Bryan Burrough (51 page)

To a Nevada senator who complained of limestone dust emitted by a Murchison factory: “The biggest cow I ever saw was raised on a diet of limestone dust; of course, her teats broke off the day she calved.” To a sportswriter who described him as a 130-pound prep-school halfback: “With reference to your recent column on the Dallas Cowboys, you are full of shit. I weigh 142 pounds.” To a television-industry executive who pitched him new business while suing another NFL team: “You must be out of your goddamned mind.” Clint Jr. and Senator Edward Kennedy carried on a long correspondence, every word of it in Gaelic.

The repartee, the practical jokes, the love for everything Texan—whatever you thought of him, Murchison projected an image of a man in thrall with life. But nothing, not the pranks, the forty-three-thousand-foot stone mansion, the private island, not even the Cowboys, thrilled Clint Jr. like women. He preferred them young, dumb, and beautiful, and by the 1960s he was pouring an enormous amount of energy into an endless litany of one-night stands. Many of the girls were procured by Bob Thompson in Dallas, Bill Dunagan in Los Angeles, and Spinny Martin in New York, but Clint Jr. turned the pursuit of sex into a daily regimen.

The Cowboys flew to road games aboard Dallas-based Braniff Airways, whose stewardesses became one of his obsessions. In the early ’60s Clint actually began attending their graduate ceremonies, sitting in a back row eyeing his would-be conquests. “After the ceremony,” one pal told the author Jane Wolfe years later, “he’d point out a few girls and say, ‘Go get their phone numbers.’ ” That he owned the Cowboys was usually enough to get him what he wanted. He spent endless hours deciding which stewardesses would work Cowboy charters. The Cleveland Browns owner, Art Modell, once watched a college football game with Clint Jr. and his pal Bedford Wynne, and was impressed that they spent much of the contest scribbling down notes, only to find the names they were writing were not players but Braniff stewardesses.
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Murchison’s sexual appetite was insatiable. “There was not a stewardess that Clint didn’t want to take to bed,” one crony told Jane Wolfe. “He was so in love with these girls he stopped flying on his private planes and flew commercial.” And it didn’t end there. When Clint attended a Miss America Pageant, he had a pal get phone numbers; if he saw a pretty actress on television, he wanted her number; in the years before they became nationally known, he rutted his way through an entire squad or two of Cowboy cheerleaders. Much as Tex Schramm employed scouts to track and analyze football players, Clint Jr. used the Bob Thompsons, Spinny Martins, and Bob Dunagans of the world to track girls. “Mr. Dunagan,” a Murchison secretary remembered, “called Mr. Murchison practically every five minutes in Dallas with news of one girl or another.” Almost every night and many afternoons, especially when on the road, there was a new girl in Clint Jr.’s bed, and he didn’t like being interrupted. The Murchisons were longtime backers of Richard Nixon’s, and when Nixon entered the White House in 1968, he and Clint Jr. spoke once a week or more. One mistress told Wolfe of being in bed with Clint Jr. in his Century City penthouse when Nixon telephoned. “Tell him I’m coming,” Clint Jr. hollered, then put the president of the free world on hold while he finished his romp.

His wife, Jane, had known of her husband’s infidelities for years. As long as he remained discreet, she tolerated them. His brother John, a stalwart family man, deplored Clint’s indiscretions. But the more famous he grew, the better the Cowboys played, the less Clint Jr. cared what anyone else thought. Over the years dozens of the couple’s friends saw him with other women; one of Jane’s girlfriends spotted him with one in an airport, and in turn was spotted by one of Clint Jr.’s cronies, who told him he had been seen. “Why don’t you tell her to mind her own business?” Murchison snapped. For years Jane buried her pain in charity work, working with local arts groups, but every gala she threw triggered an argument over whether Clint Jr. would attend. When he did, he couldn’t be bothered to speak more than a sentence or two, and then only if prompted. In time his behavior grew so boorish that Jane began attending functions alone, leading to the inevitable question from her sympathetic friends: “Where’s Clint?”

By the late 1960s Jane’s anger was manifesting itself in epic shopping sprees. A petite, attractive blonde now in her forties, she collected shoes like her husband collected women. She kept a $100,000 revolving account at Neiman Marcus and was known to top it, forcing Clint Jr. to send an accountant downtown with a check, once for $168,000. Jane amassed more than four hundred pairs of shoes, and thought nothing of walking into New York’s Bonwit Teller store and plunking down $50,000 to buy a new designer’s entire line. Clint Jr., whose daily wardrobe consisted of little more than dozens of identical powder-blue suits—Cowboy colors—and short-sleeved white shirts, couldn’t fathom it. He tried throwing out her charge cards, but nothing worked. “Jane,” he quipped, “has a black belt in shopping.”

