Bryan Burrough

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

  Richardson had interests in five or six ranches in addition to St. Joe’s, three in partnership with a brother-in-law. He had thousands of cattle, but the ones he was most proud of weren’t his. Their story involves Richardson’s friendship with the author Frank Dobie, a longtime University of Texas professor and folklorist. During the 1920s Dobie became alarmed that the number of Texas longhorn cattle—the unofficial symbol of the state—was dwindling. Ranchers had discovered longhorns produced better beef when impregnated by British bulls, leading to a shrinking of the longhorn population; by the late 1920s many of the remaining longhorns were being taken to slaughterhouses to eliminate an epidemic of tick fever. Without help, the national symbol of Texas faced extinction.

  Neither Dobie nor Richardson ever spoke of how they teamed to save the longhorn; it’s not even clear how they met. But by 1939 the two were close enough that Richardson allowed Dobie to closet himself at St. Joe’s to finish one of his best novels, The Longhorns. By then, Dobie was talking with a onetime Texas Ranger named Graves Peeler about the prospect of locating rare, pure-bred longhorns in Mexico and bringing them to Texas. For years this effort was cloaked in mystery, much of it the product of Peeler’s failing memory during interviews in the 1970s. In fact, Dobie’s papers indicate the idea to launch a concerted effort to save the longhorn came from Richardson in about 1939. In the next three years, Richardson paid for Peeler to travel into Mexico to buy the cattle, which were herded into state parks near Corpus Christi and Brownwood. These animals formed the nucleus of the so-called Texas Herd, the state’s semiofficial group of cattle. Saved from extinction, longhorns eventually become a sought-after animal, their lean beef ideal for low-calorie diets.

  Of the Big Four, only Hunt eschewed the ranching life; in matters of style, he was always more a southerner than a Texan. Not that he didn’t have the land: over the years Hunt amassed a million acres of undeveloped acreage in at least ten states, from Florida to Montana. In the late 1950s he began an effort to harvest it, using everything from East Texas pecans to Florida oranges to launch a new food business he called HLH Products. HLH bought up a dozen or more processing plants and began selling canned vegetables, meats, and peanut butter in grocery stores around the country. Though it would take up increasing amounts of Hunt’s focus in coming years, HLH Products was a consistent money-loser, and in time would cause serious problems for the Hunt family.

  IV.

  To reach his ranch, every oilman worth his salt had a plane, still a novel idea to most Americans in the 1950s. Murchison, among the first to go airborne in the 1930s, led the way after the war, purchasing an army-surplus DC-3 he converted into a luxury plane and rechristened The Flying Ginny. The plane originally sat thirty; once Murchison had a wet bar and swivel chairs put in, it held sixteen. On its inaugural flight in 1946, Murchison took his son John and two other couples and flew to Alaska, where they chartered a yacht to cruise the inward passage, a trip considered so unusual at the time that it received extensive coverage in Texas newspapers. The Flying Ginny almost single-handedly kept Murchison’s Mexican ranches supplied with ice, whiskey, and other essentials; the family thought nothing of using the plane to pop down to Juarez for lunch. By the mid-1950s Murchison had augmented it with another half-dozen planes he kept at Dallas’s Love Field.

  Sid Richardson followed Murchison’s lead, acquiring matching DC-3s. The Bass family joked that he bought the second one just so he wouldn’t be forced to fly with his sister Annie, whom he found needy; Annie’s plane did little more than ferry her to Colorado Springs every summer. In time so many oilmen sought their own aircraft that Neiman Marcus offered his-and-her private planes in its 1960 Christmas catalog. The largest single fleet probably belonged to Houston’s Big John Mecom, who owned a $1.3 million Lockheed JetStar and nine other planes. The most storied gathering of Big Rich aviation took place at a ranch near Austin in 1959, when an oilman named Pat Rutherford threw a party for Lyndon Johnson; the eight hundred guests arrived in fifty-three separate private planes.

  By and large the Big Rich didn’t go in for yachts, preferring to charter when the need arose. One of the few exceptions was Mecom, the Houston wildcatter whose fortune by the mid-1950s began to rival those of the Big Four. Son of a Spindletop-area roughneck, Mecom had begun drilling in Southeast Texas in the mid-1930s, hit it big near Galveston during the war, then struck the massive Lake Washington field south of New Orleans. The first of the Big Rich to buy a serious yacht, Mecom purchased the same 315-foot ship in which Franklin Roosevelt had fished alongside Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison in 1937, renaming it the Nourmahal. He had owned it barely three months when it caught fire at its berth in Texas City and sank. “The whole thing rolled over and lay down like a big cow,” the Texas City fire chief observed.

