Bryan Burrough (65 page)

That day at the mansion, Clint broke the news to Schramm: It was time to sell. He blamed his health. Schramm handled the ensuing auction. Offers poured in from across the country, but Clint wanted the Cowboys to remain in Texas hands. In late 1983 Schramm reached a tentative deal with a group of eleven Dallas investors led by the oilman H. R. “Bum” Bright. The offer was sixty-five million dollars for the team, plus twenty-five million dollars for the lease on Texas Stadium; it would be the highest price ever paid for an American sports team. John Jr., whose side of the family still owned half the team, warned Lupe that Clint might try to reduce the team’s price tag in favor of more money for the stadium lease, which Clint alone controlled. His concerns slowed the closing for months, but on March 19, 1984, the deal finally went through: the Cowboys, the team that had been Dallas’s salvation during the dark days of the 1960s, that had symbolized a new Texas in the 1970s, and that had briefly made Clint Murchison King of all Texans, were no longer his. The Dallas newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches praising Clint’s legacy, practically elevating him to Texas sainthood. Not a word, however, was written of how quickly Clint’s hungry banks snapped up the sale’s proceeds to satisfy his debts.

In those last ugly years, it seemed that every time Clint struck a deal to rescue himself, it spawned more trouble. The dissolution agreement in 1978 begat John Jr.’s attacks; the settlement with John Jr. begat squabbling with Lupe and her daughters. So it was with the sale of the Cowboys. Clint had begun missing debt payments at least a year earlier. The first lawsuits had come in November 1983; a Cleveland bank charged that Clint owed two million dollars on a meager four-million-dollar loan. A week later a bank in Paris sued, seeking four million dollars. In March 1984, just as the Cowboys were sold, an Arkansas savings and loan hit him with a suit demanding twenty million dollars. In short order another sought twenty-five million dollars.

After the Cowboys sale, the legal dam burst. With Clint’s last healthy asset gone, dozens of lenders, realizing the Murchison cupboard was all but bare, raced to lay claim to what remained. Citicorp sued. Merrill Lynch sued. Even one of the banks Clint owned, Nevada National, sued. By Labor Day 1984 it seemed there was a new suit every day. Clint was no longer in any shape to fight back. He had taken to a wheelchair. He stopped coming into the office. When the lawyers needed him, they went to the mansion. By Christmas even that was under threat. To their horror, Clint’s attorneys discovered that in his scramble for cash Clint had been
personally
guaranteeing loans, meaning that lenders could now foreclose not just on Murchison Brothers assets, but on Clint’s home, his cars, his farms—everything. In early December a Fort Worth bank, desperate to retrieve $9.7 million, filed notice it planned to auction off the twenty-four acres of land surrounding the mansion. During a court hearing it came out that it was only one of
sixteen
banks with liens on the land. Only a restraining order arranged by Clint’s lawyers allowed him to remain in his home for Christmas.

At the mansion, Clint sat in his wheelchair, staring, waiting. Just as the doctors had predicted, he had been losing his ability to speak, and as a series of winter storms coated Dallas in a silvery coating of ice, his voice disappeared forever. His creditors, their claims now approaching $175 million, began telephoning his doctors at Sloan-Kettering, demanding to know how long he had. But if Clint’s body was failing, his mind remained sharp. In January he hired a new lawyer, Philip I. Palmer, and with Palmer’s help he devised an audacious bailout plan. It depended on warm memories—those of his father’s oldest friend. Palmer placed the call, to a glass skyscraper thirty miles to the west. And then, hoping a deal could be struck, they invited attorneys representing more than thirty of Clint’s creditors to a meeting at the mansion on Friday, February 1.

That morning the sun rose on a scene from a chicken-fried
Citizen Kane.
The great man, ailing but still alert, all but alone in his vast mansion; his hundreds of handpicked live oaks and azalea bushes encased in armor of uncaring ice; the dark-suited attorneys in their BMWs and Mercedes creeping up the slickened driveway from Forest Lane, jaws dropping as they caught their first glimpse of Dallas’s Shangri-la. All had read of the Big Rich. Few had seen their lives up close. More than one simply shook his head. How had it come to this?

