Bryan Burrough (11 page)

In three short years Hunt had transformed himself from a gentleman planter into a professional gambler and then, finally, at the age of thirty-five, into a successful oilman. By the end of 1924 he controlled nearly four hundred thousand barrels of proven oil reserves, valued at roughly six hundred thousand dollars, about seven million dollars in today’s dollars. That year he moved Lyda and the children into a new three-bedroom brick home in El Dorado. Usually busy in the oil fields or, at night, at a poker game, Hunt was rarely at home. Lyda didn’t complain. A pleasant, religious woman, she struck up friendships with many townspeople, raising the children and pulling them to the Methodist church without their father on Sundays. About the only thing Lyda nagged Hunt about was money. He was always willing to bet their nest egg on a new well, while Lyda urged him to save. Their new house was as much a receptable for their savings as a place to live.

In February 1925 Lyda gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, a girl they named Lyda Bunker Hunt. But a month later a radiator in the new home malfunctioned, leaking fumes that smothered the infant in her crib. Lyda was devastated. Hunt did what he could to assuage her grief, whisking her off to New York for their first real vacation together, breaking ground on a big new house outside town and once again getting her pregnant. But in the weeks after his daughter’s death, it was Hunt who underwent the most profound change. Maybe it was the grief. Maybe at the age of thirty-five, it was an early midlife crisis. Maybe it had been his plan all along. Whatever it was, Hunt decided he had no interest in living out his days a country oilman in the Arkansas boondocks, monitoring oil flows and depositing checks.

Four months after his daughter’s death he suddenly sold all his holdings for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar promissary note, then had a bank discount it for cash. He was leaving the oil game, he told Lyda. With the money in hand, Hunt announced he was taking an extended trip—alone—to Florida. He said he was thinking of investing in the state’s postwar real estate boom, and maybe he believed it. But it wasn’t real estate he was looking for, as an operetta he began composing on the train to Tampa suggests. He called it, “Whenever Dreams Come True, I’ll Be with You.” “Up to the time I met you,” he wrote, “life was as drab as can be.... Something was missing for me. You are my love now forever . . .”

Leaving his pregnant wife and three young children behind in Arkansas, H. L. Hunt headed to Florida in search of romance.

Her name, once he found her, was Frania Tye. She was twenty-one years old, and when she sat down on a park bench outside the Tampa Terrace Hotel that hot September afternoon in 1925, she had been in Florida for only a few weeks. Raised in Buffalo, Frania was the daughter of Polish immigrants; her father, a carpenter, had changed the family name from Tyburski. She had reached adulthood with no career plans or obvious skills, taking jobs at department stores and hair salons, but her dark beauty, enhanced by an ample bosom and slender hips, probably persuaded her she wouldn’t need any. She was small, an inch over five feet, and spoke with the hint of an accent. As a teenager she had fallen in love with a Polish boy and followed him when he took a job in Cleveland. It didn’t last, though, and by the time she returned to Buffalo the only thing Frania knew for certain was that she didn’t want to stay in Buffalo. Eager for a new start, she persuaded her father to help her resettle in Tampa, where he moved her into a room at the DeSoto Hotel. The owners agreed to look after her.

She had just taken a job in a real estate office that day when she began talking to the older man sitting on the park bench. He said his name was Bailey, and just her luck, he was interested in real estate. Frania gave him her phone number. Later, she took a call from a man who identified himself only as “Hunt.” Mr. Hunt said he was interested in seeing some property. When he drove by to pick her up, Frania realized it was the man from the park bench. Not wanting to spook one of her first clients, she didn’t say anything. Together they drove out and looked at the property. Hunt said he’d think about it. When they returned to Tampa, he asked her to dinner. She politely declined. He called again a few days later. Once again they drove out to see the property, and this time when they returned Hunt asked her to his hotel room. She slapped him, saying she wasn’t that kind of girl.

Frania Tye didn’t see Mr. Hunt again for several weeks. When he next called, in October, he pressed her for dinner, and she relented, embarking on what she later described as a whirlwind courtship. Every night they dined out, sipping Cokes and ginger ale, as Hunt regaled her with stories of his youth wandering the West, felling trees and boxing and playing semipro baseball. He said he was a Louisiana oilman and that his full name was Major Franklyn Hunt, and when she asked if he had been in the military, he said no, that everyone in the South was a colonel or a major. In no time Frania, rootless and lonely, began to weaken beneath Major Hunt’s romantic onslaught, so much so that when Hunt, during a long drive to St. Petersburg on the night of November 10, mentioned marriage, she was helpless to deny him.