Finally not even shopping helped. In the fall of 1972, barely ten months after the Cowboys’ Super Bowl victory, a Chicago acquaintance called Jane to complain that Clint Jr. had stolen his girlfriend. It was the final straw. Jane demanded a divorce. “I can understand a few women here and there, Clint,” she told him, “but thousands of women, no.” Murchison, while surprised, let his wife go without a fight. In their January 1973 settlement he gave Jane a reported ten million dollars in cash and the town house on Sutton Place in Manhattan. For the newly crowned King of all Texans, it was the beginning of troubled times.

During the 1960s and early 1970s the Murchison brothers symbolized the twin faces of the Big Rich, the flamboyant and the staid, the high-minded and the low-rent. In reality there were far more Johns than Clint Jrs. The Big Rich were now “modest and calm,” the writer David Nevin argued in the umpteenth book analyzing the state, 1968’s
The Texans.
“They have made outmoded and unfashionable the gaucheries that once marked Texas; the time is over for the importing of 50,000 camellias to decorate the wedding lawn, of Harold Byrd’s brassy parties after the Texas-Oklahoma football game every October, of entire trains taken to Hollywood for capers with film figures.”

It wasn’t entirely true, as Clint Jr.’s behavior illustrated. Much of the mainstream press, in fact, clung to the fading myth of freewheeling millionaires dancing in oil’s black rain, but for every Texas playboy there were dozens of oil families who lived tasteful, quiet lives. Few of the Big Rich were better-behaved than Roy Cullen’s offspring. Since their beloved “Gampa’s” death his three loyal daughters and their husbands had lived quietly in their River Oaks homes, donated generously, and joined the boards of museums and hospitals. The most visible of the son-in-laws, Corbin Robertson, remained active at the University of Houston, which named its football stadium after him. It was all the notice he wanted. “Just leave us alone,” Robertson grumped in a rare interview during the 1960s.
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The Cullens, in fact, were probably the last Texas family anyone would suspect of spawning a playboy. But they harbored a secret, and to their dismay, it arrived on their doorsteps in 1964. His name was Baron Enrico di Portanova. The elder son of Roy Cullen’s “lost” daughter, Lillie, and the Italian baron she had married in Los Angeles in 1932, “Ricky” di Portanova had grown up in Italy after his parents divorced. Suave, tall, and slender, with luxurious black hair and pencil-thin mustache, di Portanova had worked as a jeweler in Rome but mostly lived
la dolce vita
, chasing actresses, driving Maseratis, and spending every cent of the five thousand dollars a month he received from the Cullen estate. For years Roy Cullen had fretted about his aimless life. “Find some legitimate business in which Enrico can become active,” he admonished his father in a 1950s-era letter rejecting an increase in Ricky’s allowance. “He cannot have his mind too much on playing society regardless of how many aristocratic friends he may have.”

Growing up in Rome, never having met any of his aunts, uncles, and cousins in far-off Texas, Ricky di Portanova had only the dimmest understanding of what the Cullen fortune involved. In 1961, with Italian friends suggesting his “allowance” was a pittance, he made his first trip to Houston to find out. He left with nothing more than a condescending lecture from a Quintana accountant. “They treated me like a foreigner, which really bugged me,” di Portanova told a writer years later. “I’m a Cullen, too, not some adopted cousin.”
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In 1964 the thirty-two-year-old baron returned to Houston, this time to live, and determined to get an accounting from the Cullens that detailed how much money they had, what Quintana was worth, and how he could secure his rightful share. With him came his beautiful, Valentino-draped wife, Ljuba, a onetime star on the Yugoslavian national basketball team who enjoyed a late-1950s moment as a starlet in Italian films. The couple, accustomed to life along the Italian Riviera, was appalled by Houston—muggy, oppressively hot, angry freeways lined with grimy shopping plazas. They moved into an exclusive high-rise in River Oaks, Inwood Manor, but nothing overcame the banality of a city where a night out consisted of barbecue and Lone Star beer. Desperate for distraction, Ricky bought Ljuba a monkey. Neighbors at Inwood Manor heard what sounded like someone dribbling a basketball late into the night, accompanied by simian squeals.

