Bryan Burrough (17 page)

One day Richardson plunked himself down in his old “office,” the downtown Fort Worth drugstore, and faced the soda jerk, Jack Collier, the man who had been taking his phone calls for years. Without Collier’s help, Richardson felt, he might never have recovered. As the Old Friend recalls, “Sid said to Collier, ‘If you had a lot of money, what would you do with it?’ And Collier said, ‘I’d like to own this drugstore.’ And Sid said to him, ‘You do.’ He had bought it for him.” The story is not apochryphal. Many years later, after Collier’s death, Richardson took ownership of the drugstore, and another he bought Collier. He would own them until the day he died.

JOHN DOS PASSOS,
1919

T
he fortunes forged during the Depression created a new top layer of Texas society, what came to be known in later years as the Big Rich. This was wealth on a scale entirely new to the state, and during the 1930s Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and H. L. Hunt, soon to be known as the “Big Four” oilmen, laid the foundations of a flamboyant lifestyle that would come to define the image of Texas Oil. There were mansions to build, presidents to meet, European vacations to take, islands to buy, and children to raise; between them, the Big Four now had four families to support. Unfortunately, two belonged to Hunt.

Murchison, the first to earn his fortune, was the first to begin gathering the trappings of serious wealth. In 1927, two years after his wife’s death, he had taken an apartment in Dallas, the city closest to his hometown of Athens. A year later he acquired a two-hundred-acre polo club on Preston Road in a rural area fifteen miles north of downtown. The rolling fields and woods teemed with wildlife, and Murchison, in an effort to reproduce the country life of his boyhood, trucked in hundreds of new animals, cattle, pigs, and goats, as well as chickens and dairy cows for milk and butter. The clubhouse was a shack, but Murchison fixed it up, adding two wings with staff quarters and hiring a squadron of governesses and Negro servants. When finished, they called it “The Big House.” Preston Road Farm, as Murchison dubbed the compound, was so vast that the Athens high school football team accepted his invitation to use it for summer training camp.

Murchison wanted his three boys to grow up as he had, trapping, riding, and fishing, and once he retrieved the boys they did just that. Already a primitive layout, the boys transformed Preston Road Farm into a backwoods paradise, their pet raccoons, skunks, and squirrels scrabbling over the furniture and unnerving the governesses. Murchison loved it; for the first time since Anne’s death he began to relax. He was lonely though, and began reaching out to his old chums in Athens. They came in droves, along with Murchison’s oil-industry pals, turning weekends at the farm into one long rollicking party of whiskey, poker, and dice games, the pots overflowing with not only cash but oil leases and royalty vouchers. The parties usually kicked off on Friday evenings when a dusty maroon Chrysler pulled up the long gravel drive, heralding Sid Richardson’s arrival from West Texas. The gambling and drinking lasted late into the night, when the guests would wobble into the bunkhouse Murchison had erected just for his friends, a dozen beds arrayed in one large room, cowboy-style.

“Murk,” as his buddies called him, blazed the trail for a generation of oilmen just learning how to be rich. He was among the first to begin traveling by private plane, a twin-engine four-seater that took off and landed on the old polo fields. He was among the first in Dallas to dig a swimming pool, an Olympic-size model that when finished in 1930 served as the focus of his entertaining, card tables splayed around its periphery as a haunch of beef or maybe a goat grilled on a spit by the cabana. Because his boys couldn’t swim well, Murchison had the pool lined with extra ladders. He adored the boys and paid tuition for them to attend public schools in University Park; most days they arrived at school in a chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow. Weeknights they all piled into one bed together with their father. Murchison swore he wouldn’t remarry until they were grown.

In time Murchison began itching for more land, a place where he and his pals could hunt and fish. In 1933 he was trolling for tarpon in the Gulf when he noticed Matagorda Island, a thirty-eight-mile sandbar that lined the coast southwest of Houston. Its eastern half was a wildlife refuge—the island abounded in shore birds, white-tailed deer, and rabbits—but the western half was a sheep ranch, and Murchison hit on the idea of turning it into a personal retreat. He had American Liberty buy it in 1933. Construction on the compound began immediately. Because there was no causeway to the mainland, building materials were ferried to the island by barge. By 1936 Murchison’s new spread was complete: a water tower, servants quarters, and a long, low clubhouse lined with bunks for thirty-five men. A veranda in front faced the beaches. It was a primitive layout in those early years, as if a dude ranch had suddenly been plunked down in the Hamptons.

