Bryan Burrough (56 page)

It was as if the Big Rich of Texas had come full circle, back to the honeymoon days of 1948 to 1953, when they were viewed as harmless, nouveau riche eccentrics. As the 1970s wore on, in fact, Texas oilmen would increasingly be seen not as dangerous but as entertaining, a function not just of the Hunts’ various soap operas but of a new television drama loosely based on the family,
Dallas
. The show, billed as the story of “dramatic feuds in the land of the big rich,” became the most watched series in America. As far as the outside world was concerned, the new face of Texas Oil was J. R. Ewing.

For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 embargo ran for five solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better. The fall of the shah of Iran led to dramatic disruptions in Arabian oil exports, driving the price of oil into the stratosphere, to an average of $12.64 a barrel in 1979, then $21.59, then $30, then, finally, amazingly, to $34 a barrel in 1980. In just seven short years prices rose 2,000 percent.

The world had never seen anything like this—prices and demand and drilling and profits, all at historic, unpredecented highs. And neither had Texas. Suddenly, everyone wanted into the oil game. Geologists fled the majors to become wildcatters. Doctors and dentists pored money into discovery wells. In Houston, Dallas, and Midland new skyscrapers grew like grass. It was the ’50s all over again.

For the first time in twenty years, new millionaire oilmen began popping up across the state. There was Clayton Williams, the Midland oilman who flew Texas A&M flags over his rigs and hosted black-tie cattle auctions. And Sybil Harrington, the Amarillo heir who became the Metropolitan Opera’s preeminent backer, bankrolling more than a dozen major performances at Lincoln Center. Everywhere one listened, there were echoes of the golden age. Out in Abilene, an oilman named “Cadillac” Jack Grimm—a moniker bestowed by his friend Bunker Hunt—followed in Tom Slick’s footsteps by funding expeditions in search of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. A garrulous type who placed second in the 1976 World Series of Poker, Grimm made world headlines mounting three expeditions in search of the
Titanic
; his 1981 effort, using deep-sea submersibles, returned with a photo Grimm swore showed the sunken ship’s propeller. (It didn’t.) Another expedition, this one to find evidence of Noah’s Ark on Turkey’s Mount Ararat, returned with a sliver of wood Grimm swore was part of the ark. (It wasn’t.) Still later he tried, in vain, to find Atlantis.

Texas Oil was back, but the days had long passed when any of the Big Four families depended on oil to put food on the table. By the early 1970s the Hunts and especially the Murchisons were thoroughly diversified. John and Clint had vacated their father’s old 1201 Main headquarters in 1965, taking the twenty-third floor of the new fifty-story First National Bank skyscraper, six floors below Hunt Oil. For the first time members of the two families could ride elevators together and exchange daily pleasantries. The Dallas Petroleum Club, where Herbert Hunt served as president in 1968, took the building’s top floor.

Few people in Dallas knew what the Murchisons were up to. In the years following the Alleghany debacle, the Murchison brothers all but disappeared from public view. While Clint’s Cowboys were famous around the world, the operator at Murchison Brothers answered calls with a polite, “Seven four one six oh three one.” The fact was, other than the Cowboys, there wasn’t much to talk about. For all the chatter around Dallas of how brilliant John and Clint were, their assets hadn’t changed much over the years: life insurance, construction, and real estate still formed the empire’s foundation, as they had for years.

Clint’s 1972 divorce signaled an era of unsettling changes for the Murchison family. He had built a shiny new headquarters for the Cowboys but, as with all his investments, he kept his hands out of day-to-day management, allowing Tex Schramm, personnel chief Gil Brandt, and coach Tom Landry to work their magic, and they did; Clint’s smiling face, usually displayed alongside a trophy or a sweaty Bob Lilly or Roger Staubach, became a regular feature of Dallas sports pages. What readers didn’t know was that as the Cowboys marched to championship after championship, their owner’s personal life was spiraling out of control. Clint thought nothing of downing a half dozen vodkas-and-crushed-ice in a sitting, and in the mid-1970s, egged on by the fast crowd he saw in California, he began using recreational drugs. What began with an occasional marijuana joint turned into a keen appetite for cocaine. “It got to the point where he needed drugs in order to perform in bed,” one of his mistresses recalled. “Without cocaine, sex was impossible for him.”
¹