Inside, everyone gathered in the living room. They watched as a servant pushed Clint into the room in his wheelchair. He didn’t speak; he couldn’t. Philip Palmer did the talking. As the lawyers leaned forward in their chairs, Palmer announced that Clint had tentatively agreed to a bailout package, a massive cash infusion coupled with plans to develop or sell eight of Murchison Brothers’ largest real estate developments around the country. His rescuer, Palmer revealed, was none other than Sid Richardson’s great-nephew, Bob Bass. It was a moment of surpassing poignancy. Forty-four years earlier it had been Clint Murchison Sr. who gave Sid Richardson the loans he needed to survive the bleakest years of the Depression. Now, Big Clint’s son slouched in his wheelchair fully aware that Sid Bass and his brothers had since achieved everything he hadn’t, that while the Basses were investing in Wall Street stocks and high-tech start-ups, he had been snorting cocaine.

Now, it appeared, the Basses would return Big Clint’s long-ago favors. One of Bob Bass’s men was there, and as the lawyers broke into groups, they pressed him how real this rescue package was. From his answers they gathered it wasn’t; everything appeared to be in the discussion stages. One of the creditor attorneys argued that Clint should be forced into involuntary bankruptcy. Others objected, fearing the consequences if he somehow managed to recover. Afterward everyone tried to shake Clint’s hand, wished him the best, and drove out beneath the ice-covered trees with nothing resolved. Within days, to no one’s surprise, the promise of a Bass-family rescue dissolved like a West Texas mirage. A week later a trio of creditors, led by Citibank, decided enough was enough. They asked a Dallas federal court to place Murchison Brothers in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. After that Clint had no choice. On February 22, 1985, his attorneys asked the court to convert the petition into a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was over.

In the ensuing months the clerk’s office at the Dallas courthouse slowly filled with filings that revealed, in harsh black and white, how the once-proud Murchison empire had been overwhelmed by a wave of debt. To many, it was almost incomprehensible how Clint had staved off disaster so long. Total creditor claims, both against Murchison Brothers and Clint personally, eventually rose to more than $1.15 billion. Clint’s assets, including Spanish Cay and the mansion, were valued at barely $71 million. His cash on hand: $4,876.66.

For the next year Clint remained in his wheelchair, mute, while the attorneys liquidated his estate. Sales of real estate brought in $300 million or so, the rest maybe $50 million, leaving creditors with barely twenty cents of every dollar the Murchisons had taken. Clint’s suite at Texas Stadium alone brought $920,000. The mansion sold for $14 million to a real estate developer, who planned to subdivide the surrounding land into home lots. For Clint, the final humiliation was the October 1986 garage sale he and Anne were forced to endure before moving out. They wheeled him into the auction, where he sat, glassy-eyed, as bidders came up to pat his hand. Several had tears in their eyes. The sentiment disappeared, however, once the bidding began.

Those handling the sale had high hopes for Clint’s twelve-foot mahogany dining table with its ivory inlays. “The table,” an auctioneer named Perry Burns announced to the crowd, “was built just for the Murchisons and is valued at twenty-five thousand dollars.”

The first bid came in at one hundred dollars.

“I can’t believe this,” Burns said. “Every important person who visited the city of Dallas in the past twenty years has eaten at this table. Let’s get some serious bidding at six thousand dollars.”

The bidding inched up, to five hundred dollars.

“This is history,” Burns pleaded. “We are talking about history.” The table sold for twenty-nine hundred dollars.

Clint’s art did no better. A collection of jungle-themed paintings and tapestries, valued between four and twelve thousand dollars, sold for an average of five hundred dollars each. Not even his collection of Cowboys memorabilia stirred the crowd. At one point, Burns held up a scrapbook containing Clint’s ticket to the 1971 Super Bowl; it had been autographed by many of the players. “Look,” Burns said, “there’s notes from Roger Staubach, Bob Lilly, Calvin Hill, Tony Fritsch—everybody. You can’t pass this up.”

Someone bid twenty-five dollars.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Burns said.

“Fifty dollars,” another bid called out.

Burns made a face. “Oh, how I wish the oil was still flowing,” he said.
⁴

Dallas, a city that had always run on boosterism and hero worship, had little interest in a failure. It was a cold good-bye, much the same as Texas was handing scores of men forced into bankruptcy that year, including John Connally, who had gone into real estate, the Houston developer Harold Farb, and the renowned heart surgeon Denton Cooley. As the Murchison auctions continued that November—they stretched on through the winter, including several days where the public was allowed to roam through the mansion—Clint was finally wheeled out of his home. He and Anne moved across the street into a small tract house not much bigger than the mansion’s living room. Clint spent his days there in a tiny bedroom, looked after by a nurse, obliged to ring a little bell when he needed something. He faded quickly. In March 1987 he contracted pneumonia and was admitted to a hospital. By then he was a vegetable. Anne and his children visited regularly, but there was little to do but wait. On Sunday, March 29, John Jr. appeared, holding his uncle’s hand and forgiving him. Clint’s eyes were open, but he couldn’t speak. He died the next evening.

