Bryan Burrough Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE - “There’s Something Down There …”

  TWO - The Creekologist

  THREE - Sid and Clint

  FOUR - The Bigamist and the Boom

  FIVE - The Worst of Times, the Best of Times

  SIX - The Big Rich

  SEVEN - Birth of the Ultraconservatives

  EIGHT - War and Peace

  NINE - The New World

  TEN - “A Clumsy and Immeasurable Power”

  ELEVEN - “Troglodyte, Genus Texana”

  TWELVE - The Golden Years

  THIRTEEN - Rising Sons

  FOURTEEN - Sun, Sex, Spaghetti—and Murder

  FIFTEEN - Watergate, Texas-style

  SIXTEEN - The Last Boom

  SEVENTEEN - The Great Silver Caper

  EIGHTEEN - The Bust

  EPILOGUE

  THANK YOUS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY BRYAN BURROUGH

  Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (with John Helyar)

  Dragonfly: An Epic Adventure of Survival in Outer Space

  Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Banking Rival Edmond Safra

  Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934

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  First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,

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  Copyright © Bryan Burrough, 2009

  All rights reserved.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Burrough, Bryan, 1961-

  The big rich : the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oil fortunes / Bryan Burrough.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68603-0

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  To Marla, and to Griffin and Dane

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s hard to tell people about Texas. It is. It’s hard to explain what it means to be a Texan. To anyone who grew up in the North, it probably means nothing. The idea of a state “identity,” or that a state’s citizens might adopt it as part of their own self-image, seems a quaint, almost antebellum notion. Folks in Iowa don’t strut around introducing themselves as Iowans, at least none I know.

  But if you grew up in Texas, as I did, it becomes a part of you, as if you’re a member of a club. It’s a product of the state’s enduring, and to my mind endearing, parochialism, a genetic tie to the days when Texas was a stand-alone nation born of its own fight for independence, which produced its own set of national myths. Ohio doesn’t have an Alamo. I’m not sure Ohioans, as wonderful as they are, have a distinct culture. As a child I was always vaguely ashamed I wasn’t born in Texas. I’ll never forget the day a boy in my fifth-grade class actually called me a carpetbagger. How on earth would he even know what that was?

  The myths about Texas die so hard, mostly because Texans love them so. So much of it is wrapped up in oil. Non-Texans probably think it’s all-pervasive; it’s not. The fact is, growing up in Central Texas during the 1970s, I never met an actual oilman. There were a few pump jacks out in the fields around our little town, but we never gave a thought to who owned them. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, the weekend I served as an escort at Waco’s Cotton Palace debutante ball, that I was introduced to the class of Texans known as the Big Rich: boys from Highland Park and River Oaks in white dinner jackets and gleaming hair, willowy Hockaday girls with enormous eyes and glistening jewels. Ogling them from within my rumpled rented tux, they seemed like royalty.

  And they were, Texas royalty at least. They had flasks in their pockets and talked of boarding schools and weekends in Las Vegas and the wine in Paris and jetting to London and my head just spun and spun and spun. It wasn’t for another five years that, as a cub reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Dallas and later in Houston, I began to read—and write a little—about the Big Rich. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were the years, the early and mid-1980s, when their era was ending. The fathers of those boys from River Oaks were going bankrupt; their buildings were being sold or torn down. The state was completing a decades-long maturation, and the new Texas, chockablock with northern-owned corporations and Yankee executives and their shimmering office parks, was fast becoming something different and somehow artificial, a Texas-flavored Ohio. Something was being lost.

  I haven’t lived in Texas for twenty years, but in some ways I’ve never left. My parents are still there. I visit often. Still, when my editor suggested some kind of book on Texas oil, I was surprised how quickly a structure sprang to mind. It took barely thirty seconds, in fact. It would be not about the oil industry per se but about the great Texas oil families, the ones who generated all those myths. The Hunts. The Basses. The Murchisons. The Cullens. I thought of them as the Big Four, though it wasn’t until I began my research that I found they had been called exactly that, although not since the 1950s.