Even before construction was finished, Murchison began leading hunting expeditions to Matagorda, the men sleeping on rented yachts as the clubhouse was built. While there was deer aplenty, the most prevalent animals were rattlesnakes, so many, in fact, that the Murchison boys weren’t allowed to visit for months while their father and three of his old buddies, Dudley Golding, his lawyer Toddie Lee Wynne, and Sid Richardson, mounted a four-man eradication effort. Murchison designed a hunting car, a stripped-down Ford with bucket seats, for the task. The men laced on hunting boots, hoisted shotguns, and hopped in the car. Murchison drove. The ranch manager and a guide led on horseback. If the horses reared near a cactus patch, they knew rattlers were inside. The guide would dismount, fish out the snake with long prongs, and Murchison and the men would blast it with shotguns. Afterward everyone would repair to the yachts and, over tumblers of Wild Turkey, argue over who earned the most kills.

All in all, Murchison’s was a splendid life, especially considering how most Americans endured the Depression. But it was not entirely free of sadness. On a chill morning at Preston Road Farm in April 1936, his youngest son, ten-year-old Burk, went out to check his animal traps, slipped, and fell into a creek. He went to school in wet clothes and by the next day had a high fever. By the time Murchison arrived home from a business trip, the fever had become pneumonia. Burk was rushed to a hospital, but his lungs, weak since birth, gave out. He died on April 11 and was buried beside his mother in Athens. Murchison was devastated. Friends said they never heard him, or any of the other Murchisons, mention Burk’s name again the rest of his life.

The following year, as if to punctuate the family’s loss, the boiler in the Big House exploded, burning much of the structure and all of Murchison’s books. Murchison decided to replace it with a manor home he had begun to envision, and he moved his lead maid, Jewel Pfifer, and his two remaining boys, John and Clint Jr., now teenagers, into the Stoneleigh Hotel. When construction began in January 1938, Murchison oversaw every detail. It was to be the largest private home in Texas, thirty-four thousand square feet, a red-fieldstone colossus longer than a football field, its veranda overlooking White Rock Creek a half mile away. The master suite alone had eight full-sized beds for Murchison, his two sons, and whatever pals were staying over—“so we can stay up all night talkin’ oil,” he explained to his decorator. Murchison had seen the kitchen at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and wanted something bigger. He got it. A single first-floor hallway measured 256 feet long. A friend cracked, “Jewel’s gonna need roller skates.”
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The new home’s centerpiece was the two-story game room. Murchison designed it himself. A mezzanine encircled the room, to stow his books, and for musicians at parties. Projection equipment was stored in a special closet, giving Murchision a 1930s-style home theater. Above the giant fireplace a motto was carved, “Sportsmanship above Pleasure.” A local painter was hired to paint wildlife murals on each wall, the wildlife of North Texas on the north wall, East Texas whitetail deer on the east, West Texas muledeer, mountain sheep, and prairie dogs on the west wall, South Texas waterfowl on the south. Murchison’s homey touches continued into the adjoining bar, where he banished wallpaper in favor of wall-to-wall tarpon scales.

The Murchisons and their Negro servants, now numbering nine, moved into the mansion in early 1939. Murchison was now forty-four. His eldest son, John, was in his second year at Yale, Clint Jr. at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey. Friends noticed their father was mellowing. Though the weekend parties continued, they were tamer, in large part because Murchison had quit serious gambling and cut back his drinking. The reason was a twenty-three-year-old blue-eyed blonde named Virginia Long. Clint called her Ginnie; he thought she looked like a petite Lana Turner. They met when a girl named Effie Arrington, who was soon to wed Murchison’s pal Wofford Cain, brought her to a pool party. Ginnie was Murchison’s dream girl, a spontaneous, energetic East Texas tomboy who could shoot ducks, reel in tarpon, and play gin rummy with the gusto of an oilman. Though clearly in love, they waited four years, until Murchison’s sons were away at school, before marrying in a quiet cememony at a friend’s home. For their engagement, Clint gave Ginnie a 16-carat diamond marquis. It cost $125,000.