  The more refined wildcatters—there were a few—started art collections. Clint Murchison’s son John began acquiring modern art in the late 1950s and in time amassed what was probably the state’s largest collection. Sid Richardson began buying art during the war. Goaded by his friend Amon Carter, Richardson hired Newhouse Galleries of New York to help him quietly assemble what became one of the greatest American collections of Western art, much of it works by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.w He eventually acquired more than fifty Remingtons and Russells, many of them displayed at St. Joe’s.

  For a time, Texas Oil’s greatest art collection belonged to Alger Meadows of Dallas, a onetime wildcatter who began his career in the East Texas field and by the 1950s was chairman of General American Oil. Meadows began buying paintings during vacations in Europe, found it addictive, and began to entertain dreams of greatness. “I kept thinking, what if I could have, in Dallas, Texas, a collection of art that might be considered a tiny Prado?” he recalled. “I might be the only person in the country who could do this.” After donating scores of paintings to Southern Methodist University, Meadows laid out a half million dollars for forty-one Spanish sculptures that formed the basis for the university’s sculpture garden. Then, in 1964, he went on a tear, snapping up fifteen Dufys, seven Modiglianis, three Matisses, two Bonnards, a Chagall, eight Derains, a Gaugin, and a Picasso. Finally he had the makings of a Texas Prado—that is, until an assessor judged them all forgeries. When the story leaked, Life magazine named Meadows “the man who owns what may be the largest private collection of fake paintings in the world.” Undaunted, Meadows spent years replacing every forgery with the genuine article, eventually amassing a sterling collection of Cezanne, Renoir, Goya, and Pollack. “Oh, we’ve got our hands on some of the prettiest things you ever saw,” he beamed.

  V.

  Just as dukes and duchesses and bank chairmen came to Texas to see what all the fuss was about, the Big Rich began venturing out into the world for much the same reason. The world’s tourism industry welcomed the new millionaires with open arms. In 1954 the elegant French Line began offering “Texas cruises” out of Houston aboard the SS Antilles. Wealthy Texans in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats tromped on board but, as the New York Times reported, were disappointed by the selections of wines, preferring bottles of bourbon brought to the dinner table, and especially the food, which they complained was altogether lacking in barbecue, greens, and black-eyed peas. In July 1952 the government of France held “Texas Week on the Riviera”; one casino adorned its menu with Brownsville Delight—some sort of melon—plus Abilene mutton, Greenville beans, and Jacksonville raspberries. A passel of oilmen flew in to throw parties, prompting a Communist newspaper to gripe that they had only come to hunt French peasants. One memorable shindig that week, thrown by oilman Jimmy Radford of Abilene, featured champagne spewing out of miniature oil derricks. For party favors, Radford handed out Texas horned frogs.

  The women of the Big Rich tended to travel in packs. Mrs. James Abercrombie of Houston and four of her friends called themselves “The Flying Five” and periodically took a family plane for jaunts in the Caribbean or Europe. Mrs. Ralph Fair of San Antonio preferred taking girlfrien
ds, along with the obligatory hairdresser and masseuse, to the Fair Ranch in Montana. For many of the Texas nouveau riche, these kinds of trips, still unusual in America, were somewhat jarring. “There I was working in the oil fields,” Mrs. Bruno Graf of Dallas told The New Yorker’s John Bainbridge, “and the next thing I knew I was going all through Europe with all my diamonds and my personal maid.”

  For the Big Rich’s most avid hunters, African safaris became a rite of passage. D. H. Byrd, who hunted alongside his close friend, the naval aviator James Doolittle, added an entire wing to his Dallas mansion just to house his animal heads, including springbok, gazelles, ostriches, wildebeests, gemsbok, hartebeest, lechwe, and cape buffalo, plus a Sumatran tiger and the heads of two polar bears. Closer to home, Alaska and northern Canada became favorite locales for weekend hunting expeditions during the ’50s; before his collapse, Glenn McCarthy maintained a massive hunting lease in North Dakota. Texans were just as serious about their fish. In 1951 the Houston oilman Alfred C. Glassell Jr. opened the Caso Blanco Fishing Club on the Pacific coast of Peru, adjacent to a game-fishing area so rich it was known as “Marlin Boulevard”; membership fees started at ten thousand dollars.

