Bryan Burrough (26 page)

He did it all with other people’s money, gobbling up tens of millions in loans from eager banks in Dallas and New York. As his reputation grew, 1201 Main became a magnet for every speculator and investment banker in the region, all arriving with deals for Murchison to consider. He would flip through a prospectus quickly, then toss it to one of a half-dozen bright young men he had hired. The group would argue an investment’s pros and cons until Murchison made a decision or, if he needed more time, threw up his hands and announced, “I’m going fishing.” They made million-dollar decisions sitting at picnic tables gnawing at the barbecue ribs Murchison loved; his aides knew to always take along money, for their boss, like Sid Richardson, never kept a cent in his pocket. One of the few times Ernestine Van Buren saw him handle actual money was when a bum wandered into 1201 Main and asked for a handout. Murchison found a ten-dollar bill and gave it to him, which brought the bum back for more. He smelled, though, and in the ensuing weeks Van Buren watched, smiling, as Clint Murchison, one of the country’s richest men, leaned out his office window and dangled a ten-dollar bill down to his new friend on the end of a long string.

For the most part, that was the extent of the Big Four’s philanthropy. H. L. Hunt regularly had the representatives of Dallas charities escorted from his office. In later years an unnamed Dallas oilman told of trying to interest Sid Richardson in charity. “Sid, why don’t you give Dallas a children’s hospital? ” the oilman suggested during a cross-country flight. Richardson replied, “Now if I do that, why everyone in the world will come around asking me for money and I just don’t want to be bothered.” His peers didn’t seem to hold this attitude against him. “Why, Sid has no more civic responsibility than a coyote,” an oilman told the same writer. “But he’s a nice guy.”

The most prominent philantropist among Texas oilmen was probably George Strake, who gave millions to the Catholic church and was generally recognized as the most decorated American layman; in 1946 Pope Pius XII personally decorated Strake a Knight, Grand Cross, of the Order of St. Sylvester, the oldest and most prized of papal orders. Of the Big Four, only Roy Cullen, with his givings to the University of Houston, had done any serious thinking about charity. Cullen turned sixty-four in 1945; his last two unmarried daughters wed returning servicemen, nice, clean-cut young men, both of whom Cullen took on as assistants. In the coming years they managed to find the odd pocket of oil in the Rockies, but by and large Cullen had discovered all the oil he was to find. As the years wore on, the men coming to his office wanted to talk as much about philanthropy and politics as oil. Cullen endowed a pair of buildings at the Gonzales Warm Springs Foundation for infantile paralysis—after receiving assurances it had nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs in Georgia—and enjoyed it.

“Lillie and I are pretty selfish about our giving,” Cullen said in 1947. They liked seeing the fruits of their gifts, unlike wealthy couples who donated posthumously. “Honey, we’ve got the children taken care of,” Cullen told Lillie one evening as they sat in their living room in River Oaks, watching the sun set over the mansion’s reflecting pool. “There is a lot of money coming in from the wells that we don’t need.” Cullen suggested they make a large donation to the university.

“But what about the hospitals?” Lillie asked. Houston’s medical facilities were aging, run-down, and poorly staffed. Several civic leaders were making noises about improving them. Cullen thought she had something. The next morning he called a man at Memorial Hospital and told him he wanted to write a check for one million dollars. The man nearly choked. Cullen’s next call went to Hermann Hospital. It, too, received a check for what he called “a million plus.” Houston had a tiny, struggling Methodist hospital as well. Cullen’s third call went to its fund-raiser. The man scurried to Cullen’s office and left, dumbfounded, with a check for one million dollars. The next day, as word of Cullen’s donations spread through the medical community, a man from the Episcopal diocese—which didn’t yet have a hospital—appeared in Cullen’s office with a set of construction blueprints under his arm. He left an hour later with a check for “one million plus.” Later Cullen added another million-plus to the Baylor University medical school.

