by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
“There’s hardly any oil and gas production in a 40-mile radius of Houston,” Mayor Bill White told Slate in 2008. “It’s the knowledge that has concentrated here that is driving things.”
As its oil reserves shrank, Texas discovered new sources of wealth, which has gone a long way toward smoothing its rough edges. Texas is far more urban, and far more educated, than it was fifty years ago. More Fortune 500 companies are based there than in any other state. The epicenter of its mid-1990s economic recovery was Austin, where a University of Texas kid named Michael Dell started a computer company that transformed the area into a salsafied Silicon Valley. Dell is the smiling face of the new Texas, at least the one chambers of commerce exalt. There are still plenty of wealthy oilmen in Houston and Dallas, but at charity dinners they sit beside just as many wealthy electronics and engineering CEOs. When Forbes published its list of the richest Americans in 2007, the wealthiest person in Texas wasn’t even an oilman. It was Michael Dell. The richest Texas oilman, Dan Duncan, ranked 39th. Of the Big Four families, it’s no surprise, the Basses remain the wealthiest; Robert Bass, at $5.5 billion, ranked 57th, Sid and Lee at $3 billion, 117th, and Ed, $2.5 billion, down at 165th. The only Hunt to make the list was Ray, with $4 billion, who ranked 82nd. None of the Murchisons or Cullens even make the list anymore.
It’s startling how quickly people forget the men who made so much of this possible. When Glenn McCarthy died in 1988, the Houston Post headline actually termed him “happy-go-lucky,” about the furthest thing from what he was. Today, outside the oil museums in East Texas and Midland and at Spindletop, you have to look hard to find monuments to the Big Rich. The Shamrock is long gone. The Cowboys will leave Texas Stadium for a new home in Arlington soon; Clint Jr.’s landmark facility will probably be torn down. The home Big Clint built in the 1930s is gone now, as is Clint Jr.’s mansion; both were razed to make way for subdivisions.
The Basses have left far more footprints, beginning with all those Sid Richardson university buildings and youth camps. The family’s most visible legacy remains downtown Fort Worth, much of it revitalized with the help of Bass money. Perry Bass, who died in 2006 at the age of ninety-one, also gave millions to his alma mater, Yale; today the university has a Perry R. Bass Center for Molecular and Structural Biology. His son Robert gave $13 million to refurbish the Yale library, now known as The Bass Library. In Dallas, Ray Hunt’s Reunion Center still shapes the downtown skyline; his half sister Caroline’s Mansion on Turtle Creek remains one of the state’s finest restaurants. Down in Houston, the Cullens built a skyscraper, the Cullen Center, on the edge of downtown in the 1960s. The family office is still there, on a high floor. Oscar Wyatt, the cantankerous oilman recently convicted of paying bribes to Saddam Hussein, lived in Roy Cullen’s old mansion for forty years. A new oilman has moved in now, a nice fellow, neighbors say.
The Cullens have remained out of the public eye since their last dustup with the Baron Enrico di Portanova, who relaunched his legal assault on the family in the late 1970s. At the time, it was the largest probate case ever brought in the United States, front-page news in the Wall Street Journal. The Baron, alas, lost the case, once and for all. He died of lung cancer in Houston in 2000. His 28-bedroom Acapulco mansion, Arabesque, used in the James Bond film License to Kill, went on the market a few years back. Asking price: $29 million. Roy Cullen’s most prominent son-in-law, Corbin Robertson, died in 1991. His son, Corbin Jr., known as “Corby,” runs Quintana today and has branched into private equity, buying a string of energy-related companies, as well as several West Virginia coal companies.
In Fort Worth, Lee Bass still runs the family’s oil-related businesses, the heart of which remain Sid Richardson’s West Texas and Louisiana oil-fields; the Louisiana fields were hit hard during Hurricane Katrina. A well-regarded civic leader, Lee sold one of his great uncle’s last assets, a West Texas pipeline company, for $1.6 billion in 2005; ironically, the buyer was Southern Union, the company Clint Murchison founded so many years ago. Ed Bass dabbles in real estate. Robert Bass remains an active investor and philanthropist. According to associates, he also remains estranged from Sid, who splits his time between homes in Fort Worth and on New York’s Fifth Avenue. St. Joe’s, now renamed San Jose Island, is still the Bass family’s private retreat. Richard Rainwater, now based in South Carolina, is one of America’s preeminent investors, as are several other Bass alumni.
