Bryan Burrough (64 page)

Her son, Clint told Lupe, was strangling Murchison Brothers. Everything, the cash-flow problems, the debt, the question of the trusts—
everything
—could be resolved in time, he promised, if only he had the freedom to maneuver. Clint pleaded with Lupe to make John Jr. see reason. She tried. He wouldn’t. For months Clint kept at his sister-in-law, nagging, wheedling, until taking his argument to its logical conclusion. If John Jr. wouldn’t see reason, Clint said, he had to be removed as coexecutor of his father’s estate. Unless his nephew was evicted from Murchison Brothers, they could lose everything. Gradually Lupe weakened. She knew nothing about the family’s finances. She could barely balance a checkbook. But at Clint’s insistence, she began talking to lawyers, and to her surprise they agreed with Clint.

The cold war at Murchison Brothers was entering its second year when, in the fall of 1980, Lupe finally acceded to Clint’s wishes and, along with her three grown daughters, sued to remove her son as coexecutor of his father’s estate. John Jr. was stunned. When the news hit the papers, so was Dallas; it was the first anyone outside the family knew of the turmoil within. Overnight John Jr. found himself shunned not only by his mother, his sisters, his uncle, and his cousins, but by much of haute Dallas. The whispers raced from the family through their friends to anyone who would listen: John Jr. had lost his mind, he was unstable, he was blowing money on cars and strippers and who knew what else. None of it was true, but it didn’t matter. When John Jr. tried to have dinner at Brook Hollow, other members actually walked away. In a bit of perverse payback whose humor was lost on the club’s members, he returned one evening with an unusual date, a Texas State Fair stripper who catwalked through the stately Brook Hollow dining room wearing nothing but a black-leather string bikini. And tassles.

John Jr. was absolutely alone, but he was determined to get justice. He hired the noted Houston criminal attorney, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, and in February 1981 returned fire, suing Clint as well as his four children, demanding his share of the trusts plus thirty million dollars in damages. It had become, as more than one wag noted, a real-life
Dallas.
Then, much as happened at the height of the Cullens-Di Portanova struggles, things got strange. Lupe’s suit against John Jr. was nearing its April trial date when, returning to the Big House one evening, she and a friend were confronted by two masked men holding pistols. The friend was bound and gagged, then thrown into one of the family Mercedes; Lupe was shoved in the trunk. When her daughter Barbara arrived a bit later, she and two of her friends were bound, gagged, and left in the living room. The men prowled the house for a full four hours before leaving. Afterward Lupe discovered almost nothing had been stolen, just a few pieces of jewelry.

It was an odd home invasion. The two intruders had used a two-way radio to communicate with someone outside the house, as if they were receiving instructions. Though there was no evidence to back their musings, John Jr.’s attorneys speculated privately that Clint had been behind the robbery. Lupe had been having second thoughts about the upcoming trial, and John Jr. came to believe his uncle had staged the whole thing in hopes that Lupe would blame her own “irrational” son, thus renewing her anger. No arrests were ever made.

The robbery left Lupe traumatized, but the trial went forward, opening in a Dallas courtroom in April. John appeared in court, seemingly ready for battle, but was shocked when, on the first day of jury selection, one of Lupe’s attorneys launched into an impassioned denunciation of him as an ungrateful son who was jeopardizing the family fortune to get his hands on money he hadn’t earned. John later said he expected to be portrayed as naive, even dim-witted, but the vigor of the attack left him shaken. Lupe’s attorneys suspected his discomfort had more to do with his dwindling savings; with little more than an eighteen-thousand-dollar salary behind him, it was far from clear he had enough money to pay his lawyers. Whatever the case, John Jr. initiated settlement talks that very night, and by dawn the deal was done. On the surface it amounted to John Jr.’s total capitulation. He resigned as coexecutor of his father’s estate. In return Lupe agreed to lend him three million dollars. John Jr. rationalized it as the only way he could raise the money to pursue the fight that really mattered, the lawsuit against Clint to free his trust. He hired new attorneys and got to work.

Clint, while relieved to be rid of his nephew, had little reason to celebrate. In the two years since his brother’s death, his financials had continued to deteriorate. Interest rates remained high, housing starts low, and every month was a fight to feed the banks. It didn’t help matters that not even Clint could keep straight the hundreds of loans and investments in the Murchison Brothers portfolio; organization had never been his forte. “The only way we knew a loan had come due was a banker would call,” remembers one aide. “Then all hell would break loose, trying to find a way to pay it.” Clint had borrowed seven million dollars in 1979 to start a new luxury development, the Summit, in Beverly Hills, but two years later what few homes had been finished remained unsold. He was forced to borrow another three million dollars just to pay interest on the first loan, then added a second mortgage.

