Bryan Burrough (19 page)

Roy Gustave drove south, and when he arrived he found the crew still struggling to free the pipe. They were down seven thousand feet, and had resorted to using a pulley system to lift and twist the mile-and-a-quarter length of pipe stuck in the ground. Each time the pipe was wenched up and twisted, the derrick shuddered. After a toolie went to check in with Cullen in Houston, he returned with a warning. “Your dad says you are to come down off that derrick!” he shouted. “He says it’s an old rig and he doesn’t want you to take any chances.”

“Okay! I’m coming down!” he yelled.

Just then it appeared the pipe jostled, as if freed. Roy checked a pressure gauge, then yelled at the driller, Chester Kraft, “I think she’s coming loose, Cheety! Pull her wide open!” With each rotation of the pulley, the pipe seemed to rise a few inches, but it was an illusion. In fact, as the family later learned, the derrick was sinking into the mud. When Kraft switched the lifting gear on full, the derrick began to vibrate violently. One of the iron bracings on its legs popped loose. “Look out, Cheety!” Roy hollered. “She’s coming down!”

As the derrick began to collapse, Kraft jumped. Roy Gustave had no chance. The derrick, more than a ton of twisting steel, collapsed atop him. Moments later, Kraft found him pinned beneath the wreckage, unconscious. Cullen hurried down from Houston. His son lingered for two days before dying, never regaining consciousness. “My grandpa had a good friend, Sheriff Fisher, down in Calhoun County,” Roy Gustave’s son, Roy Jr., remembers today. “He had lost a son in a car wreck. I remember after Dad’s death, Sheriff Fisher came into the office and, you know, he and Gampa looked at each other, and both of ’em started crying, not saying a word, these two tough old guys. Finally they blew their noses and went back to work. That was my grandfather.”

Of the Big Four, H. L. Hunt was the only one who had yet to cash in. Not for Hunt the airplanes and private islands the others enjoyed. His sole extravagance was the beautiful Mayfield Estate in Tyler, where he rose every morning before dawn, packed his brown-bag lunch, and drove into the East Texas oil fields. Once the initial rush of drilling finished around 1934, Hunt was able to return home for dinner as he had in El Dorado; afterward, everyone gathered around the piano and sang songs. Of the children, Hunt was closest to his son Hassie, who had grown into the spitting image of his father; they once won the “look-alike” award at a local banquet. When Hassie was home from boarding school, he spent every spare minute with Hunt in the oil fields. In 1933 the oldest child, Margaret, began attending Mary Baldwin College in Virginia, and the following summer was named queen of the Tyler Rose Festival. A governess named Toogie taught French to the boys, Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar. “The time we had in Tyler,” Hunt recalled years later, “may have been some of the best days we had as a family.”

When he wasn’t in Tyler, Hunt could usually be found in Dallas with his second family at their home on Versailles Avenue. Frania Tye was almost thirty now, still beautiful and still, she would always insist, under the impression she was married to Major Franklyn Hunt. When the Dad Joiner deal made headlines, she said years later, she did ask Hunt if he was the man in the papers; Hunt smiled and said no, H. L. Hunt was his uncle. Frania led a lonely life when her husband was away; for company she enticed her sister down from Buffalo. In 1932 they opened a beauty shop. Frania kept the books. Two years later, in the spring of 1934, she became pregnant for the fourth time.

That’s when the trouble began. Somehow Frania learned the truth. How it happened would be the subject of courtroom debate decades later. Frania insisted a girlfriend told her. A Hunt attorney would claim that the confrontation came after someone pointed out Margaret Hunt to her at a party. Whatever the case, Frania confronted Hunt at the home on Versailles Avenue. Hunt confessed. Overwhelmed, Frania fled to her parents’ home in Buffalo, though she couldn’t bring herself to tell them the news. When she returned to Dallas, she and Hunt reached a compromise. She demanded and received permission to live openly, as “Mrs. H. L. Hunt.” Hunt had only one condition: That she be Mrs. H. L. Hunt of Great Neck, Long Island. Which is how in mid-1934, Frania found herself moving her three children into a large white home thirty miles east of Manhattan. Hunt paid for everything. He visited every few months, telling Lyda he was going to New York on business. In October 1934, Frania gave birth to a fourth child, a son, Hugh Hunt.

