Bryan Burrough (59 page)

When one of his messages crossed Bunker’s desk in early February, Bunker read it. “Ray wants to see us?” he asked Herbert in mock surprise. “Well, I guess we better go see him then.”
⁶

There, at a meeting in Ray’s corner office, Bunker and Herbert informed their half brother that they were switching all the first family’s administrative affairs from Hunt Oil to the new Hunt Energy, which would take over Placid’s old space on the twenty-fifth floor; Bunker and Herbert were moving their offices downstairs as well. It was by all accounts a civil meeting. Bunker and Herbert had no problem with Ray assuming their father’s position as president of Hunt Oil; they agreed to maintain seats on its board. Otherwise, everything would go on as it had before. They even promised to return each other’s phone calls.

But what truly drew the two families together—at least for display in public—were preparations for Bunker and Herbert’s wiretapping trial. It was set for September 1975 in the windblown West Texas city of Lubbock, home of Texas Tech University. The good news was that two Hunt aides, including John Currington, had been convicted of mail fraud—the embezzlement scheme—that March, which would tend to make the wiretaps appear, if not legal, reasonable. The bad news came in July, when Bunker and Herbert, along with four of their attorneys, were indicted on additional charges of obstruction of justice in connection with their alleged attempts to silence the wiretappers.

The real problem, though, was that the Hunts had no serious defense. They would argue that they hadn’t known wiretapping was illegal, which doesn’t matter in criminal trials. Their sole remaining defense, and this was the line their attorney, Phil Hirschkop, reluctantly began feeding skeptical reporters, was that Bunker and Herbert had been set up by the CIA. It was all revenge, Hirschkop argued, for Bunker’s refusal to help the agency in Libya. From the beginning, though, Hirschkop sensed the trial would be more about form than substance. H.L.’s security man, Paul Rothermel, had fed reporters a theory that the first and second families were at war, that the wiretaps were part of a scheme to cheat Ray’s family out of its inheritance.

Hirschkop needed the jury to believe the wiretaps were about ferreting out an embezzlement, and he made sure Ray, his mother, Ruth, and his three sisters would appear at the trial to present a united front. At the same time, Hirschkop badly needed Bunker and Herbert to emerge from their long years in the shadows and present themselves as people a West Texas jury could embrace, good ol’ boys in cowboy boots who drove battered Chevys and rooted for the Cowboys on Sundays. The brothers did their part, easily charming a series of reporters who produced exactly the kind of aw-shucks puff pieces the defense needed. Herbert smiled and talked about raising chickens as a boy. Bunker joked about his weight. The
Dallas Morning News
reporter, whose feature appeared on the eve of the trial, was impressed by their “country charm and easy humor. . . . It would be hard to guess from their casual demeanor that these are two of the wealthiest men in the world.”
⁷

When jury selection began on September 17, 1975, there were almost as many Hunts in the courtroom as prospective jurors. Brothers, half brothers, cousins, wives, children—everyone who could smile for a camera came to Lubbock. H.L.’s widow, Ruth, described by one reporter as a “kindly grandmother,” told newsmen she was certain her stepsons were innocent; Hirschkop asked and received permission for her to sit in the courtroom. At breaks Ray smiled and chatted with Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar, who made sure to smile and chat with courtroom personnel and always wore their cowboy boots; the
New York Times
man, presumably not a Texan, called them motorcycle boots. Meanwhile, a line of Hunt wives beamed as flashbulbs popped; the picture appeared in the
Morning News
beneath the headline “Hunt Wiretap Trial Becomes a Family Affair.” “They sure don’t act like rich people,” one observer murmured.

On the witness stand Bunker and Herbert made no effort to deny the wiretapping. One of the private eyes, W. J. Everett, insisted he had told the brothers it was illegal, but Bunker and Herbert denied it. Herbert was the star, actually tearing up as he explained he had only done it to protect his beloved father. The character witnesses, especially two Dallas ministers and E. J. Holub, a mammoth Texas Tech alumnus who played for Lamar’s Kansas City Chiefs, charmed everyone. After a week of testimony the jury took just three hours to reach its verdict: not guilty on all counts. Bunker emerged from the courtroom arm in arm with Herbert, telling reporters how sorry he felt for ordinary Texans who couldn’t afford the fine lawyers the Hunts could.
^af

It was a shining moment for the Hunts, their most significant legal victory since besting Dad Joiner forty years before, and proof that the two Dallas branches of the family could live together in peace. But the warm glow was not to last. H. L. Hunt had once had another family, born to a woman most of the Hunt children only dimly remembered, and six weeks later, in the fall of 1975, she emerged from the mists and sued.

