health was failing. He had high blood pressure. The doctors at the Ochsner Clinic told him to quit drinking and cut the salt from his diet. They made him stop smoking. President Eisenhower sent a condolensce letter or two. Richardson seemed happiest when he could fly back to Fort Worth, where his first call would inevitably go to Perry Bass’s wife. “What’s for dinner?” he would ask. She always fixed him his favorite East Texas meal, sliced tomatoes, black-eyed peas, collared greens, and a single ham hock.

  Still, he was lonely. A longtime Fort Worth newspaper reporter, Carl Freund, remembers seeing Richardson many days on the sidewalk outside the Texas Hotel, chatting with bookies about a horse race. On Saturdays he would summon Bass and his teenaged grandson Sid down to his office just to shoot the breeze; later, on the way home, Bass would tell Sid the old man just didn’t want to be alone. When the Basses were busy, Richardson had trouble finding people to join him for dinner. “He’d get lonesome, and he’d call me up; he’d want me to come get him,” remembers the Texas Hotel’s manager at the time, Andy Anderson. “He loved to go to a Mexican café or some … rib joint. And he never would have any money in his pocket. He alway
s expected me to pay for it. He knew, of course, that I would charge it to the company.”6

  A few days before Christmas 1958, Richardson sent his DC-3 to Washington to ferry his lawyer, John Connally, to Palm Springs. Connally sensed trouble. He had taken a call from Perry Bass, who had seen Richardson’s will. To his dismay, it left almost nothing to the Bass family. Richardson’s share of their oil fields was to go to a new Sid Richardson Foundation. In Palm Springs, Connally fell into Richardson’s easy rhythms of coffee and cards, and after a few days brought up the matter. “Mr. Richardson,” he said one morning, “you need to leave some substantial money to your family and Perry’s children.”

  Richardson appeared startled. “Why should I?” he snapped. “Bass is rich. He could leave them plenty.” But Connally pressed, and when Richardson returned to Fort Worth he agreed to change his will. In the new will he left two million dollars to Perry Bass and each of Perry’s four sons, along with St. Joe’s Island and stock in several corporations. His share of the oil fields, however, still went to the foundation.

  On September 30, 1959, Richardson flew down to St. Joe’s. He planned to fly on to tour a pair of ranches he and Connally had purchased near San Antonio. The next morning a servant found him dead in his upstairs bed beneath one of his beloved Remingtons. He had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. He was sixty-eight.

  Sid Richardson received far more headlines in death than he ever had in life. His body was flown to Athens for burial. President Eisenhower sent a cross adorned with white carnations, along with regrets that he was unable to attend. His sister Annie was there. She cried. His chauffeur was there, and the cattle wrangler from St. Joe’s, and the houseman and his family, and his pilots. Perry Bass stood by with his four boys as Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and John Connally watched Billy Graham deliver the eulogy. “He was a loyal American and passionately loved his country and maintaining the American way of life,” Graham said, because he couldn’t say much about oil or money or cattle or playing cards, the things Sid Richardson loved most.

  X.

  Roy Cullen spent his last years paying more attention to his growing crop of grandchildren than politics or oil. His time had passed. He knew it. In their seventies now, he and Lillie spent more time at their ranch north of Houston, playing cards and dominoes on the back porch and driving out at dusk to watch the deer. They built homes there for their daughters and their husbands, and in time even acceded to their son-in-law Corbin Robertson’s desire to purchase a family plane, an old converted DC-3 the grandchildren nicknamed “Big Red.”

  Most of their brood had taken the plane to a Gulf Coast beach vacation in February 1957 when they got the call. “Gampa” had suffered a stroke in his sleep at his River Oaks mansion. Rushed to Hermann Hospital, Cullen lingered for four months but never regained consciousness. He died in June 1957, Lillie at his side. She died two years later, never adapting to her beloved husband’s absence.

  In Houston the coverage of Cullen’s death dwarfed that of any Texas oilman before or since; it was as if a president had died. The stories took up every inch of every front page, and entire sections inside. Much of it dwelled on his philanthropy; no one wanted to talk too much about his political views. Indeed, for all the sorrow and warm eulogies, there was a sense, however slight, that Houston was in some way relieved the days of Hugh Roy Cullen were over. A new Houston was blooming, and a new Texas, and crusty old oilmen who griped about liberals and New York Jews were irksome anachronisms, reminders of a time men like George Bush and Hugh Liedtke would just as soon forget.

  THIRTEEN

  Rising Sons

  I.

