Bryan Burrough (52 page)

John Blaffer knew oil, and his insights were invaluable to Ricky’s cause; if his mother’s estate was being charged for drilling fees, Blaffer pointed out, then the estate—and Ricky—should be receiving royalties as well. But Blaffer’s true value to the baron was introducing him to Texas-style hedonism. Blaffer had a wife, but he also owned an apartment complex on South Post Oak Road, and had installed his mistress to run it. More than a dozen oilmen, in fact, had girlfriends living there. Sheppard King—he of the Egyptian belly-dancer marriage—had an ex-wife living there, too, Gloria King, who fell into Ricky’s circle.

This was the heart of the Swinging Sixties, and the apartments on South Post Oak swung hard. Parties started every afternoon at five and were often still going strong at dawn. A Texas version of the Riviera, the action drew a hard-living, cosmopolitan crowd, and Baron Enrico di Portanova fit right in. When they needed a break, Blaffer took Ricky on his private plane for overnight hunting trips and tequila-fueled weekends in Acapulco. Ricky enjoyed himself so much that he purchased his own Cessna. If a morning dawned with no imminent agenda, he and Blaffer would fly over to Nuevo Laredo and hit the Cadillac Bar for a long, boozy lunch.

Such escapades did little to strengthen the di Portanovas’ marriage. After a brief separation and reconciliation in early 1967, Ricky took Ljuba to Monte Carlo that summer, only to discover her in bed with another man. Ljuba stormed out of their hotel onto the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel’s yacht; Spiegel and a group of friends including the actor Kirk Douglas were heading to Capri. From the yacht, Ljuba telephoned Ricky in tears, then put Douglas on the line to try to persuade the baron to take her back. “Kirk, you stay out of it,” the baron said. “I don’t think we can be together anymore.”

Di Portanova returned to Houston that September to file for divorce and await the Cullens’ reply to his legal filings. If all went well—and he had won every skirmish to date—he would soon take delivery of a fortune that might run to the tens of millions of dollars. While he waited, the house on Sandringham was lonely, so he began hosting nightly gatherings of the South Post Oak crowd. One attendee was his new mistress, a pretty River Oaks girl named Sandy Hovas, so bountifully endowed that her classmates at Lamar High School had nicknamed her “Buckets.” Before long, Ricky and Sandy were an item.

Then, suddenly, matters took a dark turn. Early on the evening of October 28, 1967, Gloria King and a friend named Norma Clark were visiting Ricky to discuss arrangements for an upcoming dinner party. When Gloria left on an errand, Norma Clark remained behind, sitting with Ricky in the living room. Without warning, a gunshot echoed from the kitchen. The baron’s Italian groom, Franco Necci, staggered into the living room, bleeding heavily from a chest wound, and collapsed on the floor. A tall man in a brown jacket strode in behind, waving a .45 automatic. “I’m going to kill all you S.O.B.’s!” he shouted.

Di Portanova had just begun to beg for his life when Gloria King suddenly walked in through the front door. The man with the gun motioned her toward di Portanova and Norma Clark, produced a set of handcuffs, and chained the women together, then ordered the baron to open his three wall safes. There was little inside. Frustrated and cursing, the man with the gun took $350 from the baron’s wallet and a 6-carat diamond ring from Norma Clark. Then he ran out.

Police surmised this was something more than a robbery gone bad; while the locations of two of the baron’s safes were known to friends, the robber had known of a third that was secret. Clearly, the crime had been planned in advance. A police detective named Paul Nix uncovered a snitch who told them the robber was acting under orders to “kill the Italian.” Nix felt certain that Franco Necci, who was Italian, had been murdered by mistake, that the intruder had intended to kill the baron. Few said aloud what some in Houston suspected: there was only one family who would want Baron Enrico di Portanova dead.

The Cullens, meanwhile, remained silent, refusing all interviews as they simmered in their River Oaks homes. No one reached out to di Portanova, much less socialized with him. “You don’t tend to have much to do with someone,” Beth Robertson observed, “when they’re suing you.”

