Bryan Burrough
Page 24
Actors weren’t the only stars Texas oilmen took under their wing. D. H. Byrd and a group of oilmen were among the first sponsors of a piano prodigy named Van Cliburn. In 1951 Sid Richardson befriended a young evangelist who arrived in Fort Worth to deliver God’s message. His name was Billy Graham. Richardson, though never known for his piety, took a liking to Graham, introducing him to Murchison, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson. When Graham attempted to deliver a radio broadcast from the Capitol building in Washington, he was told it was impossible; a single phone call from Richardson to Rayburn led to a special Act of Congress that allowed Graham to hold the first-ever religious service on the Capitol steps. Graham was so inspired by Richardson and other Texas oilmen he met that his fledgling film company’s first two movies, Mr. Texas and Oiltown U.S.A., told the stories of hard-living Texans who found salvation in Christ. Oiltown U.S.A., which Graham debuted at a Hollywood premiere and aired at his crusades, featured a Houston oilman whose conversion, in the words of promotional materials, featured “the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire.”r
IV.
As colorful as the jet-setting Texas playboys were, the oilman eastern writers most wanted to profile proved elusive. His name was James Marion West Jr., though he was known in Houston as “Silver Dollar” Jim West. West was the son of Roy Cullen’s onetime partner, Big Jim West, who died in 1940, leaving his family an estate of seventy million dollars, which doubled during the ensuing decade. Jim and his brother Wesley built homes two blocks down from the Cullen mansion in River Oaks, but there comparisons between the families ended.
Jim West was hands down the most flamboyant of all Houston oilmen. A roly-poly five feet nine and 210 pounds, he waddled the streets of downtown wearing cowboy boots, eight-inch-wide belt buckles adorned with oil derricks or dancing cattle, his trademark orange-flannel shirt, and a pistol, usually a .45, strapped to one hip. A smiling if sometimes cantankerous prankster, he got his nickname, “Silver Dollar,” for his habit of tossing dollar coins everywhere he went, at doormen and yardmen as tips, on a sidewalk for bums, at reporters for a grin. When a local union struck the downtown parking garage he owned, West broke up the picket line by stepping to his second-story office window and scattering silver dollars all over the sidewalk below. He kept the coins in massive racks in his basement; it was a Negro servant’s daily duty to dust them.
George Strake Jr. remembers diving for silver dollars in West’s pool as a teenager. “Except he always threw them into the deep end, and I got an ear-ache, so my parents wouldn’t let me go any more,” Strake recalls. West never left home, in fact, without stuffing silver dollars into two large saddle pockets he had custom-sewn into all his trousers; he jingled when he walked. At hotels he took plastic “cartwheels” of dollars to hand the help; the Shamrock doormen got three wheels just for retrieving his Cadillac.
West had the usual oilman toys, a DC-3, a Twin Beech, and two converted trainers, plus several ranches—he liked to say he wasn’t sure how many—and several thousand cattle. He wasn’t happy about anyone telling him what to do. When he got into a quibble over his water bill, he drilled two artesian wells for his own supply. When he judged his electric bill too high, he bought a massive diesel power plant to provide his own electricity. He was especially ingenious in thwarting the Houston zoning commission, which outlawed tennis courts with backstops. He built a court anyway, with a deep slit dug beside it; at the press of a button, a backstop rose. If an inspector appeared, he pressed another button and it sank into the ground.
West’s passion, though, was police work. He spent most nights either riding in patrol cars or racing to crime scenes in his own. Beside his bed he had an entire bank of radios and electronic equipment to monitor calls. He owned thirty cars, including eleven Cadillacs, stored in a six-car garage at home—it was connected to the main house by a 225-foot white-tiled tunnel—and the three-story garage he owned downtown. Each car carried a sawed-off shotgun, a Thompson submachine gun and, beneath the dashboard, four telephones, one wired to a police wavelength, another for the sheriff’s department, and two for personal use; there were twenty-four more telephones at home and a dozen at the garage. Several of West’s cars had racks for tear-gas canisters, which he wasn’t shy about using. When a crowd of teenagers descended on his home one Halloween, he dispersed them with a cloud of gas.
