Bryan Burrough (28 page)

This was Glenn McCarthy’s dream. Figuring, naively, that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get bank loans on his oil reserves, he announced the project in November 1944. The McCarthy Center, as he called it, would consist of the hotel, apartment buildings, a theater, and a shopping center. After a day or two of local headlines, Houston yawned. No one outside the oil business had heard of Glenn McCarthy. There was a war on. After a few weeks, the city forgot about it.

But McCarthy would not be deterred, not even when his bank, Republic of Dallas, passed on the financing; an officer suggested Republic might regard the project more favorably if McCarthy would repay the $12 million he already owed. Undaunted, McCarthy looked elsewhere. As the war drew to a close in the summer of 1945, a broker put him in touch with an officer at the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America. It was a fateful choice. Up and down Park Avenue scores of New York lenders, keenly aware of the massive loans Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison had taken, were flocking to find oilmen of their own to fund. America’s third-largest insuror, The Equitable, was late to the oil game but determined to catch up. Its executives had opened their first oil-lending office in Dallas just weeks before, in May 1945. Its first loan was for $425,000. The second, to McCarthy, would be for a jaw-dropping $22 million, among the largest single loans Equitable’s board had ever approved. That was only the beginning.

To ascertain McCarthy’s creditworthiness, Equitable first commissioned an analysis of his business. In February 1946 a petroleum geologist it hired valued McCarthy’s oil and gas reserves at forty-five million dollars. On the strength of that report, Equitable advanced McCarthy that first twenty-two million, all but three million of which went to pay off existing debts. But McCarthy knew more was coming, and in short order he began to put his plans into motion. He moved his offices into the Shell Building, taking up the entire sixth floor, and hired a public relations man, a Houston radio veteran named Fred Nahas; if McCarthy so much as burped, Nahas made sure it got into the papers. Texas reporters quickly discovered McCarthy was an entirely different animal from taciturn Roy Cullen or other press-shy Texas oilmen; eminently quotable, with his dashing mustache and good looks, McCarthy was the kind of oilman writers loved: handsome and energetic, larger than life.

So frenetic were McCarthy’s preparations that year, and so effective was Nahas at publicizing them, it sometimes seemed McCarthy was the only oilman in Houston in 1946. Their campaign began with a “coming out” spread in the
Chronicle,
a long valentine wrapped around a family portrait. That spring, three months after the Equitable loan closed, McCarthy took the unusual step of publicly announcing it, something no Texas oilman had ever done; he told reporters it was “the largest loan of its kind in Texas financial history.” Ignoring the fact that much of the money had gone to repay old debts, McCarthy simultaneously announced a thirty-three-million-dollar drilling program in ten Texas counties, along with new natural-gas facilities and pipelines.

Every week seemed to bring a new McCarthy initiative. Out at the village of Winnie, southeast of Houston on the edges of the Anahuac field, he began construction on a four-million-dollar plant that was to convert oil into formaldehyde and other industrial chemicals. At the same time, he started scouting for a pipeline to buy. In May he announced plans to bid on the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines. Two months later he followed through, offering eighty million dollars he didn’t have. He was outbid. A week later McCarthy, an aviation nut since boyhood, was reported in talks to build a new airport in the Rio Grande Valley. In December he acquired a large position in the stock of Eastern Airlines, after which the chairman, McCarthy’s new friend Eddie Rickenbacker, named him to the company’s board of directors.

But the big event, the announcement that introduced much of Houston to the McCarthy whirlwind, was the hotel’s groundbreaking. It was to dwarf anything ever built in Texas. They had decided to call it the Shamrock, after the Houston
Post
ran a naming contest, and everything about it was to be Irish-themed, the dining areas the Shamrock Room and the Emerald Room, the night club The Cork Club. McCarthy had hoped to break ground on St. Patrick’s Day, but the master of ceremonies, the actor Pat O’Brien, couldn’t make it till March 22.

That day at 4:30, three thousand people crowded the fifteen-acre building site to watch McCarthy, O’Brien, and a host of Texas dignitaries, including two former governors, give speeches from a flag-decked platform. “I’m a little bit choked up,” McCarthy said after several speakers praised his vision. “To me this symbolizes the future greatness of Houston.” O’Brien told the crowd, “The eyes of the other forty-seven states are upon Texas and this project.” The crowd cheered lustily, and grew so riotous that the actual groundbreaking had to be eliminated when McCarthy and O’Brien were mobbed as they went for their shovels. The two were hustled into a limousine. It was a sign of things to come.