It had been a long time coming. H. L. Hunt’s all-but-forgotten second “wife,” Frania Tye, now Frania Tye Lee, had withdrawn to Atlanta after World War II upon marrying one of Hunt’s men, John W. Lee. The couple had used the money from Frania’s 1942 separation agreement to buy an estate in suburban Chamliss called Flowerland, where Frania, a pretty blonde then in her forties, threw elegant parties in an effort to penetrate Atlanta society; they later added a 747-acre plantation. Frania’s social ambitions were stifled, however, by nagging rumors, apparently started by a woman who knew her in Long Island before the war, that she had been Hunt’s mistress. She and Lee had divorced in 1957, and Frania moved into a Tudor home in Atlanta’s Ansley Park neighborhood. She never remarried. Friends believed she never got over the idea that she would one day “remarry” Hunt.

Frania had raised four of Hunt’s children to adulthood. In 1975, when they suddenly sprang from the wings of the Hunt family stage, none were exactly thriving. The eldest son, Howard, who turned forty-eight that year, was a self-employed mechanical engineer. His sister Haroldina, forty-six, had married a doctor and given birth to seven children. However, like her half brother Hassie Hunt, she had been overtaken by mental illness, believed to be a form of schizophrenia, and had undergone electroshock treatments. The second daughter, Helen, one of H.L.’s favorites, had moved to New York and attempted to become an actress. Disappointed by her prospects, she had returned to Atlanta, married a real estate developer, bore him a son, and became active in local theater circles, founding the Theatre Atlanta Women’s Guild. In 1962, while on a monthlong tour of Europe, she and her husband were killed in an airplane crash along with 126 others outside Paris.

Given their tangled parentage, all of Frania’s children suffered to some extent from identity issues, especially the youngest, Hugh. Born Hugh Richard Hunt, he had changed his name over the years to first Hue R. Lee, then Hue Richard Lee, then finally to Hugh Lee Hunt. A broad-shouldered, intelligent, if insecure young man, Hugh made it into Harvard Business School only to drop out and return to Atlanta, where he blew much of what little money he had attempting to become a real estate developer. All four children had Hunt-money trusts, but they were a pittance, dribbling out barely six thousand dollars a year. Howard and Hugh had had sporadic contact with H.L. over the years, usually to borrow money. When Helen graduated high school, H.L. sent her a mink coat. But that was the extent of Hunt’s support. When the first family mentioned Frania’s brood at all, they called them “the Lee people.”

By all accounts, it was Hugh Hunt who persuaded his mother to explore the idea of some kind of lawsuit. The family had discussed it over the years. Frania’s enthusiasm waxed and waned. She was seventy now. Years before, Hunt had told her all records of their marriage had been destroyed. She and John Lee had actually gone to Tampa once to check, and found it was true. Still, Hugh pressed. Maybe they looked in the wrong place. Lyda’s sons were billionaires now. Why couldn’t Frania’s children have money, too? Hugh took his mother once more to the courthouses in Tampa, but they were unable to find any record of the marriage. It didn’t matter, Hugh said. They had lived as man and wife.

Frania hired an attorney. On November 11, 1975, fifty years to the day since she had exchanged vows with “Major Franklyn Hunt” at the little bungalow in Tampa’s Latin quarter, her family filed two suits against the Hunt estate in Louisiana. In the first, filed in Shreveport, Frania asked to be declared Hunt’s “putative” wife. She asked for half of everything Hunt had earned during their nine years together—the period where he took control of the East Texas field—and all the income that flowed from it, an amount that could run into the billions. In a separate suit filed in Baton Rouge, Hugh asked a court to declare him and his siblings H. L. Hunt’s legitimate heirs.

For the Hunts, the only good news was that no one noticed. Other than a wire-service story in the
Morning News,
the press ignored it.

