Bryan Burrough

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

  Hunt’s only hobby in those years, the one pastime that generated an adrenaline rush to rival an oil discovery, was gambling. He frequented underground joints around Dallas, playing craps as well as his beloved poker. He kept a regular game at the Baker Hotel, and for the first time began matching wits with some of the country’s best-known players, including the legendary Indiana gambler Ray Ryan. The two engaged in games whose stakes sometimes topped two hundred thousand dollars. Hunt, like both Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, stopped carrying cash altogether; when he needed money for a game, he dipped into a box he kept in an office closet, or another he kept at First National.

  During the mid-1940s the one thing that took Hunt away from his daily routines was the situation with his son Hassie. It was unbearably sad. After he testified against the Inch lines in Congress in mid-1942, Hassie had begun to unravel. Later there would be stories that he grew increasingly paranoid, believing the Roosevelts were attempting to kill him, or perhaps his father’s enemies. The turning point came in 1943, when the army transferred him from his government job in Washington to infantry training in Louisiana. There Hassie had a breakdown of some sort, washing up in an army mental ward near New Orleans. Hunt learned the news from one of his son’s drilling partners in Mississippi, who said it was sunstroke. Hunt hurried to New Orleans. When he telephoned Margaret his tone was grave. “Hassie does not seem right,” Hunt said. “Too many jokes, too much hilarity for a boy weakened by sunstroke.”

  On his return to Dallas, Hunt took Lyda to talk things over with Margaret. The army was now saying Hassie would be medically discharged. Though no one knew what it was, he clearly had some sort of mental problem. “They are recommending he be sent to the Menninger Clinic to be evaluated,” Hunt said. “Is that okay?”

  Lyda couldn’t speak. She turned to Margaret, who said “Yes.”2

  Hunt took his son to a clinic outside Andover, Massachusetts, where the doctors suggested electric-shock treatment. Hassie refused. According to Harry Hurt, Hunt tried his own treatment. Believing Hassie just needed more “action,” he brought in a string of young women for Hassie to sleep with. It had no effect. Hunt, unwilling to shut his eldest son away in a mental ward, decided to take him back to Texas. “Great!” Hassie said when he heard the news. “I’m going back to the oil fields where I belong.” Instead, Hunt installed him at the family’s pecan farm outside Tyler, hoping a period of relaxation would help him recover. It didn’t. If anything, Hassie’s behavior grew worse.

  He grew increasingly confused, unable to tell the difference between his father’s secretaries and his own sisters. The slightest disagreement could provoke violent tantrums. At times Hassie challenged his father to fistfights. Over breakfast at Mount Vernon he picked up a grapefruit and hurled it at his mother, breaking her glasses. Hunt spent long periods doing little more than telephoning and dictating correspondence to hospitals across the country, searching for a doctor who could cure his son. “It was killing Daddy, making him old,” Margaret recalled years later. “Hassie was his favorite, his most adored child. Daddy could not, would not fail him.”

  When the war ended, Hunt took Hassie to more clinics for treatment, at least one of which diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Doctor after doctor advised that he be institutionalized. Hunt wouldn’t hear of it. Hassie consented to electric-shock treatments at one clinic; the treatments, however, had no effect. Finally, at a facility in Hartford, Connecticut, a doctor urged Hunt to consider a new procedure called a prefontal lobotomy. Developed in Europe, the lobotomy involved inserting a scalpel behind the forehead to physically sever the prefontal lobes from the rest of the brain. No one understood why or how it worked, and results were uneven. Some patients calmed. Others became zombies. Tears welled in Hunt’s eyes when he told Margaret what had to be done. “It’s the only thing there is left,” he said.