The following day the
Morning News
ran an editorial thanking Clint for giving Dallas the Cowboys and produced two articles on his life. And that was it. The era of men like Clint Murchison Jr. had passed. Texas was moving on. Three days later there was a strange coda when many of Clint’s old pals left his memorial service scratching their heads. They held it at the Sacred Heart Church. Anne had been in charge. Tom Landry and others gave the eulogies, but the stage was dominated by Pastor Olen Griffing, who stood in a white suit before a Plexigas podium. He kept referring to “Brother Clint.” Someone played a guitar solo. As Clint’s pals traded glances, a troupe of girls dressed in togas came out and did some kind of interpretive dance.

This was a side of Clint’s last years that few had glimpsed; of those in the crowd, few had ever heard him speak of God. Obviously Pastor Griffing had. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Griffing said at one point, lifting his eyes toward heaven, “if Brother Clint’s up there right now, dancing before the throne and shouting, ‘Great is the Lord!’” For those who had watched the onetime King of all Texans turn somersaults between the tables at ‘21’, who had seen him cadge a million-dollar loan at a public urinal, who had known him to bed seven different women in as many days, who had flown to his private island in a zebra-lined jet, it would not be the way they remembered him at all.

While oil prices soared into the early 1980s, the stock market didn’t. As a result, almost every big oil company was sitting atop oil and gas reserves that, at thirty dollars a barrel, were worth far, far more than the total value of their stock. Analysts called this the “value gap.” It didn’t take long before the savviest American investors realized that the cheapest place to obtain oil reserves was no longer the floor of the North Sea. It was the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Among the first to recognize this were Texas oilmen, one in particular. His name was T. Boone Pickens. Born in 1928, making him just two years younger than Bunker Hunt, Pickens was a restless, headstrong geologist who had left hidebound Phillips Petroleum to build an independent oil company in his native Amarillo. He called it Mesa Petroleum. Pickens made his first fortune in Kansas natural gas, but his true genius lay in his grasp of the capital markets. In 1969, long before hostile takeovers were de rigueur, he had completed the takeover of Hugoton, a gas producer far larger than Mesa.

Pickens spent the 1970s drilling for oil and gas around the world, but by 1982 realized, with a start, how thoroughly undervalued American oil companies had become. Pickens launched his first attack on Cities Service, the nation’s eighteenth-largest oil company, which happened to be three times Mesa’s size. Cities replied with a tender offer of its own—for Mesa. At that point Gulf Oil swooped in with an offer for Cities of its own, forcing Cities executives to sell out to Occidental Petroleum. Pickens walked away with a thirty-million-dollar profit. In the following years Pickens made offers for Phillips, Gulf, and Unocal, never actually buying his quarry, but always making money on his stock. He cloaked his attacks in the populist verbiage of “shareholder rights,” and to some he became a kind of folk hero. It wasn’t long before he became the latest Texas oilman to adorn the cover of
Time.

At their glistening new Fort Worth headquarters, its executive offices adorned with the works of Jasper Johns, Sid Bass and Richard Rainwater took notice. They had stayed busy the last few years, buying a set of resort hotels from American Airlines, then accumulating stakes in several public companies that they happily sold back to management for higher and higher profits; they made sixty million dollars alone on a little-noticed deal with Blue Bell. Then, in 1981, Rainwater was leaving a Wall Street banker’s office when, just as the elevator doors closed, the banker piped up, “You should look at Marathon!”

Marathon was the country’s seventeenth-largest oil company, with annual revenues of $8 billion. Sid knew it well; every Texas oilman did. It was Marathon, then named Mid-Kansas Oil, that codiscovered the massive Yates Field south of Midland in 1926, the strike that opened West Texas to leasing; Marathon had been pumping oil from the field ever since, more than 800 billion barrels, with some 1.2 billion barrels still in the ground. “It’s just this massive cavern of oil,” Bass told Rainwater. “I mean, you just turn on the spigot and the oil comes gushing out.” In a good year the Yates produced 25 million barrels plus natural gas; with oil prices at $30 a barrel, that meant the field was generating $750 million in revenues a year, and Marathon had fields all over the world. Yet when Sid did the math, the value of its stock was barely $3.8 billion. “That’s absurd,” Sid breathed.