Bryan Burrough

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

  Finally not even shopping helped. In the fall of 1972, barely ten months after the Cowboys’ Super Bowl victory, a Chicago acquaintance called Jane to complain that Clint Jr. had stolen his girlfriend. It was the final straw. Jane demanded a divorce. “I can understand a few women here and there, Clint,” she told him, “but thousands of women, no.” Murchison, while surprised, let his wife go without a fight. In their January 1973 settlement he gave Jane a reported ten million dollars in cash and the town house on Sutton Place in Manhattan. For the newly crowned King of all Texans, it was the beginning of troubled times.

  VI.

  During the 1960s and early 1970s the Murchison brothers symbolized the twin faces of the Big Rich, the flamboyant and the staid, the high-minded and the low-rent. In reality there were far more Johns than Clint Jrs. The Big Rich were now “modest and calm,” the writer David Nevin argued in the umpteenth book analyzing the state, 1968’s The Texans. “They have made outmoded and unfashionable the gaucheries that once marked Texas; the time is over for the importing of 50,000 camellias to decorate the wedding lawn, of Harold Byrd’s brassy parties after the Texas-Oklahoma football game every October, of entire trains taken to Hollywood for capers with film figures.”

  It wasn’t entirely true, as Clint Jr.’s behavior illustrated. Much of the mainstream press, in fact, clung to the fading myth of freewheeling millionaires dancing in oil’s black rain, but for every Texas playboy there were dozens of oil families who lived tasteful, quiet lives. Few of the Big Rich were better-behaved than Roy Cullen’s offspring. Since their beloved “Gampa’s” death his three loyal daughters and their husbands had lived quietly in their River Oaks homes, donated generously, and joined the boards of museums and hospitals. The most visible of the son-in-laws, Corbin Robertson, remained active at the University of Houston, which named its football stadium after him. It was all the notice he wanted. “Just leave us alone,” Robertson grumped in a rare interview during the 1960s.9

  The Cullens, in fact, were probably the last Texas family anyone would suspect of spawning a playboy. But they harbored a secret, and to their dismay, it arrived on their doorsteps in 1964. His name was Baron Enrico di Portanova. The elder son of Roy Cullen’s “lost” daughter, Lillie, and the Italian baron she had married in Los Angeles in 1932, “Ricky” di Portanova had grown up in Italy after his parents divorced. Suave, tall, and slender, with luxurious black hair and pencil-thin mustache, di Portanova had worked as a jeweler in Rome but mostly lived la dolce vita, chasing actresses, driving Maseratis, and spending every cent of the five thousand dollars a month he received from the Cullen estate. For years Roy Cullen had fretted about his aimless life. “Find some legitimate business in which Enrico can become active,” he admonished his father in a 1950s-era letter rejecting an increase in Ricky’s allowance. “He cannot have his mind too much on playing society regardless of how many aristocratic friends he may have.”

  Growing up in Rome, never having met any of his aunts, uncles, and cousins in far-off Texas, Ricky di Portanova had only the dimmest understanding of what the Cullen fortune involved. In 1961, with Italian friends suggesting his “allowance” was a pittance, he made his first trip to Houston to find out. He left with nothing more than a condescending lecture from a Quintana accountant. “They treated me like a foreigner, which really bugged me,” di Portanova told a writer years later. “I’m a Cullen, too, not some adopted cousin.”10

  In 1964 the thirty-two-year-old baron returned to Houston, this time to live, and determined to get an accounting from the Cullens that detailed how much money they had, what Quintana was worth, and how he could secure his rightful share. With him came his beautiful, Valentino-draped wife, Ljuba, a onetime star on the Yugoslavian national basketball team who enjoyed a late-1950s moment as a starlet in Italian films. The couple, accustomed to life along the Italian Riviera, was appalled by Houston—muggy, oppressively hot, angry freeways lined with grimy shopping plazas. They moved into an exclusive high-rise in River Oaks, Inwood Manor, but nothing overcame the banality of a city where a night out consisted of barbecue and Lone Star beer. Desperate for distraction, Ricky bought Ljuba a monkey. Neighbors at Inwood Manor heard what sounded like someone dribbling a basketball late into the night, accompanied by simian squeals.