Clint knew he was in trouble, and told more than one friend he needed to reduce his drinking. He began cutting back on women as well—affairs weren’t as exciting without someone to cheat on, he found—focusing his attention on a handful of mistresses; it was during this period that he bought the one in Los Angeles a Jaguar and a home in Beverly Hills. Then, in 1974, came the promise of salvation. Her name was Anne Brandt, and she was the freshly divorced wife of the Cowboys’ director of player personnel, Gil Brandt. Smart and focused, a petite brunette who kept her hair short, Anne had lived a hard life. Raised in Oklahoma, the daughter of a traveling salesman and his alcoholic wife, she ran away at sixteen and by twenty-one had two children and two ex-husbands. She made a career as a legal secretary, married and divorced Brandt, and was still only thirty-four when she began seeing Clint.

Eyebrows had barely had time to raise when the couple was suddenly married, in a small wedding at the Murchison mansion in June 1975; Anne had been divorced less than a year. When Dallas society finally digested what had happened, the new Mrs. Murchison was met with a resounding thumbs-down. The ladies of Dallas remained loyal to Jane, who had remarried one of her decorators and settled in New York, judging Anne far too coarse for their tastes. Anne, it became clear, was no Jane. Among other things, she could be intensely jealous; anything that took Clint from her side, from his mistresses to the Cowboys, she disdained. Some of his oldest cronies now found themselves frozen out of Clint’s life. Worse, Anne had a violent streak, and when Clint did manage to sneak away for a weekend, the consequences could be hair-raising. Anne fought, struck, and even bit Clint during screaming tirades that sometimes went on for days.

Her behavior, Anne knew, was rooted in a deep-seated insecurity. At every party or Cowboys function they attended, she spent hours worrying over what to wear. She sank into depression, and when a girlfriend suggested she come to a meeting of the Dallas Christian Women’s Club, Anne went along, and that was it. Not a year into her new marriage, she pledged to become a born-again Christian, plunging into nine months of intensive therapy from which she emerged determined to devote her life—and her marriage—to God. Out the mansion door went the bottles of vodka and the vials of cocaine. Banished, at least from the Forest Lane mansion, were her husband’s oldest friends. While Clint met the onslaught of religious fervor with sighs and rolled eyes, Anne dived headlong into a new career speaking to religious groups all across Dallas, where she implored churchgoers to give themselves over to Christ. “I let Jesus handle even the littlest things,” she told
People
magazine. “Like I pray for parking spaces.”

The turmoil in his private life did nothing to concentrate Clint’s focus on business at Murchison Brothers. As the 1970s wore on, he could get interested in little beyond the most complex—and often riskiest—real estate deals. After a half century of successful family investments, he had no real sense that anything could go seriously wrong. Where his brother John remained the careful, studied keel of the Murchison Brothers ship, Clint sank millions into deals on handshakes, on napkins, at urinals, risking vast amounts on investments he seldom took time to study. Worse, just as he had peopled his private life with hard-living cronies, his business life was increasingly crowded with fast-talking sycophants who promised him the moon, which was all Clint wanted to hear. A solid 8 or 10 percent return bored him. By the mid-1970s, he simply couldn’t be bothered with any investment that didn’t promise tripling his return or more.

There was the ten million dollars he threw away on an Oklahoma plant that was to convert cattle manure into natural gas. Clint named it the Calorific Reclamation Anaerobic Process, CRAP for short. It never worked. He poured more than fifty million dollars into a computer company called Optimum Systems that had expanded into health care software after beginning its life as a program to rank and analyze college football players for the Cowboys. Murchison thought he could build it into an integrated software-management company to rival Ross Perot’s crosstown colossus, EDS. He never would. When Tex Schramm bought a marina in Key West, Clint agreed to invest twenty-one million dollars to turn it into a five-star resort, six hundred condominiums around a lush golf course. After Clint, who like his father was chronically short on cash, missed an interest payment, construction stalled, and lenders eventually foreclosed.

What real estate developments did get finished were marred by shoddy workmanship, the kind of detail Clint had long since fobbed off on subordinates. A case in point was the Hillandale project in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., the brainchild of a new pal named Lou Farris Jr., whose résumé included a pair of personal bankruptcies. Barely thirty of the planned two hundred homes were built; the first residents warned everyone within earshot that the roofs leaked and the doors jammed. Still, Farris and other cronies kept plying Murchison Brothers with vouchers for more and ever larger expenditures; when accountants questioned what they were for, Clint just scrawled out the word “Pay.” “Clint Junior,” the family’s longtime attorney, Henry Gilchrist, once observed, “just threw money at people he perceived to be his friends. He was doing this out of sight of the family and family advisers and there was no way of stopping him.”

