Bryan Burrough (29 page)

On Tuesday, with two days left, McCarthy flew to Los Angeles to fetch his friend Howard Hughes and finalize travel arrangements for the movie stars. The two returned to Houston the next morning on Hughes’s million-dollar Boeing Stratoliner, the world’s largest private plane. McCarthy was thinking of buying it. He and Hughes ate a pancake breakfast by the Shamrock’s pool. “Keep the plane,” Hughes said, rising to leave. “Fly it around. Let me know what you think.”

That morning the stars began to arrive. McCarthy had chartered an entire fourteen-car Santa Fe train—the “Shamrock Special”—to bring them from Hollywood. A crowd of five thousand dominated by teenage bobby soxers ringed the train station and lined nearby rooftops for its arrival. Girls squealed when Dorothy Lamour emerged and kissed McCarthy on the cheek. Cheers erupted as other stars followed: Robert Ryan, Andy Devine, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Kirk Douglas, Stan Laurel, Buddy Rodgers, Ruth Warwick, Robert Stack. Nearly fifty others arrived on an American Airlines charter that afternoon. Dozens of reporters trailed in their wake. Neither Houston nor Texas, as the newspapers reminded readers every morning, had ever seen anything like it.

Finally, the day arrived. McCarthy glided through the Shamrock’s carpeted hallways that morning inspecting his handiwork. Even his critics had to admit his decor made a statement. The walls and carpets were shades of coral and lime. Columns were rose and pink. The cavernous lobby, paneled in acres of Honduran mahogany, was dominated by a life-size portrait of McCarthy himself. Outside, the pool shimmered with kelly-green water. Uniformed guards lined its edges; McCarthy explained that a cabal of Texas A&M students had threatened to dump maroon dye into it. “It’s the greatest hotel the world has ever known,” he told a reporter. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, attending a convention in Houston that week, took the tour as well, and emerged in a daze. Asked his opinion of the interior, Wright remarked that he’d always wondered what the inside of a jukebox looked like. “Tragic,” he said.

Night approached. The staff appeared ready. The news vendors shifted uncomfortably in rented tuxedos. The security guards had actually been given elocution lessons, shown how to holster their Texas accents, and instructed to address guests with “Good evening, sir” instead of “Howdy.” Buxom girls stood ready to hand out the little packets of Irish shamrocks as the guests arrived.

By dusk a crowd of three thousand had surrounded the hotel. Floodlights crisscrossed the night sky, just as McCarthy dreamed they would. At seven shrieks rose from the crowd as limousines began to arrive and disgorge the celebrities. McCarthy’s new pal Errol Flynn waved. Lou Costello waddled in. Close behind came the rest: Ginger Rogers, Van Johnson, Edgar Bergen, Van Heflin, Sonja Henie, Earl Wilson, Eddie Rickenbacker. The Texans came pouring in as well, the governor and a string of politicians, oilmen, bankers, Amon Carter with a delegation from Fort Worth. Sid Richardson ambled in with his niece; only Howard Hughes failed to appear. All the men wore tuxedoes, the women in chiffon and tafetta trains and backless dresses and mink after mink after mink, diamonds dripping from every neck. The evening was a coming-out party, not just for McCarthy but for Texas Oil itself.

Inside, everyone crowded into the lobby for champagne; a cowboy actor, Don “Red” Berry, sipped his from the slipper of Beaumont oil heiress Ann Justice. By 7:30 the public areas were jam-packed. People couldn’t move. Waiters gave up trying to wade into the crowd. Off in the corners, McCarthy’s security men exchanged nervous glances. There were too many people. Two thousand had been invited. Three thousand had gotten inside. McCarthy, dressed in a white dinner jacket, did his best to navigate the throng, which was growing louder as the champagne began to dwindle. He had contracted with the National Broadcasting System to air Pat O’Brien’s opening remarks to a nationwide radio audience at eight o’clock, live from the Emerald Room. The plan was to announce O’Brien’s appearance at 7:45 over the hotel’s public-address system, at which point the crowd would file to their tables in the ballrooms.

But when McCarthy went to make the announcement, the PA system didn’t work. Some of his waiters tried to shout at people to take their seats, but no one moved. Then O’Brien couldn’t be found. At the last minute McCarthy delayed his appearance and told the network to cancel the first part of the broadcast. They would go live with Dorothy Lamour when she took the stage at 8:30. But by 8:20 the PA system still wouldn’t function. McCarthy and Lamour caucused and decided to begin the broadcast anyway, with or without an audience in the Emerald Room.

