by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
By the end of the war, he was working on his own. His American Liberty partner, Dudley Golding, died in a plane crash in 1938, an incident that frightened Murchison away from private planes for several years. Golding’s death triggered an awkward situation with his widow, Georgia, who sought to remain active at American Liberty. When she agitated to appoint an independent board, Murchison turned to his attorney, Toddie Lee Wynne, to buy her out. Wynne took over Golding’s half of the businesses. Their partnership, however, lasted barely six years. Its demise was a family secret for years afterward.
According to Murchison’s authorized biographer, his longtime secretary Ernestine Orrick Van Buren, Wynne bowed out of the business after a heart attack. But according to his unauthorized biographer, Jane Wolfe, Murchison forced the dissolution after discovering that Wynne had secretly bought a group of Wyoming oil properties, a clear breach of the pair’s gentleman’s agreement to invest together. To split up their $150 million of assets, they decided to take turns selecting the businesses they wanted, like kids choosing up sides on a playground. They flipped a coin to see who went first. Wynne won, and chose American Liberty’s oil-production division. The process left Murchison deeply embittered. As president of American Liberty and the one most attuned to its underlying values, Wynne chose wisely, and Murchison felt he did so by misrepresenting some of his own balance sheets. Worse, American Liberty owned Matagorda, which went to Wynne. It broke Murchison’s heart. “The biggest mistake of my life,” he told his sons years later, “was giving up Matagorda.”
Their 1944 divorce left Toddie Lee Wynne a very wealthy man who in time would father his own colorful Texas clan. Matagorda remained under the Wynne family’s control for decades.
II.
By 1936 Sid Richardson had been living in hotels for twenty years, and while his nomadic life was perfectly suited for the rooms he now kept at the Fort Worth Club—his widowed sister Annie lived in an adjoining suite—he yearned for something permanent. Once Murchison bought Matagorda, it wasn’t long before Richardson began muttering about his own island. In later years, any number of stories circulated about how he came to buy St. Joseph’s Island, a thin strip of barrier sand, twenty-one miles long and six miles wide, across the channel from Matagorda’s southern tip. At low tide Murchison could drive across to St. Joe’s, as it was called, and he pushed Richardson to buy it.
Richardson brought up the matter with Murchison’s banker, Rushton Ardrey, one day at Murchison’s home. As Ardrey remembered it:
Sid said, “Rush, you have been down to Clint’s island. I am going to get me an island that is better than his. I want you to lend me the money.”
“How are you going to secure it?” [Most of Richardon’s oil wells were already being used as collateral on other loans.]
[Richardson said] “Well, I’ve got a lot of Brahman cattle I can put up for security.”
At this point, Clint spoke up, “Rushton’s not interested in cattle—he is interested in oil.” I loaned Sid the money on some oil properties to buy St. Joe Island.2
The price tag was a paltry twenty-five thousand dollars. What Richardson got was an island lined with breathtaking white-sand beaches, flanked by dunes, its scrubby inland areas studded with cacti. For years its only occupants had been an absentee owner’s cattle, and the only structure, other than corrals and fencing, was a broken-down bunkhouse. Richardson envisioned a compound like Murchison’s. “He never had a home to live in, and he wanted one there,” recalled his nephew, Perry Bass, who now entered his uncle’s world. The only child of Richardson’s sister Annie and the late E. P. Bass, Perry had grown up in Wichita Falls, where as a teenager he had become, of all things, a standout sailor. Intense and socially awkward, Perry raced boats called snipes on local lakes and in 1935 won the national championships, held in Dallas. In the spring of 1936, he recalled, “Uncle Sid came up to Yale where I was about to graduate, having studied engineering and geology, and said, ‘Bass, you are an engineer, and I want you to build me a house.’ ”
It was the beginning of a lifelong partnership. With his own father dead, Perry Bass became Sid Richardson’s surrogate son. Theirs was a complex, some might say mildly abusive, relationship. According to those who knew both men well, Richardson believed his sister had spoiled Perry; for a rough-and-tumble character like Richardson, sailing wasn’t exactly a man’s sport. During all their years together, Bass seldom received the bear hugs Richardson gave other men. And in all those years Richardson never called him anything but “Bass”; one wag joked that he thought Bass’s first name was “Goddamnit.” “Sid was very, very tough on Perry—always was,” says the Old Friend. “He thought he was soft, self-important, and a tad pretentious.”
