by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Any number of newspapermen, magazine writers, and authors wrestled with questions of what the new Texas wealth meant. For starters, all these new millionaires scrambled popular perceptions of the nation’s power structure. If H. L. Hunt was really America’s richest man, what did that make the Rockefellers? Or the Du Ponts? And did Hunt really have more money than Sid Richardson or, for that matter, Howard Hughes? Guessing who ranked where became a staple for authors touring Texas. Theodore White, writing in 1954, judged Richardson “far and away the richest American, with the possible exception of his Dallas neighbor H. L. Hunt, who may be his only rival in the billion-dollar bracket.”
In an attempt to introduce structure to the confusing new world of America’s ultrawealthy, a number of publications began compiling lists of the country’s richest people—the genesis of a phenomenon that continues today with lists such as the Forbes 400. The first two of these lists, appearing in 1957, codified the notion that Texas Oil had reshuffled the status quo. Ladies’ Home Journal, in an attempt to name the ten richest Americans, judged Richardson the country’s wealthiest man, pegging his net worth at seven hundred million dollars. Murchison, who ranked sixth, downplayed the idea that the Big Rich kept score. “After the first hundred million,” he quipped, “what the heck?”
The second list, in Fortune magazine, was far more comprehensive, naming the seventy-six Americans whose net worth topped seventy-five million dollars; more than a third, twenty-six, derived their fortune from oil, fourteen from Texas Oil. Fortune ranked H. L. Hunt the fourth-wealthiest American, behind J. Paul Getty and two others, relegating Richardson to fifteenth place, just below Howard Hughes and the Rockefellers. Richardson’s “downgrading” was subjective, the magazine noted; if oil reserves were counted, Richardson’s wealth topped seven hundred million dollars, rivaling Getty’s fortune as the nation’s largest. Murchison ranked just twenty-third, behind two Houston oilmen, John Mecom and Jim Abercrombie.
One message echoed through all the coverage. With the glaring exception of the all-but-forgotten Glenn McCarthy, the Big Rich seemed to be living proof that money could buy happiness. Because despite their political reversals, despite the fact that many in the nation didn’t believe they were to be entirely trusted, the one thing that came ringing through all the newspaper profiles and lavish magazine articles was that the Big Rich were having one heckuva good time.
II.
The 1950s was the Golden Age of Texas Oil, an era when the Big Rich seemed to be swimming in money and the toys of wealth, when the headiest oilmen, intent on living up to every Ferberesque myth, collected airplanes and ranches and works of art as if they were candy. In Houston, where Jim West could be seen tossing silver dollars on the sidewalks, one oilman wore a hundred-dollar bill as a bow tie; when asked, he would take it off and throw it in the air, then tie another. Another took to riding a pet lion to meet the mailman; yet another tried in vain to keep penguins in a walk-in freezer. One wrote Pablo Picasso asking to buy ten paintings; he didn’t specify color or type, just the size of his wall. A Houston oilman’s wife wrote the Smithsonian to ask whether the Hope Diamond was for sale. Then there were the two oilmen who loved playing practical jokes on each other; the high point of their duel came when one took a European vacation and his rival erected a full-size roller coaster in his front yard.
There was the Houston heiress who always flew to Paris with two extra first-class tickets for her two toy poodles, each of whom traveled with jeweled collars and chinchilla furs—furs being something the ladies of Texas Oil knew lots about. In 1951, when a ranch home owned by the oilman L. M. Josey burned to the ground, the Houston Press reported that Mrs. Josey fought the fire while wearing her mink stole. Irked, Mrs. Josey had her secretary write the paper. “Your story says Mrs. Josey battled the blaze clad in nightgown, robe and mink stole,” the secretary wrote. “We wish to correct this. Mrs. Josey was wearing her marten furs.” When the ladies of a New England garden club toured Texas, one asked an oilman’s wife how she kept her azaleas so radiant. “Mink manure,” came the answer.
It was no accident many of these stories arose from Houston, the city that came to embody the new Texas myth; it seemed to prize vulgarity and ostentation even as Dallas and Fort Worth clung to what appeared to be the last rungs of taste in the state. In Houston oil was everywhere and everything. They hit a gusher at the city dump, at the city prison farm, and in backyards. Downtown, skyscrapers sprouted like crabgrass; between 1940 and 1960 the city grew from a 500,000 to 1.25 million people. In the newspapers columnists debated whether Texas now had more millionaires than New York or California (apparently not); in 1954 Mayor Oscar Holcombe actually threw a press conference to announce the fact that he, too, had belatedly become a millionaire. Unsurprisingly, northerners poured in, thinking it was easy to become rich. For a time it seemed true: one of Roy Cullen’s gardeners went into oil and eventually became a millionaire. Looking back years later, a onetime Houston reporter sensibly asked: “Was anybody poor?”
