Bryan Burrough (20 page)

Given the insular world of the Big Rich, it was only a matter of time before someone learned the truth. As Frania told the story years later, it happened on the evening a prominent hostess named Ruby Matthews agreed to host an introductory tea party for her at her home. Many of River Oaks’s glittering oil wives were to attend; Frania had even invited two of her girlfriends from New Orleans. Then, just as the guests began to arrive, the phone rang. On the line was a woman. She wouldn’t give her name. “I know you’re not Mrs. H. L. Hunt,” she said. “But if you give me five thousand dollars, I won’t tell what I know.”

Frania later claimed she received as many as fifty similar phone calls in the ensuing weeks. She pleaded with Hunt to do something. He sidestepped the issue, sending a letter instead. “I know you were very much distressed,” he wrote her, “and I am sorry, but don’t let them get your goat. The best of them could never be friends of ours.”

As the calls mounted, Frania became overwrought. No matter how she pleaded, Hunt would not come to her rescue. She felt abandoned. Finally she reached a breaking point. Diverting her anguish into anger at Hunt, she packed up the children and drove to Dallas, where she checked into a suite at the Adolphus and telephoned Hunt at his office.

“These are your children as well as mine,” she told him. “Come take them off my hands.” Then she drove back to Houston, leaving the four children, aged fourteen to five, at the hotel.

In River Oaks she returned to find the phone ringing. Hunt beseeched her to retrieve the children. She reluctantly did so, but the situation was fast approaching a climax. Not long after, Frania returned to Dallas. This time she demanded to see Lyda. She wanted a resolution. She wanted this to end. Hunt was almost out of options. More talk wouldn’t help. Then he thought of Margaret, now twenty-four, who had just married Al Hill. She was pregnant, and was busy overseeing construction of their home. Hunt dropped by the building site on Vassar Drive and asked her to come with him for a drive. After a few minutes in the car, he said, “You know about Frania Tye.”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “I know about Frania.”

“She is here in Dallas,” Hunt said. “She wants to meet you.”

Margaret wondered whether it was Frania or her father who wanted this meeting. “She is at the Stoneleigh Hotel,” Hunt continued. “She wants me to marry her, which I have told her I cannot and would not do.” For the first time Hunt described how he had built Frania the house in River Oaks. “She’s been threatening to call Mom,” he said.

Margaret fought back her anger. She understood what her father was doing: he obviously hoped that a plea from his pregnant daughter had a better chance of dissuading Frania. They drove to the hotel. When they entered the suite, Hunt said to Frania, “This is Margaret.” Margaret accepted Frania’s hand with difficulty. For several minutes they made awkward small talk, chatting about the weather.

Finally, as Margaret remembered the talk decades later, she said, “Frania, we’re chatting about trivia when in fact there is something important we want to get out in the open. I understand you want to call my mother. Please don’t do that. You would hurt her severely. Mother is an innocent bystander in all this.” Lyda had high blood pressure, Margaret explained. The shock could kill her.

“I don’t want to hurt your mother, Margaret,” Frania said.

“Then please don’t call her.”

“But what am I going to do? The children need to be with their father. They love him.”

Margaret shot a glance at her father, who averted his eyes.

“Frania,” Margaret said, “I can only suggest that you continue your life as you and Daddy have been doing, discreetly. I’m sure that you have been provided for, as well as the children, and that you can count on that for the rest of your life. But he cannot be married to two people at the same time.”

“But he’s already married to me,” Frania said.

“Now, Fran,” Hunt interjected, “we have discussed that and you know that we did not take out a marriage license, that what we did was simply symbolic of a man and a woman coming together emotionally but not legally, as you understood at the time.”

Something went out of Frania then. She sagged back into her chair. Margaret felt sorry for her. She walked over, leaned in close, and said, “Please don’t call my mother.” Then she left.
⁸
Once again Frania returned to Houston, distraught. Hunt pleaded with her to stay put. But she couldn’t. After fourteen years in limbo, she needed closure. Margaret was again at the building site when her father came by. “Frania’s in town again,” he said. “She’s going to move to Dallas.” Margaret couldn’t believe it. “Why? You just built her a house in Houston!” she said. “She must be crazy! No, she’s not crazy. She’s shrewd. Obviously her point is to make you feel threatened that you’ll be pointed at as a bigamist. That’s what’s going to happen.”