By 1976, with the sole exception of Bunker’s reversal in Libya, the children of H. L. Hunt’s two Dallas families, and the corporations they controlled, were thriving as never before. Thanks in large part to rising oil prices, the Hunts were probably the world’s wealthiest family. They invested together and separately, at their whims, in nearly two hundred different partnerships and companies, everything from coal and sugar to the Shakey’s Pizza chain; their real estate holdings alone were valued at $1 billion. Placid Oil, run by professional executives under the guidance of Bunker, Herbert, and Placid’s unofficial chairwoman, Margaret Hunt Hill, was the largest single Hunt entity, raking in more than $350 million in annual revenues atop reserves valued at $4 billion or more. The family-owned drilling contractor, Penrod, run by Herbert, operated offshore and onshore rigs for customers all over the world. Its assets topped $500 million. All told, the Hunts employed more than eight thousand people. Their net worth hovered in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, easily topping the next-wealthiest American families, the Mellons and Rockefellers.

The only Hunt who concentrated his moneymaking efforts outside oil was Lamar, who, after cofounding the American Football League, had become one of America’s most successful sports entrepreneurs. Lamar still ran the Kansas City Chiefs—they won the Super Bowl for him in 1970—but in 1967 he began to branch into new sports, cofounding the first serious professional tennis league, World Championship Tennis. The WCT revolutionized the sport, then run by amateur associations. Under Lamar’s supervision it staged the first big-money tournaments, instituted innovations such as the seven-point tiebreaker, and in short order transformed tennis into the mass-spectator sport it is today. Not all Lamar’s ventures worked so well. He started a professional soccer franchise in Dallas, the Tornado, but the league never caught on. He tried to buy the island of Alcatraz from the city of San Francisco, thinking he might turn it into a shopping and tourist attraction, but the project died in the face of the usual Bay Area protests.

Though the first family was loathe to admit it, the most successful Hunt during the 1970s was Ray, who began making over his father’s old Hunt Oil Company much as his Reunion project was changing the face of downtown Dallas. Like Sid Bass, Ray hired a crew of outsiders to help modernize and streamline Hunt Oil’s corporate structure, consolidating his father’s old real estate and farming businesses, then dismantling the scandal-plagued HLH Products. Once his house was in order, Ray concentrated on finding new reserves. In 1976 he snapped up his first acreage in the North Sea, a 15 percent stake in a consortium that began drilling the following year. The discovery well came in strong, revealing a new field whose reserves were estimated as high as five hundred million barrels. Hunt Oil’s share was initially valued at two hundred million dollars, then as high as a billion dollars as oil prices rose. As more than one Dallas oilman remarked, Ray had inherited his father’s luck.

Buoyed by his success, Ray hired dozens of new land men and geologists and began buying acreage all over the world, concentrating in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico. In three short years he quadrupled the size of Hunt Oil’s staff, increased its offshore leases from a hundred thousand to a million acres, and boosted the value of its reserves from one hundred million dollars to a billion dollars or more. For the first time in years, Hunt Oil was once again a legitimate player in international oil circles.

But Ray was much more than an oilman. He remained active as a real estate developer, accumulating hundreds of acres he intended to build out in the Fort Worth suburbs. Unlike Bunker and Herbert and the rest of the family, the Reunion project, fast nearing completion, had made Ray a public figure in Dallas, a genuine civic leader who accepted invitations to join the boards of the Chamber of Commerce, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the SMU Alumni Association. To the delight of many in Dallas, Ray emerged as everything the rest of the Hunts had never seemed, friendly, approachable, civic-minded,
modern.
Where his father’s idea of a media outlet was LIFE LINE, Ray started a new magazine just for Dallas,
D,
a glossy offering immediately embraced by wealthy readers. Haute Dallas simply fell in love with him. Ray was invited to join the best country clubs as well as the exclusive Idlewild, Terpsichorean, and Dervish clubs, all of whom had shunned his half brothers. A 1977 profile in
Time
anointed Ray “the Nice Hunt,” and soon
BusinessWeek
and other publications rushed to add compliments of their own. “He’s the last out of the elevator [at night],” one peer told
Time,
“and the last one walking down the hall.”

If Ray was welcomed into the bosom of greater Dallas, the first family’s respect proved far harder to gain. Ray’s mother, Ruth, tried her best to unite the two families, throwing debut parties for Herbert’s daughters at Mount Vernon and inviting the first family to camp and hunt on H.L.’s Wyoming ranchlands. Her overtures, however, were seldom returned. As one of Ray’s sisters described relations between the two branches of the family: “We only see each other at weddings and trials.” Ray’s ascendancy only made things worse. Bunker clearly resented his popularity. The first family still owned 18 percent of Hunt Oil, and despite its success, they badmouthed Ray’s management at every turn. He was too young, they said, too inexperienced. He knew nothing about the oil business. The North Sea field? Beginner’s luck.