Richardson’s determination to “toughen up” his nephew began with the work on St. Joseph’s. A year after his graduation from Yale, Bass arrived in Rockport, just across an open channel from the island. His “office” was the pay phone at the Magnolia gas station, where he relayed reports on his progress to his uncle. Richardson had budgeted thirty-five thousand dollars for construction, and in one of their first calls promptly took it back, saying he needed the money for a lease in West Texas. “Any son-of-a-bitch can build a house for thirty-five thousand dollars,” Richardson told him. “It takes a genius to build it with nothing.”3 As the Old Friend puts it, “It was just one of the ways Sid tried to make a man out of him.”
Bass “poor-boyed” construction much as Richardson had done in West Texas, buying everything on credit and promising his workmen an eventual paycheck. By autumn he had crews working on the island, casting concrete blocks from a mixture of cement, oyster shell, and sand. His men began digging the foundation on January 2, 1938, and by Thanksgiving Bass had used ninety-three thousand blocks to build the only true home Richardson would ever know. It was unlike any house in Texas. Designed by the Dallas architect O’Neil Ford, the home was an ultramodern concrete structure modeled on Le Corbusier’s famed ship houses. Long and low, built to withstand the island’s frequent hurricanes, its sole flourish was a dramatic exterior spiral staircase extending down from the master bedroom suite. The core of the home was a combination living room and porch, divided by aluminum and glass doors that receded into wall pockets. Open spaces were lined with terra cotta and mahogany.
St. Joe’s became Richardson’s very private world, off-limits to outsiders and rarely photographed, reachable only by boat or airplane. He staffed the island with Negro servants and a wrangler for his cattle and, along with the pilots and chauffeurs he accumulated in later years, this group became what amounted to his immediate family. “I’ll always remember Sid sitting back in the ‘staff room’ behind the kitchen, playing dominoes with the black houseman’s son, Joe the chauffeur, maybe a boatman from Rockport,” recalls the Old Friend. “The pilots would be there, and Raymond the cowboy, who was shy and who would usually wander off. There was a poker table in the living room, but no, Sid preferred playing in the staff room.”
It was a man’s world, the days spent hunting and fishing, the nights playing cards. Richardson never married, and no one can remember a single woman who anyone considered his companion, leading to rumors about his sexual proclivities. In fact, the Old Friend confides, the only females in Richardson’s life were what he gently calls “ladies of the evening” who could be flown in from Houston or New Orleans for a night’s entertainment and spirited off the island by dawn.
By 1938 women weren’t the only ones Richardson longed to be rid of. His shotgun marriage to the overbearing Charles Marsh was showing strains. Marsh had used his share of the Keystone Field proceeds to build a palatial English-style estate named Longlea on a thousand acres in the Northern Virginia hunt country. He had left his wife and children for his mistress, a tall, languid stunner named Alice Glass, and the two had taken to mentoring the Austin area’s new young congressman, Lyndon Johnson, during long weekends Johnson spent at Longlea. Marsh lavished money and advice on Johnson even as Glass, as LBJ’s bio
graphers have shown, took Johnson quietly into her bed.
Then, in 1938, Marsh encountered a sudden, fierce financial reversal. What happened was never disclosed publicly. But from a single mention in a letter to Richardson—contained in Marsh’s papers at the Johnson Presidential Library—it appears that the Internal Revenue Service served Marsh with a request for $1.2 million in overdue taxes. The high-living Marsh was habitually short of cash and was forever pestering Richardson’s office for advances; most of his assets were tied up in his ongoing divorce dispute. The IRS claim led to a three-year fight during which Marsh was forced to repay much of the money. To raise it, he ended up selling all his Texas newspapers, including the one in Austin, and attempted to sell his share of the Keystone Field.
