Bryan Burrough (27 page)

McCarthy’s legend began, fittingly, near Spindletop, where he was born on Christmas Day 1907.
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His father, an itinerant oil field worker and plumber, shuttled the family between Beaumont and Houston’s rough Third Ward; at one point, Glenn was the Howard Hughes family’s paper boy. A scrappy, sinewy teenager, he worked odd jobs in the oil fields and became a standout youth football player and amateur boxer. He dropped out of high school but leveraged his gridiron prowess into brief stays at Rice Institute (now Rice University) and Texas A&M, where he was expelled for hazing. By 1930, though nominally still enrolled at Rice, he was pumping gas at a Houston service station.

McCarthy was twenty-two then and handsome, with dark eyes, an Errol Flynn mustache and a single brown curl that fell rakishly over his forehead, a kid on the make with a temper to match, known for slugging just about anyone if he’d had enough to drink. His life changed one night that spring when a girl he knew stopped for gas and brought along a pretty sixteen-year-old named Faustine Lee, daughter of the wealthy oilman Thomas Lee, co-owner of Beaumont’s Yount-Lee Oil Company. Glenn took Faustine to a dance, then another, at which point, within weeks of meeting, they eloped. Her father was not happy. McCarthy told him not to worry. He refused to take a penny of Lee money. In fact, he swore to Lee he, too, would become an oilman. For now, however, the only oil McCarthy saw on a daily basis came in cans.

The newlyweds rented a one-room apartment and slept on a rollaway bed. Soon after, McCarthy quit his job after a disagreement with his boss. Money ran low. On a rainy morning in November 1931, Glenn and Faustine spread their entire net worth on the kitchen table. It came to $2.65. Sliding the money into his pocket, McCarthy took a streetcar downtown and began looking for work. By midday, rain-soaked and forlorn, he ran into a buddy, who lured him to the racetrack. With little to lose, he put three-quarters of his life’s assets down on a $2 bet. In a bit of family lore all the McCarthys swear is true, he hit the Daily Double. McCarthy came home that night and dumped $700 in front of Faustine. Her response took him aback. “Glenn McCarthy,” she said, “we don’t need money
that
badly. You take it straight back.” She assumed he had stolen it.

The only job McCarthy knew was pumping gas, so he set his sights on opening his own station. For days he counted the cars passing a busy nearby corner, at Main and McGowen Streets, and armed with his calculations he began paying daily visits to the Sinclair Oil office in suburban Angle-ton, where he pestered the man in charge, practically begging him to let him open a station. In time the man, impressed with McCarthy’s tenacity, agreed, but the deal was harsh: Sinclair would take almost all profits from gasoline sales. McCarthy could keep anything he made fixing cars and selling tires and accessories.

As a gas station manager, McCarthy was by every account a force of nature. In return for wash and grease jobs, he would drive customers to their offices in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon with a greased and washed automobile. He worked twenty hours a day, and kept the store open the other four by hiring his father. He bought huge stacks of tires at a discount, sold them for twice what he paid, and moved used cars on the side. He claimed his station sold more gasoline than any other in Houston, and he might have been right. Sinclair rewarded him with a second station, on Houston’s West Side, and by early 1933 McCarthy was clearing fifteen hundred dollars a month.

His confidence bursting, McCarthy decided it was finally time to enter the oil business. A seismographic crew was analyzing a section of scrubland along the Houston-La Porte highway, and McCarthy, on a hunch, decided to option the land and drill it. He sold the gas stations, bought up several adjoining parcels, and hired a contractor. He and Faustine put most of their savings into the discovery well—and lost it all when the well churned up nothing but salt water. Undaunted, McCarthy invested his last thousand dollars in a friend’s well. It turned out to be a small producer. McCarthy sold it for an eight-thousand-dollar profit.

Hustling back to his land on the La Porte highway, he began another well, only to have it ruined when heavy rains caused an adjacent creek to overflow, flooding the site. He sold some of the neighboring leases and managed to raise enough for one last wildcat, but this, too, came in dry. All told, McCarthy had tried three wells and had precisely nothing to show for it—except a painful education in oil. Out of cash, and determined not to borrow from Faustine’s father, he decided to try his luck as a contractor, drilling wells for others.

