Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  In the middle years of the 1930s Ash was a superb persuader, managing to buy “mineral rights,” as these deals are called, by the tens of thousands of acres in East and Central Texas. Then, as the decade neared an end, he took two savage beatings. The first almost destroyed his bank account. The second almost sent him to the state penitentiary.

  He staked much of his respectable fortune in 1937 on a gamble that oil would burst out of a waste strip of land in Duval County near Corpus Christi. Ash bought several thousand acres of mineral rights. The Humble Oil Company had already drilled part of the area, all the way down to two thousand feet, then pronounced it worthless. But Ash thought he knew better. He had come into possession of a geologist’s report and a map of dubious parentage which indicated otherwise. With the fervor of a fundamentalist preacher, Ash insisted oil could be found. But after a year, and after spending $50,000, he sadly realized that the land was arid dust. Not long thereafter, still another independent oil man came to the same spot, sank a well only thirty feet away, and hit the elusive oil. Ash could not even enjoy the irony of his bad luck. He was by this time defending himself against a serious charge, a criminal accusation of fraud and swindle.

  While his left hand had tended to the disaster in Duval County, his right had been promoting the exploitation of a 3,000-acre parcel of mineral rights he had leased in Louisiana. Ash was low on cash, and he hustled a man into chipping in $5,000. Only because he was temporarily in need of capital, wooed Ash, would he part with what was surely going to be a staggering bonanza. To back his claim, Ash waved a report in front of his investor’s eyes, suggesting that Humble had made a core test on the property and found oil sand of hot promise. And, furthermore, Ash contended that he had turned down a bid from Humble to sell his mineral rights for $750,000! The investor was spellbound; he shoved $5,000 into Ash’s hands in return for a promised one thirtieth of the anticipated fortune. But when the months passed and the land belched forth nothing, Ash’s new partner began to suspect that he had been sold snake oil. A little research turned up the fact that Humble Oil had neither found oil sand nor offered three quarters of a million dollars for Ash’s mineral rights. Complaint was made to the district attorney; Ash Robinson was arrested, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in the state penitentiary for swindle.

  “It was a god damn frame pure and simple,” cried Ash at the time, and on every recounting of the experience years thereafter. “Why, the truth of the matter was I had already spent $230,000 drilling the well in question. I was down to 6,000 feet when they got me arrested. I think I know what happened. A lot of independents were being persecuted by the majors, who were after people for getting hold of their information.”

  Ash did not serve a day in the penitentiary. His sentence was appealed and, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals deciding that the district attorney’s office in Houston had made legal errors in its prosecution, threw out the conviction. Ash may have been chastised by the experience but, if so, it did not show. The cloak of the buccaneer had fallen about his shoulders, and it gave him a raffish, martyrish aura that he relished. Many of the most prominent men in Houston had waltzed across the same thin ice. That Ash Robinson had the misfortune to fall in, pull himself out, dry off, and blast forth in search of new fortune was not damnation. It was 1938. By 1941 Ash was once again a millionaire.

  And, more pertinent, his daughter Joan was ten years old, already well embarked on a wondrous life that bade fair to shower him with more attention than had all the oil in Texas gushed at his command. She was the heart of his world. She was the only thing he had done that was special. He would have sold seven eighths of Spindletop just to keep her on his lap and watch her laugh.

  THREE

  The circumstances surrounding the birth of Joan Olive Robinson are clouded. Her birth certificate no longer exists in the state records at Austin. The country doctor who delivered her was past ninety years of age in 1975 and either unable or unwilling to recollect the February morning in 1931 when she was born. Nor does it matter much any more, except to shed a sliver of light on the obsession of her father. For that is the word that people would come to use when they spoke of Ash and Joan. Obsession.

  She was an illegitimate child, born to an anonymous mother and father at a rural hospital near Eagle Lake, Texas, the town where Ash was reared. When the infant was one month old she was carried to the Edna Gladney Home in Fort Worth, Texas, where she was formally adopted by Ash and Rhea Robinson.

