Bryan Burrough (50 page)

Many thought he was bluffing. But the City Council stirred, placing a referendum to raise twenty-nine million dollars for the Cotton Bowl’s renovation on a July ballot. Mayor Jonsson summoned Clint Jr. for what amounted to one last plea for the Cowboys to stay in Dallas.

“If you take the Cowboys out of Fair Park,” he asked at one point, “what are you suggesting we put there instead?”

Murchison just smirked: “How about an electronics plant?”

It was no bluff. On Christmas Eve, 1967, the city of Irving announced it could sell enough revenue bonds to build a structure Murchison was to name Texas Stadium. It was to be like no other sports venue in America, and Clint Jr. designed it himself, this time without delay. He wanted Cowboy football played outdoors, as it should be, but Texas’s broiling sun was hell on spectators. His answer was a roof with a vast hole over the playing field; the football would be run and passed in the heat, rain, and snow, while fans remained sheltered. Because television was increasingly the key to a team’s national popularity, Murchison arrayed seating in the most telegenic manner possible, on a steep incline, which had the added benefit of improving a fan’s sight lines, long a complaint of Cotton Bowl visitors.

But the invention that would revolutionize stadium design was Clint Jr.’s introduction of luxury suites, known in Texas Stadium as “circle suites” because they circled the field. The 178 suites, each sixteen feet square, were marketed directly to the Big Rich and their corporate peers. “Your personalized penthouse at Texas Stadium,” the sales literature read, “similar to a second residence, like a lake home or a ranch.” Each concrete cubicle cost fifty thousand dollars plus twelve season tickets a year, a price tag that typically tripled as well-heeled fans added carpet, furniture, wet bars, stereos, and televisions. In time the suites became a massive source of revenue for the Cowboys, one that over the next three decades led to the demolition and construction of scores of stadiums across America as owners in every American team sport began demanding stadiums with luxury suites of their own.

When finished, Texas Stadium cost more than twenty-five million dollars, a quarter of it from Clint Jr.’s pocket. To recoup costs, ticket prices skyrocketed; counting the stadium bonds every season ticket holder was required to buy, a family seeking four decent tickets would pay forty-two hundred dollars, roughly twelve thousand dollars in today’s dollars. Fans were horrified; some took to calling Texas Stadium “Millionaires’ Meadows.”
Esquire
captured the prevailing reaction: “Wanna buy two tickets to the Dallas Cowboys? Struck oil lately?” Despite pleas from longtime fans and newspaper editorialists, Clint Jr. refused to lower prices, and rightly so.

He knew Dallas. After its opening in October 1971, Texas Stadium was a wall-to-wall sellout every Sunday. The circle suites became must-have trophies for scores of wealthy Texans and their wives, many of whom, as national television cameras captured again and again that first year, came to the games in mink and diamonds. Clint Jr. reserved the choicest suite on the fifty-yard-line for himself, where that first game Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson sat alongside him nibbling that reknowned Texas delicacy, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Murchison surveyed the scene with undistinguished glee. Everything about the stadium was perfect, simply perfect. When someone asked why he left the roof open, he answered, “So God can watch His team play.”

Luckily for Murchison, the opening of Texas Stadium coincided with the Cowboys’ emergence as a top team in the National Football League. Led by reliable stars such as defensive tackle Bob Lilly and a tobacco-chewing fullback named Walt Garrison, Tom Landry’s squad had forged standout seasons in each of its last three years in the Cotton Bowl, but all ended in postseason defeat, the best showing a 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Colts in the team’s first Super Bowl appearance, in January 1971. Don Meredith had retired, to be replaced by a veteran named Craig Morton, then, at the outset of that 1971 season, the dashing Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. It was Staubach, backed by an angry young running back named Duane Thomas, who led the Cowboys to nine straight victories that year, followed by a postseason rampage that made Dallas the favorites to win Super Bowl VI against the Miami Dolphins in New Orleans. In the climax of a storybook year, the Cowboys overwhelmed the Dolphins 24-3, a victory that began their decadelong run as the NFL’s most popular team.

