Bryan Burrough

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

  When a Chicago technician phoned the ballroom in exasperation, listeners heard his Houston counterpart’s voice: “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

  “They’re fucking it up,” the Chicago technician muttered—live, on the air.

  Another technician chimed in: “All they’re getting is swearing on the line!”

  “What? ”

  “Swearing!”

  Meanwhile, a stream of tipsy Texans began taking shortcuts across the Emerald Room’s stage to find their tables. When a dumbfounded NBC producer told one matron she was interrupting the broadcast, the woman snatched the microphone from Lamour. “I don’t give a damn about your broadcast!” she snapped. “I want my dinner table!”

  After seven minutes NBC took the show off the air, citing technical difficulties. When the network returned live five minutes later, however, the Emerald Room’s microphones failed. Lamour, now joined by Van Heflin and a comic named Ed Gardner, tried in vain to get the crowd’s attention, but it was no use. No one could hear them.

  “People are milling around here, the PA system don’t work,” Gardner groused over the air. “Nothing is gonna get a laugh anyhow.” In an attempt to engage the crowd, Gardner began shouting the names of stars in the audience: “Over there, Pat O’Brien, ladies and gentlemen—Pat O’Brien!” Nothing worked. “I’ve been in radio a long time,” Gardner quipped, “but who has ever seen anything like this!”

  In an act of comic desperation, Gardner began calling an imaginary horse race: “And a big crowd is here tonight at Santa Anita.” Lamour pleaded for him to stop. “Now, there’s a big crowd listening on the air,” she begged. “Come on.” After a half hour the NBC producers gave up and ended the broadcast. Lamour fled to her suite in tears. “I’ve been on the road with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope but never through anything like this,” she moaned.

  The dinner service was a comedy as tuxedoed waiters weaved through the crowd. There had been considerable speculation surrounding the menu, given a price tag one writer dubbed “astronomical”: forty-two dollars a plate. Dinner turned out to be beef and a fruit cocktail dubbed “pineapple surprise.” Some guests managed to take delivery of their food; others, notably the matron who received a pineapple surprise splashed onto her bare back, wished they hadn’t. A ceremony featuring Pat O’Brien finally began around midnight, three hours behind schedule. Meanwhile, someone stole Mayor Oscar Holcombe’s chair, forcing him and his wife to sit in a hallway for two solid hours. “It was the worst mob scene I ever witnessed,” the mayor fumed afterward. “It was ridiculous.” A reporter for Time magazine wrote that the party “combined the most exciting features of a subway rush, Halloween in a madhouse and a circus fire.” The Chronicle’s society editor dubbed it “bedlam in diamonds.”

  Bedlam it was, but many regarded the Shamrock’s gaudy, chaotic, diamond-strewn opening as an apt metaphor for the new Texas. It proved to be exactly the media event McCarthy yearned for, drawing coverage around the world; Life ran a five-page photo spread. “Shamrock Puts Eyes of Nation on Houston,” read the Chronicle headline. Overnight the Shamrock became not only the dominant symbol of Houston, but of Texas. People in Dallas, unsurprisingly, hated everything about it, nicknaming it the “Damn-rock.” Still, every reporter who wrote about Texas visited the Shamrock, until its fame overshadowed anything else in the state. Most Americans, a San Antonio columnist wrote, “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds.”

  The morning after the hotel’s unveiling, McCarthy opened the doors for guests. Business was strong those first few weeks. Tourists from all over the world poured through the front doors, ogling McCarthy’s opulent “Texas Riviera,” as the gossip columnists quickly dubbed it; one Englishman told a reporter the only things he knew about Texas were the Shamrock and Roy Cullen, and he intended to see them both. Dinah Shore and Mel Torme sang in the Cork Club; Frank Sinatra was booked for January. ABC began broadcasting a weekly radio show in the Emerald Room, Live from the Shamrock. The pool became the showcase where Houston’s youngest, most beautiful, and richest women came to see and be seen. “I like it here,” one was heard muttering. “It’s like you were somewhere else—not in Houston at all.”