  Forty-three years later, on a broiling summer noon in 1974, Mrs. Rhea Robinson sipped the thick chicory coffee of her native Louisiana and remembered the long-ago adoption. Or, at least, her version. It was a tale twisted by the long years and shaped by the events that had destroyed her family. On this day Ma, as she had come to be known by all of her friends, was seventy-five years old, and reality was not her constant companion. The haze of the Southern belle still clung to her in wisps, but her memory was like a lace wedding gown kept in an attic, faded, dusty, crumbling with time. This is the way she wanted the story to be put down:

  “We had been married for ten years, Pa and I, and it was good. I was always happy with him. We never really struggled, even when we were scraping bottom. Ash always managed to come up with money when we needed it. I would be going along thinking we didn’t have two sticks to rub together and then Ash would come home with a velvet box in his pocket. And I’d open it and there would be a diamond ring. That was life with Ash. Velvet and diamonds when you least expected it.

  “I couldn’t have children, you see. I knew I had always been a little anemic, and I suppose that was the reason. It didn’t worry me, because our marriage was so good I didn’t need anything else to make me happier. But I did worry about Ash. He wanted a baby—a little girl!—more than anything else in the world. So I went to the doctor to find out why I wasn’t getting pregnant. He told me a little correction was needed surgically. That frightened me, and I went home and got up the courage to tell Ash. ‘Shall I have it done?’ I asked him. He put his arms around me and said, “I won’t push you. It’s your decision.’”

  The minor operation was performed, but still Mrs. Robinson was unable to conceive a child. Never mind, said Ash, they could live without one. But at the beginning of 1931, just as he was beginning to make the first of his several oil fortunes, Ash took Rhea out to dinner and chose his words carefully. He had heard of an adoption agency in Fort Worth operated by one Edna Gladney (who would be portrayed by Greer Garson in a 1940s movie entitled Blossoms in the Dust). Ash had heard tell that every detail was handled discreetly, that the babies came from the wombs of good girls who had gotten into trouble, that the best families from all over America were finding children there.

  “I hesitated,” remembered Mrs. Robinson, as she reluctantly pulled the story from her dying memory. “I felt a little ashamed that I could not give my husband a child of our own blood. So I told him I would have to think about it.”

  In early March 1931 she traveled by train 280 miles to Fort Worth. And at this point her account becomes confusing. Perhaps, charitably, it was a recollection embellished by the passage of four decades. Or, possibly, it had become one of those locked-away secrets that people look at now and then in privacy. If you tell yourself something long enough and hard enough, then it becomes impossible to distinguish between what really happened and what should have happened.

  “I went to the Gladney Home with a friend of mine who also wanted to adopt,” Ma remembered. “We went in, and we both looked around, and here were all these babies crying and carrying on, and I just wasn’t interested. I told my friend that I supposed I just wasn’t in the right mood because none of them appealed to me. Actually I was scared, shaking half to death. One little baby boy wanted me, he stretched out his arms to me, and he was the cutest thing I ever saw, but I couldn’t bring myself to take him. I went on back to the hotel and wondered how I was going to tell Ash why I was coming home empty-handed.

  “Just when I was
fixing to leave the next morning, the Gladney Home calls and they say they have this little baby girl I didn’t get to see. She had been sick with a cold and they didn’t bring her out. So I go back and my eyes behold the most adorable baby I had ever seen. She looked at me and laughed. When I walked away for a minute, she commenced to carrying on. She wanted me! I took her in a minute. Mr. Gladney himself drove us to the train station and he said, ‘I envy this child. She is really going to be loved.’” The prophecy was accurate. Joan Olive Robinson was showered with love, a tender, quiet, caring kind of love from her adopted mother, a powerful, crushing, overwhelming kind of love from Ash. Because of this love, it is perhaps cruel to dissect the story of her adoption, but there are too many flaws to overlook.

  The Edna Gladney Home does not now permit nor has it ever permitted two prospective mothers to visit at the same time. Nor does the home have children on display, like merchandise at a bazaar, for parents to browse over. The home has always operated under the strictest security, providing a place for pregnant unwed women to stay during gestation, paying for hospital and obstetrical costs, and matching an infant with adoptive parents only after meticulous investigation.