Cullen’s charitable spree was front-page news in Houston; in later years, when the city emerged as a national center for heart surgery and cancer research, his gifts that week would be remembered as its genesis. Afterward Cullen found himself deluged with requests for money from every fund-raiser in Houston. He and Lillie began discussing whether to establish some sort of foundation to handle all the solicitations. Cullen thought it might need more than just another few million dollars. He broke the news on the evening of March 27, 1947, when the Texas Hospital Association honored him at a banquet in Houston’s Music Hall. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Cullen told the crowd. “Mrs. Cullen and I are now having our attorneys draw up papers to create a foundation in which we will put oil properties estimated to produce eventually some thirty to forty million barrels of oil, worth eighty million dollars or more.”

There was an audible gasp from the audience; no one in Texas—no one in the entire South—had ever given away such a sum. Cullen told the crowd he hoped the money would be given to local hospitals and the University of Houston. Two days later, the Houston Chamber of Commerce’s entire board of directors came to his office en masse to thank him. “Thanks for your kindness,” Cullen told them. “But since I made that announcement, Lillie and I have been thinking this thing over, and we’ve changed our minds a little bit.”

The chamber of commerce men exchanged nervous glances.

Cullen cleared his throat. “We’ve decided,” he went on, “after looking over our property, that we can double that figure.”

It took a moment for the enormity of Cullen’s remark to sink in: $160 million; in today’s dollars, nearly $1.7 billion. It was, at the time, the single largest gift ever made by a living American. Once the paperwork was complete, the new Cullen Foundation became the largest charitable foundation in the South and, after the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, third largest in the nation. Its gifts were limited only to projects in Texas. Cullen spent the rest of his life plowing money into the foundation and the University of Houston; after its football team won a match against Baylor University in 1953, Cullen was so happy, he donated another $225,000. He would eventually give away 93 percent of his fortune.

News of Cullen’s gift made national headlines. Overnight, he found himself inundated with two hundred thousand pieces of mail, much of it from people seeking money. A man in England addressed his letter to “Hugh Roy Cullen, Texas Oil King, Somewhere in America.” Two thousand miles to the east, news of the donation prompted brows to furrow in the newsrooms of New York and Washington. Someone gave away how much? In Texas? What the hell was going on down there?

SUPERTRAMP, “BREAKFAST IN AMERICA”

I
n the first years after World War II, H. L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, and Clint Murchison had emerged as a handful of the richest men in America—
and no one knew it.
It wasn’t just that few people understood how wealthy they were. Beyond the insular world of Texas Oil, almost no one knew they existed. By 1948, despite Hunt’s historic dealings in East Texas, Cullen’s philanthropy, and Richardson’s dinners with the Roosevelts, the Big Four had garnered precisely three references in the nation’s newspaper of record, the
New York Times
. Cullen earned the only
Times
headline, when he announced his new foundation. It identified him as a “Former Texas Oil Field Laborer.”

Their anonymity was largely a function of how the press worked during the 1930s and 1940s. By and large the Texans’ few public mentions came in the oil-industry press, whose arcane regurgitation of drilling data was as indecipherable to the average newsman as Urdu. National publications, focused on the news of Washington and New York, tended to rediscover mid-America only when undistracted by world events, and the events of the previous twenty years had long diverted their newsrooms. The Depression, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, the war—for two decades there had been far more important matters to cover than the goings-on of inaccessible Texas businessmen. It wasn’t until the smoke cleared over the battlefields in Europe that the press slowly awakened to the profound changes the intervening years had wrought at home.

Even then, many writers who passed through Texas in 1945 and 1946 failed to notice the new wealth coursing through the state. A notable book of 1947,
Inside U.S.A.,
was a massive, thousand-page survey of American life written by the correspondent John Gunther, who in the words of Arthur Schlesinger set out to discover “a new America, hardly known to the world—or to itself.” Gunther wrote chapters on every state—three on Texas—and while he noticed its new industries, he had almost no sense how rich its oilmen had grown. In fact, Gunther’s theme was the opposite, that “Texas is probably the richest ‘colony’ on earth . . . and has been badly fleeced by outsiders”; this was boilerplate dating to the 1920s. Studying those who “owned” Texas, he ignored Hunt, Murchison, and Richardson in favor of conventional businessmen such as Houston banker and real estate magnate Jesse Jones, though Gunther did note that Houston’s “richest citizen, and reputedly the wealthiest man in the state, is an oil operator named Roy Cullen.”