The next morning Hunt took her to a pawn shop and bought her a simple gold band. Afterward they drove to a white stucco bungalow in Tampa’s bustling Cuban quarter, Ybor City, where Old Man Bailey was waiting with a justice of the peace, a Latin gentleman. When Frania asked about a marriage license, Hunt said Florida didn’t require one. Dazed, she signed some kind of ledger, as did Hunt, and before she knew it, the Latin gentleman was reading aloud from a Bible.

“Do you take Frania Tye as your lawful wife? ” he asked Hunt.

“Yes,” Hunt said.

“Do you take Franklyn Hunt as your lawful husband? ” he asked Frania.

“Yes,” she said.

The justice pronounced them man and wife, and if that status was legally questionable without a marriage license, it didn’t matter to the newlyweds, not yet anyway. The idea that her husband might already have a family never entered Frania’s mind; what was in Hunt’s, other than a rapid consummation of their union, was anyone’s guess. For the rest of his life he never spoke or wrote a meaningful word about Frania Tye. But from the moment they walked out of that Ybor City bungalow, Hunt treated her as his wife. After honeymooning in Orlando, Hunt said he needed to return to Louisiana for business. He promised to send for her and, after another brief return to Tampa he did, in February 1926, telling her to meet him in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

On the steamship across the Gulf of Mexico Frania became seasick, and by the time she reached Louisiana she realized she was pregnant. Hunt appeared overjoyed. After a few days enjoying the French Quarter, he spirited her to Shreveport, where they lived briefly in a hotel before Hunt rented an apartment on Hearndon Street. Frania settled in to prepare for the baby, who was due in October. Hunt disappeared on frequent business trips, but for now she was happy. He didn’t make the birth, a boy who bore his father’s initials, Howard Lee Hunt.

For the next three years Frania remained content in her new, if slightly bizarre, life. Major Hunt traveled constantly, never quite making it back to Shreveport for Thanksgiving or Christmas. On his return he was always sweet and apologetic, always making sure she had plenty of cash on hand, but after the couple moved into a small brick home on Gladstone Street, a few of the neighbors appeared to grow suspicious, wondering aloud just where the peripatetic Major Hunt was actually going. For her part, Frania would later insist she never suspected a thing. Her husband traveled for his oil field job, simple as that. She was too busy with their growing family to give it much thought. In October 1928, two years after little Howard’s arrival, she gave birth to a second child, a girl Hunt named Haroldina. Then, in the spring of 1930, Frania became pregnant for a third time.

By that point Hunt was doing a good deal of his traveling in Texas, and when Frania was deep into her pregnancy that summer, he explained it would be necessary for the family to move to Dallas. There Frania unpacked her things in a two-story brick home at 4230 Versailles Avenue, in the city’s nicest residential area, Highland Park. Not long after, she gave birth to their third child, a girl they named Helen Hilda Hunt. Once again Hunt couldn’t make it to the hospital. He was too busy, off on important business in the remote East Texas pines, where he had stumbled on a down-on-his-luck wildcatter named Columbus Joiner, a man with whom he was about to make history.

After secretly settling Frania Tye in Shreveport, Hunt had returned to El Dorado to find his first family slowly recovering from his infant daughter’s sudden death. Their new house was finished, a three-story, eight-bedroom English Revival mansion that was easily the largest in the area. They named it The Pines. Hunt bought a mammoth Packard limousine whose chauffeur drove Margaret, Hassie, and little Caroline to school each morning. The family continued to grow. In February 1926, just as Frania was moving into her new apartment in Shreveport a hundred miles to the southwest, Lyda gave birth to a second son, a twelve-pound butterball they named Nelson Bunker Hunt. Three years later came a third, Herbert, named for the president Hunt favored, Herbert Hoover. Still later came a fourth, Lamar.