For all the cloak and dagger, Frania wasn’t a complete secret. Hunt’s brother Sherman, knew her, though he seems to have believed she was a girlfriend. A few more Hunt Oil men made her acquaintance, not quite believing Hunt’s explanation that she was a friend’s sister. It is a measure of how close he was to the teenage Hassie that at some point, apparently while Frania was living in Shreveport, Hunt took his son to meet her and explained everything. For the time being, Hassie was the only person who knew the secret.

In June 1935, a year after moving Frania to Long Island, Hunt decided to diversify his holdings by buying a gold mine in Nevada. Hassie, who was then eighteen, and nineteen-year-old Margaret went along and spent six weeks gambling and relaxing in Reno. On the train back to Texas, Margaret found herself sitting alone with her brother, who wore an expression, Margaret recalled years later, “that clearly said that our vacation had come to an end.”

“Margaret,” Hassie suddenly said, “Dad has another family besides us.”

Margaret didn’t understand.

“There is a woman, Frania Tye,” Hassie went on. “Dad lives with her. Like he lives with Mother and us. As if she’s his wife, which she thinks she is. But he told me she’s not. They have four kids. A lot of the times he’s away he’s with his other family.”

Margaret thought her brother was playing a prank.

“I’m not joking, Margaret. Dad took me to see them. It’s true.”

Margaret was speechless. “One kid could be an accident,” Hassie continued. “But not four. That family was planned. I could see that by the way Dad treated them, and her.”

“Why would he take you to see them? ”

“I was with him. . . . I guess he wanted to see them, so he brought me along. It was convenient.”

“Did he explain anything? ”

“You know he wouldn’t.”

“What about Mother? Does she know? ”

“I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“How are you sure? ”

“The way Dad took me there,” Hassie said. “Like it was a secret between the two of us.”

Margaret was devastated. Her head spun, trying to get her mind around something that was unimaginable. The only thing she decided was that their mother must never know. As the train crossed Nevada, she found herself staring out the train window as it began to rain.
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By 1936 Hunt had all but finished drilling the Joiner leases. There were four hundred wells in all now, almost every one a major producer; one list showed Hunt to be the thirteenth-busiest driller in East Texas in those early years, more active than one or two of the majors. That October he finally bought out his minority partner, Pete Lake, for $1 million in cash, four of the Joiner leases, a drilling rig, and a Buick; once Lake was dispensed with, every dollar flowed into Hunt’s accounts. At that point, one of his biographers, Harry Hurt, estimates that Hunt was worth about $20 million, roughly $250 million in today’s dollars.

Hunt began to get organized, incorporating himself as a new Hunt Oil Company. As his venture into gold mining showed, he was determined to expand his holdings beyond East Texas. He hired more land men, then dispatched them into West Texas, Louisiana, and southern Mississippi, wherever there was an oil play. He had already incorporated his pipeline, as well as several other oil and gas-gathering lines, into a company called Panola Pipeline. When he purchased a small refinery near Tyler—it sold gasoline locally—he called it Parade Oil.

There were two final companies Hunt had in mind, and to name them he turned to his family. As Margaret remembered the conversation years later, they were sitting at home one evening when Hunt brought it up.

“Panola Pipeline and Parade Oil have been rewarding,” Hunt said. “What other six-letter words beginning with P would you suggest? ”

Hassie smiled. “Paltry? Putrid? ”

“This is a business conversation,” Lyda snapped. “No levity.”

Hassie thought a moment. “Placid? ”

Hunt mulled it a moment. “Placid. . . . Placid Oil. . . . Good. More? ”

Margaret had been reading Booth Tarkington. “What about Penrod?” she asked.

“Perfect,” Hunt said. “You might want to name your new company Penrod Drilling.”

Margaret blanched. “Our new company? ”
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The last two businesses Hunt formed were to be owned by the children. He transferred several choice properties into the first, Placid Oil, and placed the company under the control of trusts he formed in the children’s names. At the same time, he gathered the eleven or twelve drilling rigs he had picked up over the years and formed them into a new contract-drilling company, Penrod Drilling, which was to be owned by the children outright. In later years the two companies would become the most important Hunt businesses of all.

The only serious shadow in the Hunt family’s charmed years in Tyler fell at 3:05 P.M. on March 18, 1937, when one of Panola’s pipelines exploded beneath the schoolhouse in New London, in northwest Rusk County, killing 294 people, most of them children. The New London disaster, to this day the worst loss of life in an American school, was not the Hunt company’s fault; plumbers had attempted to illegally tap into the line to heat the school. The carnage brought out the best in Hunt, who sent scores of workers in to help clear the rubble. Hunt himself prowled the hospitals and funeral parlors, peeling off hundred-dollar bills and jamming them into the fists of brokenhearted parents.

