Bryan Burrough (25 page)

Great for the world; not so great for Texas. Projections by DeGolyer and others triggered tense talks between the American and British governments over just who would control Persian Gulf oil. At a White House meeting in February 1944, President Roosevelt showed Lord Halifax a map he had drawn of the Middle East. Persian oil, Roosevelt said, could remain British. The two countries would share anything found in Kuwait and Iraq. But Saudi Arabia, he continued, would be the exclusive province of major American oil companies. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement, signed six months later, essentially codified Roosevelt’s plan. As soon as the Nazis and Japanese surrendered, the majors would begin drilling.

Independent oilmen, especially in Texas, howled. Why should the majors control the Middle East? They wanted in, too. When the new agreement came up for a Senate vote in 1945, Texas producers led the drive against it, forcing the White House to withdraw. By the time the treaty was reintroduced, Texans had realized the problem wasn’t the
control
of Middle Eastern oil but the
competition
. If the Persian Gulf held half as much oil as Everette DeGolyer thought, it would drive prices down sharply and, if imported, swamp Texas producers. In 1947 protests against the treaty erupted across the state. Even Texas schoolteachers threatened to go on strike if it passed. Again the treaty was withdrawn, but by then it was all but irrelevant.

Once the war ended, there was no stopping the tsunami of Middle Eastern oil. Massive new fields were discovered, one every few months during 1947 and 1948; much of the oil initially went to fuel the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, but for oilmen who saw the future, the tidal wave was growing, and it was heading straight for Texas.

Compared to the decades that bracketed it, the 1940s were comparatively quiet years for the Big Four families, a time of steady corporate and family growth. The war itself was very good for Texas, especially the men of Texas Oil. Dallas and Houston boomed. The demand for jet fuel and all manner of chemicals led to the building of dozens of new refineries and chemical plants along the coast south and east of Houston—“an unbroken ninety-mile line of refineries,” in one startled writer’s words, “like a single throbbing factory.” During the war a windfall-profits tax forced oilmen to plow every last cent of extra profit into the search for new reserves. The demand for oil skyrocketed, and when the fighting ended the postwar thirst for natural gas turned a waste product into Texas Oil’s new profit engine.

Sid Richardson made a second fortune in gas, piping out billions of cubic feet of it along with millions of barrels of new oil from the amazing Ellenberger Lime in West Texas. In his new offices on the sixth floor of the Fort Worth National Bank Building, Richardson took the first steps toward forming a corporate organization, dividing his empire into halves, Texas and Louisiana. It was a munificent company. Out at the sprawling “Sid Richardson Oil” work camps in Winkler County, south of New Orleans, and at a new gas field near Eola, Louisiana, the supervisors all received Christmas gifts, while their children could look forward to something from “Uncle Sid” upon graduating high school. Once he returned from the war, Perry Bass kept things running smoothly, allowing Richardson to take long months at St. Joe’s, or at one of several resorts in Arizona where he spent the winters, betting on the ponies, playing cards, and berating Bass when the need arose.

Unlike Clint Murchison, Richardson never seriously diversified. One of his few forays outside oil came in 1948, after he was outbid for the Inch lines. An oilman named Frank Andrews suggested he try to buy another soon-to-be-auctioned war asset, a factory in Odessa that was the world’s largest producer of carbon black, a sootlike oil by-product used in making tires. Richardson put pressure on Lyndon Johnson to intervene on his behalf and Johnson came through. For the bargain price of $4.3 million, Richardson took control of not only the plant but 447 other buildings on 426 acres of land, employee housing, and fifty miles of adjoining pipeline. Johnson then pressed the White House to have carbon black classified as a “critical material” for national security, driving up its price, and even arranged for the government to stockpile its excess inventories at the Odessa facility. When Richardson cut several deals with his competitors, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation—until one of Johnson’s men intervened once more, killing the probe in its cradle.

Once the purchase went through, Frank Andrews suggested that Richardson use the massive plant to leverage a better price for the natural gas he was selling El Paso Natural Gas. Richardson was getting two cents per million cubic feet. Andrews suggested he might be able to pry four cents out of El Paso by threatening to fuel the plant with a competitor’s gas. When the negotiation concluded, Richardson telephoned Andrews and, in his teasing way, hollered, “You’re a liar, Andrews! I didn’t get four cents.” Before Andrews could respond, Richardson delivered the punch line. “I got five!” he crowed.