The Cullens did not open their arms for the di Portanovas; in fact, after a strained welcoming dinner party, they had little contact. “Mom had a party for them, I was about fourteen at the time,” Wilhelmina Robertson’s daughter Beth remembers. “We were nice to them, you know, but there wasn’t much we had in common.” Convinced he deserved a greater share of the Cullen fortune, Ricky bombarded Quintana with letters and calls; most went unreturned. Quintana executives refused the baron any meaningful information about the company or the estate. In time di Portanova opened a downtown office, a war room for the legal assault he foresaw. Before he could act, however, the Cullens voluntarily mailed him a check for $841,425. If the family thought this would dissuade the baron, they were wrong. If anything, it had the opposite effect. Ricky considered the money a bribe, one he was happy to take, and evidence that there was more to come.

Before he could move against the Cullens, the baron needed to set his own affairs in order. A lawyer suggested the first thing to do was amend his mother’s will. As matters now stood, once Lillie Cranz Cullen di Portanova died, all her assets would be returned to the Cullens. Ricky and his brother, Ugo, would be penniless. The baron sighed. This, he knew, would not be an easy thing.

Little is known of Lillie di Portanova’s life. After her marriage she disappeared from Texas, and from her family’s lives. Some in Houston thought she was dead. Roy Cullen had hired a private detective to keep track of her. In fact, since 1955, Lillie had been living off her trust fund in New York City, in the Times Square Motor Hotel, a tidy hostelry in the heart of the city’s seediest area. Most days she could be glimpsed trudging the streets in a black overcoat, black hat, and heavy black boots, shopping bags beneath each arm. She purchased coats at Bergdorf Goodman, snipped off the buttons and for some reason replaced them with safety pins. The hotel staff looked after her with care, in part, one suspects, because of the thousand-dollar tips she was prone to hand out. Most of their conversations took place through her locked door. Lillie’s diet appeared to consist almost exclusively of Coca-Cola and sweet cream. In 1965, when her son Ricky reestablished contact with his mother after several years, she weighed more than four hundred pounds and had running sores on her legs.

When di Portanova served notice to change his mother’s will, the Cullens hired lawyers who indicated they would try to stop him by challenging Lillie’s sanity. Legal wrangling stretched on until August 1966, when the two sides agreed that Lillie would be examined by three psychiatrists in a conference room at a New York bank. The doctors found her of sound mind, and immediately after the hearing Lillie signed documents that created trusts for Ricky, and for his younger brother, Ugo, who still lived in Italy. Four months afterward, Lillie died. She left her sons an estate valued at $5.2 million.

Ricky, however, was only warming up. His next task involved his brother. Three years younger than Ricky, Ugo di Portanova had taken after his mother. Morbidly obese, with long stringy hair and a heavy black beard, he lived with his father in Sorrento, where he spent his days lying in bed between attempts at painting. If Ricky could persuade an Italian court to make him Ugo’s ward, he would control twice the money he was able to pry from the Cullens. To do that, however, just as his mother had to be declared sane, Ugo had to be declared insane. An Italian judge, accommpanied by a court attorney and a psychiatrist, visited Ugo at his villa that October, two months after Lillie’s hearing in New York. He found Roy Cullen’s grandson barefoot, dressed in a bathrobe, wandering a room piled high with books, boxes filled with trash, record players, cameras, and arts supplies, including chisels, pliers, and tongs. Ugo announced he was making “a Christ.” He went on to discuss his philosophical interests in Hegel before denouncing the Bible as immoral. The judge ruled him insane.

His preparations complete, Ricky launched his long-planned legal assault in early 1967. That February his attorneys, having persuaded a Houston judge to make Ricky and his father Ugo’s guardians, asked the Cullens to pay Ugo $120,000 a year; they got it. One month later, the baron’s attorneys demanded that Ugo be paid the same $841,425 the baron had received. A week after that, the di Portanova attorneys served notice on the Cullen-appointed trustees of Ugo’s estate, demanding a full and itemized accounting of the Cullen fortune.

His legal broadside fired, Ricky and Ljuba relaxed and began to celebrate. They had been evicted from Inwood Manor—the monkey had apparently taken its toll—but with new money flowing in, they could now live in style. They bought a home on two wooded acres at 8828 Sandringham in Houston’s Memorial section, just blocks from George and Barbara Bush. A full staff was hired, including an Italian groom, Franco Necci, to take care of the horses. None of it, however, made Ljuba any happier in Houston—“this hell-hole,” she called it—and as time wore on, Ricky spent more time with a new friend, John Blaffer, the rumpled son of first-generation oil money; Blaffer’s father, Robert Lee Blaffer, had been one of Humble Oil’s founders.