The crippling blow, though, was the fall in oil prices, which threatened to sever the last leg of Clint’s tottering financial table. The value of all his remaining oil properties fell sharply, as did real estate, and lenders began demanding more collateral to offset the drops in value; almost all of Clint’s collateral, however, was already pledged to others. For a time his balance sheet was buoyed by a rise in the stock of Kirby Exploration of Houston, a publicly held wildcatter descended from oil companies assembled decades earlier by John Henry Kirby; Big Clint had purchased a controlling stake in the company from Kirby’s estate in 1956. On the promise of a new natural gas field, Kirby’s shares leaped as high as forty-five dollars in early 1981; Clint wasted no time leveraging the increase into another big loan. But when the field failed to pan out, the stock cratered, within months falling to thirteen dollars. Clint was left staring at a hundred-million-dollar loss, along with another lender angrily demanding more collateral for his loan.

Through it all Clint remained a picture of optimism, assuring his men everything would be fine once interest rates fell. In 1982 he decided to go on the offensive, snaring tens of millions of dollars in new loans to start or finish developments in Palm Springs, New Orleans, and other Sun Belt cities. Almost all this money came from out-of-state lenders who, unlike the Dallas banks, had little sense how deep Clint’s troubles actually ran. He began paying quiet visits to lenders in New York and St. Louis and Memphis. His calling card was always the Cowboys. Clint would talk football with goggle-eyed Bucks and Bubbas at some middle-market bank in Atlanta and walk away with another ten or twenty million that by month’s end would be used to pay another bank. In time, though, word spread, and Clint began trolling for money in murkier waters. Among his lenders of last resort, his lawyers would later disclose, was a Louisiana banker named Herman K. Beebe, whose known associates included the New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. In 1985 Beebe would be sentenced to a year in prison for bank fraud.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was as his financial condition reached a crisis point in early 1981 that Clint found God. Over time, Anne had simply worn him down. He had been attending church with her for several years, and at her insistence had even sworn off alcohol; the days of cocaine and multiple mistresses were now just a fading memory. When Anne began hosting Bible classes at the mansion in 1978, Clint sat on the edges of the group, half listening. In time he moved his chair in a bit and began asking questions. Then, in 1981, Clint went to see Anne’s pastor, Olen Griffing. Griffing’s church, the Shady Grove Church in Irving, was a thirty-minute drive and a world apart from everything Clint had ever known. Its blue-collar membership was made up of hard-core fundamentalists who shouted and sang and spoke in tongues.

Griffing had seen this coming. As his finances tightened, Clint had occasionally asked him about his beliefs, including a long discussion on the beach at Spanish Cay; he showed a special interest in how a man could become “saved.” Now Clint said he was prepared to give his life to Christ. Griffing suspected Anne was behind the approach, but Clint denied it. One day in the fall of 1981 Griffing drove to the mansion. Clint opened the door in his swim trunks. Together the two men waded into one of the swimming pools. When Clint was ready, Griffing dunked him beneath the water and baptized him. The ceremony was followed by a formal baptism, with Anne standing alongside, at the Shady Grove Church one Sunday that December. Follow the word of God, Griffing intoned, and all your sins will be washed away. The pastor had no idea, of course, how many sins there had been.

Clint knew. As he studied the Bible, they weighed heavily on his mind. He became convinced he would need to pay for his sins. And at some point, apparently in mid-1981, the Lord delivered the check. In truth Clint had known something was wrong for at least two years. His walk had grown unsteady. At times he had trouble maintaining his balance. In early 1982 he fell on a Cowboys flight and broke two ribs. When he began to “wobble,” as he put it, friends assumed he had fallen off the wagon. Finally Clint had tests run. They revealed he was suffering from a rare degenerative nerve disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy, or OPCA. Related to Parkinson’s, OPCA is one of several diseases known as “Parkinson’s Plus” because they attack all across the central nervous system. For now Clint was just “wobbly.” In the future, doctors told him, maybe a year, maybe five, he would suffer tremors, mild at first, then worse. Eventually he would lose the ability to speak. And he would die. No one could say how long he had.

