King of the Wildcatters

(See Cover)

If it were possible to cap the human ego like a gas well, and to pipe off its more volatile byproducts as fuel, Houston's multi-millionaire wildcatter Glenn McCarthy could heat a city the size of Omaha with no help at all. Whether he would allow his rampant psyche to be dedicated completely to so prosaic a project, however, is doubtful--several million cubic feet would undoubtedly be diverted to a McCarthy Memorial Beacon which would nightly cast its glare as far west as El Paso.

As it is, the works and pomps which Glenn McCarthy has raised in honor of McCarthy have taken a more solid form. There is McCarthy's Houston mansion, a white-pillared, $700,000 pile surrounded by vast lawns and trees bearded with Spanish moss. There is the 15,000-acre ranch on which he admires his blooded cattle and occasionally shoots deer, goats and turkeys. There is McCarthy's Colosadium (so far, only on paper), a 110,000-seat stadium for Houston with a sliding roof in case of rain. There are McCarthy's airplanes, which include a four-engined Boeing Stratoliner.

Most imposing of all is McCarthy's showy and opulent new Shamrock Hotel. In causing its white, glass-tiered, palm-bordered bulk to rise above the Texas coastal plain, McCarthy endowed Houston with the Southwest's most luxurious hostelry--a soft-carpeted, $21 million palace which boasts French cooking (filet mignon: $11), air-conditioned bedrooms with both push-button radio and Muzak, afternoon tea served to string music and big-name dinner entertainers like Edgar Bergen and Dorothy Lamour.

Wearing of the Green. In its purest sense the Shamrock is less a hotel than a kind of Versailles, and it is almost impossible to enter without being reminded that its Louis is none other than Glenn McCarthy. A large oil portrait of the proprietor hangs on a wall flanking the lobby elevator doors; framed there, with folded arms, tumbled hair and an expression reminiscent of both Maxie Rosenbloom and Barrymore's Hamlet, he stares austerely at all who enter. The portrait's eyes are said to soften slightly when McCarthy confronts it in the flesh.

McCarthy's iron will and lordly tastes are reflected by other aspects of the hotel. There is the color scheme, for instance, which boasts 63 different shades of green and encompasses walls, rugs, the bellhops' emerald & lemon uniforms and the grass-hued ink with which guests sign the register. McCarthy makes all public announcements concerning the hotel (George Lindholm, whom he hired away from Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria as manager, resigned quietly last week).

The Acquisitive Eye. In an age when most businessmen allow themselves to be governed by politicians, unions, directors, psychiatrists, the threat of ulcers and the precepts of Emily Post, McCarthy holds himself accountable only to McCarthy. Both in his bull-like determination to make himself Houston's first citizen and in the conduct of his business empire--which includes vast oil holdings, Houston's radio station KXYZ, a chemical works, 14 neighborhood newspapers and a swank men's shop--he often seems a throwback to the lustier days of the 19th Century.

At 42, after 17 spectacular years in the Texas oilfields, he looks like nothing so much as a Hollywood version of a Mississippi River gambler--a moody and monolithic male with a dark, Civil War mustache, a cold and acquisitive eye, and a brawler's shoulder-swinging walk. He affects dark glasses, wears a diamond ring as big as a dime on one rocklike fist, and on the flat Texas highways drives his royal blue Cadillac at 100 m.p.h., often with a whiskey bottle at his side. He likes to shoot craps at $1,000 a throw, and has a longshoreman's uninhibited propensity for barroom fights.

His office in Houston's Shell Building boasts gleaming brown morocco leather furniture, a five-foot tinted photograph of Glenn McCarthy, five bronze-plated baby shoes (he has four daughters: Mary Margaret, 18, Glennalee, 17, Leah, 15, Faustine, 12, and an eleven-year-old son, Glenn Jr.) and Miss Houston of 1945. The ex-Miss Houston, an imperious and well-endowed young woman named Averill Knigge, serves him as secretary.

