Bryan Burrough (49 page)

Much as it had when the Big Four dallied with Joe McCarthy, this kind of talk redounded in popular culture. Within months of the Kennedy assassination a new cultural stereotype began to appear, the Evil Texas Oilman. Powered by the new counterculture’s suspicion of all things corporate and powerful, this new image proved far darker than anything seen during the 1950s. The 1973 film
Executive Action,
based on a novel co-authored by the conspiracy theorist Mark Lane, imagined that Kennedy was killed by a cabal of steely Dallas oilmen portrayed by Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer. This idea has endured through the years, surfacing again in the granddaddy of all Kennedy-assassination movies, Oliver Stone’s 1991
JFK.
In the movie a group of unnamed Texas oilmen speculate openly of the benefits of removing Kennedy.

But the Kennedy assassination was only the beginning. The notion that there existed a cabal of nefarious Texas oilmen plotting a right-wing takeover of America surfaced in radical literature soon after the assassination and has remained a staple of popular culture ever since. Starting with a series of books and films in the mid-1960s, Texas oilmen began appearing as frightening right-wing nut jobs or James Bond-style supervillains intent on taking over the world. One of the first such portrayals came in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold war satire,
Doctor Strangelove,
which featured the actor Slim Pickens, sporting a cowboy hat and a thick Texas drawl, as a B-52 commander so eager to bomb “the Russkies” that, at the movie’s end, he rides a nuclear bomb, whooping and waving his hat, as it falls toward Russia.

Perhaps the archetypal right-wing Texas villain arrived in a 1967 British film,
Billion Dollar Brain,
based on a Len Deighton novel of the same name. In both, the villain is a Texas oilman named General Midwinter, “a raving right-wing maniac,” in one critic’s words, “a cardboard caricature of the Texan as an anti-Communist nut.”
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Midwinter wears a string tie and Stetson, runs an organization called Crusade for Freedom—clearly modeled on Facts Forum and LIFE LINE—and, in a delightfully convoluted plotline, schemes to use his vast computer system to conquer the Soviet Union. He meets his fate when his invasion force falls through the ice of a frozen Latvian lake.

H. L. Hunt, alas, lived on, and watched in amazement as his name was dragged into any number of popular conspiracy theories. The 1968 killings of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. led to a new round of death threats against him. At one point, someone actually sent a pair of trained dogs to kill the deer at Mount Vernon. Hunt recoiled from the controversies, all but begging people to calm down. In a January 1968 column titled “Less Hate in ’68,” he wrote, “The freedom fight is a joyous and constructive crusade. . . . It has no place for destructive hate.” At one point Hunt even endorsed the liberal Edward Kennedy for president. For the first time he began sitting for press interviews, including a long interview in
Playboy,
trying to explain how he really wasn’t a real-life General Midwinter.

If the national press still viewed Hunt as a noteworthy opinion leader, many Texans, schooled on
Alpaca
and LIFE LINE and years of watching Hunt up close, viewed him with a mix of amusement and disgust. As a
Dallas Times-Herald
editorial writer, A. C. Greene, put it, “If he had more flair and imagination, if he wasn’t basically such a damned hick, H. L. Hunt could be the most dangerous man in America.”

In retrospect the Kennedy assassination served as a harbinger for the dark days that plagued the Big Rich during the 1960s. For many in the state’s wealthiest families, the Swinging Sixties constituted a kind of return to Imperial Rome, a time of baccanalia as their industry withered, of cheering for helmeted gladiators while friends and neighbors went bankrupt, of family quarrels that led to courtroom fights, recriminations, scandals and, eventually, killings.

Texas was booming, with northerners continuing to stream into the suburbs ringing Houston and Dallas, but Texas Oil was slowly dying. By the mid-1960s the two forces that had been squeezing the industry for a decade—rising costs and competition from low-priced Middle Eastern oil—were killing the remaining producers. To find new oil—and most drillers now sought natural gas—meant drilling deeper and deeper, which was expensive. By the 1960s, it cost three times more to drill to twelve thousand feet as it did to five thousand; as a result, between 1959 and 1972 oil field production costs rose by nearly two-thirds. Given the cost, deep wells needed to bring in huge production just to break even.