The Cowboys represented more than just football excellence. With their clean-cut quarterback and their pneumatic cheerleaders and their sparkling new stadium and television ratings no other franchise could touch, they became, by wide acclaim, “America’s Team,” a red, white, and blue antidote not just for Texas’s pain but, in the era of Vietnam and drug-addled hippies and Charles Manson, the nation’s. Gone, washed away by a glistening river of victories, was the City of Hate, the Texas of General Midwinter and Pappy O’Daniel and Stetsoned right-wing demagogues. In its place was a new-new Texas, brought to you by the man who now emerged as a beloved Lone Star icon, Clint Murchison Jr. What Glenn McCarthy had sought with the first great symbol of the “new” Texas, the Shamrock Hotel, Clint Jr. accomplished with its spiritual reincarnation, the Dallas Cowboys. He had become not only the folksy new face of the Big Rich, he had become a de facto King of all Texans.

Few had any inkling how unsteadily his crown was worn. For while McCarthy had envisioned using his status to build a corporate empire, Clint Jr. had long grown bored with business. What he wanted most—and this was the tragedy of his life—was to have a good time.

Much as his father had done for the first generation of Big Rich, Clint Murchison Jr. set the standard for a new generation of Texas playboys eager to experience the Swinging Sixties. It was a time of transformation, of “letting your hair down,” both for America and an entire class of heirs who grew up in the 1950s beneath their fathers’ cossetting wings. The classic case was Fort Worth’s Cullen Davis, heir to the four-billion-dollar oil-equipment fortune his father Kenneth “Stinky” Davis built over the years thanks to clients like Roy Cullen, for whom Cullen was named. Cullen Davis had been a little-known John Murchison manqué, a stiff young executive in his father’s company—that is, until his divorce in 1968. Practically overnight Cullen took up with a fast-living twenty-seven-year-old young divorcée named Priscilla Wilborn, and in no time the couple emerged as Fort Worth’s white-trash Nick and Nora Dunn, jetting off to weekends in London or Paris or Rio or Miami, wherever the spirit and the credit card moved them.

Fort Worth, whose buttoned-down upper class was symbolized by the proper Perry Bass family, had never seen anything quite like Cullen and Priscilla. From the Ridglea Country Club, where Priscilla played tennis, to the Petroleum Club, it was all Fort Worth’s wealthy could talk about: the black-leather suit Priscilla had bought Cullen, the impromptu appetizer of oral sex she had supposedly given him in the middle of a Dallas restaurant. At one point, Priscilla shaved her pubic hair into the shape of a heart and died it pink. Cullen and Priscilla scandalized Fort Worth off and on until 1975, when they separated and a masked man stormed into the Davis mansion and shot Priscilla’s new boyfriend dead. Cullen went on trial for the murder; to this day, in fact, he is the wealthiest American ever tried for a capital offense. After a trial that made national headlines, he was acquitted, and spent the rest of his years as a born-again Christian.

In terms of Texas-style hedonism, though, the Cullen Davises of the world were no match for Clint Jr. All through the ’60s he piled on the homes and toys, a three-bedroom hideaway in New Orleans’ French Quarter; a five-story Manhattan town house once owned by Aristotle Onassis, where his wife, Jane, stayed when shopping; a four-million-dollar Park Avenue penthouse where Clint and his cronies bedded scores of young women; and a Century City penthouse where they continued their romps while in Los Angeles. He flew to Spanish Cay now in a new Gulfstream jet, its interior done in genuine zebra skin. If friends came along, and they always did, there was a separate jet or two for their luggage. At Spanish Cay he added an eighty-five-foot teakwood yacht,
The Morning After,
which Tom Landry and his coaches used for fishing expeditions when they weren’t diagramming plays beneath the island’s towering palms. Years later, when he tired of it, Clint sold the yacht to Frank Sinatra.

It was a good life, a Texas life. When Clint Jr.’s Jaguar broke down one day driving to Texas Stadium, he wandered into a roadside warehouse, telephoned his office, ordered up a helicopter, and had the pilot fly him the rest of the way. At his New York penthouse he hired a formal butler, Harry Hughes, who cringed when Murchison and his pals hollered for him by his first name. Hughes was a gourmet cook, yet Clint Jr. disdained his offerings, preferring to grill steaks on one of the balconies. In New York he ate lunch every day at ‘21’, eventually persuading the owner to put chili on the menu. When he tired of waiting for someone to open a decent barbecue joint in Manhattan, Murchison did it himself, opening The Dallas Cowboy on Forty-ninth Street; he reluctantly abbreviated the name to The Cowboy after informed that he had broken NFL rules. The restaurant served his favorites, tamale pie, black bean soup, nachos, and chili, all routinely ruined by the Italian chef Clint inexplicably hired. The Cowboy was blessedly replaced a few years later by an outpost of the barbecued-ribs eatery Tony Roma’s, which Clint discovered in Miami, bought, and expanded into a nationwide chain.