  The operation was performed in Philadelphia in 1946. It transformed Hassie from the energetic young wildcatter his family remembered into a quiet, lethargic man who lost all interest in business. He turned pensive and introspective; about all he enjoyed doing was reading and taking long walks. Hunt had Hassie placed in a New York psychiatric hospital for a time, but on Lyda’s urgings eventually brought him home to Dallas. They purchased a house for him adjacent to Mount Vernon, where he lived in seclusion. For the rest of his life Hunt was plagued with doubts over what he had done. During the 1950s, when doctors began to produce drugs to treat schizophrenia, his guilt began to mount. “Daddy was certain he had made a terrible, tragic mistake,” Margaret recalled. Margaret, in turn, blamed the family fortune. If they hadn’t had the money for the lobotomy, she reasoned, perhaps they could have somehow found another treatment.

  No one outside the Hunt family saw much of Hassie after that. For years Hunt kept the office next to his vacant, for his son; he never came to work. Instead, from time to time, friends would spot a thin, ghostly presense, a latter-day Boo Radley, walking the shores of White Oak Lake. The sightings went on for years, then a decade, then another and another. In the end, Hassie Hunt outlived his parents, finally passing away quietly, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2005.

  IV.

  In the 1940s most Americans still thought of millionaires as stuffy, tuxedoed Monopoly Men in Fifth Avenue mansions. While Hunt and Roy Cullen, sober men who wore suits each morning to a downtown office, conformed to the expectations of how businessmen should look and act, Clint Murchison shattered the mold. Years before Bill Gates made it acceptable for executives to doff their jackets, Murchison became one of the nation’s first—maybe the first—casual billionaire.

  While he embraced ostentation in private life, Murchison abhorred it in business. The downtown Dallas building he moved into after the war, a bland two-story affair he picked up with an insurance company, didn’t even announce his presense; its only adornment was a metal plate that read 1201 MAIN. For Murchison, every day was casual Friday. If he was seeing people, he wore khakis and an open-neck shirt; he kept a tie in his office closet, but the only one he wore on a daily basis he used as a belt. If his schedule was free, his taste ran to shorts, a battered straw hat, and sandals; he didn’t care for socks, and the ones he wore were often mismatched. His only formality was reserved for his secretary, Ernestine Van Buren. When she was needed, he didn’t holler, always gliding to his office door to murmur, “Mrs. Van Buren.”

  The relaxed atmosphere at 1201 Main belied the sophistication of Murchison’s growing basket of investments. “Money is like manure,” Murchison liked to say. “You gotta spread it around for things to grow.” The diversification he began in the late 1930s picked up steam during the 1940s. Figuring that returning soldiers would trigger a baby boom, he invested in textbooks by buying the New York publisher Henry Holt & Co. in 1945. He tried to buy one of his favorite magazines, Popular Mechanics, but couldn’t, picking up Field & Stream instead. Betting all those new families would take to vacationing, he bought a Seattle steam line and a pair of bus companies. Still, he never lost touch with oil. In 1948 he had Southern Union spin off its exploration arm, Delhi Oil, into a separate company traded on the New York Stock Exchange; it was the only publicly traded company Murchison managed, taking a slot as Delhi’s chairman.o Delhi began as a small outfit headquartered above a corset shop in a run-down building a few blocks from 1201 Main, but its oil finders proved top notch. Ranging across the Rocky Mountains and Canadian West, they unearthed massive quantities of natural gas in the next decade, turning Delhi’s handful of executives, plied with stock at Murchison’s insistence, into millionaires.

  He did it all with other people’s money, gobbling up tens of millions in loans from eager banks in Dallas and New York. As his reputation grew, 1201 Main became a magnet for every speculator and investment banker in the region, all arriving with deals for Murchison to consider. He would flip through a prospectus quickly, then toss it to one of a half-dozen bright young men he had hired. The group would argue an investment’s pros and cons until Murchis
on made a decision or, if he needed more time, threw up his hands and announced, “I’m going fishing.” They made million-dollar decisions sitting at picnic tables gnawing at the barbecue ribs Murchison loved; his aides knew to always take along money, for their boss, like Sid Richardson, never kept a cent in his pocket. One of the few times Ernestine Van Buren saw him handle actual money was when a bum wandered into 1201 Main and asked for a handout. Murchison found a ten-dollar bill and gave it to him, which brought the bum back for more. He smelled, though, and in the ensuing weeks Van Buren watched, smiling, as Clint Murchison, one of the country’s richest men, leaned out his office window and dangled a ten-dollar bill down to his new friend on the end of a long string.

