Awed, Ash Robinson held the check and dimly heard his father’s coincidental lecture. “Now, son, you didn’t earn this money, and you don’t know what it’s worth. I can tell you that it’s more than most men earn in a lifetime. My advice to you is … the quicker you get rid of it, the better off you’re going to be. Then you’ll start finding out what life is really like.”
Suddenly, wonderfully rich, Ash returned to New Orleans on the first day of the new year of 1919. By July 4, six months later, he had spent every penny of his inheritance.
“Those damn ponies!” Ash would exclaim decades later, when he remembered the tale. “I thought I knew horses. But I came to find out soon enough I didn’t know anything about horses when they were race horses.” But for six incandescent months his life was as dazzling as the jewel-studded walking cane he swung on the arm of his hand-tailored suit as he promenaded down Bourbon Street. During his splurge, he made some progress toward a goal that had avoided him during his college years at Tulane, that being acceptance by New Orleans’ old guard society. Doors had been slamming rudely in his hick-town face ever since he arrived in a city with more social stratification than Boston. Even his friends at Tulane, delighted to drink the whiskey that his money paid for, rarely invited him to their homes, muttering excuses that, though well couched, did not soothe Ash’s ravaged Texas pride.
But with pockets bulging with cash and gold coins, he found his invitations picking up. At one party his eyes fell upon a shy, dark-haired young woman guarded closely by a chaperone. Her name, Ash discovered, was Rhea Ernestine Gardere, and she was the genuine article, a Southern belle with lineage that traced back to the last king of France and a father who, rumor held, owned a fleet of river boats that cruised the Mississippi. He could not have imagined a more perfect object for romantic attention. Rhea Ernestine Gardere had indeed been reared by nannies and chaperones, and she spoke French until she was in her teens. But all she had was a pedigree. There was no money left in her family’s bank account. Her father was not the owner of river boats; he was only the captain of one. She would have told Ash this on their first meeting, for she was not a woman to misrepresent herself. The fact of the matter was, she could not get a word in, so overwhelming was Ash Robinson’s pursuit. To a friend, Rhea confided, “He talks faster than a tobacco auctioneer and he throws money around like it was confetti. But he is good-looking.”
Once, when Ash took her to the New Orleans race track, she mentioned that her great-great-great-grandfather had come to America with La Salle and had settled in Louisiana on a 150,000-acre tract awarded him by the French royal house.
“Where is it?” asked Ash, with widened eyes.
“We’re standing on it,” answered Rhea. Her ancestral home had long ago been lost and had become the New Orleans race track. But as a child she could remember visiting relatives in the great manor house here called Chatsworth, with marble staircases imported from an Italian Renaissance palace, and golden fixtures in the bathrooms.
That night, sitting on the front porch of Rhea’s home, a modest place on Chestnut Street, Ash suddenly said, “Marry me.”
“Give me some time to think it over,” answered Rhea.
“There isn’t any time,” said Ash urgently.
Rhea wanted to clear up one point. If Ash was a fortune hunter, then he should stalk his game elsewhere. She had less money than the waitress who served them coffee at the old French Market.
“I know that,” said Ash. “But it doesn’t matter. I love you and I want you.”
Rhea looked closely at the restless young man beside her. What would he become? What would he do with his life? He had already told her that it was not his intention to practice dentistry.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” answered Ash frankly, “but I expect we’ll have some fun finding out.”
Ash Robinson and Rhea Ernestine Gardere were married on July 28, 1919, before a justice of the peace in New Orleans. The groom had ten dollars to his name, all that was left of the $69,000 he had inherited but six months before. By the time he paid for the license and the recording fee, and tipped the justice of the peace, there was one dime left in his pocket. This he used to make two telephone calls, beseeching a college friend to come and fetch the newlyweds and carry them to the boardinghouse where they began their married life.