Many of the Murchison grandchildren remain in the Dallas area. Clint Jr.’s sons fished several family assets out of the ruins of bankruptcy and quietly run them to this day. They don’t have much to do with the other side of the family. John Murchison’s widow, Lupe, died a few years back. Jane Murchison Haber remained active in volunteer activities in Dallas and New York for years. She died in 2001. Clint Jr.’s second wife, Anne, is still alive and living in East Texas, where she has a Web site devoted to religious writings and poetry. Not long ago Clint Jr.’s son Burk published a recipe book based on his childhood vacations at Spanish Cay, now long sold.
When I spoke to Burk and his brother Robert, they expressed concern that I might delve into the tawdrier aspects of their father’s life, especially his drug use, which they strongly deny. Both speak lovingly of Clint Jr. and want readers to know that whatever his flaws, he was a brilliant and sensitive man, a caring father and an inspiration to them all. “At the end of his life he made some bad decisions, and listened to people with bad advice,” Robert told me. “But he was always a man of honor, a man of his word.”
Many of H. L. Hunt’s heirs remain prominent in Dallas; between children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, there are more than one hundred Hunts in all. After years as a beloved civic volunteer, Margaret Hunt Hill died in 2007; one of her grandsons is now suing his father and uncles for a greater share of his inheritance. Hassie Hunt died in 2005. Lamar remained active in sports circles for years, cofounding Major League Soccer in 1996 and owning two of its franchises; he died in 2006. His sister Caroline owns a string of chic hotels; her net worth has been estimated at $600 million. One of H.L.’s daughters by Ruth, Swanee Hunt, was President Clinton’s ambassador to Austria, then founded the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her sister June remains an evangelist with her own radio program broadcast from Dallas. Frania Tye Lee died in 2002 at the age of ninety-eight. All her children, after belatedly accepting their settlement with the Hunts in the early 1980s, have passed away.
Both Placid Oil and Penrod Drilling were sold off during the 1990s; Bunker sued in vain to block the Placid sale, saying it wasn’t what his father would have wanted. All told, Bunker and Herbert’s combined losses from the crash in oil prices and their boneheaded silver play have been widely estimated at about $5 billion. After years of legal wrangling, the two brothers finally sorted out their troubles with the government in 1994. Together they agreed to turn over about $140 million in fines and back taxes; part of that went to the State of New York, where a jury found them guilty on civil charges of conspiring to corner the silver market. While embroiled in corporate and personal bankruptcies, Bunker was obliged to sell off many of his assets, including his Circle T ranch and all his thoroughbred racehorses. In a single day in 1988, he sold 580 horses for almost $47 million.
Not that either brother will be accepting charity anytime soon. Bunker emerged from his legal travails with a net worth estimated at $175 million, thanks to a private trust that lay outside his creditors’ reach; Herbert’s wealth was believed to be in the same range. Both plunged back into business, this time separately. Herbert called his new company Petro-Hunt, which his family runs today. Bunker has a small oil company, too, and by 2000 he was doing well enough to begin buying racehorses again. By 2004 he owned almost eighty. He and Herbert, now both in their mid-eighties, continue to live quietly in Dallas.
It’s hard to know what H. L. Hunt or Clint Murchison or Roy Cullen would think of America today. They would probably hate it; Lord knows it wouldn’t t
hink much of them. No doubt their hearts would have warmed to see the White House run for eight years by a true conservative, and a Texas oilman at that. All the trickles of conservative sentiment they nurtured going back to the 1930s joined a rushing river of conservatism that put first Ronald Reagan in office, then George H. W. Bush, then his son, populating the halls of Congress with thorny troublemakers like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and Phil Gramm. Texas oil money didn’t put any of them in office, not by itself, but all that cash, along with a brash Texas spirit, long ago empowered a state that might have gone down as just another Mississippi or Alabama. Texas oil, and to a degree the Big Four families, brought true national power to the state, and it’s a power America grapples with to this day.