  This book is built on three years of research, during which I plunged into dozens of Texas and out-of-state archives, interviewed surviving members of the Big Four families, and read more than two hundred books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. Some of the choicest information I found in county courthouses, in the mammoth, musty suitcase-sized ledger books where Texas clerks for decades scrawled out the minutiae of land records, oil leases, and lawsuits.
The published literature is hefty but uneven, and hasn’t been refreshed since the great bankruptcies of the 1980s. There have been four books published on the Hunts, two on the Murchisons, one on Roy Cullen, and nothing but bits of journalism on the Basses and their paterfamilias, Sid Richardson. The best of these are Harry Hurt III’s 1981 history of the Hunts, Texas Rich, and Jane Wolfe’s 1989 The Murchisons. Both books are definitive; I’ve done my best to add new material to their stories despite having far fewer pages to use, a product of telling all four families’ tales at once. Also of great help were books written by the foremost historian of the Texas oil industry, Roger Olien.

  These and other histories served as a starting point to explore the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oilmen, many of whom are fast being forgotten. There’s never been anything lasting written about Houston’s flamboyant Glenn McCarthy, though there should be; it’s hard to find anyone under sixty who remembers a Texas legend so famous in his day he adorned the cover of Time. There’s been even less written about the secretive Sid Richardson, once the richest man in America. My research led into areas other historians have downplayed or ignored, notably the Big Four’s involvement in national politics. Texas Oil’s contribution to America’s rightward shift in recent decades became a major theme for me. I mean, the Bushes had to come from somewhere.

  This book is what you might call an engineered history; that is, I’ve superimposed a narrative framework onto disparate events that may be familiar to Texans of a certain age. There are concepts introduced here with which some academic historians may disagree, such as the idea that Texas oil wealth was “discovered” by the national press in 1948. The story of the Big Four’s introduction to, and ignominious departure from, Washington politics during the 1950s has likewise never been told; few realized what was happening at the time, and even fewer wrote about it afterward. In fact, the very idea that the highwater years of the Big Four constituted an “era” from 1920 until about 1986 is likely to be challenged in a state where, when I was growing up at least, every student took a year of Texas history in the seventh grade.

  The joys of writing this book were multitude. There’s nothing I love more than cruising the Texas back country. It’s beautiful land, calming, serene. Before working on this book, I thought I knew the state well. Then one morning in 2005 I was in far West Texas heading out of Midland on Rural Route 91, out toward the state’s most remote corner, Winkler County, in the crook of the elbow where southeastern New Mexico tucks into the Texas border. There’s nothing but barbed wire and blue sky for miles around, or so I thought, until I crested a rise, just east of Kermit, and entered a tableland whose view was so breathtaking I had to pull to the side.

  There, as far as the eye could see, were oil wells. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of robotic pump jacks, their metal heads bobbing up and down like metronomes, laid out from my windshield to every horizon. It was like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a lost plateau, filled not with dinosaurs but with the steel and wire and sweat of American industry. Men had been out here for years, I realized, mapping the land, drilling holes in the earth, and, I imagined, returning home to Dallas and Houston and Fort Worth with millions of dollars in their pockets. This was a Texas, an America, I had never seen, and I suddenly needed to know what became of these men and their fortunes. Their stories, it turned out, were everything I had imagined and more.

  I hope you enjoy The Big Rich. It certainly was a pleasure to write. Everything you read here is true; any errors are mine and mine alone. If you have any question or comments, feel free to e-mail me at [email protected]. I live with my wife and two sons in suburban New Jersey now, a half hour west of the Holland Tunnel. For you native Texans out there, I hope you won’t hold that against me.

  BRYAN BURROUGH

  SUMMIT, NEW JERSEY

  ONE

  “There’s Something Down There …”

  I.

  On Friday morning, January 10, 1901, the people of Beaumont, in southeast Texas, woke beneath their blankets to a chill dawn, the winds of a rare blue Norther whistling past the buckboards and wagons bumping along the unpaved downtown streets. Splayed along the banks of the Neches River, about fifteen miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, Beaumont was a lumberman’s town, ringed by sawmills that split and cut the giant tree trunks railroad cars brought in from East Texas.

  Four miles southwest of town, out on the barren coastal moors pockmarked with marshes and sinkholes, rose a lonely mound. Cattle nibbled grass all around it. The locals called it the Big Hill, but it was hardly a hill at all, more a bump on the earth, barely fifteen feet high. The prairie grasses, waving now in the north wind, gave way at its crest to a whitish spray of alkali, making it look like a grandfather’s balding head. The older children sometimes tried to scare the little ones by saying the Big Hill was haunted. There were legends the pirate Jean Lafitte had buried treasure there. Sometimes at night you could see strange dancing lights. The Big Hill certainly smelled satanic, owing to the sulfur springs that spat and bubbled all around its weary base.