The first hint of impending change came on a cool, windy afternoon in February 1948, when Hunt, wearing an off-the-rack tan gabardine suit and gray fedora, emerged from the Mercantile National Bank Building onto the sidewalk along Commerce Street. He was on his way to a card game at the Baker Hotel. When he reached the corner at Ervay Street, across from the Neiman Marcus department store, he stopped for a red light. Suddenly a man rushed up, lifted a camera, and snapped a photo. Before Hunt could react, the man disappeared into the crowds. Hunt headed on, thinking the man was probably taking a picture of the building behind him.

In fact, the photographer belonged to a team sent by
Life
magazine, whose Dallas bureau chief, Allene Pohlvogt, had been mulling a story on Hunt for months. Both
Life
and its sister publication,
Fortune,
were preparing layouts on the Texas economic boom and had caught wind of just how wealthy Hunt and his peers had become. Still, just about everyone in Dallas—and around the country—was floored by the headline in the April 5, 1948, issue of
Life:
Under the photo of Hunt, it read: “Is this the richest man in the U.S.? ”

Fortune
’s April issue went a step further, painting a portrait of oil millionaires popping up daily across the Southwest, especially in Texas. Its article carried an early mention of the term that would come to define the Big Four and their brethren: The Big Rich. Hunt,
Fortune
said, was “the biggest of The Big Rich, and thus also probably the richest individual in the U.S.” Both magazines underestimated Hunt’s net worth at $237 million at a time that it was probably closer to $600 million. Both misspelled his first name as “Haralson.”

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the
Life
and
Fortune
spreads, which triggered a seismic shift in the way America viewed Texas, especially its oilmen. The story of Texas Oil, in fact, can be divided into halves, the anonymity of the pre-1948 years, and everything after. Until April 1948 Texas had been known mostly for cowboys, cattle, and braggodocio.
^p
On the morning after, you could almost see editors up and down the Eastern Seaboard scratching their heads. America’s richest man? In Texas? And there were more? It was as if a curtain had been lifted and a new band of actors, mysterious Texas millionaires, had wandered onto the national stage. Who were they? What did they want? For the Big Four, nothing would ever be the same.

The
Life
and
Fortune
articles sent dozens of eastern writers scurrying into Texas for the first time, many eager to advance the stereotype of eccentric, nouveau riche Texas zillionaires tossing hundred-dollar bills like confetti. From 1948 until well into the 1950s their articles crowded every newspaper and magazine of the day, from
Time
and
Colliers
to glossy spreads in
Holiday,
including piece after piece in the
New York Times.
In short order books began to appear:
The Lusty Texans of Dallas
in 1951,
Houston: Land of the Big Rich
the same year, followed by a a collection of Texas primers such as
The Super-Americans
by
The New Yorker
’s John Bainbridge.

At least initially, the Big Four were too canny to engage with snooping reporters. Hunt gave only a single interview, to the
Dallas Morning News,
then scrambled for cover. Still, to the chagrin of those in the state who prized discretion and taste, many writers found exactly the kind of Texan they were looking for. His name was Glenn McCarthy.

The stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling, fistfighting, cash-tossing, damn-the-torpedoes Texas oil millionaire did not exist before Glenn McCarthy rocketed into the national imagination in the late 1940s. Yet McCarthy was all that and more. Little remembered today, it was McCarthy, and his quixotic dreams, who, more than H. L. Hunt or Roy Cullen or his wealthier peers, introduced Americans to the changes oil had brought to Texas. The distilled essence of swaggering Texas id, McCarthy rubbed elbows with Howard Hughes and Hollywood stars, drank and brawled his way from Buffalo Bayou to Sunset Boulevard, and, at the peak of his fame, adorned the cover of
Time.
No Texas oilman ever rose so high or fell so hard.