With no rig of his own, all McCarthy could do was beg for a drilling job. Oilmen laughed him out of their offices. But McCarthy didn’t give up. He offered to drill wells for next to nothing, and a few wildcatters, no doubt mindful who his father-in-law was, gave him a chance. His results were impressive; even when McCarthy found no oil, he drilled fast, worked hard, and came in under budget. His father-in-law was sufficiently impressed to introduce him to the cotton magnate M. D. Anderson, who needed someone to drill him a well on the edge of George Strake’s field at Conroe. As he had done before, McCarthy begged, borrowed, and “covertly borrowed” most of his equipment, sending his men, all of whom worked for food and the promise of an eventual paycheck, sneaking into the woods at night to liberate pipes and barrels of drilling mud from nearby drill sites. When McCarthy couldn’t pay his rig’s rental fee, the owner secured an injunction preventing its use. McCarthy ignored the court order, but it worried Anderson, who brought in a thirty-year-old attorney named Leon Jaworski—later to achieve fame as a Watergate prosecutor—to handle things.

Jaworski drove deep into the pines to find the drill site, and what he saw when he arrived fired the McCarthy legend:

 

 

McCarthy eventually hit oil for Anderson at Conroe, and he soon had a car, a larger apartment, and a reputation. “He was known as a man who could drill a well in half the time it would take a major oil company,” a geologist named Michel Halbouty recalled, “a man inclined to raise his fists at every affront whether large, small or imaginary . . . but he could charm Lady Godiva off her horse.” As good as he was at drilling, McCarthy, whose own father had grown poor working on other men’s wells, knew he could never become wealthy unless he worked for himself. By 1935 he had enough money to try, and his father-in-law introduced him to the talented Halbouty, who had proven to have an uncanny nose for knowing where to find oil.

Halbouty leased a tiny but promising plot of land west of Beaumont, but there was a catch: the existing lease expired in twenty days. If McCarthy hadn’t drilled by then, he couldn’t drill at all. Somehow McCarthy managed to wheedle a rig on credit, but the following week it rained so hard, it took eleven days just to drag it to the drill site. By the final day they had the rig in place, but couldn’t get the motor running to begin drilling. By dusk the owner’s lawyers were standing in the mud alongside, ready to stop McCarthy at the stroke of midnight. At eleven o’clock, with the motor still dead, McCarthy hollered, “All right, boys, we’re gonna start drilling this son-of-a-bitch by hand.” At 11:45 McCarthy used a pair of chain tongs to inch the drill bit into the mud. He had a notary standing by to prove it. They called the well Longe No. 1, and a week later it came in strong, the discovery well of what became known as the West Beaumont Field. McCarthy had found the first oil of his own.

They had just started work on Longe No. 2 a few weeks later when, one afternoon resting in a Beaumont hotel, Halbouty spied smoke on the horizon: the well was on fire. The two men raced to the site but it was too late. Their rig and all their equipment had melted. If that weren’t bad enough, nearby residents began pelting McCarthy with lawsuits, claiming the sooty smoke had killed their crops and cattle. McCarthy hired Leon Jaworski to defend him in court, and while McCarthy underwent an appendectomy, Jaworski appeared to be swaying the jury. McCarthy’s inate flamboyance, however, nearly sank the case. When he arrived to testify, he sat in a wheelchair pushed by a Negro man—“his valet!” observers whispered—and attended by a buxom blond nurse. Even worse, he wore a silk bathrobe and a silk scarf knotted at the neck. Somehow Jaworski won the case, and saved McCarthy’s career.

McCarthy went on to hit a string of strong producers outside Beaumont, earning him nearly two million dollars, enough to build his dream home, a seven-thousand-square-foot columned southern mansion just south of downtown Houston. He had a family now, four girls and a little boy on the way, and while never exactly faithful to Faustine, he was a good father, staging inpromptu plays for the kids and wrestling with them. A lesser man might have been satisfied. But McCarthy wanted more.