The Houston police loved him. At Christmas every captain on the force received a crisp hundred-dollar bill, every lieutenant a fifty, every sergeant twenty-five silver dollars, and every patrolman ten. One cold winter West ordered a gross of European sheepskin coats and handed them out to policemen. When the Texas Rangers gave him an honorary commission and a gold Ranger star to wear, he had it encircled by nine large diamonds and wore it religiously. West made it to every national police conference and just about every shooting in Houston; often he arrived before the police. His nocturnal missions were seldom dull. Returning from a jaunt at 3:30 one morning in May 1949, he fell asleep at the wheel on West Gray. His Cadillac struck a parked car, careened across a lawn, and smashed through a concrete mailbox before plowing through a hedge. Startled awake, West went to press the clutch but pressed his siren instead, waking the neighborhood. A crowd in bathrobes and slippers was soon on the scene, but no one was hurt.
One night in October 1954, during a time of tensions between Mayor Roy Hofheinz and the police chief, West heard that Hofheinz was throwing a party for a hundred friends. West bet his best friend, Lieutenant A. C. Martindale, a Coca-Cola that Hofheinz didn’t have a hundred friends. When West parked his Cadillac in front of the mayor’s home, Hofheinz saw them and assumed they were spying on him. West and Lieutenant Martindale drove away, but the mayor leaped into his son’s car and gave chase, following the pair just long enough to identify the car. Two days later the episode hit the papers, making everyone look silly.
Not all West’s adventures were so harmless. One night in 1952, he was accompanying Lieutenant Martindale on patrol when they responded to reports of a burglary downtown. A man had broken the front window of a sporting goods store and taken a shotgun. West and Martindale spotted the man on Dowling Street; the lieutenant jumped from the car and yelled “Halt!” The burglar opened fire with the shotgun. When a police cruiser reached the scene minutes later, the burglar was down and bleeding; so was Lieutenant Martindale, shot in the shoulder and in the ankle. When a ballistics report indicated that the bullets that struck Martindale had been fired by different guns, the Houston Post reported speculation that West had mistakenly shot his friend. Martindale defused the crisis, however, insisting that he had accidently shot himself. The Post took West to task in a front-page editorial anyway; the headline read, “Let’s Disarm the Amateurs.”
Many readers agreed. In fact, it was a sign of Houston’s gradual maturation that, when a Collier’s writer finally cornered him for an interview in 1953, Silver Dollar Jim West felt his fellow citizens were beginning to view him as an embarrassment; he knew he was the kind of caricature many Americans expected a Texas oilman to be, and he didn’t give a damn. But what really galled him was mail. Publicity had triggered an avalanche of money-seeking letters to several top Texas oilmen—Roy Cullen got bags a day—and West couldn’t stand it. Some of his mail was marked, “Any Millionaire, Houston.”
“I just hate to get letters!” he told the man from Collier’s, brandishing one envelope. “Man here wrote me from New Orleans and asked for five thousand dollars. Said he’d insure himself for ten and commit suicide in case he couldn’t pay it back in a year. That’s awful, ain’t it? Trouble with the bunk you write, people think I’ll send ’em money, or a maybe a Cadillac. Tell them I won’t answer.”
V.
By the time Glenn McCarthy appeared on the cover of Time in February 1950, ten months after the Shamrock’s opening, he was already in deep financial trouble. Unable to make debt payments to either the Equitable or Metropolitan Life, he was facing the unimaginable:
a foreclosure, loss of the Shamrock, loss of his dreams. All through the early months of 1950 he endured a series of make-or-break meetings with his creditors in Houston and New York. When Metropolitan ordered a new estimate of McCarthy’s gas reserves, it was stunned to find they were down by almost two-thirds in several key fields. While McCarthy blamed the drop on foreign oil, Metropolitan’s engineers deduced that the greatest damage to McCarthy’s reserves had been administered by McCarthy himself. In his rush to raise cash, he had pumped so much natural gas so quickly that well pressures could not be maintained, rendering wells less productive and in some cases useless. Auditors uncovered telltale hints of financial chicanery. Wells had been completed and put on McCarthy’s books when it was doubtful they would ever produce commercial amounts of oil or gas. The lesser wells—whether weak from birth or crippled by McCarthy’s haste—had been abandoned in droves without telling the creditors.