H. L. Hunt spent the war years drilling hundreds of new wells across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, then branched east into Florida before turning west, snapping up leases in the Rockies and Canada. Hunt liked to boast that Hunt Oil had produced more oil during the war than all the Axis powers combined, and while it wasn’t true, it was close. He bought dozens of new rigs, eventually sixty-five or more, and worked them around the clock, completing as many as three hundred new wells a year. Oil was harder to find outside Texas, but Hunt’s new son-in-law, Al Hill, urged him to hire his first geologists, and under their guidance Hunt Oil piled on massive new reserves. By 1946 the company was bringing in an estimated one million dollars a week in free cash flow. Hunt purchased a new refinery outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and began marketing his Parade brand gasoline in five southern states.

Everything was run out of Hunt Oil’s new offices in the Mercantile Bank Building in downtown Dallas, where Hunt relocated in 1945. The headquarters staff remained small in those years, rarely more than a few dozen secretaries and bookkeepers. Working out of a corner office behind a large mahogany desk, Hunt was an unremarkable manager for his day, taciturn and impatient, never one to lavish compliments on his people; his only eccentricities were a penchant for singing gospel songs and a habit of taking off his shoes and socks and propping his bare feet on his desktop. Outside the office, Hunt was just another balding Texan in his fifties in a gray suit and fedora; as a man with three separate families now, it was no accident he avoided all publicity, refusing to join local boards or give to Dallas museums or charities. For the most part, Dallas returned the favor. In 1941, when Hunt applied to the exclusive Brook Hollow Country Club, he was turned down. A number of oilmen suffered the same fate. It would take many years, in fact, before Dallas became entirely comfortable with oil money.

Hunt’s only hobby in those years, the one pastime that generated an adrenaline rush to rival an oil discovery, was gambling. He frequented underground joints around Dallas, playing craps as well as his beloved poker. He kept a regular game at the Baker Hotel, and for the first time began matching wits with some of the country’s best-known players, including the legendary Indiana gambler Ray Ryan. The two engaged in games whose stakes sometimes topped two hundred thousand dollars. Hunt, like both Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, stopped carrying cash altogether; when he needed money for a game, he dipped into a box he kept in an office closet, or another he kept at First National.

During the mid-1940s the one thing that took Hunt away from his daily routines was the situation with his son Hassie. It was unbearably sad. After he testified against the Inch lines in Congress in mid-1942, Hassie had begun to unravel. Later there would be stories that he grew increasingly paranoid, believing the Roosevelts were attempting to kill him, or perhaps his father’s enemies. The turning point came in 1943, when the army transferred him from his government job in Washington to infantry training in Louisiana. There Hassie had a breakdown of some sort, washing up in an army mental ward near New Orleans. Hunt learned the news from one of his son’s drilling partners in Mississippi, who said it was sunstroke. Hunt hurried to New Orleans. When he telephoned Margaret his tone was grave. “Hassie does not seem right,” Hunt said. “Too many jokes, too much hilarity for a boy weakened by sunstroke.”

On his return to Dallas, Hunt took Lyda to talk things over with Margaret. The army was now saying Hassie would be medically discharged. Though no one knew what it was, he clearly had some sort of mental problem. “They are recommending he be sent to the Menninger Clinic to be evaluated,” Hunt said. “Is that okay?”

Lyda couldn’t speak. She turned to Margaret, who said “Yes.”
²

Hunt took his son to a clinic outside Andover, Massachusetts, where the doctors suggested electric-shock treatment. Hassie refused. According to Harry Hurt, Hunt tried his own treatment. Believing Hassie just needed more “action,” he brought in a string of young women for Hassie to sleep with. It had no effect. Hunt, unwilling to shut his eldest son away in a mental ward, decided to take him back to Texas. “Great!” Hassie said when he heard the news. “I’m going back to the oil fields where I belong.” Instead, Hunt installed him at the family’s pecan farm outside Tyler, hoping a period of relaxation would help him recover. It didn’t. If anything, Hassie’s behavior grew worse.

He grew increasingly confused, unable to tell the difference between his father’s secretaries and his own sisters. The slightest disagreement could provoke violent tantrums. At times Hassie challenged his father to fistfights. Over breakfast at Mount Vernon he picked up a grapefruit and hurled it at his mother, breaking her glasses. Hunt spent long periods doing little more than telephoning and dictating correspondence to hospitals across the country, searching for a doctor who could cure his son. “It was killing Daddy, making him old,” Margaret recalled years later. “Hassie was his favorite, his most adored child. Daddy could not, would not fail him.”