In 1939 he took everything he had and plunged into a risky play around the town of Palacios, on the Gulf Coast southwest of Houston. Geologic charts suggested it was one of the most promising formations in years. McCarthy optioned 562 parcels in and around the town, then borrowed heavily to buy five new drilling rigs, which cost $1 million. He started five wells simultaneously, but the formation was laden with unstable natural gas. One after another, all five wells blew out. What gas McCarthy found he was unable to sell. By the time he gave up, he had lost $1.5 million and was heavily in debt.

Facing bankruptcy, McCarthy convened a meeting of his creditors. The CEO of one was named to oversee what remained of his business, while McCarthy went back to contract drilling in hopes of recouping his debts. A prewar drilling boom was under way, and a hapless Minnesota businessman named Frank Anderson, facing deadlines to drill thousand of acres he had amassed north of Galveston, hired McCarthy when no other reputable driller would take him on. McCarthy drilled Anderson’s first well to nine thousand feet and came up dry. His contract fulfilled, McCarthy was about to pack up his rig when, after dipping his tongue in a final coring, he told his tool-pusher to drill another two hundred feet. They found oil. Anderson gave him a $100,000 bonus and a piece of the upside, and in the ensuing two years McCarthy drilled him another sixty wells in the area, earning a total of $1.5 million, enough to pay his creditors.

By 1942 McCarthy was back drilling his own wells. He kept to areas he knew, the swamplands and buggy moors south and east of Houston, and his crews hit gusher after gusher. At Anahuac, Chocolate Bayou, Angel-ton, Collins Lake, Coleto, North and South Stowell—overnight, it seemed, McCarthy became the hottest oil finder in Texas. Michel Halbouty, who went on to become one of Houston’s most celebrated oilmen, called McCarthy “possibly the best practical oilman the country had produced, an improviser who could drill with junk [and who possessed] a knack for finding oil he couldn’t explain because it came installed in his system like an antenna. And he was a plunger, always willing to shoot the moon on his chances of finding oil.”

All through the war years, with little fanfare, McCarthy opened new fields, extended old ones, and fattened his bank accounts. By 1945 he was a very wealthy man, his oil reserves worth $50 million, about $535 million today. He bought the twenty-two-story Shell Building in downtown Houston, then led a group that bought the Second National Bank. Like every successful oilman, he added a ranch, fifteen thousand acres of West Texas prairie outside Uvalde. He enjoyed nothing so much as racing around his land in one of his Cadillacs, a bottle of bourbon at his side, slowing down just long enough to blast his shotgun at a rattlesnake or dove.

Had McCarthy stopped there, he might have been recognized as a fifth member of the Big Four, lazing away his days playing cards like Sid Richardson, or sniping at politicians like Roy Cullen. How differently things would have turned out had he stuck to oil. But Glenn McCarthy was a man with dreams—vast, historic, world-altering dreams. Whether they sprang from his hardscrabble beginnings, a desire to eclipse his wealthy father-in-law, or something else altogether, McCarthy burned to eclipse the Hunts and Cullens and Richardsons atop the Texas pyramid, to own titanic refineries and office towers and continent-spanning pipelines. He wanted to create a legacy, a landmark, something no one else had ever done. And the more he thought, the more he planned, the more he mapped out what postwar America would need, the more McCarthy’s dream crystallized into a single idea:

A hotel.

Not just any hotel: the world’s finest hotel, built for Texas, a mammoth, ornate structure to eclipse the Waldorf-Astorias and Ritzes and Hiltons, the largest building between New York and Los Angeles, a glorious symbol not just of his own mushrooming power and confidence but that of Texas as well. It would be the Lone Star Taj Mahal, its Eiffel Tower, its London Bridge. And McCarthy, as its builder and owner, would emerge as the state’s dominant impresario, using newfound fame and contacts to expand into every conceivable business, to conquer New York and Hollywood, even Dallas. He would be King of Texas.