Hunt’s life as a covert bigamist did nothing to mar the idyllic days at The Pines. If anything, he spent more time with his children than before. Hassie operated a lemonade stand in the driveway. Margaret learned to drive. Meals were a time for Hunt to educate his growing brood, lecturing the children on everything from politics and music to the complications of serving on a bank’s board of directors. Every night after dinner Lyda played their new grand piano, and everyone would gather around and sing, Hunt theatrically draping his arms around Lyda, crooning, “I can’t give you anything but love . . . baby.” It was as close as the Hunts ever came to displays of intimacy. No one in the family kissed—ever. Once, when Hassie went to kiss his mother’s cheek, Hunt shooed him away. “Stop that,” he said. “Don’t be kissing people.” No one was quite sure what Hunt had against kissing, but his authority in the family remained unquestioned, as it always would.

On his return to El Dorado, Hunt wasted no time getting back into oil. Though not unwilling to bet money on a rank wildcat, he preferred to improve his odds by investing in areas where oil had already been found. Mostly he drilled his own wells, but sometimes he bought ones other men had started; under both strategies, Hunt, like most oilmen, put a premium on intelligence-gathering, seeking to learn everything he could about existing and aborning wells. For the first time he incorporated his own company, Hunt Oil, and gathered around him a half-dozen seasoned oil scouts, sending them nosing around southern Arkansas and especially several new fields opening in northern Louisiana. Hunt’s men, led by the ever-present Old Man Bailey, proved top notch. Time and again they identified the best spots to drill. Hunt struck oil in the Tullos-Urania Field outside Monroe, Louisiana, then at several places near Shreveport. By 1929 he had opened offices in El Dorado and Shreveport and was operating more than one hundred wells, though with oil selling at barely $1.25 a barrel he was forced to plow most of his profits back into the search for still more acreage. He had emerged as one of the region’s largest independent operators, a wealthy man by Arkansas standards, but still far from serious riches.

For the first time his eyes turned to Texas. The West Texas boom that lured Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson out onto the plains also attracted Hunt. He and Old Man Bailey drove west in 1927, putting together a drilling block near Ballinger in Runnels County, but the few wells they attempted came up dry. The West Texas fields were large compared to those in Louisiana, however, and Texas continued to intrigue Hunt. When oil was found in 1929 at Van, east of Dallas, he tried to lease land but found the majors had already snatched up the best acreage; the one well he managed to drill came up dry. Then came the stock market crash, which overnight gave way to an economic depression the likes of which America had never before seen. Hunt survived with little trouble, but money remained tight, and by that following summer of 1930 he still hadn’t found a drop of oil in Texas.

Then, on September 5, Hunt took a call from an El Dorado oil field equipment man named M. M. Miller. Miller was marketing a new drill stem that Hunt used; Hunt, in fact, was one of his best customers, and Miller wasn’t above freshening the relationship with the odd tip.

“There’s a wildcatter working down in East Texas, and he may have something going,” Miller said. “He might call on us to run a drill-stem test on his well, and I thought you might be interested.”

He was. This, in fact, was exactly the kind of inside information Hunt valued most. Still, he was short on cash that week, so before driving to Texas he put in a call to the owner of an El Dorado clothing store, a squat, bald character named Pete Lake. Lake had lent Hunt money in tight spots before, and was always interested in new action. They left that same day, taking Lake’s car into Louisiana, where they stopped for maps in Shreveport, then headed into East Texas to find the drill site in remote Rusk County. That afternoon, six miles past the hamlet of Henderson, they turned down a rutted dirt road that ran deep into the pines. A mile down the road they arrived at a clearing where a crowd of about twenty people was watching as Columbus Joiner and his crew prepared for the test. One of Joiner’s men, M. M. Miller’s brother Clarence, saw the car drive up and scrambled down from the derrick.

After a minute Joiner ambled over.

“H. L. Hunt,” Miller said, “meet C. M. Joiner.”

There was an instant rapport between the two wildcatters, and not just because they were dressed in almost identical outfits; slacks, ties, matching white shirts and straw boaters. Joiner needed money; Hunt wanted to invest. He had thought he might offer to pay for Joiner’s casing in return for a share of the lease. But Joiner squelched the idea the moment Hunt brought it up. “All taken care of,” he said. “Got a string of used casing on the way any time now.”