Bryan Burrough (30 page)

McCarthy found relief from his mounting financial pressures in bottles of bourbon and night after night of drunken revelry. And when McCarthy drank, he fought. That spring a Houston radio announcer sued him for eighty-seven thousand dollars for punching him at a party. In June McCarthy engaged a twenty-six-year-old Hollywood “producer” in a wild early-morning melee inside the Cork Club. The young man, William Kent, was in the club on McCarthy’s invitation and was thus surprised when McCarthy accused him of insulting behavior and punched him in the head. Kent threw McCarthy to the floor and was sitting on his chest when four burly Shamrock waiters attacked him and, along with McCarthy, began chasing him around the club, overturning tables in little explosions of expensive stemware. As Kent raced down a hallway to safety, he heard McCarthy shout, “One Irishman can beat up eight Englishmen any day!”

September brought the strangest fracas to date. McCarthy had wagered fifteen hundred dollars on a Texas A&M football game, but there was a mix-up; the bookie thought McCarthy bet on the loser, not the winner. McCarthy angrily summoned the man who arranged the bet, a gambler named Larry Rummens. The ensuing discussion ended when Rummens called McCarthy a liar, at which point the new King of Texas leaped onto his desktop and, as Rummens stood before him, kicked his guest in the chest, then launched himself onto Rummens and began pounding him with his fists. The incident led to a set of nasty headlines and a lawsuit in which Rummens claimed McCarthy held him hostage at the hotel for two days.

The newspapers made light of such incidents; fistfighting and carousing were seen as part of McCarthy’s larger-than-life persona. Some of McCarthy’s peers, however, tried to calm him down. Roy Cullen’s grandson, also named Roy Cullen, remembers his grandfather taking McCarthy into the pantry of the Cullen mansion and gently admonishing him to take it easy. Good families, Cullen suggested, wouldn’t be seen at the Shamrock if it were viewed as a haven for hooliganism. “My father viewed Glenn as a very bad guy,” recalls George Strake Jr. “We wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

But McCarthy wasn’t listening to anyone—even the FBI. In October, on the same day Larry Rummens sued him for $210,000, McCarthy received an extortion note from a would-be kidnapper who threatened to take McCarthy’s family hostage unless paid $50,000. The money was to be placed in a nearby culvert and against the FBI’s advice, McCarthy strapped on a shoulder holster, slid in a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, walked to the culvert, and threw in a reply note stating he needed more time to raise the money. The note was never retrieved, but the next day police arrested a Shamrock janitor, a onetime deputy sheriff named Raymond “Good Buddy” Chambers, so named because he ended his sentences with “good buddy.” Chambers was later convicted.

Through it all, McCarthy’s finances continued to deteriorate. Though word of his loan defaults hadn’t leaked, by Thanksgiving rumors of financial strain were growing by the day. McCarthy laughed off the questions, but signs of distress were evident. In a matter of weeks he sold the Shell Building, closed the chemical plant, then sold the Detroit steel plant—ten months after buying it. He tried to sell the New Ulm field to Howard Hughes but couldn’t. In October speculation about McCarthy’s future spread to Washington when he was seen sliding into a side door at the White House for what officials told reporters was a private meeting with President Truman. Three months later McCarthy stunned the financial press by confirming that he had asked the federal Reconstruction Financial Corporation—and the president—for a seventy-million-dollar loan package, which, if approved, would be the largest government loan ever granted a private businessman in peacetime.

Still McCarthy denied he was in trouble, even as rumors swept Houston that the Shamrock was poised to close. When the
Chronicle
reported “curbside gossip” that he was “on the threshold of the poorhouse,” McCarthy flatly lied, claiming all his operations, including the Shamrock and the moldering chemical plant, were running at a profit. “I have no problem I will not be able to overcome within a very short time by gearing operations to my income,” he told a reporter. His only problem, McCarthy claimed, was new competition from low-priced Middle Eastern oil, which was being imported at $1 a barrel at a time Texas oil cost $2.65. “Every time a barrel of foreign oil comes in America, a barrel less is produced in Texas,” he groused. “Texas is taking most of the licking, but the rest of the country will feel it before long.”