THANK YOUS
There’re a lot of folks to thank on a book like this, beginning with Scott Moyers, who first suggested I write something about Texas oil. Scott began this project as my editor and ended up as one of my agents, which is a story in itself. Thanks also to Scott’s new colleagues, my longtime agents, Andrew Wylie and Jeff Posternak, and to Brian Siberell at the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.
Much of the on-site work for The Big Rich was done in Texas libraries and courthouses. I’d like to thank the very helpful staff at the Special Collections room at the University of Houston, which houses, among its many valuable archives, the papers of George Fuermann; the Center for American History and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas at Austin; the Rice University library in Houston; the Permian Basin Oil Museum in Midland; the Angelo State University Library in San Angelo; the public library in Houston, which holds certain papers of John Henry Kirby; the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty, which holds the papers of Martin Dies; the Special Collections room at the University of Texas Arlington Library, which holds the papers of both George Armstrong and Ida Darden; the Texas Tech University library in Lubbock; the Henderson County Historical Society in Athens; the Rosenburg Library in Galveston; as well as the public libraries in Dallas, Austin, Beaumont, Fort Worth, Galveston, Midland, Monahans, Odessa, Kermit, Athens, Mexia, Temple, Waco, and Wichita Falls.
At the Cullen Foundation in Houston, Alan Stewart was a gracious guide to the family’s history. Thanks to Carl Freund, Joseph Pratt at the University of Houston, and Stephen Fox at Rice University for invaluable guidance. At the Equitable Insurance Company, Jon Cross uncovered scads of information in the corporate archives on the company’s unfortunate dealings with Glenn McCarthy. A special thanks to Sid Richardson’s “old family friend,” who insisted on remaining anonymous; I could not have assembled so complete a picture of Richardson’s life without this person’s help. In New York, John Ortved and Chris Bateman were indefatigable researchers who helped track down hard-to-find newspaper and magazine articles. Melissa Goldstein collected all the photos. Thanks to Doug Stumpf and Marla Burrough for reading the manuscript, and to my new editor, Laura Stickney, for whipping it into fighting shape. Thanks as well to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, the best boss a writer could possibly have.
Many thanks to my parents, Mac and Mary Burrough of Temple, Texas, for inspiration, shelter, and sympathetic ears, and to Paul Kerr, for being a great friend to our family. And last, but never least, all my love to Marla, Griffin, and Dane, for everything.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: “THERE’S SOMETHING DOWN THER E …”
1 Daniel Yergin. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 86-89.
CHAPTER 2: THE CREEKOLOGIST
The principal source for this chapter is Roy Cullen’s authorized biography, Hugh Roy Cullen: A Story of American Opportunity by Kilman and Wright. Additional material was drawn from an unpublished manuscript by Ed Kilman, held in the Cullen family archives in Houston, as well as various newspaper articles that accompanied Cullen’s gifts to the University of Houston in 1937 and at his death.
1 Cited in Diana Davids Olien and Roger M. Olien. Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895-1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 9.
2 Kilman and Wright, 130.
3 Cited in “Lillie and Me,” unpublished manuscript, held in Cullen family storeroom.
4 Unpublished Kilman manuscript.
5 Kilman and Wright, 141-42.
CHAPTER 3: SID AND CLINT
The principal sources of information about Clint Murchison’s early years are his authorized biography, Clint, by his longtime secretary, Ernestine Orrick Van Buren, and The Murchisons by Jane Wolfe. The story of Sid Richardson’s early years is taken from several magazine articles published in the 1950s, especially “The Billionaire Bachelor” (Collier’s, 1954); a biographical essay published by Richardson’s longtime secretary’s son, contained in archives at the Henderson County Historical Society; land and deed records in Ward, Winkler, and Henderson Counties; plus the recollections of a longtime family friend.