On the whole, the Dallas Big Rich lived tamer lives than their Houston counterparts. The city’s nearest answer to Shamrock-style revelry were the mammoth street parties the oilman D. H. Byrd threw every year when his beloved University of Texas football team squared off against the Oklahoma Sooners at the Cotton Bowl. Byrd, who made his fortune in East Texas—he was there the day Hunt first met Dad Joiner—was one of the biggest Longhorn boosters in the state. His signature gift to the university was Big Bertha, the world’s largest bass drum, eight feet across, so big it took four men to pull its carriage.
Parties were one way the Normal Rich applied for Big Rich status. In fact, some of the most talked-about fetes of mid-1950s America were thrown by Lone Star oilmen yearning to be noticed. On New Year’s Eve 1952 a little-known Dallas oilman named Tevis F. Morrow rented out the Sunset Boulevard nightspot Mocambo for a dusk-to-dawn affair where the guests—including Edith Piaf, the heiress Doris Duke, and Conrad Hilton—were given ten-gallon hats; Time carried a photo of the goggle-eyed Morrow accepting kisses from a trio of actresses led by Joan Crawford. For the next four years a string of oilmen took turns topping Morrow’s fete, climaxing with a New Year’s Eve 1956 party thrown by the Dallas oilman D. D. Feldman, a publicity lover who had once briefly changed his name to D. D. Fontaine. Feldman’s party, for which he transformed a Hollywood restaurant into a replica of New York’s famed turn-of-the-century Delmonico’s, attracted Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, and Bing Crosby. He threw it, Feldman told reporters, to prove Texas oilmen were nothing like their portrayals in Giant. “I wanted to show the world that Texans can compete with the best in gentility,” Feldman said. To which a wire-service report replied: “The wealthy Texan objected to a scene in the movie which showed millionaire Texans as boisterous fun lovers. By 2 A.M. of Jan. 1, 1957, when the party started dwindling, the movie looked pretty authentic.”
III.
When it came to the toys of Texas Oil, every conversation began with ranches and ended with airplanes. Then as now, a ranch is to the Texan what a house in the Hamptons is to the New Yorker, or a Malibu beachhouse to a denizen of Beverly Hills. Ranches could be luxurious or rustic, so long as they came with horses, cattle, a wet bar, animal heads—antlers were a must—and shotguns. Roy Cullen’s spread north of Houston was a simple affair, a few hundred acres and a stone house; he and Lillie enjoyed watching the deer. One of the more unusual ranches belonged to John Mecom’s son, John Jr., who populated his acreage near Laredo with a bustling menagery of African wildlife, including elephants, giraffes, wildebeests, gazelles, and hippopotamuses.
Many of these retreats were decorated by the Big Rich’s unofficial arbiter of taste, Neiman Marcus of Dallas, a retailer that earned national notice during the 1950s catering to the whims of oil money. Neiman’s was typically the first stop for any Texan who struck it rich, a notion enshrined in a 1956 New Yorker cartoon showing a Texan and his wife dancing in a gusher’s black rain. “It’s wonderful, Harry!” the wife cri
es. “How late does Neiman Marcus stay open?” The Neiman’s Christmas catalog offered baubles so outrageous, store executives received annual calls from the likes of Walter Cronkite and Edmund Murrow snooping for the latest tidbits of Big Rich gauchery. In 1955 Neiman’s offered a jewel-encrusted stuffed tiger. Another year it was his-and-her Jaguars, then his-and-her mummy cases, then, for oilmen tired of their fishing boats, authentic Chinese junks. The peak came the year the store offered a full-scale replica of Noah’s ark, complete with French chef, Swedish masseur, German hairstylist, Park Avenue doctor, and a Texas A&M veterinarian—to care for pair after pair of animals, including ninety-two mammals, ten reptiles, fourteen freshwater fish, twenty-six birds, and thirty-eight insects. Alas, priced at $588,247, the ark went unsold.