No one around Houston seriously believed McCarthy could go under. An oilman going bankrupt in Texas? He was too big, people said, the Shamrock too glamorous, the times too giddy to even consider such a thing. McCarthy’s legend, in fact, continued to grow. Just three weeks after disclosure of his government-loan request, he reaped the ultimate American accolade: the cover of
Time
magazine. Beneath an oil derrick adorned with cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat, and flexing its muscles Adonis-style, the headline read: “Texas’ Glenn McCarthy: Since Spindletop a Jillion Jackpots.” The package inside, including a map of Texas titled “Land of the Big Rich,” marked the apex of two years of nonstop Texas hype in the national press. “The Lone Star State,” it noted without irony, “is one of the few places left in the world where millionaires hatch seasonally, like May flies.”

Texans, for the most part, ate it up. For now.

The media’s coverage of Glenn McCarthy spawned a new cultural icon, the Lone Star playboy, the swinging oilman who romances starlets between trips on his airplane to see his next gusher. In the postwar years many of the stories fueling this caricature emanated from Hollywood, where McCarthy and other wealthy Texans, like the nouveau riche of every American generation, were drawn to the glamour and glitz and welcomed by money-hungry movie producers and a bevy of young actresses all too happy to take up with Texas sugar daddies. As a Hollywood columnist wrote in 1954, “The Texas jillion-aires seem to gravitate to the motion pictures like a moth to a candle.”

Among the first to arrive was Jack Wrather, a Dallas oil heir who, bored with life in the oil fields, moved to Los Angeles and married the actress Bonita Granville in 1947. Wrather used his fortune to produce seven movies in the next several years, then branched into television, eventually producing
Lassie
and
The Lone Ranger.
In time he purchased the Queen Mary entertainment complex in Long Beach, built the Disneyland Hotel in Ana-heim, and became a founding member of Ronald Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of political advisers.

By and large, though, the Texas playboys took home far more actresses than Oscars. The starlet Jane Withers wed an Odessa oilman and would-be producer named Bill Moss in 1947; after their divorce, Moss married the dancer Ann Miller. The Moss-Miller wedding, in La Jolla, California, brought together an increasingly common constellation of Hollywood stars and Texas oilmen, everyone from Ginger Rogers to Clint Murchison. Miller, however, couldn’t cope with Moss and his hard-living oilman buddies, whose lives were a series of drinking binges wrapped up around evenings at night spots like Ciro’s in Hollywood and the Cipango Club in Dallas. “I simply didn’t have the energy or the patience to keep up with him, especially when we went out to parties that lasted two or three days,” Miller wrote in her autobiography.

When Miller and Moss divorced, she married another Texas oilman, Arthur Cameron, who had purchased Louis B. Mayer’s Benedict Canyon mansion and built one of the largest private estates in the desert outside Palm Springs. On their European honeymoon Cameron summoned a man from Harry Winston’s, the New York jeweler, and bought Miller a 20-carat white diamond. Cameron, however, was a serial philanderer, and Miller left him several years later upon finding him engaged in an impromptu pool party with seventeen young ladies in bikinis.

The Houston oilman W. Howard Lee, meanwhile, romanced and married the actress Hedy Lamarr; the two lived for several years in River Oaks, until their divorce. Afterward Lee married the actress Gene Tierney. One of Clint Murchison’s closest friends, the Dallas oilman E. E. “Buddy” Fogelson, wed Greer Garson at his New Mexico ranch in 1949. A six-time Academy Aware nominee—she won the 1942 Oscar for best actress in
Mrs. Miniver
—Garson all but gave up films after her marriage and settled into a long, quiet life in Dallas with Fogelson, who died in 1987. Garson became a beloved Texas philanthropist, endowed the Greer Garson Theater at Southern Methodist University, and died in 1996.

Money, not romance, was at the heart of most Texas-Hollywood partnerships. One of Fort Worth’s richest oilmen, W. A. “Monty” Moncrief, took to wintering in Palm Springs, where he began playing golf with a number of stars, including Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. When the two actors expressed an interest in investing in an oil well, Moncrief cut them into shares of a new West Texas field for a pittance. Following a single dry hole, after which Moncrief had to explain to his new friends that not every well actually struck oil, he hit a string of twenty straight producers. By Moncrief’s estimate years later, Hope and Crosby walked away from their investments more than ten million dollars richer.