Though McCarthy's interest in literature is largely confined to oil leases, he sometimes sums up his personal code by exhibiting an anonymous piece of verse which was presented to him by Airman Eddie Rickenbacker. It is entitled The Little Red God of Guts, and reads, in part, as follows:

He is neither a fool with a frozen smile, Nor a sad old toad in a cask of bile; He can dance with a shoe nail in his heel, And never a sign of his pain reveal . . .

[He can) worship a sweet, white virgin's glove,

Or teach a courtesan how to love . . . Build where the builders all have failed, And sail the seas that no man has sailed.

McCarthy's incessant, explosive extracurricular activities, plus the luck, deadly nerve and ferocious vitality with which he has sought and found oil, have made him one of the most highly publicized Texans since Sam Houston. This does not mean that he is popular; many of his fellow citizens grudgingly envy him his wealth and audacity. As many more deprecate him, and point out, correctly, that he is hardly typical of the Texas millionaire (see box). Nevertheless, Glenn McCarthy is as peculiarly a product of Texas as the famed San Jacinto monument; the Lone Star State is one of the few places left in the world where millionaires hatch seasonally, like May flies.

Surrealist Jungles. Texas throbs with prosperity. In a fevered decade of war and boom it has not only produced new fortunes in crops and cattle, but become one of the nation's great industrial areas.

Its cloud-hung Gulf Coast bristles with a staggering concentration of chemical plants--enormous, surrealistic jungles of piping, gleaming spheroids of tanks and stacks--and with miles of great oil refineries, tank farms and factories. The combined Gulf ports handle more export tonnage than New York. Texas produces 80% of U.S. sulphur, almost half of its natural gas, and a lion's share of that Texas delicacy, chili powder. Texans make B-36 bombers in the Consolidated Vultee

Aircraft Corp.'s plant in Fort Worth, newsprint in the piny-woods country at Lufkin, saddles and cowboy boots in scores of small shops, and women's sport clothes in Dallas' burgeoning garment business. The West Texas town of Monahans (pop. 7,000) is popularly believed to produce the nation's healthiest and most intelligent trained fleas.

Both cattle and cotton--once the main supports of Texas--are still big business; Texas plantations and ranches yield a third of U.S. cotton, 10% of U.S. beef. Texas has 25% of the nation's sheep, and raises $100 million worth of wheat.

The effects of this $5 billion combination of industrial and agrarian prosperity has inspired a giant construction industry: Texas cities have not only acquired new factories, but the high, clean shafts of new office buildings, bright-roofed acres of housing for the new industrial workers, and tree-shaded mansions for the new millionaires. Dallas has a Rolls-Royce agency; its fashionable Neiman-Marcus sells more mink than any store outside New York. There is fresh paint on farmhouses and new tractors grumble across the endless Texas land.

In many ways it is an astonishing phenomenon; few areas of the world have experienced so much change with such little pain. Oil (plus natural gas) has been the catalyst. The presence of potential bonanzas under the soil inspired the beginnings of Texas industry; modern oil production (roughly one-quarter of the world's production) built it. And the steady stream of oil wealth, along with the income-tax generosity of the U.S. Government,/- sprayed money off in dozens of different directions.

Gusher. Both Texas industry and Wildcatter Glenn McCarthy were born at Spindletop--a gently sloping salt dome near Beaumont, from which gushed the first big flood of dark, heavy Texas oil. Like many another boom field which was to follow, the Spindletop discovery was the result of one man's faith, energy and stubbornness.

Three dry holes had been drilled in the dome before the arrival of an engineer, prospector and onetime Austrian naval officer named A. F. Lucas. Lucas drilled a fourth "duster at Spindletop." Undiscouraged, he set up new equipment and began again, determined to pierce 500 ft. of quicksand which lay beneath the surface soil.