“I’ve offered Fran a million dollars,” Hunt said. “She screamed at me that she wouldn’t sell her children. I’m not trying to buy the children. I’m trying to support them. What else can I do? ”

The next morning Margaret was at Mount Vernon when she found a note on her windshield. “Please see me before you leave,” it read. “Mother.” She found Lyda in the morning room, staring out the window. It took a full minute before Lyda could find the words. “I just had a telephone call from a Miss Frania Tye,” she said. “She said that she and your father were married in 1925 . . . and have four children.”

“They were never married, Mother.”

“You know about this? ”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why would I?”

Margaret stayed with her mother all day. At lunch Lyda said, “Those poor children.” Before Margaret could respond, Lyda said, “Daddy always said that his genes were so outstanding that he wanted to leave a lot of them to the world. I am certain that he does not imagine there is anything the matter with this. He is so naive.” She startled Margaret by suggesting she adopt Frania’s children.

Three days later Frania called again. Lyda mentioned adoption. Frania refused, but softened. She ended up apologizing, saying that Lyda must be an extraordinary woman, and returned to Houston. “I arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Hunt was the finest woman I had ever met,” Frania said later. “I decided I would do everything to leave the family alone regardless of what [Hunt] would do.”

Afterward, Lyda told Margaret they must never speak of Frania Tye again. “I don’t forgive him like you do,” Margaret replied.

“You must,” Lyda said. “Do not dwell on something about which you can do nothing. It does not help anything. Or anyone. It makes it worse. Let us have our say now, but then after today never mention this again.” It was, in fact, the last time Margaret ever heard her mother speak of Frania Tye. She felt certain her parents never spoke of it.
⁹

After her talks with Lyda, Frania gave up attempting to reconcile with Hunt. On his urging, she moved once again, this time to Los Angeles, where she took rooms at the Santa Monica Club and enrolled the children in private schools. Friends urged her to sue Hunt for bigamy. Frania refused, saying it would irreparably harm the children. In December 1941 Hunt had trusts created for their children, mostly oil and gas leases, that initially threw off six thousand dollars in cash each year. The epistle led to a series of discussions between Frania, her attorneys, and Hunt at the Adolphus, aimed at a final resolution. The talks ended in a sixty-two-page agreement, signed on January 24, 1942, in which Hunt agreed to pay Frania three hundred thousand dollars plus two thousand dollars a month for the rest of her life. In return, she signed a statement swearing they had never legally married.

Twelve days later Frania married a Hunt Oil employee named John W. Lee. Lee, whose principal duties involved handicapping horse races for his boss, was tall, handsome, malleable, and willing to marry a beautiful, rich woman. After the war, they settled outside Atlanta, comfortably outside the Hunt family’s orbit. For the time being.
¹⁰

The story of H. L. Hunt, bigamist, should end there. But it doesn’t. By the time he packed off Frania to her new life in Georgia, Hunt had already taken up with a new woman, a petite, twenty-five-year-old Hunt Oil secretary named Ruth Ray. Blessed with deep green eyes and a pneumatic figure that men noticed—“a real baby-doll type,” one acquaintance remembered—Ray was a Depression refugee from dust-bowl Oklahoma, a religious girl who kept a can on her desk for tithes.
¹¹
After dropping out of college she found work as a legal secretary in Shreveport, and when her boss joined the firm’s largest client, Hunt Oil, she went along. As he told the story years later, Hunt noticed her one day outside the offices, waiting for a bus. He offered to take her for a drive in the country. Hunt being Hunt, she was soon pregnant.