The next day’s press coverage was breathless, even by Texas standards. “Speakers Hail Shamrock as Symbol of New Era” blared a
Chronicle
headline. The
Post
coverage swallowed the entire front page. The
Chronicle,
terming the project “perhaps the greatest ever undertaken by an individual in Texas,” listed the Shamrock’s features: “largest suburban theatre in the South, seating 1500 . . . biggest food market, and biggest drug store in Texas, maybe anywhere...electronic gadgets and plastic materials throughout...radios in every room... a two-floor registration desk... a 10,919-square-foot main dining room, the Shamrock Room . . . dancing nightly to nationally-famed bands . . . a five-story parking garage with room for 5,750 automobiles . . . and all topped off with a blazing neon sign that can be seen from Sugar Land and Humble and which will fill that part of the city with soft green moonlight.”

Yet even before the groundbreaking, there were naysayers. McCarthy had chosen to erect the hotel three miles south of downtown, on Main Street near his home. One morning at the Rice Hotel Jesse Jones took him aside and gently warned that business travelers wouldn’t stay that far from downtown. McCarthy didn’t listen. Houston was growing fast, and though no one said it at the time, the Shamrock’s location constituted a bet on postwar suburbanization.

What no one understood was that McCarthy didn’t have a fraction of the cash he needed to complete the Shamrock or any of his other projects. He was counting on the Equitable’s eagerness to produce it. It was a sound bet. A second analysis of his reserves was already under way, and when completed in May 1947, it valued McCarthy’s oil and gas at $61.9 million. A third analysis, in 1948, would boost the figure to $73.5 million. With that kind of collateral, Equitable’s board felt secure pushing mounds of cash at McCarthy, loan after loan after loan, eventually reaching a total of $51.8 million. But not without strings. Equitable’s board arm-twisted McCarthy into downsizing the Shamrock project, eliminating the apartment buildings, the shopping center, the grocery, the drugstore, and the theater, leaving only the hotel, which was fine by McCarthy. It was all he really wanted anyway.

Construction began, and proceeded fitfully through 1947 and 1948. The Shamrock was as big as McCarthy had hoped, a gray granite colossus eighteen stories high and almost as wide. Building it, however, was the easy part. McCarthy dreamed of making the Shamrock’s opening, scheduled for St. Patrick’s Day 1949, a national event, with coverage in
Time
and
Life
and newspapers around the world. He envisioned a Hollywood-style gala, complete with spotlights and movie stars. Unfortunately, Houston had no movie stars. So McCarthy hatched the idea of holding a simultaneous movie and hotel opening. To do that, however, it would be necessary to make an actual movie.

And so, in March 1948, one year before the opening, McCarthy flew to Los Angeles and announced the formation of Glenn McCarthy Productions, telling reporters he was embarking on a series of major film projects. His announcement, coming just as
Life
introduced America to H. L. Hunt and the strange new world of Texas millionaires, created a stir in film circles. “A spectacular entrance,” one columnist termed it. “It looked as though McCarthy would turn Hollywood topsy-turvy with his ambitious production plans.” McCarthy then embarked on a manic tour of Hollywood parties and nightspots, befriending a slew of stars, from Errol Flynn to John Wayne. Making a movie, he discovered, wasn’t nearly as difficult as finding oil. McCarthy hired a director and a cameraman and had talent agents hire actors. He had a script ready to film,
The Green Promise,
the story of a young girl’s struggle to save her family’s farm. To McCarthy’s delight, the child star Natalie Wood agreed to play the lead. Walter Brennan signed to play her father.

But the movie was only the beginning. The Shamrock’s biggest star, McCarthy sensed, had to be Glenn McCarthy himself. If he was to be King of all Texans, he needed to assume the role. The first step was to dress the part. Out the door went his business suits. In their place came a look equal parts Houston and Hollywood: dark sunglasses, leopard-patterned ascots, gleaming leather jackets, a diamond on his pinkie the size of a dime. His deeds, McCarthy knew, had to match the look. He appeared at the Houston Fat Stock Show and outbid everyone for the champion steer two years running. Not satisfied with a regional victory, he proceeded to the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, where he was so confident of purchasing the champion bull, he marched into the hall carrying banners that read, SOLD TO GLENN MCCARTHY. He was as good as his word, laying out a world-record $12,900 for a single cow, then set a second record by becoming the first individual to buy the champion steer and its runner-up.