In 1965, for example, Dallas independent Jake Hamon and a group of partners spent $2.75 million and more than eighteen months to complete a discovery well in the Coyanosa Gas Field in West Texas; the development wells alone cost $1.75 million apiece. Small independents couldn’t even think of this kind of outlay. For larger independents, it made every deep well a financial risk—one that more and more began to lose. Of thirty-one independent producers listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1952, fifteen were bought out by 1962; between 1963 and 1965 more than 150 independents were sold or went out of business. It was the same across the country. As one producer told a West Texas professor named Roger Olien: “You can lose your fucking shirt on gas.”

It was only a matter of time before the new realities struck down one of the Big Rich. It was Big John Mecom. By the mid-1960s Mecom and his son John Jr. rivaled the Murchisons as the second most visible clan of Texas oilmen after the Hunts. Like Bunker Hunt, Big John had pushed past the borders of Texas and Louisiana to drill for oil in spots as far afield as Honduras and Jordan. With a net worth estimated at between four and five hundred million dollars in 1964, he had branched into real estate, buying Houston’s Warwick Hotel, plus hotels in Peru and San Francisco, fish-meal factories, and an assortment of land and ranches. Like Lamar Hunt, John Jr. was using the family fortune to make his mark in sports. His racing team won the Indianapolis 500 in 1966, the same year he was awarded an NFL’s franchise, the New Orleans Saints. Of professional football’s twenty-four teams, four were now owned by Texas oilmen.

In December 1965 Big John struck his biggest deal to date, agreeing to buy the
Houston Chronicle
and other holdings, including a 30 percent stake in the giant Texas Commerce Bank, for eighty-five million dollars. In short order Mecom’s name appeared on the newspaper’s masthead as president and publisher; the famed “Mecom blue” carpet was laid in the lobbies of both the
Chronicle
and the bank. But then, barely six months later, Mecom’s name suddenly disappeared from the masthead. Though neither the
Chronicle
nor the rival
Houston Post
explained what had transpired, it was apparent the whole deal had been called off.

What happened, it turned out, was that Mecom couldn’t scrape together the purchase price. He had actually been turned down for loans everywhere he looked. In desperation he had tried to cobble together a deal to sell the
Chronicle
to an out-of-state buyer—keeping the bank stock and other assets—but the
Chronicle
’s owners balked. It was the first sign that Big John was no longer so big. His empire, in fact, was drowning in debt. For the rest of the 1960s Mecom sold off various real estate and stock holdings, but nothing he did could right his ship.

In 1970 Big John Mecom filed for bankruptcy. To oilmen across the state, it had never been more clear: No one was safe. Not anymore.

More than one account of John Mecom’s fall drew parallels to that of the only other major Texas wildcatter to go under, Glenn McCarthy. Oilmen who read the name shuddered. Because McCarthy’s life after the Shamrock was every oilman’s nightmare.
There but for the grace of God. . . .

It was not a pretty story. McCarthy had dragged himself back from Bolivia in 1957, bruised, battered, and, if not exactly penniless, no longer a rich man; unable to build a pipeline to transport the natural gas he had discovered, he sold his Bolivian interests to a group of American companies for $1.5 million, much of which he used to repay debts. On his return to Houston he sat sullenly, wearing his trademark dark glasses, for a network television interview with Mike Wallace, in which he spat the name Edna Ferber and talked about suing her.

He could still look for oil, but that cost money, and he no longer had the will to search overseas. His only asset of value was the Shamrock’s aging night club, his beloved Cork Club, which was owned by its members. In a stab at reclaiming his glory days, McCarthy removed the club from the Shamrock and reopened it atop a downtown skyscraper. There he became a night-club impresario, hosting glittering floor shows packed with dancing girls and Las Vegas-style entertainers such as Soupy Sales and Mel Torme. McCarthy’s real passion, though, appeared to be bourbon. Every few months the papers carried a new item about a fistfight or car accident. In 1960 McCarthy engaged in a wild brawl with his son-in-law at a charity benefit, the Bill Williams Capon dinner; police had to break it up. Two years later a cabbie sued him after another fistfight, this one triggered by the cabbie’s refusal to move when McCarthy needed to park. McCarthy won. The city, meanwhile, sued him for back taxes, leading to litigation that lasted for years.