  Joan Robinson did not learn she was adopted until she was in her late teens and needing a birth certificate for a passport. At that moment Ma revealed the family secret, breaking down in tears as she told Joan. “Don’t you see, honey?” said Ma. “Of all the baby girls in the world, I picked you out to be my own.” After that the subject was never mentioned again.

  When Joan was a woman past thirty years old she grew curious as to the identity of her real parents, as most adopted children eventually do. Secretly she engaged a private detective who, after an investigation of several months, arranged a rendezvous with his client in the parking lot of a Houston shopping center. There he presented a document that indicated—but fell short of indisputable proof—that her real father was Ash Robinson and her real mother a then young woman who had worked in a Houston office. There was the implication—unproven—that Ash had paid a woman to bear his child, then arranged to adopt her.

  Joan studied the report carefully, reading it over several times. Then she ripped the papers into tiny pieces, dropped them to the pavement, knelt, and set the pile afire with her cigarette lighter. While smoke rose about her, she murmured, “I wish I hadn’t done this. I don’t care who my parents are. My mother is Ma, and my father is Pa, and I love them more than I can say.” Then she kicked the ashes away and ran in tears to her Cadillac.

  The day would come when Ash would be asked repeatedly if he indeed was the blood father of Joan. “No,” he answered. “But she was the child of very good people.” By this time he would be denying so many other things that it was difficult to choose just which one of Ash Robinson’s pronouncements was worth believing.

  When Ma stepped off the train that happy morning in 1931 she was met at the Houston depot by Ash, who had yellow roses in his arms and radiance across his face. Immediately he scooped the baby girl from his wife’s arms and boosted her high above his head. “Welcome home!” he cried. He carried her like a trophy through the crowded station.

  From that moment she was Daddy’s girl. “I hardly saw that baby again,” Ma used to joke. “I lost her as soon as Ash took her in his arms. There never was a man so smitten with a tiny baby.” Ash insisted on fixing the infant’s formula. He washed her diapers, rose cheerfully from his bed in the middle of the night to walk her, even carried her off for days at a time to the places where oil was being sought. With geological maps in one hand and his baby girl in the other, Ash would sit in the fading cool of a Texas dusk and talk to an engineer about whether a well was running high or where the abnormalities were hiding in the subsurface of the earth that centuries ago had trapped the oil. Farm wives often rode out with fried chicken and a five-gallon can of fresh coffee for their men. And they would laugh and carry on about the big city fellow with the baby on his lap, but they would also draw back and cluck kindly about his obvious glowing love for the child.

  Joan was an exuberant youngster who attacked life full tilt, grabbing it the hour of her awakening each day and squeezing every minute of its value until she reluctantly fell asleep exhausted. And throughout the day she made her father laugh. Not a man of especially good humor, Ash was often dour in demeanor. But at the sight of Joan his face turned joyous. Once the child ran in from a playground and leaped into her father’s armchair. “I ’spect I need a good talkin’ to, Pa,” she suggested seriously.

  “Why, honey? Did you do something bad?”

  Joan nodded. “Yes, Pa. I just gave Billy a sock in the face.” Joan was four; Billy was five.

  On another day a religiously committed neighbor suggested to Joan that she attend a nearby Sunday school. “No, ma’am,” responded the child politely. “I want to go to hell with my daddy.” Ash heard the story and roared, telling it all over Texas.

  Joan was as well attended as a czarina. Should a minor scratch appear on her arm from a molesting kitten, Ash would summon a specialist and, if necessary, a medical staff. “I want the best for this child,” he always said. Nursemaids, private schools, toe dance teachers—all received his patronage, if their credentials were pre-eminent in Ash’s eyes. By 1934 he was in a prosperous period, enough to engage a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, chiefly because he enjoyed going on rides with his daughter and sharing her joy of discovery at the age of three. He did not want to divide his attention between her and the road. Once, while motoring out Houston’s South Main Street, Joan noticed an amusement park with pony rides.