  Two years later, in August 1953, Glassell reeled in a fifteen-hundred-pound black marlin, at fourteen feet, seven inches long still the largest fish ever caught on a rod and reel. Sports Illustrated put Glassell on its cover, while film of his titanic struggle with the fish—it leaped from the ocean forty-nine times during a two-hour struggle—was spliced into The Old Man and the Sea, a movie based on the Ernest Hemingway novel; Glassell later presented his trophy to the Smithsonian.5 News of his catch transformed Caso Blanco for a time into the sport-fishing capital of the world, drawing such celebrity anglers as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, baseball great Ted Williams, and Hemingway himself.x

  When it came to oilmen’s appetite for big game, the more exotic the catch, the better. But for sheer mystery and adventure, no Texan could top the expeditions mounted by the San Antonio oil heir Thomas Slick Jr. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1938, Slick spent the next twenty years in a whirlwind of oil prospecting, art collecting—he owned Picassos and O’Keeffes—and amateur science, founding two separate research institutes in San Antonio. He was drawn to many of the world’s most isolated lands and stranger mysteries. During college he took a group of Yale pals to Scotland to investigate the Loch Ness Monster. In 1956, while on a diamond-hunting trip in British Guiana, his plane crashed, forcing him to live with the remote Waiwai tribe.

  Slick became best known for the expeditions he launched in search of the world’s most elusive primate, the Abominable Snowman. One of the first serious efforts to investigate reports of a strange creature high in the Himalayas, Slick’s two expeditions between 1956 and 1958 took dozens of porters, guides, and scientists on treks deep into Nepal to collect Yeti footprints, artifacts, and sightings. It was Slick’s team that discovered what some believed to be the first physical evidence of a yeti, the so-called Pangboche Hand, a mummified hand discovered at a Nepalese monastery. The find, however, was never authenticated. Afterward Slick sponsored two of the first expeditions that sought to verify a rash of new sightings of a yeti-like creature in the American Northwest, what became known as Big Foot. His investigations came to an abrupt end when he died in a plane crash in Montana in 1962.

  VI.

  All these tales, from the original Life and Fortune articles in 1948 to chronicles of the Big Rich that populated periodicals as diverse as Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker, painted Texas as a new promised land, a place where a young man with energy and guts and a little luck could make himself a millionaire. Northerners had begun streaming into the state during World War II, but their numbers mushroomed after the media boomlet of 1948-49, rich and poor alike coursing into Dallas, Houston, and, increasingly, the new boomtowns out in West Texas, Midland, and Odessa. A new oil formation, the Spraberry Trend, had been discovered there in 1948, and within three years had become the single biggest oil play in America. In 1952 one of every fourteen rigs in the country was drilling around Midland and Odessa. By 1950 more than 215 different oil companies had opened offices. In the decade after the war Midland alone, a town of barely nine thousand people in 1940, more than sextupled in size, its population reaching sixty-two thousand.

  Many of the new arrivals were the sons of eastern wealth, second- and third-generation heirs looking to make names of their own. Young Gettys, Rockefellers, and Mellons all came to Midland, which despite no university of its own and an atmosphere thick with the rotten-egg smell of natural gas, soon sported a Harvard Club, a Yale Club, and a Princeton Club. Among these ambitious young Ivy Leaguers was one young man who would come to symbolize a new breed of Texas oilman, and in time a new Texas: a Connecticut senator’s son named George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush was intoxicated by the Life and Fortune stories, and by tales of easy money Texas friends told him in the navy. With his wife, Barbara, he had driven to Midland after his graduation from Yale in 1948, rejecting a Wall Street career in favor of a job offered by a family friend, the chairman of the oil field-services company Dresser Industries. For most of the next three years, Bush hustled the sand-blown backroads of West Texas, hawking Dresser goods and services from Winkler County all the way to Muleshoe.