As principal owner of America’s Team, Murchison was now in a position to befriend everyone who was anyone, from President Nixon to Clint Eastwood. What distinguished him from his father’s generation was that he chose not to. Not for him J. Edgar Hoover or John McCloy or Howard Hughes. Clint Jr. preferred an earthier class of crony, the kind of man who could match him drink for drink, who told jokes so he didn’t have to, who knew how to find women willing to please. Some called them sycophants; his wife, Jane, who longed for the society friends John and Lupe Murchison favored, dismissed them as trash. Bob Thompson of Tecon was still around, always ready to dance on a tabletop or drive a girl home. In Los Angeles a onetime advertising executive named Bill Dunagan became Clint Jr.’s inseparable friend, squiring him to Hollywood parties and introducing him to Dennis Hopper and other stars. In New York Clint Jr.’s running buddy was Spencer “Spinny” Martin, whose jobs included acting as the beard when Murchison took a girl to ‘21’.

In the backslapping embrace of these and other cronies Clint Jr.’s personality underwent a transformation. While he remained brusque around strangers, he was a different man with his pals, delighting in endless pranks and silliness. When Bob Thompson left Dallas on a business trip, Clint Jr. brought in a Tecon crane to plop a forty-foot yacht in Thompson’s swimming pool. When another pal left his station wagon at Love Field, he returned to find inside a snarling black panther, a surprise from Clint Jr. The Dallas sportswriter Blackie Sherrod, having penned a critical column about the Cowboys, was stunned to return home one evening to find a live goat tethered to his staircase, a note attached from Murchison chiding him for “getting my goat.” Occasionally his cronies retaliated. New York’s mayor Robert Wagner became a friend, and when Clint Jr. passed out after a boozy lunch at “21,” Thompson hired an ambulance, slid Murchison into a coffin, and drove him to Gracie Mansion. When Wagner returned later, he found Clint Jr., a black wreath on his head, asleep in his office.
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At other times Murchison’s vast appetite for liquor manifested itself in a bizarre penchant for acrobatic stunts. At ‘21’ he would flop to the floor and turn somersaults between the tables, popping to his feet to show the other patrons he hadn’t spilled the drink in his hand. Aboard the
Flying Ginny
he drew applause, and the ire of his pilots, by performing a tumbling routine during even the steepest takeoffs. One evening when he and Jane were staying overnight at the White House, Lyndon Johnson was startled to find Clint Jr. standing on his head outside the Lincoln Bedroom. “Clint,” the president sputtered, “what the hell you doin’?” Clint Jr. replied that he had wanted to stand on his head in the White House since he was a child.
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And that was how the King of all Texans often came across, as an overgrown child. He loved costume parties, donning a variety of getups over the years that never failed to have his pals in stitches: a hippie for his forty-eighth birthday party, at other times a cowboy, an aviator, or W. C. Fields.

Some of Murchison’s most infamous gags were played on other NFL owners. The rival Redskins took pride in their halftime shows, and for a December 1961 game in which Santa Claus was to appear, Clint Jr. and Bob Thompson had the entire field covered with chicken feed the night before, in anticipation of loosing two hundred chickens into the middle of Santa’s show. The scheme was foiled when Redskin executives caught wind of it and, in Clint Jr.’s words, “had the chickens arrested.” When the owner, George Marshall, complained to Commissioner Pete Rozelle, he found himself bombarded with strange phone calls. Each time he picked up the receiver, all the angry Marshall heard were clucking noises. Marshall exploded, ordering Rozelle to have the calls stopped. They did, but the next time the Cowboys visited Washington, Clint Jr. hired a man in a giant chicken suit to parade around the playing field.

Many in Dallas found such exploits endearing, especially local sportswriters, who carried on a prolonged love affair with Clint Jr., their ardor fueled in part by languid weekends on Spanish Cay. Clint, in turn, envied their easy way with words. He was always a deeper man than some believed; at Spanish Cay he could stare at the ocean for hours or lose himself in an engineering journal or, to the dismay of his hard-drinking pals, the poetry of Shelley or Byron. He became the kind of man who, too shy to speak clever remarks aloud, loved to put them in writing, firing off thousands of short, pithy notes, many only a single sentence. Most were warm and good-hearted, feelings he found difficult to express in person. Others were playful or teasing.