  The Cullens did not open their arms for the di Portanovas; in fact, after a strained welcoming dinner party, they had little contact. “Mom had a party for them, I was about fourteen at the time,” Wilhelmina Robertson’s daughter Beth remembers. “We were nice to them, you know, but there wasn’t much we had in common.” Convinced he deserved a greater share of the Cullen fortune, Ricky bombarded Quintana with letters and calls; most went unreturned. Quintana executives refused the baron any meaningful information about the company or the estate. In time di Portanova opened a downtown office, a war room for the legal assault he foresaw. Before he could act, however, the Cullens voluntarily mailed him a check for $841,425. If the family thought this would dissuade the baron, they were wrong. If anything, it had the opposite effect. Ricky considered the money a bribe, one he was happy to take, and evidence that there was more to come.

  Before he could move against the Cullens, the baron needed to set his own affairs in order. A lawyer suggested the first thing to do was amend his mother’s will. As matters now stood, once Lillie Cranz Cullen di Portanova died, all her assets would be returned to the Cullens. Ricky and his brother, Ugo, would be penniless. The baron sighed. This, he knew, would not be an easy thing.

  Little is known of Lillie di Portanova’s life. After her marriage she disappeared from Texas, and from her family’s lives. Some in Houston thought she was dead. Roy Cullen had hired a private detective to keep track of her. In fact, since 1955, Lillie had been living off her trust fund in New York City, in the Times Square Motor Hotel, a tidy hostelry in the heart of the city’s seediest area. Most days she could be glimpsed trudging the streets in a black overcoat, black hat, and heavy black boots, shopping bags beneath each arm. She purchased coats at Bergdorf Goodman, snipped off the buttons and for some reason replaced them with safety pins. The hotel staff looked after her with care, in part, one suspects, because of the thousand-dollar tips she was prone to hand out. Most of their conversations took place through her locked door. Lillie’s diet appeared to consist almost exclusively of Coca-Cola and sweet cream. In 1965, when her son Ricky reestablished contact with his mother after several years, she weighed more than four hundred pounds and had running sores on her legs.

  When di Portanova served notice to change his mother’s will, the Cullens hired lawyers who indicated they would try to stop him by challenging Lillie’s sanity. Legal wrangling stretched on until August 1966, when the two sides agreed that Lillie would be examined by three psychiatrists in a conference room at a New York bank. The doctors found her of sound mind, and immediately after the hearing Lillie signed documents that created trusts for Ricky, and for his younger brother, Ugo, who still lived in Italy. Four months afterward, Lillie died. She left her sons an estate valued at $5.2 million.

  Ricky, however, was only warming up. His next task involved his brother. Three years younger than Ricky, Ugo di Portanova had taken after his mother. Morbidly obese, with long stringy hair and a heavy black beard, he lived with his father in Sorrento, where he spent his days lying in bed between attempts at painting. If Ricky could persuade an Italian court to make him Ugo’s ward, he would control twice the money he was able to pry from the Cullens. To do that, however, just as his mother had to be declared sane, Ugo had to be declared insane. An Italian judge, accommpanied by a court attorney and a psychiatrist, visited Ugo at his villa that October, two months after Lillie’s hearing in New York. He found Roy Cullen’s grandson barefoot, dressed in a bathrobe, wandering a room piled high with books, boxes filled with trash, record players, cameras, and arts supplies, including chisels, pliers, and tongs. Ugo announced he was making “a Christ.” He went on to discuss his philosophical interests in Hegel before denounc
ing the Bible as immoral. The judge ruled him insane.

  His preparations complete, Ricky launched his long-planned legal assault in early 1967. That February his attorneys, having persuaded a Houston judge to make Ricky and his father Ugo’s guardians, asked the Cullens to pay Ugo $120,000 a year; they got it. One month later, the baron’s attorneys demanded that Ugo be paid the same $841,425 the baron had received. A week after that, the di Portanova attorneys served notice on the Cullen-appointed trustees of Ugo’s estate, demanding a full and itemized accounting of the Cullen fortune.

  His legal broadside fired, Ricky and Ljuba relaxed and began to celebrate. They had been evicted from Inwood Manor—the monkey had apparently taken its toll—but with new money flowing in, they could now live in style. They bought a home on two wooded acres at 8828 Sandringham in Houston’s Memorial section, just blocks from George and Barbara Bush. A full staff was hired, including an Italian groom, Franco Necci, to take care of the horses. None of it, however, made Ljuba any happier in Houston—“this hell-hole,” she called it—and as time wore on, Ricky spent more time with a new friend, John Blaffer, the rumpled son of first-generation oil money; Blaffer’s father, Robert Lee Blaffer, had been one of Humble Oil’s founders.