  For the most part, that was the extent of the Big Four’s philanthropy. H. L. Hunt regularly had the representatives of Dallas charities escorted from his office. In later years an unnamed Dallas oilman told of trying to interest Sid Richardson in charity. “Sid, why don’t you give Dallas a children’s hospital? ” the oilman suggested during a cross-country flight. Richardson replied, “Now if I do that, why everyone in the world will come around asking me for money and I just don’t want to be bothered.” His peers didn’t seem to hold this attitude against him. “Why, Sid has no more civic responsibility than a coyote,” an oilman told the same writer. “But he’s a nice guy.”

  The most prominent philantropist among Texas oilmen was probably George Strake, who gave millions to the Catholic church and was generally recognized as the most decorated American layman; in 1946 Pope Pius XII personally decorated Strake a Knight, Grand Cross, of the Order of St. Sylvester, the oldest and most prized of papal orders. Of the Big Four, only Roy Cullen, with his givings to the University of Houston, had done any serious thinking about charity. Cullen turned sixty-four in 1945; his last two unmarried daughters wed returning servicemen, nice, clean-cut young men, both of whom Cullen took on as assistants. In the coming years they managed to find the odd pocket of oil in the Rockies, but by and large Cullen had discovered all the oil he was to find. As the years wore on, the men coming to his office wanted to talk as much about philanthropy and politics as oil. Cullen endowed a pair of buildings at the Gonzales Warm Springs Foundation for infantile paralysis—after receiving assurances it had nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs in Georgia—and enjoyed it.

  “Lillie and I are pretty selfish about our giving,” Cullen said in 1947. They liked seeing the fruits of their gifts, unlike wealthy couples who donated posthumously. “Honey, we’ve got the children taken care of,” Cullen told Lillie one evening as they sat in their living room in River Oaks, watching the sun set over the mansion’s reflecting pool. “There is a lot of money coming in from the wells that we don’t need.” Cullen suggested they make a large donation to the university.

  “But what about the hospitals?” Lillie asked. Houston’s medical facilities were aging, run-down, and poorly staffed. Several civic leaders were making noises about improving them. Cullen thought she had something. The next morning he called a man at Memorial Hospital and told him he wanted to write a check for one million dollars. The man nearly choked. Cullen’s next call went to Hermann Hospital. It, too, received a check for what he called “a million plus.” Houston had a tiny, struggling Methodist hospital as well. Cullen’s third call went to its fund-raiser. The man scurried to Cullen’s office and left, dumbfounded, with a check for one million dollars. The next day, as word of Cullen’s donations spread through the medical community, a man from the Episcopal diocese—which didn’t yet have a hospital—appeared in Cullen’s office with a set of construction blueprints under his arm. He left an hour later with a check for “one million plus.” Later Cullen added another million-plus to the Baylor University medical school.

  Cullen’s charitable spree was front-page news in Houston; in later years, when the city emerged as a national center for heart surgery and cancer research, his gifts that week would be remembered as its genesis. Afterward Cullen found himself deluged with requests for money from every fund-raiser in Houston. He and Lillie began discussing whether to establish some sort of foundation to handle all the solicitations. Cullen thought it might need more than just another few million dollars. He broke the news on the evening of March 27, 1947, when the Texas Hospital Association honored him at a banquet in Houston’s Music Hall. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Cullen told the crowd. “Mrs. Cullen and I are now having our attorneys draw up papers to create a foundation in which we will put oil properties estimated to produce eventually some thirty to forty million barrels of oil, worth eighty million dollars or more.”

  There was an audible gasp from the audience; no one in Texas—no one in the entire South—had ever given away such a sum. Cullen told the crowd he hoped the money would be given to local hospitals and the University of Houston. Two days later, the Houston Chamber of Commerce’s entire board of directors came to his office en masse to thank him. “Thanks for your kindness,” Cullen told them. “But since I made that announcement, Lillie and I have been thinking this thing over, and we’ve changed our minds a little bit.”