Actors weren’t the only stars Texas oilmen took under their wing. D. H. Byrd and a group of oilmen were among the first sponsors of a piano prodigy named Van Cliburn. In 1951 Sid Richardson befriended a young evangelist who arrived in Fort Worth to deliver God’s message. His name was Billy Graham. Richardson, though never known for his piety, took a liking to Graham, introducing him to Murchison, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson. When Graham attempted to deliver a radio broadcast from the Capitol building in Washington, he was told it was impossible; a single phone call from Richardson to Rayburn led to a special Act of Congress that allowed Graham to hold the first-ever religious service on the Capitol steps. Graham was so inspired by Richardson and other Texas oilmen he met that his fledgling film company’s first two movies,
Mr. Texas
and
Oiltown U.S.A.
, told the stories of hard-living Texans who found salvation in Christ.
Oiltown U.S.A.
, which Graham debuted at a Hollywood premiere and aired at his crusades, featured a Houston oilman whose conversion, in the words of promotional materials, featured “the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire.”
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As colorful as the jet-setting Texas playboys were, the oilman eastern writers most wanted to profile proved elusive. His name was James Marion West Jr., though he was known in Houston as “Silver Dollar” Jim West. West was the son of Roy Cullen’s onetime partner, Big Jim West, who died in 1940, leaving his family an estate of seventy million dollars, which doubled during the ensuing decade. Jim and his brother Wesley built homes two blocks down from the Cullen mansion in River Oaks, but there comparisons between the families ended.

Jim West was hands down the most flamboyant of all Houston oilmen. A roly-poly five feet nine and 210 pounds, he waddled the streets of downtown wearing cowboy boots, eight-inch-wide belt buckles adorned with oil derricks or dancing cattle, his trademark orange-flannel shirt, and a pistol, usually a .45, strapped to one hip. A smiling if sometimes cantankerous prankster, he got his nickname, “Silver Dollar,” for his habit of tossing dollar coins everywhere he went, at doormen and yardmen as tips, on a sidewalk for bums, at reporters for a grin. When a local union struck the downtown parking garage he owned, West broke up the picket line by stepping to his second-story office window and scattering silver dollars all over the sidewalk below. He kept the coins in massive racks in his basement; it was a Negro servant’s daily duty to dust them.

George Strake Jr. remembers diving for silver dollars in West’s pool as a teenager. “Except he always threw them into the deep end, and I got an ear-ache, so my parents wouldn’t let me go any more,” Strake recalls. West never left home, in fact, without stuffing silver dollars into two large saddle pockets he had custom-sewn into all his trousers; he jingled when he walked. At hotels he took plastic “cartwheels” of dollars to hand the help; the Shamrock doormen got three wheels just for retrieving his Cadillac.

West had the usual oilman toys, a DC-3, a Twin Beech, and two converted trainers, plus several ranches—he liked to say he wasn’t sure how many—and several thousand cattle. He wasn’t happy about anyone telling him what to do. When he got into a quibble over his water bill, he drilled two artesian wells for his own supply. When he judged his electric bill too high, he bought a massive diesel power plant to provide his own electricity. He was especially ingenious in thwarting the Houston zoning commission, which outlawed tennis courts with backstops. He built a court anyway, with a deep slit dug beside it; at the press of a button, a backstop rose. If an inspector appeared, he pressed another button and it sank into the ground.

West’s passion, though, was police work. He spent most nights either riding in patrol cars or racing to crime scenes in his own. Beside his bed he had an entire bank of radios and electronic equipment to monitor calls. He owned thirty cars, including eleven Cadillacs, stored in a six-car garage at home—it was connected to the main house by a 225-foot white-tiled tunnel—and the three-story garage he owned downtown. Each car carried a sawed-off shotgun, a Thompson submachine gun and, beneath the dashboard, four telephones, one wired to a police wavelength, another for the sheriff’s department, and two for personal use; there were twenty-four more telephones at home and a dozen at the garage. Several of West’s cars had racks for tear-gas canisters, which he wasn’t shy about using. When a crowd of teenagers descended on his home one Halloween, he dispersed them with a cloud of gas.

The Houston police loved him. At Christmas every captain on the force received a crisp hundred-dollar bill, every lieutenant a fifty, every sergeant twenty-five silver dollars, and every patrolman ten. One cold winter West ordered a gross of European sheepskin coats and handed them out to policemen. When the Texas Rangers gave him an honorary commission and a gold Ranger star to wear, he had it encircled by nine large diamonds and wore it religiously. West made it to every national police conference and just about every shooting in Houston; often he arrived before the police. His nocturnal missions were seldom dull. Returning from a jaunt at 3:30 one morning in May 1949, he fell asleep at the wheel on West Gray. His Cadillac struck a parked car, careened across a lawn, and smashed through a concrete mailbox before plowing through a hedge. Startled awake, West went to press the clutch but pressed his siren instead, waking the neighborhood. A crowd in bathrobes and slippers was soon on the scene, but no one was hurt.