As his horizons moved beyond East Texas, Hunt pondered moving his family once more, to Dallas. It made sense, he told Lyda. His banks and attorneys were there. He took Margaret along to look at houses. The one they chose was set on ten acres on White Rock Lake, eight miles north of downtown and several miles from Clint Murchison’s spread. A large fourteen-room house if not quite a mansion, it was a replica of George Washington’s home in Virginia, down to the glassed-in cupola and weathervane at its apex. Everyone called it Mount Vernon. The family moved in on January 1, 1938, prompting the
Dallas News
to note that “quite the nicest family has come to Mt. Vernon of Dallas to stay.”

Hunt loved the lakeview; it reminded him of Lake Village back in Arkansas. Like Murchison’s, Hunt’s land had a rural feel, dotted with pecan trees and woods full of squirrels and songbirds; Hunt bought a half-dozen deer to make it feel even more like the countryside. He and Lyda took adjacent second-floor bedrooms. Margaret, who was now working as her father’s assistant in Hunt Oil’s new offices in the downtown Cotton Exchange Building, thought the house was impossibly isolated and fretted she would never meet a suitor; she did, however, and was soon engaged to a Hunt Oil accountant named Al Hill. The youngest boys, Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar, shared the master bedroom and used the second-floor laundry chute as a slide; Lyda had them enrolled at Dallas Country Day. The house came with five safes, which no one knew what to do with. Lyda used one to store canned goods. Six-year-old Lamar, a sports nut, took another to store his footballs and baseballs.

By the time he moved his first family to Dallas, Hunt had taken in his son Hassie as a partner. By 1938, when he turned twenty-one, Hassie was already shaping up to be the kind of stellar oilman his father knew he would be. At first he took a job leasing Penrod rigs, but Hassie’s passion was finding oil. Having learned the basics at his father’s side, he struck out on his own, drilling a series of wells in Southern Mississippi and hitting strike after strike in what became known as the Tinsley Field. Unlike Texas, Mississippi had no prorationing, so Hassie could pump all the oil he wanted. By his twenty-fourth birthday his wells were bringing in an estimated four million dollars a year. Hunt said more than once that Hassie had an unmatched gift, something mystical, for finding oil.

But Hassie had problems. He had been an unusual child, dyslexic and prone to temperamental fits. As a young man, his behavior grew stranger. Some of it was subtle; he laughed too loud, and at the wrong things. At a drill site, he might pick up a rock and sling it within feet of another man’s head. Out in a duck blind, he would shoot a single duck just as a flock of geese hove into view, laughing as his fellow hunters fumed. Hunt could be hard on him, criticizing his sloppy paperwork and carping about how much he paid for land. Hassie responded by competing openly with his father, whether in buying acreage or in the memory games they played after dinner; each would study a deck of cards, then see who could remember the most. Once or twice these contests became so intense that Hunt and Hassie ended up in heated wrestling matches. Hunt believed Hassie was simply headstrong and needed “action,” but some things couldn’t be explained away so easily, as when Hassie showed up in the office barefoot with his shoes hanging by laces around his neck.
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Or the time he walked past an automobile showroom, saw a car he wanted, then fired a rock through the window to get it. In time Hunt decided to assign a man to watch him full-time.

Once resettled in Dallas, Hunt began to miss Frania Tye, who remained in Long Island raising their four children. Though he was only able to see her every few months, Hunt’s desire for Frania, as evidenced in poems he mailed her, remained intense. “Running now a little late / But hoping to keep our date,” he wrote before a Christmas visit in 1937. “So strong is the urging / My engine is surging.”

In the fall of 1939 Hunt moved Frania and their family to Houston. Maybe it was Frania’s desire to continue living as “Mrs. H. L. Hunt” or maybe Hunt had grown overconfident after more than a decade of successful secrecy, but instead of tucking Frania away in a discreet corner of the city, Hunt hired a New York architect to design and build her a large home smack in the middle of the city’s finest neighborhood, right there on River Oaks Boulevard, one block down and just across the street from the Cullen mansion. As if to claim her rights as Hunt’s wife, Frania applied to the River Oaks Country Club, just behind the Cullen spread, as “Mrs. H. L. Hunt, femme sole.”