John Murchison was not amused. John had become everything his brother was not, mature, worldly, personable. He and Lupe were now respected members of Dallas society, hosts of the city’s most elegant parties; John’s thoughtful insights, so unlike Clint’s, were sought by anyone weighing major new projects, especially those in the world of arts, museums, and civic boards. Uppercrust Dallas had been frankly dismayed in the early 1960s when John began uncrating the Miros and Rauchenbergs he and Lupe bought in New York and hung throughout the Big House. But as Dallas matured, John’s taste in art came to be seen not as bizarre but cutting edge, and he emerged as a driving force behind the Dallas Museum of Art, serving as chairman and then president from 1972 to 1978. “Everyone deferred to him because he had superb judgment,” one Dallas civic leader recalled. “He would say something at a park board meeting and suddenly everyone would say, ‘Yes, that’s the answer. Why didn’t I think of that? It was so simple.’ ”
²

By the early 1970s John’s judgment was telling him to steer clear of his brother’s investments. For the first time John began venturing out on his own. North Dallas and its surrounding suburbs were booming, and in 1972 he and another developer set aside two hundred acres of pasturelands Big Clint had used for grazing cattle and began work on a $250 million residential, office, and retail project they called Bent Tree; it was the first major project John had attempted without Clint, and it was a resounding success. Yet in his own way John was no more enamored of day-to-day work at Murchison Brothers than his brother. Their companies ran themselves, and as the years wore on he and Lupe began traveling more and more. Summers they spent in La Jolla, autumns at a new plantation they bought in Georgia, while winter always found them in Vail. In between they spent long periods at a sparkling new home they had built on the harbor in Sydney, Australia, jetting off to Paris, fishing in Iceland, and photographing elephants in Kenya. Their four children were usually left behind, in the care of governesses.

Whether in Texas, Vail, or Sydney, they entertained lavishly, parties that drew the crème of not just Texas but the nation. President Ford skied with John and Lupe in Vail, while Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and other politicians were regulars at Big House affairs. Their gatherings, like a Gladoaks pigeon hunt they hosted in the mid-1970s, fused East Coast sophistication with Texas country life. Private jets disgorged hundreds of guests for the Gladoaks shoot, men with antique English shotguns, wives in rustic fashionables, all assembling beneath a dozen giant tents for a catered luncheon of fried bass, string beans, corn bread, and peach cobbler. Afterward the men struck off into the brush to blast pigeons released for their aim, returning to the tents at dusk for an outdoor banquet that lasted to the wee hours.

John might have overlooked Clint’s string of bad investments were it not for the debt Clint was piling onto the Murchison Brothers balance sheet. His brother, raised on their father’s ability to get rich using other people’s money, never met a loan he wouldn’t take. In fact, Clint chased new loans with much the same fervor he chased women, always believing he could engineer a return higher than the interest rate. “Borrowing money was a game and a challenge to Clint,” one of his attorneys recalled. “He was always trying to see how much he could borrow. Most businessmen would get an idea for a deal and then go out and get the financing for it. Clint did the opposite. He’d pledge a Murchison Brothers asset, get a twenty-million-dollar loan for it, and then he’d look for a place to put the twenty million. Most people thought it was ludicrous, but it worked for him for years.”
³

When the lending game changed during the 1970s, Clint didn’t. Where Big Clint had built his fortune on interest rates of 2 or 3 percent, soaring oil prices in the ’70s brought soaring inflation, and with it soaring interest rates—by 1977 as high as 18 or sometimes 20 percent a year. Higher rates threatened Murchison Brothers from every angle. Not only did loans cost more to pay off, higher interest rates meant higher mortgage rates, so high many Americans couldn’t afford a new home. The resulting slowdown in the housing market struck Murchison Brothers a hard blow; several of Clint’s biggest projects, including the ones in Washington and Key West, stalled. His cash flow slowed. Yet the banks still had to be paid. Neither John nor Clint, schooled on Big Clint’s lectures to spread money like manure, kept much cash on hand. By 1977 their aides were scrambling almost every month to scare up enough to pay the banks.