  By the autumn of 1959 H. L. Hunt, who turned seventy that year, was the only one of the Big Four still active, and even he was passing off his corporate responsibilities to aides and his sons Bunker and Herbert, who by then had reached their thirties. It had been a long, tumultuous decade for Hunt, lived now in the spotlight; whether it was accurate or not, he was widely regarded as the world’s richest man. But he was an oilman now only on paper. His men sensed he had lost all interest in oil. “He enjoyed looking at the old wells and remembering the primitive methods employed to bring them in,” his nephew Tom Hunt recalled. “But he never cared to look at anything that Hunt Oil had done without him… . We had new wells that were producing ten or twenty thousand dollars a month but to him they weren’t his.”1

  The year 1955 was a turning point, when Hunt not only closed his beloved Facts Forum but suffered the wrenching loss of his wife, Lyda. She had suffered a stroke. Not trusting Texas hospitals, he had her flown to the Mayo Clinic, but she died within days. Despite the other women in his life, Lyda had been Hunt’s rock. He wept on the plane back to Dallas. “I don’t know how I’ll ever get by without her,” he said. Afterward Hunt disappeared on a six-month tour of Latin America, where he later said he had studied local governments. In all likelihood he simply needed time to deal with his grief. “Daddy went downhill from the day Mother died,” his daughter Margaret remembered.2 Bunker tried to get him to play cards, but he wouldn’t. Nothing interested him.

  To the dismay of his first family, what saved Hunt was the love of his mistress, Ruth Ray Wright, and his secret “third” family.y He and Ruth had been together almost fifteen years by then. A simple, sweet, religious woman, Ruth still lived in her house on Meadow Lake Avenue, as did the couple’s four children. Their son Ray, who bore a striking resemblance to Hunt, turned thirteen in 1956; they also had three girls, aged twelve to seven. With Lyda gone, Ruth began demanding to be recognized as Hunt’s wife; Hunt procrastinated, knowing it would mean rumors about their secret life. By the mid- 1950s a handful of Hunt’s sons, including Bunker and Herbert, appeared to have learned of Ruth; others, notably the oldest sibling, Margaret, did not. When she first encountered Ruth at Mount Vernon after Lyda’s death, Margaret thought she was a secretary. Margaret’s husband, Al Hill, who was close to Hunt, wasted no time pulling her out of the house into their car.

  As Margaret recalled the moment years later, she demanded to know why they were leaving. “Sweetheart,” Hill began, “now, I know this is going to make you unhappy—”

  “Al,” Margaret demanded, “what is going on?”

  “Ruth Ray,” he said, turning toward her, “is your father’s, well, she’s his wife without being married to him. They have four children together.” As Margaret recalled her thoughts: “I was astounded, disbelieving, horrified, brokenhearted. As I was about to demand, ‘Al, why didn’t you tell me?,’ I heard Mother asking me the same thing (twenty years before) and my reply: Why would I?”

  After Lyda’s death, Ruth and her children all but moved in to Mount Vernon, fixing Hunt’s meals, packing his brown-bag lunches, and singing to him when he became depressed. Neither branch of the family was happy with the new arrangement; Margaret, for one, stopped speaking to her father. The first family, led by Margaret and Bunker, considered Ruth’s family interlopers and wanted nothing to do with them. Ruth’s family, especially teenaged Ray, thought it high time their parents were finally married. As Hunt later told the story, Ray came to his office one day to lay down the law. “You will marry my mother,” he told Hunt. “She is a good, religious person, and you will marry her.”

  In time he did, sneaking off one Sunday afternoon in November 1957 to the home of Ruth’s minister, who wed them. The six children of Hunt’s first family only learned of their father’s marriage when a short item appeared in the Dallas Times Herald. All across Dallas, tongues clucked. Nobody knew of Hunt’s bigamist past, but reading between the lines, it was clear the world’s richest man had been up to something. When Hunt adopted Ruth’s four children, changing their last names to Hunt, everyone in Dallas knew the truth. Hunt didn’t care. He was happy with Ruth, who now joined him full-time at Mount Vernon.

  His new life with Ruth changed Hunt. She considered gambling a sin, and tended to cry when Hunt spoke of his wagers. Soon after their marriage he gave up gambling
altogether—to placate her, Hunt said. Another motivation, however, might have been a federal investigation linked to the gambler Ray Ryan. Hunt was among dozens of gamblers subpoenaed before an Indiana grand jury, though he avoided testimony when his doctor claimed he had a throat ailment. A rumored probe into whether Hunt had paid taxes on his winnings never reached a court.

  The biggest change, though, was Hunt’s embrace of religion. Ruth had joined the Dallas Baptist Church, the South’s largest Baptist congregation, and had taken to holding prayer meetings at Mount Vernon. In time Hunt began joining her at services, though it was a right-wing minister named Wayne Poucher who later took credit for Hunt’s turn toward Christ. As Poucher told the story, Hunt was dining at the minister’s home in suburban Washington one evening in 1959 when the family invited him to join their nightly prayer service. Hunt said he’d rather observe, but as the prayers wore on he slid from his chair and kneeled on the floor beside Poucher. By the time the prayers came to an end, Poucher said, tears were sliding down Hunt’s face.

  Afterward, “I took him to [his] hotel and for two hours we talked about him and his soul,” Poucher recalled. “I finished by telling him that I wanted to take him to the church building and baptize him.” Hunt was torn. “Wayne, I want to,” he said, “but I have been an evil person and I don’t feel I can ask God to forgive me until I have lived better for a little longer time.” Soon after, Hunt was baptized at Dallas Baptist. Finding God, Hunt said later, “was the greatest trade I ever made. I traded the Here for the Hereafter.”