Rumors of a murder-for-hire were still swirling in mid-November when Detective Nix arrested an ex-convict and heroin addict named Carl Thomas Preston. The baron, Gloria King, and Norma Clark identified him in a lineup as the man who had robbed them. Preston was indicted for Franco Necci’s murder and, while awaiting trial, was convicted of heroin possession, for which he drew a life sentence; then as now, Texas drug laws were nothing to trifle with. The baron offered Preston a hundred thousand dollars if he would identify who had arranged the murder. Preston refused, however, saying his life wouldn’t be worth a penny if he squealed. With Preston keeping silent, the theories being floated about who, if any one, was behind the killing remained nothing but unproved suspicions.

There matters lay when the baron’s divorce suit suddenly heated up. He was already paying Ljuba five thousand dollars a month in temporary alimony and had made a settlement offer—twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, three thousand dollars a month, and a 1966 Mustang—but Ljuba, keenly aware of the fortune Ricky stood to inherit, held out for more. Rather than face a countersuit, the baron skipped the country in April 1968, taking Sandy Hovas to Rome, where they rented a luxurious apartment with two terraces and a seventy-five-foot-long living room they packed with antiques. He sent condolences to his business manager, Edward Condon, and his secretary, Vivian Flynn, when Condon wrapped the baron’s beloved Maserati around a tree.

“Received the tragic news about the Maserati,” Ricky wrote Condon in October 1968, “. . . that bunch of stupid American peasants raced my beautiful machine over those goddam flat, ugly, unprepared roads. . . . You allow a Texan to drive a Maserati it is like allowing a baboon to play a Stradivarius. . . . Please have Vivian pack my mink lined trench coat as the weather is getting colder. If you would like to wear it Sweetie go right ahead. All of us girls should be draped in mink after 40.”

Money was now pouring into di Portanova’s accounts, from his mother’s estate and from wise investments Condon made on his behalf. Even as his divorce proceedings dragged on, the baron embarked on a shopping spree of epic proportions. He bought a mansion in Acapulco—it had a name, “Arabesque”—another home in Palm Springs, and a farm outside Rome; a new plane, a King Air Beechcraft, a helicopter, and a speedboat; two Maseratis, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce; plus five racehorses in England and four more in Rome. There were servants at every house, a secretary in Houston, two full-time pilots, and a captain for the speedboat. “I hope that in the near future,” he wrote Condon in March 1969, “I [will] be in a position as my father and think of nothing other than the best things in life—sun, sex and spaghetti.”

Di Portanova was having so much fun he didn’t bother to return to Houston for the murder trial of Carl Thomas Preston. Despite Gloria King’s testimony against him, defense attorneys broadly hinted that someone else had shot Franco Necci. In the end, jurors believed Preston’s alibi that he had been in Arizona the night of the murder. He was acquitted; the crime has never been solved, nor has any light ever been shed on the mystery of who—if anyone—hired Preston.

Ricky didn’t especially care. Life was good—so good, in fact, that he all but gave up his efforts to pry more money from the Cullens, who had done their best to tie up his pleadings in court. The family’s attorneys had succeeded in pushing the matter from a Harris County court into a state court. Rather than wait years to jump-start the proceedings there, and clearly dreading the time in Houston it would require, the baron accepted an out-of-court settlement in 1969. The Cullens allowed di Portanova to become a trustee of Ugo’s estate, granting him a measure of control, but refused to produce any kind of accounting. The baron, diverted by his racehorses and Maseratis, by a wonderful life of sun, sex, and spaghetti, ran up the white flag.

For the moment.

T
he Hunt family, for all its oddities, harbored no playboys or serious inter-family squabbling during the 1960s—that was yet to come. Hunt himself, who turned seventy-nine in 1968, was still hailed as the world’s richest man, although he almost certainly wasn’t. That year
Forbes
estimated him to be only one of the six richest Americans, and for the first time placed Bunker in the top ten, pegging his worth at between three and five hundred million dollars. Outside Dallas H.L. “has become symbolic of the lusty Texas tycoon who flashes $1000 bills, drapes his women in mink, and turns in his Cadillacs when they get dirty,” the journalist Jack Anderson wrote in 1969. But there was a wide gap between image and reality.

In fact, Hunt lived a spartan life, still driving himself to work six mornings a week, his lunch beside him in a brown paper bag. At Mount Vernon in the evenings he fed carrots to his deer and sat on the veranda holding hands with Ruth, often singing their favorite song, “Just Plain Folks.” In 1965 he had moved all the family offices into the new First National Bank skyscraper downtown. Hunt Oil took the twenty-ninth floor. Hunt moved his old furniture into a corner office; next door was an unoccupied room whose door still bore the nameplate “Hassie Hunt.”