It became Ash’s habit to work out daily at the Elks Club where many of the city’s prominent young men gathered to steam away the food from Antoine’s restaurant and swim in an indoor pool. A fellow with an alert pair of ears could pick up potentially rewarding information there. During a swim one afternoon, Ash found himself taking laps beside a man named Murphy who revealed that he was going to San Francisco to work in a Vanderbilt family venture. A half century later, Ash could remember what happened:
“Young Mr. Murphy asked me to go along. Said I would get a salary of five hundred dollars a month. Well, in 1922, that was a princely sum of money. And with a name like Vanderbilt behind it, it didn’t take me long to say yes. I went home and told Ma we were heading west, to California!” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., was ensconced in San Francisco, preparing to launch sister newspapers in that city and in Los Angeles. Ushered into the dynamic entrepreneur’s office, Ash was as subservient as a Milanese peasant approaching the Pope. He had learned to respect money and power. “My entire personal fortune is behind this undertaking,” said Vanderbilt. Ash was signed on as deputy to the illustrious man himself, his franchise being the selling of advertisements, the hiring and firing of clerks, and the accommodation of the publisher’s smallest whim. He was even permitted to sit in on interviews with actresses and the titans of West Coast finance. Once, during a party on the tenth floor of a building, Ash saw the champagne in his goblet suddenly dance. Then the chandelier swayed ominously. At first he thought it was the effect of the wine, but then someone cried, “Earthquake!” The tremor was a slight one, but it was prophetic for the venture. The newspapers crumbled from weak financing. Ash was ahead of them. Knowing that the empire was about to topple, he fled the city, taking Rhea hurriedly to New York. Someone had told him that only there was real money to be made.
Ash arrived in Manhattan with a small stake of a few thousand dollars, but that was enough for a man on the make. It was 1924, and Wall Street was as giddy and bountiful as the flappers who danced the Charleston at the Astor Hotel. Within a year Ash owned securities worth more than $400,000 and he was not yet twenty-seven years old. Then from the fringes of Rhea’s family appeared a “Spanish nobleman,” a darkly handsome, thickly accented man in exquisite clothes. He knew his way around the city, speaking whatever language a maître d’ seemed most comfortable in, mentioning names like Morgan and Carnegie with such familiarity that Ash was spellbound. The two men went into partnership, opening a firm that dealt in securities and mortgages. Within four months Ash would sadly realize that he had once again picked the wrong coconut shell at the county fair. “We opened an account at the Chase Bank,” Ash would remember years later, his voice always taking on a hard edge as he told the story. “And my partner, naturally, had check-writing privileges. I thought everything was going splendidly. I thought it was just a matter of weeks before the Rockefellers would buy us out, or at least have us over for lunch. And then, one day, the bank calls and says our account is overdrawn. Four hundred thousand dollars is gone! And so is my partner. I commissioned the Daugherty Detective Agency to track him down, and they wouldn’t take the case without a $500 retainer. I gave them Rhea’s diamond ring instead. It didn’t take them long. The god damned ‘Spanish nobleman’ had sailed for Europe on the old Olympia steamer, with the Prince of Wales in the next cabin.” Ash cabled the ship’s captain to arrest the scoundrel and hold him for arrest in France. But upon docking, the elegant passenger had a perfect explanation. He had not absconded with his partner’s money. It was too bad that their investments were poor, but there was no crime in buying the wrong securities. Tell Ash Robinson better luck next time.