  The chamber of commerce men exchanged nervous glances.

  Cullen cleared his throat. “We’ve decided,” he went on, “after looking over our property, that we can double that figure.”

  It took a moment for the enormity of Cullen’s remark to sink in: $160 million; in today’s dollars, nearly $1.7 billion. It was, at the time, the single largest gift ever made by a living American. Once the paperwork was complete, the new Cullen Foundation became the largest charitable foundation in the South and, after the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, third largest in the nation. Its gifts were limited only to projects in Texas. Cullen spent the rest of his life plowing money into the foundation and the University of Houston; after its football team won a match against Baylor University in 1953, Cullen was so happy, he donated another $225,000. He would eventually give away 93 percent of his fortune.

  News of Cullen’s gift made national headlines. Overnight, he found himself inundated with two hundred thousand pieces of mail, much of it from people seeking money. A man in England addressed his letter to “Hugh Roy Cullen, Texas Oil King, Somewhere in America.” Two thousand miles to the east, news of the donation prompted brows to furrow in the newsrooms of New York and Washington. Someone gave away how much? In Texas? What the hell was going on down there?

  NINE

  The New World

  Could we have kippers for breakfast?

  Mummy dear, mummy dear

  They gotta have ’em in Texas

  ’Cause everyone’s a millionaire

  SUPERTRAMP, “BREAKFAST IN AMERICA”

  I.

  In the first years after World War II, H. L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, and Clint Murchison had emerged as a handful of the richest men in America—and no one knew it. It wasn’t just that few people understood how wealthy they were. Beyond the insular world of Texas Oil, almost no one knew they existed. By 1948, despite Hunt’s historic dealings in East Texas, Cullen’s philanthropy, and Richardson’s dinners with the Roosevelts, the Big Four had garnered precisely three references in the nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. Cullen earned the only Times headline, when he announced his new foundation. It identified him as a “Former Texas Oil Field Laborer.”

  Their anonymity was largely a function of how the press worked during the 1930s and 1940s. By and large the Texans’ few public mentions came in the oil-industry press, whose arcane regurgitation of drilling data was as indecipherable to the average newsman as Urdu. National publications, focused on the news of Washington and New York, tended to rediscover mid-America only when undistracted by world events, and the events of the previous twenty years had long diverted their newsrooms. The Depression, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, the war—for two decades there had been far more important matters to cover than the goings-on of inaccessible Texas businessmen. It wasn’t until the smoke cleared over the b
attlefields in Europe that the press slowly awakened to the profound changes the intervening years had wrought at home.

  Even then, many writers who passed through Texas in 1945 and 1946 failed to notice the new wealth coursing through the state. A notable book of 1947, Inside U.S.A., was a massive, thousand-page survey of American life written by the correspondent John Gunther, who in the words of Arthur Schlesinger set out to discover “a new America, hardly known to the world—or to itself.” Gunther wrote chapters on every state—three on Texas—and while he noticed its new industries, he had almost no sense how rich its oilmen had grown. In fact, Gunther’s theme was the opposite, that “Texas is probably the richest ‘colony’ on earth … and has been badly fleeced by outsiders”; this was boilerplate dating to the 1920s. Studying those who “owned” Texas, he ignored Hunt, Murchison, and Richardson in favor of conventional businessmen such as Houston banker and real estate magnate Jesse Jones, though Gunther did note that Houston’s “richest citizen, and reputedly the wealthiest man in the state, is an oil operator named Roy Cullen.”

  The first hint of impending change came on a cool, windy afternoon in February 1948, when Hunt, wearing an off-the-rack tan gabardine suit and gray fedora, emerged from the Mercantile National Bank Building onto the sidewalk along Commerce Street. He was on his way to a card game at the Baker Hotel. When he reached the corner at Ervay Street, across from the Neiman Marcus department store, he stopped for a red light. Suddenly a man rushed up, lifted a camera, and snapped a photo. Before Hunt could react, the man disappeared into the crowds. Hunt headed on, thinking the man was probably taking a picture of the building behind him.