This effort, in fact, figures in the opening scene of Robert Caro’s three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. In the anecdote Caro relates, Marsh and Brown & Root’s cofounder, George Brown, met with Johnson during the summer of 1940 at the Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia. As two of Johnson’s closest backers, they were attempting to find a way to augment Johnson’s meager legislative salary. According to Caro, Marsh offered to sign over his partnership with Richardson. Johnson declined, believing such a sweetheart deal, if ever disclosed, would kill his future in politics. Marsh, it appears, then sold out to Richardson instead, in October 1941. Though the precise amounts remain unclear, Richardson paid Marsh roughly $260,000 plus several large loans. With one stroke of a pen, Richardson took outright control of the Keystone Field, nearly doubling his existing oil reserves.h
By the time he parted ways with Charles Marsh, Richardson had taken in Perry Bass as his junior partner; for the next twenty years the two owned everything they found 75/25. Already Richardson had leveraged his Keystone profits into discoveries in several other West Texas counties, including a series of strikes on the famed Slaughter Ranch. But Richardson wasn’t satisfied. In 1939, following Bass’s work on St. Joe’s, “Sid told him, ‘Goddamnit, Bass, you’re a geologist, go find me an oil field,’ ” says the Old Friend. Like many Texas oilmen, the two began scouting the new frontiers in Louisiana, which was opening its coastal wetlands to drilling. Bass set up shop at New Orleans’s Roosevelt Hotel in anticipation of a massive auction of state lands. Because Richardson was so frugal, Bass worked on the cheap. When Richardson refused to hire enough seismographic crews to map an area’s geology, Bass chartered a plane and mapped the telltale paths competing crews left as their boats passed through the marshes below New Orleans; in this way he could see what lands other oil companies were studying.
According to family lore, Richardson employed a characteristic sleight of hand during the state’s two-day land auction. On the first day, realizing his competitors were watching him closely, Richardson placed a huge bid on a parcel he didn’t actually want. The next day, assuming Richardson knew something they didn’t, Humble, Texaco, and other companies spent much of their money leasing parcels all around the ones Richardson had taken. As they did, Richardson swooped in and bought the distant parcels he actually sought at significantly lower costs. It was deep in these bayous below New Orleans where, over the next several years, Richardson struck the second- and third-largest fields of his career, at Cox Bay and Pointe a la Hache.
But the greatest oil field Richardson and Bass ever discovered lay beneath ground they already controlled. Richardson had found his first oil in the Keystone Field at thirty-five hundred feet. Over the next several years drillers in Winkler County had bored their way steadily deeper into the earth, until in early 1942, Richardson’s friend, the newspaper publisher Amon Carter, announced he was drilling past nine thousand feet. At ninety-two hundred feet, Carter and his partners hit one of the largest oil sands ever found in Texas, the legendary Ellenberger Lime. Soon oilmen all over West Texas were scrambling to reach the Ellenberger. Richardson and Bass dropped well after well after well, and nearly all found vast amounts of oil. “The Ellenberger is just magical,” marvels the Old Friend. “That was Sid’s big pay. It made a big field, an elephant.”
The Ellenberger production thrust Richardson into the top ranks of independent oilmen; his reserves approached one million barrels, at one point more than those of three major oil companies. “[Sid] drilled the deep wells and got a magnificent field,” his friend Edgar Owen remembered years later. “Gulf Oil wanted to buy it. Sid and [Gulf’s] Jay Adams were very close friends. Jay’d come over every day and dicker with Sid about buying the leases for the whole property… . [I remember one day] Sid said, ‘Goddamnit, Jay, I’ve told you a dozen times I’m not going to sell it!’ Jay said, ‘Well, the company authorized me to pay eighty million dollars for it. Sid, that’s more money than you’ll ever know what to do with.’ Sid said, ‘No, I want to be big rich!’ Jay said, ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with any more money.’ Sid said, ‘Oh yes, I’d just be like the rest of these rich bastards and have me some foundations.’ [Jay] just gave up. Sid never seemed to take anything seriously. But he always knew what he was doing.”