At precisely 8:30 radio listeners around the country heard Lamour welcome them to the gala opening of the Shamrock Hotel. Word quickly spread through the packed lobby that the show was beginning. Chaos ensued. Hundreds of tuxedoed men and fur-clad women began to push their way into the Emerald Room, knocking over chairs and a table or two. A cacophony of shouts, curses, and wolf whistles erupted as everyone attempted to find a seat. Amid the din, Lamour’s radio audience heard little but crowd noise, interspersed with curses from the control room.

When a Chicago technician phoned the ballroom in exasperation, listeners heard his Houston counterpart’s voice: “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

“They’re fucking it up,” the Chicago technician muttered—live, on the air.

Another technician chimed in: “All they’re getting is swearing on the line!”

“What? ”

“Swearing!”

Meanwhile, a stream of tipsy Texans began taking shortcuts across the Emerald Room’s stage to find their tables. When a dumbfounded NBC producer told one matron she was interrupting the broadcast, the woman snatched the microphone from Lamour. “I don’t give a damn about your broadcast!” she snapped. “I want my dinner table!”

After seven minutes NBC took the show off the air, citing technical difficulties. When the network returned live five minutes later, however, the Emerald Room’s microphones failed. Lamour, now joined by Van Heflin and a comic named Ed Gardner, tried in vain to get the crowd’s attention, but it was no use. No one could hear them.

“People are milling around here, the PA system don’t work,” Gardner groused over the air. “Nothing is gonna get a laugh anyhow.” In an attempt to engage the crowd, Gardner began shouting the names of stars in the audience: “Over there, Pat O’Brien, ladies and gentlemen—Pat O’Brien!” Nothing worked. “I’ve been in radio a long time,” Gardner quipped, “but who has ever seen anything like this!”

In an act of comic desperation, Gardner began calling an imaginary horse race: “And a big crowd is here tonight at Santa Anita.” Lamour pleaded for him to stop. “Now, there’s a big crowd listening on the air,” she begged. “Come on.” After a half hour the NBC producers gave up and ended the broadcast. Lamour fled to her suite in tears. “I’ve been on the road with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope but never through anything like this,” she moaned.

The dinner service was a comedy as tuxedoed waiters weaved through the crowd. There had been considerable speculation surrounding the menu, given a price tag one writer dubbed “astronomical”: forty-two dollars a plate. Dinner turned out to be beef and a fruit cocktail dubbed “pineapple surprise.” Some guests managed to take delivery of their food; others, notably the matron who received a pineapple surprise splashed onto her bare back, wished they hadn’t. A ceremony featuring Pat O’Brien finally began around midnight, three hours behind schedule. Meanwhile, someone stole Mayor Oscar Holcombe’s chair, forcing him and his wife to sit in a hallway for two solid hours. “It was the worst mob scene I ever witnessed,” the mayor fumed afterward. “It was ridiculous.” A reporter for
Time
magazine wrote that the party “combined the most exciting features of a subway rush, Halloween in a madhouse and a circus fire.” The
Chronicle
’s society editor dubbed it “bedlam in diamonds.”

Bedlam it was, but many regarded the Shamrock’s gaudy, chaotic, diamond-strewn opening as an apt metaphor for the new Texas. It proved to be exactly the media event McCarthy yearned for, drawing coverage around the world;
Life
ran a five-page photo spread. “Shamrock Puts Eyes of Nation on Houston,” read the
Chronicle
headline. Overnight the Shamrock became not only the dominant symbol of Houston, but of Texas. People in Dallas, unsurprisingly, hated everything about it, nicknaming it the “Damn-rock.” Still, every reporter who wrote about Texas visited the Shamrock, until its fame overshadowed anything else in the state. Most Americans, a San Antonio columnist wrote, “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds.”

The morning after the hotel’s unveiling, McCarthy opened the doors for guests. Business was strong those first few weeks. Tourists from all over the world poured through the front doors, ogling McCarthy’s opulent “Texas Riviera,” as the gossip columnists quickly dubbed it; one Englishman told a reporter the only things he knew about Texas were the Shamrock and Roy Cullen, and he intended to see them both. Dinah Shore and Mel Torme sang in the Cork Club; Frank Sinatra was booked for January. ABC began broadcasting a weekly radio show in the Emerald Room,
Live from the Shamrock.
The pool became the showcase where Houston’s youngest, most beautiful, and richest women came to see and be seen. “I like it here,” one was heard muttering. “It’s like you were somewhere else—not in Houston at all.”