  To an outsider the Shamrock appeared to be exactly the shining new symbol of Texas of McCarthy’s dreams. Inside the New York offices of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, however, his lenders weren’t so pleased. The hotel was losing money, and fast. Red ink was to be expected in any new venture, but McCarthy’s spending was simply out of control. He was laying out three thousand dollars a year for a golf pro, never mind that he didn’t have a course, plus a half million a year for a promotional magazine named Preview, which McCarthy labeled a “cowpuncher” alternative to The New Yorker.2 On Easter the Shamrock hosted what it called the largest Easter egg hunt in history; hotel workers spent days hiding more than ten thousand eggs all over the property.

  McCarthy unveiled his biggest show on July 4, a fireworks display he boasted would be the greatest ever seen on earth. By dusk fifty thousand people had lined the streets around the Shamrock, a crowd dwarfing the throng of opening night; traffic was backed up for miles on all three lanes of South Main, families in fishtailed Cadillacs and pickup trucks scanning the sky. At nightfall skyrockets of every hue arced up over the hotel, exploding in gushers of yellow, blue, and green. “Some of the fireworks seemed to be improvements on anything ever set off before,” the Chronicle reported the next day. “Their startling ‘whoosh’ sounded like the passing of a jet fighter, their whistle like the falling of 1000-pound bombs, and their bursting was like all glory let loose.” The massive show ended with a series of rockets that burst into a giant green shamrock over Houston.

  Every day, it seemed, McCarthy had something new to show the press. In August he led reporters through his newest toy, the Boeing Stratocruiser he bought from Howard Hughes for $500,000. Adorned with a wet bar, two desks, and sleeping berths for eight, the interior was done in uncharacteristically tasteful shades of pastel blue and pink. It was McCarthy’s third plane. He named it The Gooney Bird. Meanwhile, at Houston’s Fat Stock Show, McCarthy broke his own American record by purchasing the champion steer, an eight-hundred-pound heifer, for $15,400.

  In his new role as Texas kingmaker, he threw himself into efforts to attract a professional football team for Houston. He sponsored an exhibition game dubbed “The Shamrock Bowl” at Rice Stadium between teams of NFL all-stars that December—Bob Hope led the entertainment—and afterward unveiled plans to build a covered stadium that could seat 130,000 people. McCarthy flew to Philadelphia to crash a meeting of football owners and make his case for Houston. He managed to corner Commissioner Bert Bell but got nowhere. Afterward, people snickered at the very idea of a covered stadium, but McCarthy, as usual, was ahead of his time. Sixteen years later Houston built the Astrodome.

  All this activity, and all the expense, had the Equitable on edge. On June 30, 1949, three months after the Shamrock’s opening, its board was given a fourth updated report on McCarthy’s oil reserves; the valuation came in at fifty-nine million dollars, down fifteen million from the previous report, but still enough—just—to cover his outstanding loans. For Equitable executives, the first sign of real trouble came not from the oil fields or the Shamrock but from the chemical plant McCarthy had begun building east of Houston in 1946. Its construction, budgeted at four million dollars, came in at eight million. The plant was to use a new technology called the “Bloodworth Process” to strip liquid petroleum gases out of natural gas and convert them into methanol for use as an antifreeze additive. Unfortunately, the plant didn’t work. Engineers spent months tinkering with equipment but could never figure out why. McCarthy spent millions replacing machinery before finally giving up.

  Equitable had first realized the plant was in trouble the previous summer when McCarthy approached i
ts executives for money to fix it. They politely declined. Undeterred, McCarthy had pried fifteen million dollars from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in return for a lien on all his chemical-related assets and a written guarantee that the plant would be up and running in a year. When the deadline arrived that August, however, the plant was still comatose. With no money coming in, McCarthy was unable to pay his quarterly interest payment to Met Life that September. Far worse, he told Equitable executives he would need to delay his next three debt payments to them as well.

  Alarm bells were already ringing at Equitable’s headquarters when McCarthy stunned the company by announcing he had found a new oil field at New Ulm, eighty miles west of Houston. It should have been welcome news. But developing the field took money McCarthy didn’t have. Lender and borrower arrived at a face-off: Equitable insisted it wouldn’t lend McCarthy another dime until he paid what he owed; he was already giving Equitable half his income. McCarthy insisted he couldn’t pay unless allowed to develop New Ulm. In the meantime, he began paying many of the Shamrock’s entertainment acts with shares in the new field.