Clint, now fifty-eight, took the news with grace. But he knew in his heart why he was sick. His son Robert later recalled a Bible-study session at the mansion not long after Clint’s diagnosis. Another attendee suddenly asked Clint if he understood what had caused his illness. “I think,” Clint replied, “that it’s because of my past sins.”
²

John Jr. would not forgive, and he would not forget. In October 1981, at roughly the same time Clint underwent baptism in his swimming pool, his nephew’s attorneys scored their first victory, persuading a Dallas court to make Clint release six million dollars in Optimum Systems stock held in John’s trust. That left twenty-four million dollars John still wanted, and in December he attempted to capitalize on his success with a settlement offer. In broad strokes, he offered to drop his claim for thirty million dollars in damages if Clint would just release the last twenty-four million dollars in his trust. John Jr. then revealed his trump card. If Clint didn’t settle, his attorneys made clear, his nephew was poised to go public with details of Clint’s financial condition. If he did, Clint’s attorneys advised, it could initiate a feeding frenzy. Each of Clint’s banks knew but one side of the elephant; if they realized how sick the entire animal was, it could release a flood tide of lawsuits as each attempted to lay legal claims before the others. There was no way Murchison Brothers could survive such a run. It would mean bankruptcy.

Clint, distracted by his illness and the demands of feeding the banks, dragged his heels about making a decision for more than a year. In April 1983 he finally gave in, handing over John Jr.’s twenty-four million dollars and shifting the debt encumbering his late brother’s assets to his own. He knew it had to be done, but his greatest fear appeared to be the specter of his faltering finances splashed across the newspapers. He could just see it: the vast Murchison empire, Big Clint’s legacy, the second-greatest family fortune in all Texas, ruined by his own stupidity. Surrendering to his nephew, however, did nothing to calm family tensions. Once John Jr. got his trust money, his sisters wanted theirs. Lupe, too, began making noises about finally removing her family’s assets from the Murchison Brothers partnership. A series of meetings ensued between Lupe’s family and Clint’s, dozens of attorneys and accountants crammed into conference rooms on the twenty-third floor.

For Clint, it was unbearably sad. By and large the meetings remained civil, but everyone involved understood that if some kind of agreement couldn’t be worked out, they were headed for years in court and years of humiliating headlines. “Everyone was threatening to sue everyone else,” one person in the room recalled. “It didn’t matter that these people were family.” By late 1983 the outlines of an omnibus settlement had emerged. All the children would get their trusts. Lupe would gain control of most of John’s remaining investments. Clint left the negotiating table with a mound of debt, a collection of companies leveraged to the hilt, a stack of message slips from angry bankers—and the Cowboys. To those closest to him, Clint appeared to take solace that at least he still owned America’s Team. As long as he still had the Cowboys, he was still Clint Murchison.

Numbers are cruel things, though, and Clint knew what they said. At first he just mused about what the team was actually worth. In early 1983, just as he was settling with John Jr., he had a friend send out quiet feelers; in no time, he received an offer for forty million dollars. Clint brushed it aside. “Thanks,” he said, “but you know, selling the Cowboys would be like selling one of my kids.”
³
When rumors of a sale hit the papers, Clint’s men reluctantly confirmed them, lamely fibbing that it might be needed to settle John’s estate.

By now Clint had grown visibly ill. The tremors had begun. His hands shook. He began using a cane. His businesses were even sicker. Finally, in the spring of 1983, Clint called Tex Schramm to the mansion. The two men had been together twenty-four years; Schramm was the only general manager the Cowboys had ever known, and he was immensely fond of Clint who, unlike so many sports-team owners, had never interfered with his work. The Cowboys, if no longer the goliaths they had been a decade before, were still thriving. They had made it to three more Super Bowls in the 1970s, winning in 1978, but after Roger Staubach’s retirement following the 1979 season, it became clear America’s Team had peaked. Their decline, in fact, exactly paralleled Clint’s. Between 1980 and 1982 Dallas lost three straight NFC championship games. Yet the Cowboys’ image as America’s foremost sports franchise—their only rivals were the New York Yankees—was as strong as ever. Clint’s players still popped up in movies and television shows and loads of commercials, Tom Landry shilling for American Express, Charlie Waters and D. D. Lewis for Lite Beer, Randy White for Dannon Yogurt.