“Houston is,” a man once wrote the local newspaper, “an overgrown, dirty village, seemingly blundering along without any policy or defined government or management.… I am compelled to say that Houston is the most dirty, slovenly, go-as-you-please, vagabond city of which I have knowledge.” And though this judgment was offered in 1896, the harsh description was not far off three decades later, when Ash Robinson settled in to try for a third fortune. Twice burned, he had become a suspicious young man, with narrowed eyes that counted his fingers to make sure there were five left on each hand every time he met a new man. It was a time for caution. The city was caught in a whirlwind. Oil leases were hawked on the corners of downtown intersections, great mansions were going up in River Oaks, Cadillacs and Packards crowded the dusty, rutted streets. But no one knew exactly why. There was no real reason for Houston even to exist. Of all the major cities in the world, Houston held slimmest natural promise. She sat inland fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, on a relentlessly flat swamp, threaded by muddy bayous on whose banks sunned water moccasins. Her resources were scant; the summer heat was cruel to crops, the earth contained a little oil, but not as much as that to be found in any other direction. Her most valuable asset turned out to be a core of shrewd and ruthless men who literally dug out a place for their city in the world. Although there were a dozen natural ports scattered along those states lapped by the Gulf of Mexico, and three within arm’s length of landbound Houston, the city fathers floated a bond issue shortly after the turn of the century to create a channel from the Gulf fifty miles inland to Houston. It was a project approaching in audacity the Panama Canal. But when no Eastern financiers chose to put money into the reckless scheme, then the bankers of Houston did it themselves. To hell with conservative Yankees.
The first week he was in Houston, Ash heard a man say, “A fellow can make ten million dollars here if he wants to run after it. A fellow can make one million dollars just by standing still.” But though he could boast of having worked as the personal associate of a Vanderbilt, and of having danced merrily with the bulls of Wall Street, no one would deal Ash Robinson a hand to play unless he had an ante to put on the table.
“I took a job today selling used cars,” he told Rhea in the bleakness of their furnished room. “But stay with me, it’s gonna get better.” His wife nodded cheerfully. She had come to learn that in the roller coaster ride of life with Ash, when the car reached bottom, the next curve was up.
He was, as he would remember, “a helluva salesman. God damn, I sold those cars! I made a two-year-old Packard with its tail pipe dragging as desirable as Napoleon’s golden coach.” From there, he moved into real estate, joining a firm that hawked raw lots in the south end of the city for $250 each. “I sold out an entire subdivision in less than no time,” he liked to say. And then, by stroke of fair fortune, he got into the business that was on the collective lips of everyone. Oil!
A stranger walked into the real estate shack in 1930 and turned a long face toward Ash Robinson. He was in financial trouble. “I’ve been down that road myself a time or two,” said Ash, willing to hear the story. The man had leased a section of land, 640 acres, in East Texas at a dollar an acre, and had pledged that the money due would be paid by the end of the month. The day was approaching quickly, and he lacked funds to cover it. “How much do you need?” asked Ash. “Half of $640,” was the answer.
Though skeptical, Ash put up the money and obtained a fifty per cent interest in the lease. And he forgot about it. Three months later the man rushed into the real estate office with surprising good news. An offer had come from an oil company to buy the lease outright at ten dollars an acre. A thousand per cent profit! Ash Robinson did not jump in excitement. In fact, his antennae of suspicion went up. “Had they offered two bucks an acre, I would have sold my part in a Tennessee minute,” Ash would remember years later. “But if somebody was offering ten, I figured it must be worth a helluva lot more. I held tight.” Two weeks later the offer was upped to twenty-five dollars an acre. Again, Ash declined to sell, though his instincts were waging war against his common sense. Not until the oil company announced it would pay fifty dollars an acre did Ash sell, making $16,000 on an investment of $320.
“At that moment, it is fair to say I became an oilman,” Ash would one day remember.
Long before the Spanish kings sent their explorers to pillage Texas in the sixteenth century, the land was awash in oil. Indians had used it for medicine and to calk their canoes. It seeped and bubbled from the ground. The first well was drilled in 1866, but not until four decades later, on a January morning in 1901, did the enormity of the state’s natural reserves come to the world’s attention. That was the hour of Spindletop, a man-made volcano gushing tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the skies near Beaumont. The discovery was staggering. In 1902, Spindletop alone disgorged 17.5 million barrels of oil, ninety-four per cent of the entire state’s production. The price of oil plunged to three cents a barrel.