  McCarthy found relief from his mounting financial pressures in bottles of bourbon and night after night of drunken revelry. And when McCarthy drank, he fought. That spring a Houston radio announcer sued him for eighty-seven thousand dollars for punching him at a party. In June McCarthy engaged a twenty-six-year-old Hollywood “producer” in a wild early-morning melee inside the Cork Club. The young man, William Kent, was in the club on McCarthy’s invitation and was thus surprised when McCarthy accused him of insulting behavior and punched him in the head. Kent threw McCarthy to the floor and was sitting on his chest when four burly Shamrock waiters attacked him and, along with McCarthy, began chasing him around the club, overturning tables in little explosions of expensive stemware. As Kent raced down a hallway to safety, he heard McCarthy shout, “One Irishman can beat up eight Englishmen any day!”

  September brought the strangest fracas to date. McCarthy had wagered fifteen hundred dollars on a Texas A&M football game, but there was a mix-up; the bookie thought McCarthy bet on the loser, not the winner. McCarthy angrily summoned the man who arranged the bet, a gambler named Larry Rummens. The ensuing discussion ended when Rummens called McCarthy a liar, at which point the new King of Texas leaped onto his desktop and, as Rummens stood before him, kicked his guest in the chest, then launched himself onto Rummens and began pounding him with his fists. The incident led to a set of nasty headlines and a lawsuit in which Rummens claimed McCarthy held him hostage at the hotel for two days.

  The newspapers made light of such incidents; fistfighting and carousing were seen as part of McCarthy’s larger-than-life persona. Some of McCarthy’s peers, however, tried to calm him down. Roy Cullen’s grandson, also named Roy Cullen, remembers his grandfather taking McCarthy into the pantry of the Cullen mansion and gently admonishing him to take it easy. Good families, Cullen suggested, wouldn’t be seen at the Shamrock if it were viewed as a haven for hooliganism. “My father viewed Glenn as a very bad guy,” recalls George Strake Jr. “We wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  But McCarthy wasn’t listening to anyone—even the FBI. In October, on the same day Larry Rummens sued him for $210,000, McCarthy received an extortion note from a would-be kidnapper who threatened to take McCarthy’s family hostage unless paid $50,000. The money was to be placed in a nearby culvert and against the FBI’s advice, McCarthy strapped on a shoulder holster, slid in a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, walked to the culvert, and threw in a reply note stating he needed more time to raise the money. The note was never retrieved, but the next day police arrested a Shamrock janitor, a onetime deputy sheriff named Raymond “Good Buddy” Chambers, so named because he ended his sentences with “good buddy.” Chambers was later convicted.

  Through it all, McCarthy’s finances continued to deteriorate. Though word of his loan defaults hadn’t leaked, by Thanksgiving rumors of financial strain were growing by the day. McCarthy laughed off the questions, but signs of distress were evident. In a matter of weeks he sold the Shell Building, closed the chemical plant, then sold the Detroit steel plant—ten months after buying it. He tried to sell the New Ulm field to Howard Hughes but couldn’t. In October speculation about McCarthy’s future spread to Washington when he was seen sliding into a side door at the White House for what officials told reporters was a private meeting with President Truman. Three months later McCarthy stunned the financial press by confirming that he had asked the federal Reconstruction Financial Corporation—and the president—for a seventy-million-dollar loan package, which, if approved, would be the largest government loan ever granted a private businessman in peacetime.

  Still McCarthy denied he was in trouble, even as rumors swept Houston that the Shamrock was poised to close. When the Chronicle reported “curbside gossip” that he was “on the threshold of the poorhouse,” McCarthy flatly lied, claiming all his operations, including the Shamrock and the moldering chemical plant, were running at a profit. “I have no problem I will not be able to overcome within a very short time by gearing operations to my income,” he told a reporter. His only problem, McCarthy claimed, was new competition from low-priced Middle Eastern oil, which was being imported at $1 a barrel at a time Texas oil cost $2.65. “Every time a barrel of foreign oil comes in America, a barrel less is produced in Texas,” he groused. “Texas is taking most of the licking, but the rest of the country will feel it before long.”

