by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
It was an odd home invasion. The two intruders had used a two-way radio to communicate with someone outside the house, as if they were receiving instructions. Though there was no evidence to back their musings, John Jr.’s attorneys speculated privately that Clint had been behind the robbery. Lupe had been having second thoughts about the upcoming trial, and John Jr. came to believe his uncle had staged the whole thing in hopes that Lupe would blame her own “irrational” son, thus renewing her anger. No arrests were ever made.
The robbery left Lupe traumatized, but the trial went forward, opening in a Dallas courtroom in April. John appeared in court, seemingly ready for battle, but was shocked when, on the first day of jury selection, one of Lupe’s attorneys launched into an impassioned denunciation of him as an ungrateful son who was jeopardizing the family fortune to get his hands on money he hadn’t earned. John later said he expected to be portrayed as naive, even dim-witted, but the vigor of the attack left him shaken. Lupe’s attorneys suspected his discomfort had more to do with his dwindling savings; with little more than an eighteen-thousand-dollar salary behind him, it was far from clear he had enough money to pay his lawyers. Whatever the case, John Jr. initiated settlement talks that very night, and by dawn the deal was done. On the surface it amounted to John Jr.’s total capitulation. He resigned as coexecutor of his father’s estate. In return Lupe agreed to lend him three million dollars. John Jr. rationalized it as the only way he could raise the money to pursue the fight that really mattered, the lawsuit against Clint to free his trust. He hired new attorneys and got to work.
Clint, while relieved to be rid of his nephew, had little reason to celebrate. In the two years since his brother’s death, his financials had continued to deteriorate. Interest rates remained high, housing starts low, and every month was a fight to feed the banks. It didn’t help matters that not even Clint could keep straight the hundreds of loans and investments in the Murchison Brothers portfolio; organization had never been his forte. “The only way we knew a loan had come due was a banker would call,” remembers one aide. “Then all hell would break loose, trying to find a way to pay it.” Clint had borrowed seven million dollars in 1979 to start a new luxury development, the Summit, in Beverly Hills, but two years later what few homes had been finished remained unsold. He was forced to borrow another three million dollars just to pay interest on the first loan, then added a second mortgage.
The crippling blow, though, was the fall in oil prices, which threatened to sever the last leg of Clint’s tottering financial table. The value of all his remaining oil properties fell sharply, as did real estate, and lenders began demanding more collateral to offset the drops in value; almost all of Clint’s collateral, however, was already pledged to others. For a time his balance sheet was buoyed by a rise in the stock of Kirby Exploration of Houston, a publicly held wildcatter descended from oil companies assembled decades earlier by John Henry Kirby; Big Clint had purchased a controlling stake in the company from Kirby’s estate in 1956. On the promise of a new natural gas field, Kirby’s shares leaped as high as forty-five dollars in early 1981; Clint wasted no time leveraging the increase into another big loan. But when the field failed to pan out, the stock cratered, within months falling to thirteen dollars. Clint was left staring at a hundred-million-dollar loss, along with another lender angrily demanding more collateral for his loan.
Through it all Clint remained a picture of optimism, assuring his men everything would be fine once interest rates fell. In 1982 he decided to go on the offensive, snaring tens of millions of dollars in new loans to start or finish developments in Palm Springs, New Orleans, and other Sun Belt cities. Almost all this money came from out-of-state lenders who, unlike the Dallas banks, had little sense how deep Clint’s troubles actually ran. He began paying quiet visits to lenders in New York and St. Louis and Memphis. His calling card was always the Cowboys. Clint would talk football with goggle-eyed Bucks and Bubbas at some middle-market bank in Atlanta and walk away with another ten or twenty million that by month’s end would be used to pay another bank. In time, though, word spread, and Clint began trolling for money in murkier waters. Among his lenders of last resort, his lawyers would later disclose, was a Louisiana banker named Herman K. Beebe, whose known associates included the New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. In 1985 Beebe would be sentenced to a year in prison for bank fraud.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was as his financial condition reached a crisis point in early 1981 that Clint found God. Over time, Anne had simply worn him down. He had been attending church with her for several years, and at her insistence had even sworn off alcohol; the days of cocaine and multiple mistresses were now just a fading memory. When Anne began hosting Bible classes at the mansion in 1978, Clint sat on the edges of the group, half listening. In time he moved his chair in a bit and began asking questions. Then, in 1981, Clint went to see Anne’s pastor, Olen Griffing. Griffing’s church, the Shady Grove Church in Irving, was a thirty-minute drive and a world apart from everything Clint had ever known. Its blue-collar membership was made up of hard-core fundamentalists who shouted and sang and spoke in tongues.