When it came to vacation retreats, no one in Texas could compete with Clint Murchison. The state, in fact, didn’t have enough free land for the kind of open space Murchison craved, so in the 1940s he began acquiring land in northern Mexico. It started with a small hunting lease during the war, but the more Murchison visited, the more he came to love the anonymity and frontier-style living he found in “Old Mexico,” as Texans of a certain age called it. His first purchase was a new island. After losing Matagorda to Toddie Lee Wynne in 1944, Murchison wasted little time snapping up a replacement, nine-hundred-acre Isla del Toro, off the Mexican coast near Tampico. He shipped in a herd of Brahman cattle, built a sprawling hacienda-style mansion, and transformed the island into a private fishing and duck-hunting resort.
Word of inland ranches for sale slowly filtered down to Murchison’s new spread, and all through the 1940s he bought up Mexican land, eventually more than a half million acres, including a three-hundred-thousand-acre section it was said he never got around to actually seeing. The centerpiece of Murchison’s holdings was Hacienda Acuna, a grouping of a half-dozen interconnected ranches covering seventy-five thousand acres in northern Mexico’s rugged Sierra Madre. As Murchison told the story, he had set off to scout the Acuna site alone, renting a car in a hilltop town, then driving until the road stopped, at which point he trundled the last twelve miles on a farmer’s oxcart. What he found on arrival was a striking mountain wilderness, a verdant land dripping with Spanish moss and orchids, awash in wildflowers, waterfalls crashing from the hillsides. The only building was a tumbledown bunkhouse. Afterward he told his wife, Ginnie, “I have found the paradise of the world.”
He bought it all for ten thousand dollars, then returned with Ginnie on horseback, where they slept under the stars and the next morning selected the site for their dream house. They hired every peasant in the area—Murchison built them houses with running water, and a school—and began clearing land for the mansion and the airstrip. Once the strip was finished, Murchison flew in brick masons, carpenters, architects, and construction workers by the score. Everything, Murchison ordained, had to made locally. Peasants built the furniture from walnut and cedar trees. Stone for the house was quarried on site. As the walls rose, Murchison reveled in his primitive Eden, laughing as well-heeled guests from Dallas teetered to the outhouse at night and rode horses down to the waterfall to bathe. Finally, after more than a year of work, the house was nearly finished, a twenty-room red-roofed hacienda in the shape of a horseshoe, set around a courtyard where Murchison had an enormous barbecue pit dug. Rocking chairs lined the surrounding porches. Bougainvillea and flowering vines crept up the support beams.
Clint and Ginnie flew to Spain to buy the antiques to fill the house. On the floors they tossed ocelot and mountain-lion skins, all shot on the ranch; the walls were dotted with the bleached-white skulls of longhorn cattle. After a road was finished, hundreds of beef cattle were trucked in, along with dozens of dairy cows for milk and butter. Acuna’s staff, several dozen butlers and cooks and vaqueros, lived in cottages Murchison had built in the fields. Everything was nearing completion in late 1949 when Murchison’s Wall Street friend, Bob Young, mentioned that Acuna would make a perfect stop for his friends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had expressed an interest in seeing Texas.
The visit was quickly confirmed—so quickly that the house wasn’t entirely finished. Clint and Ginnie embarked on a whirlwind of last-minute preparations, finishing the last of the guest bedrooms just as word of the Windsors’ visit broke in a New York gossip column. News that European royalty was coming to see the Big Rich for themselves was an oddity almost every newspaper in America reported. In the month leading up to the February 1950 visit, Texas newspapers carried items almost every day; the Dallas Morning News devoted a half page to photographs and copies of the Acuna blueprints.
It fell to Ginnie Murchison to prepare the waitstaff for the man who had once been king of England. Every afternoon she rehearsed with the Mexican butlers and maids the proper way to serve tea. The hardest part, Ginnie always said, was teaching them the English words. Duke and Duchess didn’t easily translate; in the end, they agreed the duke would be called “El Rey,” the king, the duchess, the former Wallis Simpson, “La Reina,” the queen. At the last minute, Ginnie had a group of friends flown down from Dallas for a “rehearsal party” in which Clint’s pal T. B. Cochran played the part of the duke.2
Finally, on February 4, the duke and duchess, having traveled three days from Palm Springs to Tampico in one of Bob Young’s private trains, arrived in the town of Gonzales, thirty miles from the ranch. Murchison staff members were there to greet them as the Windsors, exhausted, stepped onto the dusty platform. With them was Bob Young and his wife, along with Charles Cushing, of the Boston Cushings, and the New York socialite Edith Baker, along with 150 pieces of luggage, 104 of which belonged to the duchess, including twenty enormous steamer trunks. The bags were thrown in a cattle truck. The guests crammed into station wagons for the four-hour drive up the rutted roads to Acuna.