But Spindletop was only Act One. Act Two began on an October day in 1930, in a stumpy, brushy piece of East Texas land near the village called Turnertown. An eccentric wildcatter named C. M. (Dad) Joiner persisted in pouring money into a territory that geologists of the major oil companies had long since pronounced barren. Dad Joiner was considered the local thickhead. But he not only found oil, he opened up a field so rich that it dwarfed Spindletop. There ensued a hysterical stampede to the farms of Rusk County by speculators trying to buy leases.
Ash Robinson was among them. He packed a satchel with hundred-dollar bills and rushed to the piney woods east of Houston. When a farmer could be found who was willing to lease a few acres, he would not take a check. It had to be cash on signature. And it needed to be consummated that moment, for if a fellow hesitated, then there were four more speculators behind him chugging up the dirt paths to the farm in Model A Fords. Ash met one man who had $50,000 in his satchel ready to scatter among suddenly wary farmers who a month before had been mired to their necks in the Depression. He witnessed promoters shot dead over leasing disputes. Happily he paid fifty dollars to pass a restless night on a cot in a farmer’s barn, twenty other hustlers jammed next to one another, clutching their bags until the sun rose. The situation became so frenetic that Governor Ross Sterling declared martial law in August 1931 and dispatched the National Guard to the oil fields to restore order.
Ash became what is known in the business as an “independent oil man,” an appellation that has as many shades as layers of rock in an ancient piece of the earth. Many of the greatest Houston oil fortunes were made by such men, who approached their endeavor with the same attitude a stalk of mistletoe has toward a tree. They operated in parasitic fashion. And the principal requirements for success were two: an ability to snoop, an ability to hustle. Ash Robinson was richly endowed in both. An “independent oil man” could hear a rumor over coffee in Houston one morning and by lunch be racing to a place not even on the map, where a major company was—whispers had it—prowling for oil. Often the rumor was as empty as the wind. Once Ash heard on good report that a play was secretly beginning west of Fort Worth, where a major company was quietly buying leases. “I hurried up there and bought two big chunks as fast as I could. And I got there early. Before the week was out, the place was swarming with speculators. Come to find out, nobody knew anything. Nobody made a damn penny except for the farmers, who probably started the rumor in the first place.”
It took a considerable amount of money to actually drill a well—$35,000 was the going figure in the 1930s—and at least seventy-five per cent of them came in dry. But major oil companies could afford the risk, operating on the theo
ry first propounded by Queen Elizabeth I. She felt it was worth dispatching fifty ships in search of riches, and if only a handful returned, then the rewards were ample enough to shield her risk. Men like Ash Robinson could not finance the actual drilling of wells, but they devised a way to wiggle in on the profits.
If Ash chanced to hear a guarded conversation in the Houston Club men’s room—talk of a new discovery or of one that the Humble Company’s geologists felt were promising—he would quickly write the information down. It was further possible to develop contacts within the majors’ own executive suites, men willing to tip off speculators in return for one third of the profits, if any. Then it was up to the “independent oil man” to stuff his pockets with cash and search out the farmer whose cornfield might—or might not—be covering a king’s ransom in oil. The independent oil man could not just hurry out and buy up the land in question. Not only was this prohibitively expensive, it might so anger the major oil company that it would refuse, out of spite, to drill. The rules of the game dictated that men like Ash should locate a farmer who had already leased his land to, say, Texaco. Careful to shed his city manners and replace them with down-home folksiness, Ash would sit down on the farmer’s porch and talk a spell. Might be some oil over there. Again, there might not. The odds were overwhelmingly against a gusher raining black gold down on the roof, which, by the way, sure needed patching. Feller might do better for his wife and kids if he gambled, if he took a little profit right here and now, if he signed over one eighth of his potential royalties to Ash Robinson. If Texaco hit it big over there, then the money would flow so lavishly that who’d miss a measly one eighth? On the other hand, if Texaco came up dry, and packed up and went away, and the weeds took over, then the farmer still had this right respectable chunk of cash that Ash Robinson was prepared to pay—that very minute.
Blood and Money Page 2