When the war ended, Hunt took Hassie to more clinics for treatment, at least one of which diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Doctor after doctor advised that he be institutionalized. Hunt wouldn’t hear of it. Hassie consented to electric-shock treatments at one clinic; the treatments, however, had no effect. Finally, at a facility in Hartford, Connecticut, a doctor urged Hunt to consider a new procedure called a prefontal lobotomy. Developed in Europe, the lobotomy involved inserting a scalpel behind the forehead to physically sever the prefontal lobes from the rest of the brain. No one understood why or how it worked, and results were uneven. Some patients calmed. Others became zombies. Tears welled in Hunt’s eyes when he told Margaret what had to be done. “It’s the only thing there is left,” he said.

The operation was performed in Philadelphia in 1946. It transformed Hassie from the energetic young wildcatter his family remembered into a quiet, lethargic man who lost all interest in business. He turned pensive and introspective; about all he enjoyed doing was reading and taking long walks. Hunt had Hassie placed in a New York psychiatric hospital for a time, but on Lyda’s urgings eventually brought him home to Dallas. They purchased a house for him adjacent to Mount Vernon, where he lived in seclusion. For the rest of his life Hunt was plagued with doubts over what he had done. During the 1950s, when doctors began to produce drugs to treat schizophrenia, his guilt began to mount. “Daddy was certain he had made a terrible, tragic mistake,” Margaret recalled. Margaret, in turn, blamed the family fortune. If they hadn’t had the money for the lobotomy, she reasoned, perhaps they could have somehow found another treatment.

No one outside the Hunt family saw much of Hassie after that. For years Hunt kept the office next to his vacant, for his son; he never came to work. Instead, from time to time, friends would spot a thin, ghostly presense, a latter-day Boo Radley, walking the shores of White Oak Lake. The sightings went on for years, then a decade, then another and another. In the end, Hassie Hunt outlived his parents, finally passing away quietly, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2005.

In the 1940s most Americans still thought of millionaires as stuffy, tuxedoed Monopoly Men in Fifth Avenue mansions. While Hunt and Roy Cullen, sober men who wore suits each morning to a downtown office, conformed to the expectations of how businessmen should look and act, Clint Murchison shattered the mold. Years before Bill Gates made it acceptable for executives to doff their jackets, Murchison became one of the nation’s first—maybe
the
first—casual billionaire.

While he embraced ostentation in private life, Murchison abhorred it in business. The downtown Dallas building he moved into after the war, a bland two-story affair he picked up with an insurance company, didn’t even announce his presense; its only adornment was a metal plate that read 1201 MAIN. For Murchison, every day was casual Friday. If he was seeing people, he wore khakis and an open-neck shirt; he kept a tie in his office closet, but the only one he wore on a daily basis he used as a belt. If his schedule was free, his taste ran to shorts, a battered straw hat, and sandals; he didn’t care for socks, and the ones he wore were often mismatched. His only formality was reserved for his secretary, Ernestine Van Buren. When she was needed, he didn’t holler, always gliding to his office door to murmur, “Mrs. Van Buren.”

The relaxed atmosphere at 1201 Main belied the sophistication of Murchison’s growing basket of investments. “Money is like manure,” Murchison liked to say. “You gotta spread it around for things to grow.” The diversification he began in the late 1930s picked up steam during the 1940s. Figuring that returning soldiers would trigger a baby boom, he invested in textbooks by buying the New York publisher Henry Holt & Co. in 1945. He tried to buy one of his favorite magazines,
Popular Mechanics
, but couldn’t, picking up
Field & Stream
instead. Betting all those new families would take to vacationing, he bought a Seattle steam line and a pair of bus companies. Still, he never lost touch with oil. In 1948 he had Southern Union spin off its exploration arm, Delhi Oil, into a separate company traded on the New York Stock Exchange; it was the only publicly traded company Murchison managed, taking a slot as Delhi’s chairman.
^o
Delhi began as a small outfit headquartered above a corset shop in a run-down building a few blocks from 1201 Main, but its oil finders proved top notch. Ranging across the Rocky Mountains and Canadian West, they unearthed massive quantities of natural gas in the next decade, turning Delhi’s handful of executives, plied with stock at Murchison’s insistence, into millionaires.