  “I remember well exactly what happened,” Ash would say some forty years later. “Joanie commenced to hollering that she wanted to ride those ponies. I told the chauffeur to stop and I walked over and put her up on the pony. Nickel a ride. I expected her to cry like the other kiddies or get tired and demand to be taken off. But she loved it. That was the beginning. Everything dates from that afternoon.”

  It is a special moment when a small child connects with something that will dominate a life. Rarely does it happen at such an early age, but from that day in 1934 Joan Robinson was committed to horses as surely as the young Mozart was bound to music.

  She began fretting for her nursery school class to end each day so that the chauffeur could drive her to the pony rides. “Hurry!” Joan cried, impatiently sitting in the back seat. Within six weeks she had succeeded in making one of the weary Shetland ponies lope around the track. The manager stood openmouthed in amazement and the other children grew frightened. “You better get this kid a real horse,” said the manager to Ash.

  Near Houston’s Hermann Park was a public stable operated by a man with the Dickensian name of Skaggs. He owned a broken-down chestnut mare named Dot who had borne ten thousand young Houston children on her swayed back. Patient and docile, she seemed void of juices and ready only to lie down forever. But when Joan leaped upon her back, Dot’s ears perked and she was rejuvenated. A quiver rippled across the old horse’s flanks. Whispering in Dot’s ear, Joan dug in her heels and the two were off, bursting from the stable, down a path, into the thick woods.

  “My God!” cried Ash fearfully, beginning to run after his tiny daughter. Surely the horse had gone insane and would throw the child, perhaps even trample her.

  “They’ll be okay,” murmured Skaggs. He was not frightened, only astonished.

  When Joan returned, with Dot prancing and snorting like a colt, she beseeched her father to buy the horse. “Is she for sale?” asked Ash.

  Skaggs scratched his head. He was suddenly a good horse trader. “Well,” he allowed, “she’s got a lot of turns left in her.”

  “How much will you take for her?” pushed Ash, taking out his bankroll as testimony to his sincerity. He always carried a wad of big bills, for his trips to the oil country.

  “To tell you the truth, old Dot ain’t worth a damn,” said Skaggs. “But she’s the kiddies’ favorite. She’s made a lot of quarters for me.”

&n
bsp; Assuming that no deal could be struck, Ash took his disappointed daughter by the hand and led her toward the limousine. Skaggs’s words stopped him. “’Bout a hundred and fifty bucks, I reckon.”

  “A hundred and fifty dollars?” Ash was incredulous. “That’s highway robbery.” But his daughter was crying and, to shush her, he counted out the money. Had Joan asked for the Rice Hotel to store her dolls in, Ash would have telephoned his real estate broker.

  The deal was struck and Skaggs went over to pat his suddenly illustrious steed. “You’re a lucky old nag,” he said. “Those other kids just about wore you out. Now maybe you’ll get a little rest.”

  If Skaggs presumed that Joan Robinson, age four, would be like the other rich children, the kind who screamed until their daddies bought them a horse and then ignored the creature in a few weeks after infatuation waned, he was wrong. The spunky child with the light brown hair that flew behind her as she ran—she seldom walked anywhere—fell immediately in love with her first horse. Dot was transformed. She was groomed, scolded, cajoled, fed treats, trained, and generally cared for in the manner of a Kentucky Derby champion. A society instructor was engaged to teach Joan the fundamentals of riding but could not suppress a wince at seeing the horse that the child led out to begin the first lesson. Joan saw the look of dismay. “Dot can do anything!” she insisted. Within three months Dot could indeed walk, trot, and even canter on cue. But only for Joan. She would not respond to any other rider.

  When she was five years old and still in need of a stepladder to mount Dot, Joan entered the equitation competition at the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. She was ready to test her riding ability against all female comers twelve years and under. Ma and Pa tried to dissuade their daughter but Joan was adamant. She would enter and she would win. With drawn breath, the Robinsons watched as the event began. Their daughter weighed fifty pounds, the horse fifteen hundred. Together, the imbalance was enchanting, clearly the crowd’s favorite. Throughout her turn Joan flashed a dazzling smile, one that would become her trademark. Dot rose to the occasion, obeying each of her young mistress’ commands, and when the results were announced Joan Robinson was awarded the third place ribbon.