By 1964 the Cork Club was in decline. Membership, once near six thousand people, had fallen by two-thirds. It was losing money. McCarthy fired the dancing girls.
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In the coming years the club’s reputation grew increasingly sordid. In 1967 the Houston vice squad launched an investigation after a guest claimed McCarthy had hosted an “orgy” at the club, complete with live sex acts atop the tabletops; nothing came of it. By 1971 it was over. Membership was down to almost nothing. McCarthy announced he was closing the club. Houston shrugged. In 1972 McCarthy sold his beloved mansion, the one he and his wife, Faustine, built in 1937, to a developer, who demolished it and put up apartments. Quietly, so quietly no one noticed, the McCarthys moved into a house in the suburb of La Porte. The story of Glenn McCarthy, once Houston’s greatest wildcatter, was all but over.

The Kennedy assassination was the most traumatic blow to the Texas psyche since the Alamo. No one felt the world’s condemnation more keenly than the people of Dallas, which found itself portrayed as a metropolis teeming with violent right-wing extremists—the “city of hate,” as one writer put it. The deluge of criticism triggered an unprecedented bout of soul-searching. Many felt the city was being treated unfairly. Others, such as University of Texas professor Robert McGee, writing in
The Nation,
found in Dallas an explosive combination of Texacentric factors—potent local right-wingers, a near-total absence of a Radical Left, the institutionalization of personal violence, and the widespread ownership of guns—that made the president’s killing seem almost preordained. “Barring the probability of Mississippi,” McGee concluded, “in a doomed and fated way it had to be Texas, and, in Texas, Dallas.”
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In the mid-1960s the people of Dallas searched for something—anything—to make them feel good about themselves again. They found it in Clint Murchison Jr.’s Dallas Cowboys. City fathers, looking for anything clean and new to burnish the city’s image, began promoting the Cowboys at every turn, and though still a so-so team—in 1964 they won five games—the Cotton Bowl began to fill. In 1965, when the charismatic SMU graduate “Dandy” Don Meredith led the team on a seven-game season-ending streak of victories, pushing the Cowboys into the postseason for the first time, attendance leaped 45 percent. A November game against the Cleveland Browns actually sold out. Suddenly the Cowboys were the hottest tickets in Dallas. Thousands of fans began appearing at Love Field to welcome them back from road games.

A psychologist would have smiled; here was the one thing that could draw all of Dallas’s dejected citizens together in a carefree, guilt-free celebration of civic pride. In 1966 the Cowboys won ten games and surged to the NFC championship game, losing by a touchdown to the Green Bay Packers in the final seconds when one of Meredith’s desperation heaves was intercepted in the end zone. The outpouring of grief matched anything in Texas sports history. “If ever a team attained tremendous status in defeat,” one sportswriter remarked, “it was Dallas.” Clint Jr., though heartbroken, tossed off one of the quips Texans were beginning to expect from him. “Oh well,” he said with a shrug, “we didn’t want to give ’em too much too soon.”

Dallas’s love affair with the Cowboys, however, didn’t erase its ambivalence toward the Big Rich, as Murchison discovered when he attempted to leverage the team’s popularity into a new stadium. The Cotton Bowl was a wreck, filthy, and without air-conditioned locker rooms, lined with ancient wooden seats that had housewives tweezing splinters from their rears. Worse, it sat in Fair Park amid the city’s worst black slums. Cars in the parking lots were routinely vandalized, hubcabs and aerials yanked off, while over the years scores of fans complained of being mugged after night games. A 1967 contest against the Packers was marred by a postgame rampage in which dozens of patrons were held up and robbed outside the stadium, one man was shot, his wife beaten, and another man stabbed. Murchison pleaded with the City Council to build a new facility, but local politicians, acutely aware of how little the Murchisons and Hunts had done for the city, adamantly refused. “To hell with him,” one snapped after a meeting with Clint Jr. “What have the Murchisons ever done for Dallas?”

Matters came to a head in 1966, when Clint Jr. demanded to know whether he was trapped in the Cotton Bowl forever. The city’s headstrong mayor, Erik Jonsson, a northern-born founder of the new Texas Instruments electronics conglomerate, didn’t care much for oil-family heirs who frolicked in gargantuan mansions and private islands but always seemed too busy to donate to civic causes. He proposed renovating the Cotton Bowl. Clint Jr. said it wasn’t good enough. Instead, later that year, he snapped up a ninety-acre parcel at the intersection of three expressways in the western suburb of Irving. In January 1967 he announced he planned to build “the finest football stadium to date in the world” if Irving could just pay for it.