'The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,' by Bryan Burrough

"It may be hard for outsiders to accept, but there is, in fact, a Texas canon. Opinions vary, but my list would include T. R. Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star,” John Bainbridge’s “Super Americans,” John Graves’s “Goodbye to a River,” Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” and his nonfiction classic “In a Narrow Grave,” certain Molly Ivins columns, the Texas portions of Willie Morris’s “North Toward Home,” Billy Lee Brammer’s “Gay Place,” ­Tommy Thompson’s vastly underrated “Blood and Money” and Edna Ferber’s “Giant.” Not all of these works are great literature, and not all of them were written by ­Texans, but they’re all required reading if you want to understand the Texas soul. It’s a complicated thing, a roiling psychic stew of narcissism, ambition, brilliance, humor, vengefulness, pettiness, fearlessness and, of course, a bottomless pit of need. (For what? Pretty much ­everything.)

The irresistibility of the Texas rich in particular has persisted to this day, even as the most recent Texas president was leaving the White House in ignominy. Our super­rich are the gift that keeps on giving, a consistent and gloriously entertaining reminder that life can always be lived bigger, better and, sometimes, appallingly dumber than the average human mind can imagine. Bryan Burrough, a co-author, with John Helyar, of the seminal “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,” and a native Texan himself, would seem a natural to chronicle this world, and to a large part, in “The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,” he succeeds.

Every good history needs a conceit, and Burrough has attempted nothing less than a history of modern (as opposed to contemporary) Texas as told through the lives of Roy Cullen of Houston, Sid Richardson of Fort Worth, and Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt of Dallas, men who are — it seems almost impossible to this Texan — fast fading into history. “If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it,” Burrough writes. “A good ol’ boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.” Those who don’t know these stories will find “The Big Rich” lively reading, replete as it is with the requisite anecdotes of ­Texas excess: Hunt maneuvering among his three families, Cullen staging a war bond drive that included professional wrestlers performing in tandem with the local symphony. Here is the stereotypical rich lout wearing and then discarding $100 bills as bow ties, and another riding his pet lion to get the mail. Here, too, is the opening of the fabled Shamrock Hotel in Houston, an event that Time magazine said “combined the most exciting features of a subway rush, Halloween in a madhouse and a circus fire.”

But Burrough, with his gifts for both synthesis and lyricism, brings more to the table than that. His set pieces describing the events at Spindletop, the gusher that started it all, and the rise and fall of the wildcatter Glenn McCarthy (the model for Ferber’s Jett Rink) are impeccably rendered, as are the tales of many other fabled characters. Burrough has also done estimable new reporting, showing links between Texas money and national politics that stretch back far earlier than the days of Lyndon B. Johnson; while recording the ups and downs of that relationship, he shows how the stereotype of the Texas oilman shifted from beloved buffoon to evil greed-head to would-be assassin. (See J. R. Ewing, and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”)

Texas in the early part of the 20th century was little more than a lumber and cotton colony of the East Coast, with nothing but resentment to show for it. The men who would change all that appeared different on the surface but, deep down, were remarkably similar: Cullen, for instance, grew up in a family of reduced circumstances, read Dickens and dreamed of restoring his mother to “the massive white plantation home he would build someday, with porticoes and trellises and gardens, just like the beloved family plantation the hated Union men had burned.” Murchison, “saddled with the body of a snowman — big head, beanbag nose, no neck to speak of — and a face like a dish of melted ice cream,” was similarly steely, but where Cullen was intuitive, he was a man of science, able to do complex calculations in his head. The son of an East Texas banker, he teamed up early with Richardson, the son of a local bar owner, in what would become a lifelong partnership of untold riches and Texas-size pranks. Hunt, the richest man in the world at various times in his life, was, arguably, the craziest of the four, possibly certifiable.

But all these men were fiercely independent, deeply suspicious of Yankees and undoubtedly brilliant, though each had a weakness for believing that just because he was brilliant in one way, he was brilliant in all ways. Borrowing on a grand scale was a rule of the game: “If you’re gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay,” Murchison advised. “Then the people can’t afford to foreclose.” Not surprisingly, the four men also possessed the oilman’s cast-iron optimism, which Cullen, coming home from drilling one too many dry holes, expressed simply as “Tomorrow’s another day.”

Burrough deftly advances these men through history, showing how they made their vast fortunes in one five-year window, from 1930 to 1935, thanks largely to the failures of the major oil companies during the Depression. Along the way to becoming the richest men in the world, they built their mansions — Cullen got his columned dream home, Murchison and Richardson bought competing islands off the Gulf Coast — and made ample use of private planes. (On a visit to the Murchisons’ Mexican ranch, the Duchess of Windsor was flown to Tampico to get her hair done.)

All employed their wealth to spread their political views: Cullen and Hunt railed against Jews, blacks and Communists while championing the far right; Murchison and Richardson cozied up to every pol from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson. They tried to unseat Vice President Richard Nixon and got John Connally to grease many a wheel. (J. Edgar Hoover was another ally and sometime investor.) Texas oil fueled prosperity in the 1940s and ’50s, which made the Big Four political kingmakers on a scale never seen before; the growth of (cheaper) Middle Eastern oil made them bullies as they tried to hang on to what was theirs. In particular, all but Richardson supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, an alliance that eventually cost them dearly. “All they do is hate,” said Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House and a fellow Texan.

Resurrection would come, to some extent, with the next generation. In a wonderful bit of positive thinking, Burrough posits that Clint Murchison Jr. assuaged Dallas’s post-assassination shame by building America’s team, the Cowboys.

It’s all there and more, which is this ambitious book’s strength and its weakness. By the time we get to the successes and failures of the next generation — Clint Jr.’s excesses with drugs and women; Bunker and Herbert Hunt’s illegal-­wiretapping and silver-cornering fiascoes; the takeover of Disney by the Bass brothers (Richardson’s great-nephews) — the book starts to feel more like a marathon than a jaunt. By the end I was longing to sit on one of Murchison’s verandas, drink in hand, and savor a single good story while a cool breeze blew through the trees. Murchison might have said the author bit off a little more than he could chew. Of course, that puts Burrough in some very good company.


THE BIG RICH
The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
By Bryan Burrough
Illustrated. 466 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95