This time he took no chances. Without any explanation to her co-workers, who guessed the truth, Ruth vanished from Shreveport. Hunt spirited her to an apartment in New York City, where Ruth mailed out wedding announcements saying she was marrying an army officer named Raymond Wright. The women at Hunt Oil weren’t fooled. They wagered that the mysterious Mr. Wright would soon go missing in some far-off combat action.
¹²
In April 1943 Ruth gave birth to Hunt’s twelfth child, a son they named Ray Lee Wright. Hunt was smitten with Ruth and their little boy, and couldn’t bear to be away from them. For this, his third family, he decided it was worth the risk to keep them close.

He must have been emboldened by Lyda’s reaction to Frania Tye, because the small bungalow he bought for Ruth was tucked away on the far side of White Rock Lake, a ten-minute walk from Mount Vernon. Unlike Frania, Ruth knew everything, including her place. She was perfectly happy to be H. L. Hunt’s kept woman, living quietly and, as the years wore on, giving him child after child after child.

—THE NATION, 1962

O
ne of the most important, and most overlooked, legacies of Texas Oil has been its contribution to the growth of right-wing policies and politicians, especially in their most radical guises. In the decades after the East Texas strike, the state’s oil millionaires would channel tens of millions of dollars into new conservative causes, bankrolling everything from mainstream Republican thinktanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting campaigns of the 1950s to extremist groups that openly espoused racism and anti-Semitism; later, oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right. In a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America today—in fact, the entire “Texanization” of right-wing politics that brought figures such as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence—can be traced to forces set into motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s.

Modern Texas conservatism sprang from the intersection of two disparate events: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Depression-era oil discoveries, especially those in East Texas. The New Deal outraged many Texas oilmen and East Texas gave them the money to fight it. Each oilman had his own pet peeve, but in general conservative fury was fueled by a fear of what is known today as “big government,” the New Deal’s introduction of a modern welfare state and deep-seated southern racism. “Nowhere in the United States, not even on Wall Street or the Republican epicenters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, did I find such a perfervid hatred for Mr. Roosevelt as in Texas,” the author John Gunther wrote after touring the state in 1944. “[There] I met men who had been unfalteringly convinced that if FDR won again, ‘it would mean that the Mexicans and niggers will take us over.’ ”

Politically, if not always socially, the Big Four oilmen moved easily into the society of oligarchs who controlled the state. Before oil the greatest Texas fortunes were made in ranching and East Texas lumber, where success depended on exploiting the labor of blacks, Latinos, and poor whites—the same formula necessary to succeed in the state’s other industries such as sulfur mining and farming. The men who ran Texas oversaw a hierarchical, plantation-style culture, ruled by a southern aristocracy dedicated to harvesting the earth while keeping its workers subservient and poorly educated.

Even before making their fortunes, the Big Four enjoyed the trappings of Deep South culture—none more so than Roy Cullen. Though raised in San Antonio, Cullen identified deeply with his South Carolina-born mother. As a boy he dreamed of living in a “big white house . . . a great, spreading mansion with white porticoes and columns along the front,” and his home in River Oaks was just that, complete with Negro servants. Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson hailed from East Texas, the westernmost bastion of the Old South, and Murchison was what Cullen only wished he had been: a child of southern privilege.

Texas oilmen shared a deep loathing of taxes, labor organizers, and anyone who looked to change their ways. Roosevelt was the first president since Reconstruction to try, at least indirectly. By the mid-1930s taxes were rising. Homeowners received protection against foreclosures, which angered real estate and banking interests. New labor standards and the growth of unions drove up wages, and thus the cost of doing business. Poor families received jobs from the federal Works Progress Administration, sucking the power from political bosses. Farm programs helped millions of families but upset the fragile relationship with landlords. Scores of new federal programs trampled territory long reserved for counties, cities, and states. Worse, the Roosevelts made public shows of helping blacks and other minorities, which didn’t sit well with southerners who could still be surprisingly candid in their support of white supremacy. Everywhere Texas businessmen looked, it seemed, the federal government was poking its nose into their affairs. For many, there was no distinction between socialism and the New Deal—the “Jew Deal,” as Texas racists termed it. Roy Cullen, for one, termed it “creeping socialism.”