Griffing had seen this coming. As his finances tightened, Clint had occasionally asked him about his beliefs, including a long discussion on the beach at Spanish Cay; he showed a special interest in how a man could become “saved.” Now Clint said he was prepared to give his life to Christ. Griffing suspected Anne was behind the approach, but Clint denied it. One day in the fall of 1981 Griffing drove to the mansion. Clint opened the door in his swim trunks. Together the two men waded into one of the swimming pools. When Clint was ready, Griffing dunked him beneath the water and baptized him. The ceremony was followed by a formal baptism, with Anne standing alongside, at the Shady Grove Church one Sunday that December. Follow the word of God, Griffing intoned, and all your sins will be washed away. The pastor had no idea, of course, how many sins there had been.
Clint knew. As he studied the Bible, they weighed heavily on his mind. He became convinced he would need to pay for his sins. And at some point, apparently in mid-1981, the Lord delivered the check. In truth Clint had known something was wrong for at least two years. His walk had grown unsteady. At times he had trouble maintaining his balance. In early 1982 he fell on a Cowboys flight and broke two ribs. When he began to “wobble,” as he put it, friends assumed he had fallen off the wagon. Finally Clint had tests run. They revealed he was suffering from a rare degenerative nerve disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy, or OPCA. Related to Parkinson’s, OPCA is one of several diseases known as “Parkinson’s Plus” because they attack all across the central nervous system. For now Clint was just “wobbly.” In the future, doctors told him, maybe a year, maybe five, he would suffer tremors, mild at first, then worse. Eventually he would lose the ability to speak. And he would die. No one could say how long he had.
Clint, now fifty-eight, took the news with grace. But he knew in his heart why he was sick. His son Robert later recalled a Bible-study session at the mansion not long after Clint’s diagnosis. Another attendee suddenly asked Clint if he understood what had caused his illness. “I think,” Clint replied, “that it’s because of my past sins.”2
III.
John Jr. would not forgive, and he would not forget. In October 1981, at roughly the same time Clint underwent baptism in his swimming pool, his nephew’s attorneys scored their first victory, persuading a Dallas court to make Clint release six million dollars in Optimum Systems stock held in John’s trust. That left twenty-four million dollars John still wanted, and in December he attempted to capitalize on his success with a settlement offer. In broad strokes, he offered to drop his claim for thirty million dollars in damages if Clint would just release the last twenty-four million dollars in his trust. John Jr. then revealed his trump card. If Clint didn’t settle, his attorneys made clear, his nephew was poised to go public with details of Clint’s financial condition. If he did, Clint’s attorneys advised, it could initiate a feeding
frenzy. Each of Clint’s banks knew but one side of the elephant; if they realized how sick the entire animal was, it could release a flood tide of lawsuits as each attempted to lay legal claims before the others. There was no way Murchison Brothers could survive such a run. It would mean bankruptcy.
Clint, distracted by his illness and the demands of feeding the banks, dragged his heels about making a decision for more than a year. In April 1983 he finally gave in, handing over John Jr.’s twenty-four million dollars and shifting the debt encumbering his late brother’s assets to his own. He knew it had to be done, but his greatest fear appeared to be the specter of his faltering finances splashed across the newspapers. He could just see it: the vast Murchison empire, Big Clint’s legacy, the second-greatest family fortune in all Texas, ruined by his own stupidity. Surrendering to his nephew, however, did nothing to calm family tensions. Once John Jr. got his trust money, his sisters wanted theirs. Lupe, too, began making noises about finally removing her family’s assets from the Murchison Brothers partnership. A series of meetings ensued between Lupe’s family and Clint’s, dozens of attorneys and accountants crammed into conference rooms on the twenty-third floor.