It was a long, heartbreaking job. But on Jan. 10, 1901, when the bit had reached 1,020 ft., the well began to erupt. With a cannonlike report, mud, water and gas roared up, shooting pipe and rocks high in the air. Then came a greasy and terrifying geyser of oil -- a 75,000-barrel-a-day flow, more than many a whole field produces. Within weeks, the town of Beaumont was a madhouse of tents, saloons, lean-tos and one-room shacks; land on the dome was selling for as much as $1,000,000 an acre, and derricks were rising, leg to leg, in a confused and feverish race for riches.

Jackpots. After Spindletop, in the superlatives of the oilfields, came a jillion jackpots--roaring booms at Electra, Ranger, Burkburnett, Desdemona and Mexia proved that oil was where you found it. The automobile age created a rising demand, and after the Lucas No. 1, Texas wildcatters never stopped their probing in the earth's baffling substrata. Glenn McCarthy, a man with a lust for money and fame, became one of them.

He had been suckled with the sound of oil rigs in his ears; his father, an itinerant oilfield workman named William McCarthy, came to Spindletop as a driller, and Glenn was born there in 1907. One of his earliest memories concerns the great Gulf Coast hurricane of 1915. As the storm approached, the elder McCarthy galloped to the field in a two-wheeled gig; Glenn went with him and crouched in the roaring darkness as derrick after derrick crashed into wreckage.

William McCarthy got none of the wealth of Spindletop. His job petered out and the family moved on. Glenn grew up in Houston's "Bloody Fifth" ward, where as he says today, "the cops were afraid of the people, and there was almost always a dead man somewhere on the street in the morning."

It was a hard place to live; in the humid, tropical summers, men tucked newspapers under their shirtsleeves, made masks of them for their faces to keep off whining swarms of mosquitoes. For years, Glenn had racking seizures of malaria. The McCarthys had little money for cures --or anything else.

Roving Tackle. Despite illness and poverty, the boy developed into a big, cold-eyed, hard-fisted youngster who burned with a desire to make the world notice Glenn McCarthy. In Houston's San Jacinto High School he began to succeed--he often came to school with a patch on his pants but he was a football hero and a successful fighter at Saturday-night dances. Girls were enthralled by him.

When he was 17 he joined the Navy, served a six-month hitch in an unsuccessful attempt to get to Annapolis. After that, he made football his life. He went to New Orleans and played fullback one season for both the Tulane freshman and a local high-school team. He starred for each. Dana X. Bible persuaded him to go to Texas A. & M., but the coach soon suffered an untimely loss; McCarthy was fired for hazing before the fall season began, and played for Allen Academy at Bryan instead. The year after that he was on the freshman team at Rice Institute.

Then he got married--and made his first impact on Houston society. His bride, Faustine Lee, was the daughter of Millionaire Oilman W. E. Lee. Unabashed by her father's riches, the fact that she was only 16, or the knowledge that he had only a dollar and a half, McCarthy borrowed his mother's wedding ring, contrived to get a license and engineered an elopement. His father-in-law was not pleased. McCarthy moved his bride into a $15-a-month apartment, got a job painting tank bottoms and swore to get as rich as the Lees in a hurry.

He saved his money, in 1930 opened a dry-cleaning shop. He sold it, got an option on a downtown corner, talked the Sinclair Oil Corp. into putting up a gas station for him. He soon had a second. He made the two pay $1,000 a month. But he burned for great wealth; though the Depression was at its deepest and oil was down to 10-c- a barrel, he began gambling in wildcat drilling ventures. He sank a dry hole, sold one of his service stations, and sank another.

He bought a derrick, got an ancient, 3,000-ft. East Texas drilling rig and a leaking secondhand boiler and boldly set out to sink a 6,000-ft. hole in Hardin County. He drafted his father as a tool pusher, his younger brother William as a laborer. It was agonizing toil. Sand ruined the rubber rings in his pumps every half hour; each time, he dismantled the mechanism and installed new ones. The "coffee pot" rig broke down endlessly. He says: "We might as well have been drilling with a high-heeled boot." It took six months to sink a hole which modern equipment would drill in a week. The well was dry.