To an outsider the Shamrock appeared to be exactly the shining new symbol of Texas of McCarthy’s dreams. Inside the New York offices of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, however, his lenders weren’t so pleased. The hotel was losing money, and fast. Red ink was to be expected in any new venture, but McCarthy’s spending was simply out of control. He was laying out three thousand dollars a year for a golf pro, never mind that he didn’t have a course, plus a half million a year for a promotional magazine named
Preview,
which McCarthy labeled a “cowpuncher” alternative to
The New Yorker
.
²
On Easter the Shamrock hosted what it called the largest Easter egg hunt in history; hotel workers spent days hiding more than ten thousand eggs all over the property.

McCarthy unveiled his biggest show on July 4, a fireworks display he boasted would be the greatest ever seen on earth. By dusk fifty thousand people had lined the streets around the Shamrock, a crowd dwarfing the throng of opening night; traffic was backed up for miles on all three lanes of South Main, families in fishtailed Cadillacs and pickup trucks scanning the sky. At nightfall skyrockets of every hue arced up over the hotel, exploding in gushers of yellow, blue, and green. “Some of the fireworks seemed to be improvements on anything ever set off before,” the
Chronicle
reported the next day. “Their startling ‘whoosh’ sounded like the passing of a jet fighter, their whistle like the falling of 1000-pound bombs, and their bursting was like all glory let loose.” The massive show ended with a series of rockets that burst into a giant green shamrock over Houston.

Every day, it seemed, McCarthy had something new to show the press. In August he led reporters through his newest toy, the Boeing Stratocruiser he bought from Howard Hughes for $500,000. Adorned with a wet bar, two desks, and sleeping berths for eight, the interior was done in uncharacteristically tasteful shades of pastel blue and pink. It was McCarthy’s third plane. He named it
The Gooney Bird.
Meanwhile, at Houston’s Fat Stock Show, McCarthy broke his own American record by purchasing the champion steer, an eight-hundred-pound heifer, for $15,400.

In his new role as Texas kingmaker, he threw himself into efforts to attract a professional football team for Houston. He sponsored an exhibition game dubbed “The Shamrock Bowl” at Rice Stadium between teams of NFL all-stars that December—Bob Hope led the entertainment—and afterward unveiled plans to build a covered stadium that could seat 130,000 people. McCarthy flew to Philadelphia to crash a meeting of football owners and make his case for Houston. He managed to corner Commissioner Bert Bell but got nowhere. Afterward, people snickered at the very idea of a covered stadium, but McCarthy, as usual, was ahead of his time. Sixteen years later Houston built the Astrodome.

All this activity, and all the expense, had the Equitable on edge. On June 30, 1949, three months after the Shamrock’s opening, its board was given a fourth updated report on McCarthy’s oil reserves; the valuation came in at fifty-nine million dollars, down fifteen million from the previous report, but still enough—just—to cover his outstanding loans. For Equitable executives, the first sign of real trouble came not from the oil fields or the Shamrock but from the chemical plant McCarthy had begun building east of Houston in 1946. Its construction, budgeted at four million dollars, came in at eight million. The plant was to use a new technology called the “Bloodworth Process” to strip liquid petroleum gases out of natural gas and convert them into methanol for use as an antifreeze additive. Unfortunately, the plant didn’t work. Engineers spent months tinkering with equipment but could never figure out why. McCarthy spent millions replacing machinery before finally giving up.

Equitable had first realized the plant was in trouble the previous summer when McCarthy approached its executives for money to fix it. They politely declined. Undeterred, McCarthy had pried fifteen million dollars from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in return for a lien on all his chemical-related assets and a written guarantee that the plant would be up and running in a year. When the deadline arrived that August, however, the plant was still comatose. With no money coming in, McCarthy was unable to pay his quarterly interest payment to Met Life that September. Far worse, he told Equitable executives he would need to delay his next three debt payments to them as well.

Alarm bells were already ringing at Equitable’s headquarters when McCarthy stunned the company by announcing he had found a new oil field at New Ulm, eighty miles west of Houston. It should have been welcome news. But developing the field took money McCarthy didn’t have. Lender and borrower arrived at a face-off: Equitable insisted it wouldn’t lend McCarthy another dime until he paid what he owed; he was already giving Equitable half his income. McCarthy insisted he couldn’t pay unless allowed to develop New Ulm. In the meantime, he began paying many of the Shamrock’s entertainment acts with shares in the new field.