  Atop the mound, silhouetted against the gray morning sky, stood the skeleton of an oil derrick, a latticework triangle of wood, sixty-four feet high. At its base that morning two men could be seen working, a square-jawed young man named Curt Hamill and his helper, Peck Byrd. At around nine, a buckboard pulled up below. Their boss, Curt’s brother Al, trudged up the hill with a new drill bit. The old one had ground to pieces the day before when they struck solid rock.

  The Hamills, honest, strongly built men known for working themselves to exhaustion, were water-well drillers who had switched to oil three years earlier, nursing the odd trickle of crude out of the ground at Corsicana, south of Dallas. Called to Beaumont, they had been working this new well for seven weeks now, reaching eleven hundred feet, and they had already found the rainbow sheen of oil in the muck they drew from below. They told no one but the owner, who instructed them to drill deeper. Yet even that modest showing of oil would surprise folks in Beaumont. Most everyone around town thought they were daft to be looking for oil here anyway. Everyone knew the only serious oil under American soil was back east, in Pennsylvania, or up north, in Kansas.

  When Al brought up the new bit, he and Curt attached it to the drill stem, then began lowering steel pipe into the hole. Curt clambered high on the derrick, onto the swivel boards, where he worked the elevator wires as the pipe slowly disappeared into the earth. An hour later they had fed thirty-five joints of pipe into the hole, reaching seven hundred feet or so, when suddenly the pipe began to shake violently. A moment later, the rig began to shudder and quake.

  As the Hamills watched, dumbstruck, reddish-brown drilling mud began to bubble up from the hole, slowly at first, then faster, till the entire drilling platform was awash. With the rush of mud came a hissing sound, then a gurgling, as if some giant beast below was spitting up. Beneath them the Big Hill began to rumble. The flow of drilling mud began to jump and leap, creating a fountain right there in front of them. Then, suddenly, the fountain exploded, an eruption of mud that shot straight up into the morning sky high above the derrick.

  Al and Peck Byrd dived to the side, rolling beneath a barbed-wire fence. The geyser of mud drenched Curt, high on the swivel boards, momentarily blinding him. He leaped for the ladder and skittered to the ground like a circus acrobat, though years later he would say he had no memory of doing so. Al yelled for him to run, but Curt paused. Now rocks began to shoot out of the hole, firing into the sky and falling around them. With them came the rotten-egg smell of natural gas. The traveling block, caught in the geyser, began to lift off the ground, and Curt saw that if it hit the top of the derrick, it could destroy everything. Bravely wading through the rain of mud and rocks, Curt wobbled across the derrick floor and kicked out the clutch, stopping the machinery. Then he dived out, rolling down toward Al.

  Just then drill pipe began shooting out of the hole, tons of it, rocketing up through the crown block, destroying the top of
the derrick. The pipe surged high in the air, then broke into sections, tumbling back to the ground as the men covered their heads. After a moment Curt took his shirttail and cleared his eyes. It was then he thought of the boiler. It was still on fire. If flames lit the gas escaping from the hole, well, Curt didn’t want to think of that. All three men crawled to their feet and ran for the boiler pit, where they took buckets of water and threw them into the firebox, dousing the flame. Then they ran. From safe spots on the hillside below, they watched as the geyser of mud slowly fell, foot by foot, then stopped.

  Silence.

  Slowly the three men crept back up the hill. The derrick still stood, just barely, but all their machinery was a wreck. To one side the drill stem, heaved from the hole during the tumult, protruded from the hillside like a thrown spear. Six inches of drilling mud covered the derrick floor. Discarded pipe lay everywhere. Al stared at it. It was rented pipe, and he knew they would have to pay for it.

  Drillers hated blowouts like this; they could ruin months of hard work. Al had just grabbed a shovel, starting the cleanup, when suddenly a six-inch plug of mud exploded from the hole like a cannon shot. Then, once again, silence enveloped the Big Hill. The men glanced at one another. Al edged toward the hole. Taking care, as if perched on the edge of a balcony, he looked down into it. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, but then he saw it: Something was down there. Something moving evenly up the hole, then receding back into the darkness. As Al watched, it flowed up again, then down again, the movement regular now. For the longest few seconds, the thing down in the shadows once again heaved toward him, then eased back. To Al Hamill, it was as if he was peering into the very heart of the Earth, and it was breathing.