The ranch remained so primitive that Murchison had neither telephone nor radio, and thus no way of knowing his guests had arrived. Instead, he had one of his pilots fly ahead from Gonzales. As he flew low over the ranch, a single roll of toilet paper dropped from the plane, unfurling into a long ribbon that wafted to the ground. A servant retrieved the cardboard tube. Inside was a message: “They’ve arrived in Gonzales.” Several hours later, Ginnie and a girlfriend, their hair still in curlers and wearing no makeup, were working in the kitchen, preparing hors d’ouevres. Someone walked in and began to help. Not till the butler, Jose, shouted “El Rey!” did Ginnie realize the Duke of Windsor had arrived and wandered into the kitchen unannounced.
An avid sportsman, the duke appeared to thoroughly enjoy his week at Murchison’s side. The men spent the days hunting, firing at mountain lions, turkeys, pheasants, pigeons, and quails. The duke bagged two turkeys and stood for multiple snapshots with his prey. For doves, the group boarded one of Murchison’s planes to another ranch, where Murchison used his trusty shotgun to bag scores of white birds.
The women’s days were more challenging, thanks to the duchess. She was a tad needy, always sending her maid to pester Ginnie for bobby pins or cosmetics. At one point she demanded to have her hair done, an impossibility, but when she insisted Ginnie had a plane ferry her to Tampico, where a Mexican hairdresser did the best she could. The duchess, however, managed to redeem herself, at least in Ginnie’s eyes, the night the furnace went out, reaching deep beneath the boiler herself to reignite the pilot light. All in all, things went swimmingly, at least until the party reconvened to Murchison’s island ranch of El Toro for a few final days of fishing. The duke and Bob Young, accompanied by Edith Baker, were out on a boat whose engine suddenly gave out. The captain was unable to fix it; there was no radio aboard to call for help. Night fell. Back at the ranch house, Murchison, fearing the worst, dispatched all his remaining boats in search of the duke’s. Meanwhile, the duke, who tended to imbibe more freely when away from the duchess’s unyielding eye, passed out in an inopportune spot.
“What do you say to the man who was once the king of England when you have to use the restroom
and he’s lying in front of the door passed out on the floor?” Edith Baker later asked Ginnie. “I finally just stepped over him into the bathroom.” After a long, anxious night Murchison spent pacing the beach, one of the search boats finally found the stricken vessel, returning the duke to land just before dawn.3
“I really rather enjoyed myself,” the duke told Murchison afterward. “Very relaxing, a dead motor.”
As much as he enjoyed the duke’s visit to Acuna, Murchison harbored a special love for his other retreats, especially an exclusive fishing and hunting club outside his hometown of Athens called, of all things, the Koon Kreek Club. Koon Kreek represented the antithesis of material wealth, a chance for wealthy country boys to rediscover their childhoods. The club itself was nothing much, a collection of five man-made lakes arrayed around a beat-up wooden clubhouse where the members, almost all Dallas oilmen, drank and played gin and served themselves heaping dinners of fried chicken, ham hocks, and turnip greens. There were no butlers or valets or neckties at Koon Kreek, just fishing guides, one for every boat. This was a man’s man’s club, the members in straw hats, dungarees, and hip waders, spittoons on the card tables, up every morning at dawn to fish for bream. In duck-hunting season the men retreated into the club’s eleven blinds. Murchison never tired of extolling Koon Kreek’s virtues. “Brings a man back to his roots,” he said. He kept another ranch nearby, Gladoaks.
Like Murchison, Sid Richardson never tired of hunting, and both men loved to emphasize their “Texan-ness” by taking eastern visitors along. When John McCloy, the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, came to St. Joe’s to shoot quail, Richardson informed him they would be hunting from the comfort of a Range Rover. McCloy, wielding an antique British shotgun, insisted on walking. It took only a few minutes before McCloy let out a yelp upon spying a rattlesnake. He blasted the snake, then another and another, before finally joining Richardson in the car.4