Behind closed doors, executives at Equitable and Metropolitan Life pondered whether to foreclose. They ultimately decided against it, fearing the public-relations nightmare of crippling a Texas legend and recognizing that the Shamrock, if run properly, might yet turn a profit. In May 1950 McCarthy hammered out a deal in which Metropolitan ponied up an additional six million dollars in cash in exchange for liens on his New Ulm field. Equitable, however, was out of patience; its board decided the only way to bring McCarthy’s spending under control was to take control itself—gradually and in secret, so as not to antagonize McCarthy or those in Texas who regarded him as a hero. Months of secret meetings culminated in an agreement signed January 15, 1951, in which McCarthy reluctantly ceded Equitable complete control over all his oil fields, the Shamrock and just about everything else he owned for ten years. McCarthy would still run things, but under the watchful eye of a comptroller Equitable brought in to oversee his finances.
It took three days for the deal to fall apart. On January 18, an updated analysis of McCarthy’s overall reserves reached Equitable’s board. It was catastrophic. Reserves were down a third. Equitable’s board met and decided gradual control would no longer do. It needed immediate and total control. At a meeting in Houston on March 1, the insurer’s executives ousted McCarthy as president of his companies—he remained chairman—and replaced him with a squat Equitable attorney named Warner H. Mendel. In effect, Mendel became McCarthy’s new boss. Equitable needed McCarthy’s continued presence if the Shamrock was to maintain its stature; any hint that Equitable had pushed him aside, an internal report noted, would lead Texans to view it “as the big, bad absentee Scrooge.” Mendel’s mandate, as stated in another report, was “to obtain complete control of the operations of McCarthy Oil & Gas and the Shamrock Hotel, while preserving sufficient anonymity to assure McCarthy’s cooperation.”
For Warner Mendel, it was the job from Hell. McCarthy had gone along with the change because he had no choice, and because he felt he had wrung from Equitable a pledge “to keep your damned hands off the hotel.” But of course that was the whole point. Mendel moved to Houston, overseeing McCarthy Oil & Gas from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. each day and running the hotel until 11 every night. When he began slashing costs, McCarthy resisted. It was no use. Mendel fired the golf pro, killed the magazine, and suggested that the next time McCarthy was in New York, he might inquire as to the market for used private planes.
The Shamrock spiraled into an internecine war between McCarthy and Mendel. When McCarthy proposed spending fourteen thousand dollars to fly in a planeload of Hollywood stars for the Shamrock’s third-anniversary celebration, Mendel said no. Over howls of protest from McCarthy, Mendel cut back the July 4 fireworks display. Matters came to a head when Mendel questioned the personal expenses McCarthy was billing to the hotel. At that point, McCarthy, in the words of an internal Equitable report, “threatened to use physical violence upon Mendel, a man of slight stature.” Mendel stood his ground. As the Equitable report concludes: “Violence did not ensue, and Mendel told McCarthy that ‘there were to be no further illusions as to where the final control lay on matters relating to hotel operations.’ ”
McCarthy withdrew to his mansion, beaten. No matter how hard he tried, he realized he couldn’t best the Equitable, not with his fists, and not in court. But he was damned if he was going to be a glorified greeter at his own hotel. He was still Glenn McCarthy. He was still a living legend. He was only forty-three, still a young man. If he could make a fortune once, McCarthy reasoned, he could do it again. But not in Texas. The big fields had all been found. And then it hit him: the Middle East. He would beat the oil importers at their own game.
Rumors that McCarthy was mounting some kind of mysterious Middle Eastern excursion were already swirling when he abruptly disappeared from Houston in early November 1951. “McCarthy on Mystery Oil Junket,” read the Houston Post’s front-page story, which speculated that McCarthy might be heading to Egypt to hire the famous belly dancer, Samia Gamal, who had just married a Texas playboy named Sheppard King III. “Glenn has an addiction and attraction to dancers,” Warner Mendel wryly noted, “[so] maybe he is.” When a reporter tracked him down at New York’s St. Moritz Hotel, McCarthy said he couldn’t speak publicly, explaining, “I don’t think the United States government would like me talking about its business.” Another round of front-page stories ensued, now suggesting that McCarthy was engaged in a diplomatic mission or some kind of government espionage. No, no, no, the oilman told a second reporter the next day. It was personal business, and he couldn’t talk about it.