1 Wolfe, 31.
2 Van Buren, 40.
CHAPTER 4: THE BIGAMIST AND THE BOOM
The principal source for information about H. L. Hunt’s early years is Hunt’s self-published Hunt Heritage. Additional information is drawn from Texas Rich by Harry Hurt and H.L. and Lyda by Hunt’s oldest daughter, Margaret Hunt Hill. Information about Hunt’s relationship with Frania Tye is derived from Hurt, with several scenes derived from Hill. Background on Dad Joiner and the East Texas field is taken from many sources, notably The Last Boom by Michel Halbouty and James Clark. The best summary of Hunt’s dealings with Joiner is Hurt, augmented by contemporary newspaper reports.
1 Hunt, Hunt Heritage, 88.
CHAPTER 5: THE WORST OF TIMES, THE BEST OF TIMES
Information in this chapter was derived from a variety of sources. The story of Murchison’s work in the early 1930s is taken from Van Buren, Clint; Wolfe, The Murchisons; and Southern Union by N. P. Chesnutt. Information about Cullen and West’s sale to Humble was found in History of Humble Oil & Refining Company by Henrietta M. Larson and Kenneth Wiggins Porter. The story of the Tom O’Connor field is told in Kilman and Wright. Information about George Strake and the Conroe field is derived from a 1956 commemorative booklet written by Patrick O’Bryan, as well as interviews with George Strake Jr. The story of Sid Richardson’s work during the Depression is derived from a variety of sources, including Van Buren and land and lease records filed in Winkler County. Information about Richardson’s various loans is taken from Winkler County records. Information about Richardson’s relationship with Charles E. Marsh is derived from unpublished correspondence between the two men contained in the Marsh papers at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
1 Van Buren, 100.
2 Ibid.
3 James Presley, Saga of Wealth: The Rise of the Texas Oilman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 116.
CHAPTER 6: THE BIG RICH
Information in this chapter was derived from a variety of sources. The story of Murchison’s life during the 1930s is taken from Wolfe and Van Buren. The story of Richardson’s life during the 1930s is taken from the recollections of “The Old Friend,” as well as Van Buren. Perry Bass’s recollections of St. Joe’s are taken from Aransas; The Life of a Texas Coastal County by William Allen and Sue Hastings Taylor. Richardson’s home is described in The Architecture of O’Neil Ford by David Dillon. The story of Cullen’s life during the 1930s is taken from newspaper clippings contained in the Cullen archives; interviews with his grandson, Roy Cullen; as well as Kilman and Wright. Information about Hunt is principally derived from Hurt and Hill.
1 Wolfe, 101.
2 Van Buren, 283.
3 David Dillon, The Architecture of O’Neil Ford (Austin: University of Texas Press), 1999.
4 Fuermann, Reluctant Empire, 38.
5 Hill, 115-17.
6 Ibid., 110.
7 Hurt, 134.
8 Hill, 211-13.
9 Ibid., 214-16.
10 Hurt, 128-30.
11 Ibid., 133.
12 I
bid.
CHAPTER 7: BIRTH OF THE ULTRACONSERVATIVES
Information in this chapter is derived from a variety of books and Texas archives, including the George W. Armstrong papers at the University of Texas Arlington; the Maco Stewart papers at The Rosenberg Library in Galveston; and the John Henry Kirby papers at the Houston Public Library. Biographical information on Kirby is taken from contemporary accounts as well as John Henry Kirby by Mary Lasswell. Kirby’s activities with Vance Muse are described in The Establishment in Texas Politics by George Norris Green, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles. The story of Richardson and Murchison’s dealings with the Roosevelts is derived from IRS depositions contained in the Westbrook Pegler papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.
1 Cited in William Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek.
2 Cited in correspondence, George Armstrong papers, University of Texas Arlington.
3 Letter, Lewis Valentine Ulrey to J. Frank Norris, April 25, 1938, contained in Maco Stewart papers, The Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas.
4 Cited in Barney Farley, Fishing Yesterday’s Gulf Coast (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2002).