For Murchison, it was pocket change. Cash from East Texas and the Southern Union pipelines was gushing into his accounts, and he leveraged his growing fortune fivefold by using every penny as collateral for new and ever-larger bank loans. He had been among the first oilmen to capitalize on the banks’ new energy-lending practices in the early 1930s, and in the ensuing decade, years before any of his peers attempted it, he was the first to begin diversifying outside oil. Fearing inflation, he purchased his first non-oil asset, an Indianapolis insurance company, in 1939, then added another in 1942.

By the end of the war, he was working on his own. His American Liberty partner, Dudley Golding, died in a plane crash in 1938, an incident that frightened Murchison away from private planes for several years. Golding’s death triggered an awkward situation with his widow, Georgia, who sought to remain active at American Liberty. When she agitated to appoint an independent board, Murchison turned to his attorney, Toddie Lee Wynne, to buy her out. Wynne took over Golding’s half of the businesses. Their partnership, however, lasted barely six years. Its demise was a family secret for years afterward.

According to Murchison’s authorized biographer, his longtime secretary Ernestine Orrick Van Buren, Wynne bowed out of the business after a heart attack. But according to his unauthorized biographer, Jane Wolfe, Murchison forced the dissolution after discovering that Wynne had secretly bought a group of Wyoming oil properties, a clear breach of the pair’s gentleman’s agreement to invest together. To split up their $150 million of assets, they decided to take turns selecting the businesses they wanted, like kids choosing up sides on a playground. They flipped a coin to see who went first. Wynne won, and chose American Liberty’s oil-production division. The process left Murchison deeply embittered. As president of American Liberty and the one most attuned to its underlying values, Wynne chose wisely, and Murchison felt he did so by misrepresenting some of his own balance sheets. Worse, American Liberty owned Matagorda, which went to Wynne. It broke Murchison’s heart. “The biggest mistake of my life,” he told his sons years later, “was giving up Matagorda.”

Their 1944 divorce left Toddie Lee Wynne a very wealthy man who in time would father his own colorful Texas clan. Matagorda remained under the Wynne family’s control for decades.

By 1936 Sid Richardson had been living in hotels for twenty years, and while his nomadic life was perfectly suited for the rooms he now kept at the Fort Worth Club—his widowed sister Annie lived in an adjoining suite—he yearned for something permanent. Once Murchison bought Matagorda, it wasn’t long before Richardson began muttering about his own island. In later years, any number of stories circulated about how he came to buy St. Joseph’s Island, a thin strip of barrier sand, twenty-one miles long and six miles wide, across the channel from Matagorda’s southern tip. At low tide Murchison could drive across to St. Joe’s, as it was called, and he pushed Richardson to buy it.

Richardson brought up the matter with Murchison’s banker, Rushton Ardrey, one day at Murchison’s home. As Ardrey remembered it:

 

 

The price tag was a paltry twenty-five thousand dollars. What Richardson got was an island lined with breathtaking white-sand beaches, flanked by dunes, its scrubby inland areas studded with cacti. For years its only occupants had been an absentee owner’s cattle, and the only structure, other than corrals and fencing, was a broken-down bunkhouse. Richardson envisioned a compound like Murchison’s. “He never had a home to live in, and he wanted one there,” recalled his nephew, Perry Bass, who now entered his uncle’s world. The only child of Richardson’s sister Annie and the late E. P. Bass, Perry had grown up in Wichita Falls, where as a teenager he had become, of all things, a standout sailor. Intense and socially awkward, Perry raced boats called snipes on local lakes and in 1935 won the national championships, held in Dallas. In the spring of 1936, he recalled, “Uncle Sid came up to Yale where I was about to graduate, having studied engineering and geology, and said, ‘Bass, you are an engineer, and I want you to build me a house.’ ”