McCarthy refused to quit. He rented another rig, drilled again in the Conroe field. A platform collapsed and he burned the skin off his hands sliding to safety; he stood off a sheriff bent on reclaiming his equipment. He finally "made a well." He got a little oil with another hole in the same field. Then he hit it big in Chambers County and one day the Humble Oil Co. sent him a check for $700,000. He was 26. McCarthy ordered his Houston mansion built, bought his big diamond and went on plunging.

Disaster. For a while his luck held. He bought up a lease with only eleven days to run, gambled on drilling before its expiration date. It rained night & day for the whole eleven days. McCarthy toiled in knee-deep, liquid mud for days at a stretch, drove his men to exhaustion. But his derrick was up and rigged and his rotary turning in 10 1/2 days. He brought in a big gas producer.

Then one disaster after another hit him: a derrick collapsed, a well blew out and started a quarter-million-dollar fire. McCarthy invaded the Palacios district, sank $700,000 in leases, a million dollars in equipment, drilled five disappointing wells at once and went broke. By the time his mansion was built he was $1,500,000 in debt.

It might have been the finish of a softer man. McCarthy was worried because the grounds around the mansion were still bare --he bought a nursery firm, used its stock to landscape his vast lawns, and sold the company at a $1,500 profit. Then he argued his creditors into letting him go on drilling. After that he really got rich with a string of successful explorations at Chocolate Bayou, Anchor, Bailey's Prairie, Coleto Creek, Angleton, Winnie-Stowell and Blue Lake.

Danger. He never quit plunging, and the Shamrock, his big chemical company (which is reported losing money) and his endless drilling ventures have been great financial drains. Last week Houston was alive with a titillating rumor: that its most flamboyant citizen was strapped for cash. In the last few years, McCarthy has borrowed $50 million from big insurance companies, using as security his vast oil reserves (calculated at from 100 to 200 million barrels). The trouble with reserves is that they are still underground. With oil prices falling and recent sharp cuts in oil production quotas ordered by the state, his weekly take from his own fields has been curtailed.

Last December he asked the RFC (which does not lend money when private capital is available) for a loan of $70 million. If he gets it, he can pay off the insurance companies, and use $20 million to tide himself over while he does his utmost to develop new fields at New Ulm and Collins Lake. If the RFC refuses him? Glenn McCarthy might have to surrender some of his empire.

McCarthy, a gambler by instinct, gives no sign of doubt. He still lives like a burning roman candle; in times of stress or excitement he goes without sleep or food, drinks steadily for days on end without a tremor of unsteadiness. Even in normal period he often awakens, apparently fresh, after only a few hours of sleep, tosses off vodka and tomato juice (a combination which he believes does not taint the breath), reads leases or studies maps and impatiently awaits the new dawn.

Though he cannot brook restraint or criticism and has quarreled with most close business associates, he cannot bear to be alone; he keeps himself surrounded by a circle of yes-men. They treat him with anxious concern, like veterinarians in a lion's cage. But McCarthy needs them--to mix him a drink, answer the telephone, nod when he speaks, to leap into a plane with him if he wants to go to New York, to Hollywood.

McCarthy's zest for chance, life, personal combat and the power of wealth seems undiminished. He still likes to rub his hands in thick, crude oil and mutter:

"This is oil." He still has grandiose ideas. Last month he tried to buy a professional football club for Houston. Last week he paid a princely $15,400 for an 890-lb. prize Hereford.

Where was Glenn McCarthy going? Houstonians say: "He's going to kill himself, go bankrupt, or get to be the richest man on earth. You figure out which."

/- To encourage oil discoveries, the Government, since 1926, has allowed oilmen to write off up to 27 1/2% of their gross income for "depletion," a kindly gesture which permits them not only to make huge fortunes but keep them. Now that there is plenty of oil, President Truman has asked Congress to plug the income-tax loophole --but powerful Texans like Speaker Sam Rayburn oppose any change in the law.

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