Transcript
Introduction
It's hard to tell people about Texas. It's hard to explain what it means to be a Texan. But if you grew up in Texas, as I did, it becomes a part of you as if you're a member of a club. The myths about Texas die so hard mostly because Texans love them. So much of it is wrapped up in oil. But the fact is, growing up in Central Texas during the 1970s, I never met an actual oil man. It wasn't until I was 16, the weekend I served as an escort at a debutante ball that I was introduced to the class of Texans known as The Big Rich. They talked of boarding schools and weekends in Las Vegas and wine in Paris and jetting to London and my head just spun and spun and spun. Though I didn't realize it at the time, those were the years, the early and mid-1980s, when their era was ending. The fathers of those boys were going bankrupt. When my editor suggested some kind of book on Texas oil, I was surprised how quickly a structure sprang to my mind.
It would be not about the oil industry per se, but about the great Texas oil families, the ones who generated all those myths, the Hunts, the Basses, the Murchisons, the Cullens. I thought of them as the Big 4, though it wasn't until I began my research that I found out that they had been called exactly that. This book is built on 3 years of research during which I plunged into dozens of Texas and out-of-state archives, interviewed surviving members of the Big 4 families, and read more than 200 books and thousands of newspapers and magazine articles. These and other history served as a starting point to explore the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oilmen, many of whom are fast being forgotten. There's never been anything lasting written about Houston's flamboyant Glenn McCarthy, though there should be. It's hard to find anyone under 60 who remembers a Texas legend so famous in his day, they’d adorn the cover of Time Magazine.
There's even been less written about the secretive Sid Richardson, once the richest man in America. The joys of writing this book were multitude. There's nothing I love more than cruising the Texas backcountry. One morning in 2005, I was in Far West Texas. I entered a tableland whose view was so breathtaking, I had to pull to the side. There, as far as the eye could see, were oil wells. Hundreds, maybe thousands, a lost plateau filled not with dinosaurs, but with the steel and wire and sweat of American industry. Men had been out there for years, I realized, mapping the land, drilling holes in the earth, returning home to Dallas and Houston, and Fort Worth with millions of dollars in their pockets. This was at Texas, an America I had never seen, and I suddenly needed to know what became of these men and their fortunes.
Their stories it turned out were everything I had imagined and more. There's truth behind legend. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires. Patriarchs of squabbling families who own private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars and jousted with Presidents and tried to corner an international market or two. This is their story, told to the lives of the 4 Texas families and a few of their peers, who rose the highest, and in some cases, fell the hardest. Each of their patriarchs began in obscurity and all through a historic quirk of fate laid the foundations of their fortunes in a single 4-year span. In time, their days dissolved into a sore litany of debauchery, family feuds, scandals, and murder and to collapsing in a tangle of bankruptcies. Some survived, others didn't. A few count their millions to this day.
That was an excerpt from one of the wildest books I have ever read. The book is called The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes and is written by Bryan Burrough. This was actually recommended to me by a listener, and I went to the page on Amazon, and this is what I read -- the first sentence I read and I immediately ordered it after I read the sentence that says, this is the economist reviewing the book. And it says, what's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money and the punishment of greed and shortsightedness. Okay. So I have a ton of highlights and notes. So I'm going to jump right into so we don't waste any time. I'm going to focus -- there's a million interesting stories in this book. I'm going to focus on the 4 main founders. That's Roy Cullen, H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson. So before I get into the 4 main characters, I want to give you a little prehistory to the Texas oil industry. Most -- there's a generation before our 4 main characters. There was another boom in Texas oil.