A few days later reporters trailed McCarthy to Paris, where he was staying at the Hotel George V with Howard Hughes’s onetime PR man, Johnny Meyer. Each morning a new round of speculation erupted in Houston: Where was McCarthy going? And what was he up to? The answer came when a wire-service reporter spotted him in Cairo, and McCarthy admitted he was there to look at the prospect of obtaining an oil concession in the Middle East, though he wouldn’t say where. “You can rule out Iran and Saudi Arabia,” his PR man whispered.
A week later McCarthy resurfaced, again in Cairo, grumping about an Egyptian law mandating that any Egyptian oil company had to be at least 51 percent owned by Egyptians. Reporters refused to believe there wasn’t more to the trip, repeatedly asking McCarthy whether he had come to sign Samia Gamal. “I came out here to see if we could buy up some land and drill for oil,” he snapped, “not to sign up any dancers.” From there it was on to Rome, where he stopped by to see the pope.
Still McCarthy would not give up. All that winter he engaged in a frenzy of would-be deal-making. Returning to Houston, where he insisted he would prevail upon the Egyptian parliament to change its ownership laws, he announced plans to build the largest hotel in Latin America, a six-million-dollar resort in Guatemala City. Next he said he had purchased exclusive rights to broadcast television in Guatemala. A week after that he confirmed he was exploring a massive oil deal with the government of Venezuela. Then an entire chain of Shamrock hotels across America. To top it all off—and to have any hope of financing his fanciful schemes, not one of which ever saw the light of day—McCarthy announced he was starting a new oil company and intended to sell its shares to the public on the New York Stock Exchange.
This was too much for Warner Mendel and the Equitable’s board of directors. They wanted McCarthy where he could do them the most good, shaking hands at the hotel and, most of all, sorting out the mess at his oil company. Mendel gave McCarthy an ultimatum: devote himself full-time to the Shamrock and his oil fields, or else. McCarthy refused. Mendel demanded that McCarthy hand over his stock, giving the Equitable outright ownership of his companies. McCarthy refused.
At that point, Mendel wrote the board that McCarthy had outlived his usefulness. He was doing more harm than good at the hotel, and Mendel couldn’t see anyone buying McCarthy’s oil properties—which appeared to be the only way Equitable could ever recoup its investment—if it meant dealing with McCarthy. Mendel wanted to foreclose, but before doing so he made McCarthy one final offer. In
exchange for signing over all his stock, and a promise to refrain from interfering in the Shamrock’s operations, McCarthy could keep a suite at the hotel and spend “a limited amount of money” on business entertainment. McCarthy would retain only “redemption rights,” that is, the rights to regain ownership in the unlikely event his debt was ever repaid, which at the Shamrock’s current rate of profitability, Warner Mendel estimated, might occur as early as 1977.
McCarthy signed. He had no choice. Everyone issued upbeat statements to the press, and the Houston newspapers, backing McCarthy to the end, ran stories emphasizing his tenuous chance at regaining ownership. Still, everyone knew it was over. A scant three years after its legendary opening, the Shamrock was no longer Glenn McCarthy’s. For McCarthy, the only good news was that the national publications that celebrated his rise generally failed to notice his fall. In those last few months, in fact, there had been just one eastern writer snooping around the hotel. McCarthy had met her once or twice and forgotten about it. She said she was writing a book. Her name was Edna Ferber.
VI.
Probably the best-known female novelist of mid-century America, Edna Ferber was a creature of effete New York literary salons, a witty, headstrong member of the Algonquin Round Table and a lesbian, all of which made her an improbable chronicler of muscular, nouveau riche Texas. She had been famous since the mid-1920s, when one of her early novels, So Big, won the Pulitzer Prize. Ferber had been mulling over a novel about Texas since at least 1939, when she first toured the state. At the time, she found Texas too foreign, too outlandish, too big to easily grasp. There was a great American novel there, she decided, but not hers. “Let Michener write it,” she told a friend.