For Clint, it was unbearably sad. By and large the meetings remained civil, but everyone involved understood that if some kind of agreement couldn’t be worked out, they were headed for years in court and years of humiliating headlines. “Everyone was threatening to sue everyone else,” one person in the room recalled. “It didn’t matter that these people were family.” By late 1983 the outlines of an omnibus settlement had emerged. All the children would get their trusts. Lupe would gain control of most of John’s remaining investments. Clint left the negotiating table with a mound of debt, a collection of companies leveraged to the hilt, a stack of message slips from angry bankers—and the Cowboys. To those closest to him, Clint appeared to take solace that at least he still owned America’s Team. As long as he still had the Cowboys, he was still Clint Murchison.
Numbers are cruel things, though, and Clint knew what they said. At first he just mused about what the team was actually worth. In early 1983, just as he was settling with John Jr., he had a friend send out quiet feelers; in no time, he received an offer for forty million dollars. Clint brushed it aside. “Thanks,” he said, “but you know, selling the Cowboys would be like selling one of my kids.”3 When rumors of a sale hit the papers, Clint’s men reluctantly confirmed them, lamely fibbing that it might be needed to settle John’s estate.
By now Clint had grown visibly ill. The tremors had begun. His hands shook. He began using a cane. His businesses were even sicker. Finally, in the spring of 1983, Clint called Tex Schramm to the mansion. The two men had been together twenty-four years; Schramm was the only general manager the Cowboys had ever known, and he was immensely fond of Clint who, unlike so many sports-team owners, had never interfered with his work. The Cowboys, if no longer the goliaths they had been a decade before, were still thriving. They had made it to three more Super Bowls in the 1970s, winning in 1978, but after Roger Staubach’s retirement following the 1979 season, it became clear America’s Team had peaked. Their decline, in fact, exactly paralleled Clint’s. Between 1980 and 1982 Dallas lost three straight NFC championship games. Yet the Cowboys’ image as America’s foremost sports franchise—their only rivals were the New York Yankees—was as strong as ever. Clint’s players still popped up in movies and television shows and loads of commercials, Tom Landry shilling for American Express, Charlie Waters and D. D. Lewis for Lite Beer, Randy White for Dannon Yogurt.
That day at the mansion, Clint broke the news to Schramm: It was time to sell. He blamed his health. Schramm handled the ensuing auction. Offers poured in from across the country, but Clint wanted the Cowboys to remain in Texas hands. In late 1983 Schramm reached a tentative deal with a group of eleven Dallas investors led by the oilman H. R. “Bum” Bright. The offer was sixty-five million dollars for the team, plus twenty-five million dollars for the lease on Texas Stadium; it would be the highest price ever paid for an American sports team. John Jr., whose side of the family still owned half the team, warned Lupe that Clint might try to reduce the team’s price tag in favor of more money for the stadium lease, which Clint alone controlled. His concerns slowed the closing for months, but on March 19, 1984, the deal finally went through: the Cowboys, the team that had been Dallas’s salvation during the dark days of the 1960s, that had symbolized a new Texas in the 1970s, and that had briefly made Clint Murchison King of all Texans, were no longer his. The Dallas newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches praising Clint’s legacy, practically elevating him to Texas sainthood. Not a word, however, was written of how quickly Clint’s hungry banks snapped up the sale’s proceeds to satisfy his debts.
In those last ugly years, it seemed that every time Clint struck a deal to rescue himself, it spawned more trouble. The dissolution agreement in 1978 begat John Jr.’s attacks; the settlement with John Jr. begat squabbling with Lupe and her daughters. So it was with the sale of the Cowboys. Clint had begun missing debt payments at least a year earlier. The first lawsuits had come in November 1983; a Cleveland bank charged that Clint owed two million dollars on a meager four-million-dollar loan. A week later a bank in Paris sued, seeking four million dollars. In March 1984, just as the Cowboys were sold, an Arkansas savings and loan hit him with a suit demanding twenty million dollars. In short order another sought twenty-five million dollars.