Richardson, like H. L. Hunt, became the rare independent to purchase his own refinery and make gasoline. Clint Murchison had picked up a refinery in Texas City, south of Houston, and didn’t want it. The two old friends were negotiating its sale one day on Matagorda when the lawyers noticed they had gone missing. An aide found Richardson and Murchison in a barn, arguing over a debt—a very old debt. Murchison had reminded Richardson of a day when they were teenagers, packing peaches at the Richardson orchard outside Athens. Richardson had shortchanged Murchison by $4, and now Murchison was demanding repayment, plus interest. At prevailing rates, Murchison calculated, Richardson’s four-dollar debt now came to thirty-five thousand dollars. Apparently Murchison won the argument, because Richardson ended up with the refinery.
III.
Though it made stabs at the southern gentility Dallas and Fort Worth achieved, Houston was always a rougher city, obsessively devoted to the dollar, where public displays of ostentation were not only tolerated but prized. The first of these began to appear in the 1930s, as newly wealthy oilmen began to build their dream homes. One of the more elaborate belonged to Clifford Mooers, a wildcatter who erected a colonial-style mansion as a gift for his second wife, a Cuban debutante, on a hundred-acre tract on Buffalo Bayou. Concerned about flooding, the Mooers home featured eighteen-inch concrete walls reinforced with steel, along with aluminum plates that slid over every door and window; the mansion was designed to remain airtight in the face of floodwaters twenty-four feet deep. On the grounds Mooers built a lake lined with tons of California sand, and a private zoo featuring dwarf Australian barking deer and a family of penguins. Despite their air-conditioned pen, the penguins did not survive their first summer.i4
Roy Cullen’s partner, Big Jim West, opted for an Italianate mansion he built south of the city on Galveston Bay. George Strake moved his growing family into a tasteful Tudor in River Oaks, where many oil families were building mansions. Strake saved his money for his Colorado summer home, Glen Eyrie, a vast stone castle, complete with turrets, that had been built in 1906 by the railroad magnate who founded Colorado Springs, William Jackson Palmer. After Palmer’s death the castle, which sat amid several hundred thousand acres of ranchland, canyons, and mountain lakes, passed through the hands of several owners, none of whom could afford its maintenance costs. It had actually been vacant for thirteen years when Strake acquired it in 1938.j
The greatest of the new Houston mansions was Roy Cullen’s. It was the “big white house” he had dreamed of as a boy, set on six acres at the head of River Oaks Boulevard just below the River Oaks Country Club. A bit chagrined to be building such a home during the Depression, Cullen justified the cost as a “civic enterprise” that would put hundreds of men to work. He put much of his energy into the adjoining gardens, sending horticultural experts traveling through the Deep South in search of the very best strains of azaleas and camelias; he bought so many flowers in Louisiana that, until his sellers protested, state offici
als briefly threatened an embargo.
Life at the Cullen mansion, however, was marred by loss. While the three youngest daughters were celebrated debutantes educated at eastern colleges, the eldest daughter, Lillie, was erratic, a headstrong young woman who yearned to be an actress. In the seven scrapbrooks devoted to Cullen’s life and career at the family office in Houston, she is mentioned in only one clipping, the very first, a 1927 newspaper photo announcing her debut as a dancer in a play to be staged in San Antonio. Four years later, in 1931, Lillie traveled with an aunt to Los Angeles and, to her father’s dismay, stayed. She married an Italian man, a would-be actor and self-styled baron named Paolo di Portanova. She gave birth to two sons, later divorced, and cut off all contact with her family. No one but her father, who hired private detectives to trace her, knew of her whereabouts. “Gampa hated it; they tried every possible way to approach her,” Cullen’s granddaughter Beth Robertson remembers. “In time, you know, she became a recluse. I think, everyone thinks, that Lillie was sick, like manic depressive.”
Of his five children, Cullen was closest to his strapping son, Roy Gustave, who after college followed him into the oil fields, drilling wells for Quintana. Cullen was deeply proud of the young man, known inside the family as Sonny, who he felt had the makings of a top-notch oilman; Roy Gustave and his wife had a son, Roy Jr., and lived in their own River Oaks home. Then, in May 1936, when he was thirty-three, he was summoned to a Quintana drill site in the Rio Grande Valley, where pipe had frozen in a well near Edinburg. The derrick, which Cullen had rented, was erected on an old-fashioned wooden base, braced by iron pipe. “Be careful about that rig, Sonny,” Cullen warned. “It’s not as solid as our rigs.”