The cattle-buying excursions brought McCarthy his first national headlines, but it was his love for flying that really got him noticed. In 1947 McCarthy purchased a P-38 fighter for four thousand dollars, spent fifty thousand dollars upgrading it, then entered it in the cross-country Bendix Trophy Races from Los Angeles to Cleveland. Though fifty planes entered the race, McCarthy’s promotional skills secured him the advance headlines; he held a series of star-studded Hollywood launch parties, then prevailed upon the actress Joan Crawford to christen
The Flying Shamrock,
smashing a champagne bottle across its nose as flashbulbs burst. More headlines ensued when a fire erupted in one of the McCarthy plane’s engines, forcing his pilot to parachute from twenty-five thousand feet; a day later the pilot was found wandering an Arizona Indian reservation. McCarthy got still more headlines when the race’s winner, the celebrated flier Paul Mantz, scrambled through the finish-line crowds in Cleveland to claim a ten-thousand-dollar bet McCarthy had made him on the race.

The following year McCarthy hired Mantz to fly one of three separate planes he entered in the race. They finished first, second, and fourth, and as reporters mobbed McCarthy afterward, he announced his hopes that the Bendix races would come to Houston in 1949. They wouldn’t, but it was the kind of proposal McCarthy had begun making regularly. Around Houston he had become a human tornado of postwar progress, donating land for a new airport, holding press conferences to announce charitable gifts, riding a horse in the rodeo parade, lobbying to bring the city a professional baseball or football team. Between appearances he purchased a steel factory in Detroit, Houston’s largest radio station, and a string of small newspapers. Every appearance and every press release generated headlines, and headlines, McCarthy knew in his heart, would be the key to the Shamrock’s success.

By January 1949, with the hotel’s opening now three months away, McCarthy rivaled Roy Cullen as Houston’s best-known millionaire. He even wangled a profile of his own in
Life
. “Brawny Glenn McCarthy Embodies City’s Success,” the headline read. Construction on the Shamrock was almost finished; it had cost twenty-one million dollars.
The Green Promise
was complete, and would premiere at a Houston theater the night after the hotel’s opening; city fathers had agreed to stage a torchlit evening parade in its honor. In those frantic final weeks, no detail seemed too small for McCarthy’s notice. When every major grass supplier in Texas refused to hand over the ten acres of San Augustine McCarthy needed to seed the Shamrock’s lawn—they insisted it was needed for other customers—McCarthy simply bought one of the suppliers, trucked in a bulldozer, and planted the grass himself.

McCarthy spared no expense. The Shamrock pool, he claimed, was the world’s largest. Its towels: the world’s largest. The opening alone was costing him $1.5 million. He mailed gold-filigreed invitations to every movie star and CEO he could think of, then invited dignitaries from twenty-four foreign countries. The
Post
and the
Chronicle
planned special editions. Thousands of shamrocks were flown in from Ireland; McCarthy even prevailed upon a Dublin newspaper to publish a special edition of its own. Hundreds of reporters were coming, from as far away as London.

With six days to go, the hotel was still not complete. The top floors still needed painting. Everywhere the walls and ceilings were lined with wet plaster. McCarthy brought in massive fans to dry it. On Monday, three days before the gala, the Emerald Room was finally ready. But when McCarthy strode in to see it, he found a workman had just fallen through the damp plaster atop its dome, leaving a gaping hole. He ordered the entire dome rebuilt. Industrial heaters were rolled in to dry its plaster. Later that day, McCarthy was checking the Emerald Room’s lighting when he discovered there were no “pin lights” in the ceiling to spotlight the entertainers. A telephone call turned up the fact that the nearest lights were in New York. At four the next morning McCarthy found a seller. The man said a shipment would take ten days; it would take three just to pack the lights. “Don’t pack ’em,” McCarthy barked. He had a plane on the way to New York at daylight. The lights were in Houston by nightfall. Installation was finished by dawn.