  In time Bush tired of working for others and, after raising a half million dollars from an uncle, Herbie Walker, and family friends—one was the owner of the Washington Post—he and a partner opened an office in the Midland Petroleum Building to trade oil leases. A neighbor, Hugh Liedtke, also eastern-educated, persuaded him the real money was in finding the oil itself, so in 1953, with still more money from Uncle Herbie and friends in the Astor and Rockefeller families, Bush merged his company into Liedtke’s and renamed it Zapata Petroleum, after a Marlon Brando film, Viva Zapata. On its very first well, in nearby Coke County, Zapata struck oil. Five more strikes followed, then sixty-five more in the next eighteen months. By 1955 Zapata was producing 1,250 barrels a day, making Bush and Liedkte, on paper at least, minor millionaires.

  While Liedtke and his brother Bill searched for oil on land, Bush started a new subsidiary, Zapata Offshore, and with bonds sold on Wall Street by his Uncle Herbie, bought two experimental drilling rigs whose designers promised they could find oil in a new frontier: underwater. Bush’s offshore rigs, leased to large oil companies, were among the first to begin drilling the shallow floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next several years Zapata acquired more rigs and sent them farther and farther afield, off the shore of Cuba, the Persian Gulf, even the coast of Borneo. Bush’s success, however, led to an amicable parting with Hugh Liedtke, who wanted to focus on land drilling. Liedkte took Zapata Petroleum, Bush Zapata Offshore. It made sense, friends said. Liedtke was all about money. Bush saw other mountains to climb.

  In the summer of 1959 Bush, now CEO of his own company, moved Barbara and their sons to Houston, where George joined the Houston Country Club and the exclusive Bayou Club. There he began amassing a clutch of friends who would remain at his side for decades. He met Jim Baker, a Princeton man whose grandfather founded Houston’s giant Baker & Botts law firm, on the tennis court at the country club. Bob Mosbacher was a young wildcatter who had struck oil in South Texas. In time Bush befriended two prominent attornies, Leon Jaworski and Bob Strauss. He had always known he would try politics someday, and with the help of friends he began testing the waters in Houston.

  Bush did so at a turning point in Texas political history. After almost twenty years of ultraconservative rule, the last of the true hard-liners had been swept from state office just two years earlier, in 1957, the same year Lyndon Johnson finally secured control of the state Democratic Party, the same year Texans actually voted into office a liberal senator, Ralph Yarborough. The era of Pappy O’Daniel and Roy Cullen and Joe McCarthy was ending, people said, swept away by new ideas, new people, new times. These were the years of the Organization Man, and George Bush was an Organization Man for Texas, an ea
stern-bred country-club Republican who didn’t want to change the status quo so much as run it. Not for Bush hillbilly bands and bags of cash; he looked silly in a ten-gallon hat and knew it. The cities of Texas were filling with gray-suited executives who thought the way Bush did, and they would boost him to his first political post, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, in 1964. The rest was history.

  If George Bush represented the future of Texas politics, Hugh Liedtke was the future of Texas Oil. Liedtke became an oilman in the Murchison model, a Wall Street-savvy CEO who over the next twenty years used Zapata Petroleum as a battering ram to engineer a series of mergers and hostile acquisitions that produced Pennzoil, one of the largest independents in Texas, housed in a glittering glass tower in downtown Houston. Liedtke was the consummate example of what The New Yorker’s John Bainbridge in 1959 called the Texas “wheeler-dealer,” a man who found oil on the telephone and the stock market. (The tag eventually gained wide usage, inspiring a 1964 movie of the same name, a lark starring James Garner as a high-rolling Texas oilman.) Like Bush, Liedtke could adopt the good ol’ boy style when needed. But unlike the Roy Cullens and Sid Richardsons who made their fortunes tromping through marshes and deserts looking for oil under the ground, Liedtke was simply a businessmen—whose business happened to be oil.

  VII.

  And then, suddenly, it was over.

  It’s difficult to select a date or any one event when it happened—the selling of the Shamrock in 1954, the uproar over the 1956 natural gas bill, the first decline in Texas oil production in 1957—but by the late 1950s the golden age of Texas Oil had come to an end. Stylistically, the backlash against the excesses and political extremism of the Big Four had taken its toll. In 1957 the Houston Post published an entire series of front-page articles exploring why so many Americans hated Texas. In 1958 Big John Mecom and a group of oilmen took out a full-page advertisement in the Post defending Texas Oil and declaring that attacks on it were un-American—an early sign of an industry-wide persecution complex that would endure for decades.