  No one around Houston seriously believed McCarthy could go under. An oilman going bankrupt in Texas? He was too big, people said, the Shamrock too glamorous, the times too giddy to even consider such a thing. McCarthy’s legend, in fact, continued to grow. Just three weeks after disclosure of his government-loan request, he reaped the ultimate American accolade: the cover of Time magazine. Beneath an oil derrick adorned with cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat, and flexing its muscles Adonis-style, the headline read: “Texas’ Glenn McCarthy: Since Spindletop a Jillion Jackpots.” The package inside, including a map of Texas titled “Land of the Big Rich,” marked the apex of two years of nonstop Texas hype in the national press. “The Lone Star State,” it noted without irony, “is one of the few places left in the world where millionaires hatch seasonally, like May flies.”

  Texans, for the most part, ate it up. For now.

  III.

  The media’s coverage of Glenn McCarthy spawned a new cultural icon, the Lone Star playboy, the swinging oilman who romances starlets between trips on his airplane to see his next gusher. In the postwar years many of the stories fueling this caricature emanated from Hollywood, where McCarthy and other wealthy Texans, like the nouveau riche of every American generation, were drawn to the glamour and glitz and welcomed by money-hungry movie producers and a bevy of young actresses all too happy to take up with Texas sugar daddies. As a Hollywood columnist wrote in 1954, “The Texas jillion-aires seem to gravitate to the motion pictures like a moth to a candle.”

  Among the first to arrive was Jack Wrather, a Dallas oil heir who, bored with life in the oil fields, moved to Los Angeles and married the actress Bonita Granville in 1947. Wrather used his fortune to produce seven movies in the next several years, then branched into television, eventually producing Lassie and The Lone Ranger. In time he purchased the Queen Mary entertainment complex in Long Beach, built the Disneyland Hotel in Ana-heim, and became a founding member of Ronald Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of political advisers.

  By and large, though, the Texas playboys took home far more actresses than Oscars. The starlet Jane Withers wed an Odessa oilman and would-be producer named Bill Moss in 1947; after their divorce, Moss married the dancer Ann Miller. The Moss-Miller wedding, in La Jolla, California, brought together an increasingly common constellation of Hollywood stars and Texas oilmen, everyone from Ginger Rogers to Clint Murchison. Miller, however, couldn’t cope with Moss and his hard-living oilman buddies, whose lives were a series of drinking binges wrapped up around eve
nings at night spots like Ciro’s in Hollywood and the Cipango Club in Dallas. “I simply didn’t have the energy or the patience to keep up with him, especially when we went out to parties that lasted two or three days,” Miller wrote in her autobiography.

  When Miller and Moss divorced, she married another Texas oilman, Arthur Cameron, who had purchased Louis B. Mayer’s Benedict Canyon mansion and built one of the largest private estates in the desert outside Palm Springs. On their European honeymoon Cameron summoned a man from Harry Winston’s, the New York jeweler, and bought Miller a 20-carat white diamond. Cameron, however, was a serial philanderer, and Miller left him several years later upon finding him engaged in an impromptu pool party with seventeen young ladies in bikinis.

  The Houston oilman W. Howard Lee, meanwhile, romanced and married the actress Hedy Lamarr; the two lived for several years in River Oaks, until their divorce. Afterward Lee married the actress Gene Tierney. One of Clint Murchison’s closest friends, the Dallas oilman E. E. “Buddy” Fogelson, wed Greer Garson at his New Mexico ranch in 1949. A six-time Academy Aware nominee—she won the 1942 Oscar for best actress in Mrs. Miniver—Garson all but gave up films after her marriage and settled into a long, quiet life in Dallas with Fogelson, who died in 1987. Garson became a beloved Texas philanthropist, endowed the Greer Garson Theater at Southern Methodist University, and died in 1996.

  Money, not romance, was at the heart of most Texas-Hollywood partnerships. One of Fort Worth’s richest oilmen, W. A. “Monty” Moncrief, took to wintering in Palm Springs, where he began playing golf with a number of stars, including Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. When the two actors expressed an interest in investing in an oil well, Moncrief cut them into shares of a new West Texas field for a pittance. Following a single dry hole, after which Moncrief had to explain to his new friends that not every well actually struck oil, he hit a string of twenty straight producers. By Moncrief’s estimate years later, Hope and Crosby walked away from their investments more than ten million dollars richer.