  John Blaffer knew oil, and his insights were invaluable to Ricky’s cause; if his mother’s estate was being charged for drilling fees, Blaffer pointed out, then the estate—and Ricky—should be receiving royalties as well. But Blaffer’s true value to the baron was introducing him to Texas-style hedonism. Blaffer had a wife, but he also owned an apartment complex on South Post Oak Road, and had installed his mistress to run it. More than a dozen oilmen, in fact, had girlfriends living there. Sheppard King—he of the Egyptian belly-dancer marriage—had an ex-wife living there, too, Gloria King, who fell into Ricky’s circle.

  This was the heart of the Swinging Sixties, and the apartments on South Post Oak swung hard. Parties started every afternoon at five and were often still going strong at dawn. A Texas version of the Riviera, the action drew a hard-living, cosmopolitan crowd, and Baron Enrico di Portanova fit right in. When they needed a break, Blaffer took Ricky on his private plane for overnight hunting trips and tequila-fueled weekends in Acapulco. Ricky enjoyed himself so much that he purchased his own Cessna. If a morning dawned with no imminent agenda, he and Blaffer would fly over to Nuevo Laredo and hit the Cadillac Bar for a long, boozy lunch.

  Such escapades did little to strengthen the di Portanovas’ marriage. After a brief separation and reconciliation in early 1967, Ricky took Ljuba to Monte Carlo that summer, only to discover her in bed with another man. Ljuba stormed out of their hotel onto the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel’s yacht; Spiegel and a group of friends including the actor Kirk Douglas were heading to Capri. From the yacht, Ljuba telephoned Ricky in tears, then put Douglas on the line to try to persuade the baron to take her back. “Kirk, you stay out of it,” the baron said. “I don’t think we can be together anymore.”

  Di Portanova returned to Houston that September to file for divorce and await the Cullens’ reply to his legal filings. If all went well—and he had won every skirmish to date—he would soon take delivery of a fortune that might run to the tens of millions of dollars. While he waited, the house on Sandringham was lonely, so he began hosting nightly gatherings of the South Post Oak crowd. One attendee was his new mistress, a pretty River Oaks girl named Sandy Hovas, so bountifully endowed that her classmates at Lamar High School had nicknamed her “Buckets.” Before long, Ricky and Sandy were an item.

  Then, suddenly, matters took a dark turn. Early on the evening of October 28, 1967, Gloria King and a friend named Norma Clark were visiting Ricky to discuss arrangements for an upcoming dinner party. When Gloria left on an errand, Norma Clark remained behind, sitting with Ricky in the living room. Without warning, a gunshot echoed from the kitchen. The baron’s Italian groom, Franco Necci, staggered into the living room, bleeding heavily from a chest wound, and collapsed on the floor. A tall man in a brown jacket strode in behind, waving a .45 automatic. “I’m going to kill all you S.O.B.’s!” he shouted.

  Di Portanova had just begun to beg for his life when Gloria King suddenly walked in through the front door. The man with the gun motioned her toward di Portanova and Norma Clark, produced a set of handcuffs, and chained the women together, then ordered the baron to open his three wall safes. There was little inside. Frustrated and cursing, the man with the gun took $350 from the baron’s wallet and a 6-carat diamond ring from Norma Clark. Then he ran out.

  Police surmised this was something more than a robbery gone bad; while the locations of two of the baron’s safes were known to friends, the robber had known of a third that was secret. Clearly, the crime had been planned in advance. A police detective named Paul Nix uncovered a snitch who told them the robber was acting under orders to “kill the Italian.” Nix felt certain that Franco Necci, who was Italian, had been murdered by mistake, that the intruder had intended to kill the baron. Few said aloud what some in Houston suspected: there was only one family who would want Baron Enrico di Portanova dead.

  The Cullens, meanwhile, remained silent, refusing all interviews as they simmered in their River Oaks homes. No one reached out to di Portanova, much less socialized with him. “You don’t tend to have much to do with someone,” Beth Robertson observed, “when they’re suing you.”