By the 1960s Hunt had given up on oil; even as Placid Oil, which remained controlled by the first family’s trusts, discovered the massive Black Lake oil field in southern Louisiana—a strike that probably made the first family’s six children billionaires for the first time—Hunt Oil found no significant new reserves in the 1960s. Instead Hunt focused much of his energy on writing, politics, and faddish health products, especially the plant derivative aloe vera, which he believed had all-but-mystical healing qualities. None of this did anything to increase his stature around Dallas. A case in point was the interview Hunt gave to a young
Morning News
reporter named Rena Pederson about his diet. At first everything appeared normal. Hunt, with Ruth at his side, sat in Mount Vernon’s dining room, chatting amiably as he gobbled down, and sang the praises of, apricots, dates, and pecans between sips of orange juice and bouillon. “I have lots of money,” Hunt mused. “So they call me the Billionaire Health Crank. Heh, heh, heh.”

Suddenly, without warning, Hunt dropped to the floor and began furiously crawling around the table. He made one lap around, then two, before the startled Pederson asked what he was doing. Hunt replied that he was indulging in his favorite exercise activity, “creeping.” “I’m a crank about creeping!” he blurted, still circling the table.

“Don’t go too fast,” Ruth pleaded.

“Yes, please slow down,” Pederson’s photographer said. “I want to get your picture.” And that was the photo that appeared in the
Morning News
, the “world’s richest man” on his hands and knees, creeping around his dining room. “Yahoo!” Hunt yelled as he finished.

What Hunt-the-philosopher lacked in credibility he made up for in literary output. All through the 1960s he continued to fire off letters to newspapers, almost all on tried-and-true ultraconservative themes; noting the rise of the hippie counterculture, he titled one “We CAN Turn Back the Clock.” He began writing a syndicated column, where he engaged in running one-way feuds with everyone from William F. Buckley to Senator William Fulbright, handed out political endorsements no one much wanted, and continued churning out new ideas and terms to describe them; he saw himself as a “freedomist,” all who opposed him “anti-freedomists,” and dubbed eastern elites “Fabians.” At their peak Hunt’s columns were carried in thirty-six daily newspapers and twenty-two weeklies, mostly in the South. Between 1964 and 1970 he followed
Alpaca
with ten more self-published books, several of them collections of his columns, but also a family history called
Hunt Heritage
and a second stab at the
Alpaca
story,
Alpaca Revisited.
None exactly roiled literary circles. LIFE LINE, meanwhile, kept chugging along. Despite an ongoing feud with several congressmen over its tax-exempt status, it continued broadcasting its mix of religion and right-wing propaganda all through the years of Woodstock and My Lai; in 1969 it was still carried on five hundred radio stations.

Despite the stream of messages to the outside world, as the years wore on Hunt increasingly withdrew into a world of his own, disdaining the advice of his children in favor of two trusted security men, Paul Rothermel and John Currington, whose offices flanked his own. Rothermel’s investigation into the various Kennedy-conspiracy probes made him Hunt’s one indispensable aide; over the years he and Currington emerged as Hunt’s all-purpose fixers, supervising trust disbursements to all three families, running Hunt’s food company, HLH Products, even trying to collect old gambling debts. Whether it was his advancing age, the changing political climate, or the torrents of criticism he endured in the wake of Kennedy’s death, by the mid- 1960s Hunt began to evidence a mounting paranoia. As the decade wore on, Hunt began seeing vague threats everywhere, from hippies, left-wing politicians, even Hunt Oil employees. At one point, when Libya was threatening to nationalize Bunker’s oil fields, Hunt had Rothermel infiltrate a group of local Libyan exchange students, worried they might assassinate him. The real threat, however, came from within.

For much of the 1960s the Hunt family’s most irksome headache was Hunt’s food business. Between its inception in 1960 and 1968 HLH Products posted losses totalling thirty million dollars, and was increasingly a point of contention between H.L. and the children of his first family, a relationship that had never fully recovered from H.L.’s decision to marry Ruth and adopt her children. Bunker and Herbert tried to persuade their father to close HLH any number of times, but he refused to listen. In time things got so bad that Herbert and his father briefly stopped speaking.