After the Cowboys sale, the legal dam burst. With Clint’s last healthy asset gone, dozens of lenders, realizing the Murchison cupboard was all but bare, raced to lay claim to what remained. Citicorp sued. Merrill Lynch sued. Even one of the banks Clint owned, Nevada National, sued. By Labor Day 1984 it seemed there was a new suit every day. Clint was no longer in any shape to fight back. He had taken to a wheelchair. He stopped coming into the office. When the lawyers needed him, they went to the mansion. By Christmas even that was under threat. To their horror, Clint’s attorneys discovered that in his scramble for cash Clint had been personally guaranteeing loans, meaning that lenders could now foreclose not just on Murchison Brothers assets, but on Clint’s home, his cars, his farms—everything. In early December a Fort Worth bank, desperate to retrieve $9.7 million, filed notice it planned to auction off the twenty-four acres of land surrounding the mansion. During a court hearing it came out that it was only one of sixteen banks with liens on the land. Only a restraining order arranged by Clint’s lawyers allowed him to remain in his home for Christmas.
At the mansion, Clint sat in his wheelchair, staring, waiting. Just as the doctors had predicted, he had been losing his ability to speak, and as a series of winter storms coated Dallas in a silvery coating of ice, his voice disappeared forever. His creditors, their claims now approaching $175 million, began telephoning his doctors at Sloan-Kettering, demanding to know how long he had. But if Clint’s body was failing, his mind remained sharp. In January he hired a new lawyer, Philip I. Palmer, and with Palmer’s help he devised an audacious bailout plan. It depended on warm memories—those of his father’s oldest friend. Palmer placed the call, to a glass skyscraper thirty miles to the west. And then, hoping a deal could be struck, they invited attorneys representing more than thirty of Clint’s creditors to a meeting at the mansion on Friday, February 1.
That morning the sun rose on a scene from a chicken-fried Citizen Kane. The great man, ailing but still alert, all but alone in his vast mansion; his hundreds of handpicked live oaks and azalea bushes encased in armor of uncaring ice; the dark-suited attorneys in their BMWs and Mercedes creeping up the slickened driveway from Forest Lane, jaws dropping as they caught their first glimpse of Dallas’s Shangri-la. All had read of the Big Rich. Few had seen their lives up close. More than one simply shook his head. How had it come to this?
Inside, everyone gathered in the living room. They watched as a servant pushed Clint into the room in his wheelchair. He didn’t speak; he couldn’t. Philip Palmer did the talking. As the lawyers leaned fo
rward in their chairs, Palmer announced that Clint had tentatively agreed to a bailout package, a massive cash infusion coupled with plans to develop or sell eight of Murchison Brothers’ largest real estate developments around the country. His rescuer, Palmer revealed, was none other than Sid Richardson’s great-nephew, Bob Bass. It was a moment of surpassing poignancy. Forty-four years earlier it had been Clint Murchison Sr. who gave Sid Richardson the loans he needed to survive the bleakest years of the Depression. Now, Big Clint’s son slouched in his wheelchair fully aware that Sid Bass and his brothers had since achieved everything he hadn’t, that while the Basses were investing in Wall Street stocks and high-tech start-ups, he had been snorting cocaine.
Now, it appeared, the Basses would return Big Clint’s long-ago favors. One of Bob Bass’s men was there, and as the lawyers broke into groups, they pressed him how real this rescue package was. From his answers they gathered it wasn’t; everything appeared to be in the discussion stages. One of the creditor attorneys argued that Clint should be forced into involuntary bankruptcy. Others objected, fearing the consequences if he somehow managed to recover. Afterward everyone tried to shake Clint’s hand, wished him the best, and drove out beneath the ice-covered trees with nothing resolved. Within days, to no one’s surprise, the promise of a Bass-family rescue dissolved like a West Texas mirage. A week later a trio of creditors, led by Citibank, decided enough was enough. They asked a Dallas federal court to place Murchison Brothers in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. After that Clint had no choice. On February 22, 1985, his attorneys asked the court to convert the petition into a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was over.