  Rumors of a murder-for-hire were still swirling in mid-November when Detective Nix arrested an ex-convict and heroin addict named Carl Thomas Preston. The baron, Gloria King, and Norma Clark identified him in a lineup as the man who had robbed them. Preston was indicted for Franco Necci’s murder and, while awaiting trial, was convicted of heroin possession, for which he drew a life sentence; then as now, Texas drug laws were nothing to trifle with. The baron offered Preston a hundred thousand dollars if he would identify who had arranged the murder. Preston refused, however, saying his life wouldn’t be worth a penny if he squealed. With Preston keeping silent, the theories being floated about who, if any one, was behind the killing remained nothing but unproved suspicions.

  There matters lay when the baron’s divorce suit suddenly heated up. He was already paying Ljuba five thousand dollars a month in temporary alimony and had made a settlement offer—twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, three thousand dollars a month, and a 1966 Mustang—but Ljuba, keenly aware of the fortune Ricky stood to inherit, held out for more. Rather than face a countersuit, the baron skipped the country in April 1968, taking Sandy Hovas to Rome, where they rented a luxurious apartment with two terraces and a seventy-five-foot-long living room they packed with antiques. He sent condolences to his business manager, Edward Condon, and his secretary, Vivian Flynn, when Condon wrapped the baron’s beloved Maserati around a tree.

  “Received the tragic news about the Maserati,” Ricky wrote Condon in October 1968, “… that bunch of stupid American peasants raced my beautiful machine over those goddam flat, ugly, unprepared roads… . You allow a Texan to drive a Maserati it is like allowing a baboon to play a Stradivarius… . Please have Vivian pack my mink lined trench coat as the weather is getting colder. If you would like to wear it Sweetie go right ahead. All of us girls should be draped in mink after 40.”

  Money was now pouring into di Portanova’s accounts, from his mother’s estate and from wise investments Condon made on his behalf. Even as his divorce proceedings dragged on, the baron embarked on a shopping spree of epic proportions. He bought a mansion in Acapulco—it had a name, “Arabesque”—another home in Palm Springs, and a farm outside Rome; a new plane, a King Air Beechcraft, a helicopter, and a speedboat; two Maseratis, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce; plus five racehorses in England and four more in Rome. There were servants at every house, a secretary in Houston, two full-time pilots, and a captain for the speedboat. “I hope that in the near future,” he wrote Condon in March 1969, “I [will] be in a position as my father and think of nothing other than the best things in life—sun, sex and spaghetti.”

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p; Di Portanova was having so much fun he didn’t bother to return to Houston for the murder trial of Carl Thomas Preston. Despite Gloria King’s testimony against him, defense attorneys broadly hinted that someone else had shot Franco Necci. In the end, jurors believed Preston’s alibi that he had been in Arizona the night of the murder. He was acquitted; the crime has never been solved, nor has any light ever been shed on the mystery of who—if anyone—hired Preston.

  Ricky didn’t especially care. Life was good—so good, in fact, that he all but gave up his efforts to pry more money from the Cullens, who had done their best to tie up his pleadings in court. The family’s attorneys had succeeded in pushing the matter from a Harris County court into a state court. Rather than wait years to jump-start the proceedings there, and clearly dreading the time in Houston it would require, the baron accepted an out-of-court settlement in 1969. The Cullens allowed di Portanova to become a trustee of Ugo’s estate, granting him a measure of control, but refused to produce any kind of accounting. The baron, diverted by his racehorses and Maseratis, by a wonderful life of sun, sex, and spaghetti, ran up the white flag.

  For the moment.

  FIFTEEN

  Watergate, Texas-style

  I.

  The Hunt family, for all its oddities, harbored no playboys or serious inter-family squabbling during the 1960s—that was yet to come. Hunt himself, who turned seventy-nine in 1968, was still hailed as the world’s richest man, although he almost certainly wasn’t. That year Forbes estimated him to be only one of the six richest Americans, and for the first time placed Bunker in the top ten, pegging his worth at between three and five hundred million dollars. Outside Dallas H.L. “has become symbolic of the lusty Texas tycoon who flashes $1000 bills, drapes his women in mink, and turns in his Cadillacs when they get dirty,” the journalist Jack Anderson wrote in 1969. But there was a wide gap between image and reality.