[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.4 Some of the real-life stories of fortunes being made and spent rivaled those of future television character JedClampett and spawned jokes, such as the one about the Texas mil-lionaire who, called before an IRS agent, interrupted him with,‘‘Don’t bother me with all those figures, son, just tell me how muchyou need to make ends meet.’’5 In 1948, for example, Colonel Henry Russell of Dallas bought a new Rolls-Royce for his wife (for$19,500, the cost of a Hyundai today) simply because, as she putit, ‘‘it goes with my blue hat.’’ The Russells were also planning tobuild a new, much bigger house for themselves, having decided togive their current one to their servants.6 One key member of the postwar Big Rich club was D.Harold (‘‘Dry-hole’’) Byrd, who wouldinvite the Texas and Oklahoma football teams over to his estateevery fall, along with hundreds of other guests.One year, an entireIF I WERE A RICH MAN: 1946 –1964107tribe of Indians from Oklahoma was hired to dance around a foun-tain.7It was readily apparent, especially to East Coast sticks-in-the-mud, that this brand of rich was quite unlike anything seen before.Regional ‘‘distinctiveness’’ and the origins of Big Rich wealth sepa-rated them from the Old Money crowd like oil and water.Marketersto the wealthy often found themselves having to adapt to the ratherunorthodox lifestyles of Big Rich.Clothing and jewelry salesmenand models from Neiman Marcus, for example, regularly made tripsto outlying ranches and oil fields, thinking that if Mohammedcouldn’t come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mo-hammed (or Tex, in this case).8 Many, if not most, Texan millionaires, however, didn’t care a whit about what they wore betweentheir head and feet, but they were more than happy to pay topdollar for a well-made ten-gallon hat and pair of boots.Three- andfour-carat diamond rings were also popular among the oil and cat-tle set, as were solid gold belt buckles with diamond and ruby studs.Ranchers and wildcatters in Odessa and Midland often lived intrailer camps, shacks, and even open tents, but the woman of thehouse not unusually insisted on using sterling silver for the table,on which she served the family’s favorite vittles—salt meat andblack Mexican beans.9Dust Bowl refugees who settled in California’s southern SanJoaquin valley represented the West Coast branch of Big Rich.JessGoforth, for example, who left Oklahoma in 1931 with his wife andinfant son and made it to California with just $1.50 left in hispocket, was growing cotton, wheat, barley, and cantaloupes on hisown 6,400-acre ranch twenty years later, his grapes of wrath nowquite sweet from the fertile soil.Although a millionaire many timesover should he cash out, the aptly named Goforth worked as hardas ever and saw no need to get a telephone for his home on theedge of the prairie.10‘‘Big Rich’’ was all relative, however.In 1957, only one Ameri-can, H.L.Hunt, was among the top five richest people in the world,he lagging behind four men who could be considered ‘‘giant rich’’:108R ICHKing Saud of Saudi Arabia; the Sheik of Kuwait; the Sheik of Qatar;and the Nizam of Hyderabad (who, unlike the others, was not richfrom oil money).King Saud, who earned $300 million a year, per-haps lived more lavishly than anyone in history, even the Pharaohs,who weren’t exactly cheapskates.Included in his personal house-hold of 10,000 were three wives, eighty to ninety concubines, and‘‘about’’ twenty-five sons (daughters weren’t considered full-fledged children), each of whom received his own Cadillac andchauffeur at age 12.It was known that his own cars were gold-plated, but few people, probably including the King himself, knewexactly how many were in the fleet.And despite owning twenty-four palaces, the King was building a new one at a cost of $50million, almost certainly the most expensive home in the world.11Although over a million barrels of oil gushed from Kuwait’swells every day, compared to King Saud, the Sheik lived like amonk.For one thing he had only one wife, despite Muslim lawallowing four, and he owned only one house and one car (albeit aCaddy).Unlike his partner in oil, the Sheik was in the process ofcreating what was arguably the world’s first true welfare state, in-vesting much of his country’s fortune in education, housing, healthcare, and utilities.Little was known about the Sheik of Qatar ex-cept that he raked in at least $50 million from oil, spending a goodchunk of it on his four hundred relatives (which did not includehis immediate family of wives, concubines, and children).TheSheik also enjoyed giving handouts to the needy from the frontsteps of his palace, which, with its red neon lights, looked ‘‘verymuch like something in Coney Island,’’ reported the New YorkTimes.The Nizam of Hyderabad had a much different story, having fallen on rather hard times when the Indian government strippedhim of his sovereignty.His annual income reduced from about $50million to $2 million, the Nizam felt the need to put himself on a$20 a month budget, sleeping on a hospital cot in a 10- by 12-footroom.Fortunately for the Nizam, a descendant of Mongol rulers,the Indian government had at least for the moment not seized the$2 billion he had socked away for a rainy day nor his fleet of thirty-IF I WERE A RICH MAN: 1946 –1964109plus luxury automobiles.Rather than drive one of these, however,the Nizam preferred to cruise around Hyderabad in a 1934 Ford,and he spent a good deal of his time planning the daily menu forhis household, which consisted of three wives, forty-two concu-bines, thirty-three children, dozens of grandchildren, and hundredsof servants.12Hunt, sixty-eight years old in 1957, had fewer wives, concu-bines, children, and cars than the other richest men in the world,but with his $2- to $3-billion nest egg and $40- to $50-million an-nual income, he was not exactly scraping by.His only extravaganceappeared to be his home, a five-times-the-original-size copy ofGeorge Washington’s Mount Vernon.Hunt walked the streets ofDallas largely unrecognized, preferring to stay out of the spotlightand, quite literally, laugh all the way to the bank.13 By the end of the fifties, however, the inescapable forces of Ben Franklin’s onlytwo constants took a heavy toll on independent oil millionaires.The deaths of Cullen and Richardson left only the other half of theindustry’s Fantastic Four—Hunt and Murchison—alive and kick-ing, but high taxes and changes in the oil business itself wouldsignal the end of the decade-and-change run for Big Rich.Techni-cal skills in geology and engineering and business skills in manage-ment and marketing were surpassing the roll-the-dice approach ofthe wildcatter and, with college graduates with majors in financeentering the business, oil now wasn’t that much different thanbanking [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.4 Some of the real-life stories of fortunes being made and spent rivaled those of future television character JedClampett and spawned jokes, such as the one about the Texas mil-lionaire who, called before an IRS agent, interrupted him with,‘‘Don’t bother me with all those figures, son, just tell me how muchyou need to make ends meet.’’5 In 1948, for example, Colonel Henry Russell of Dallas bought a new Rolls-Royce for his wife (for$19,500, the cost of a Hyundai today) simply because, as she putit, ‘‘it goes with my blue hat.’’ The Russells were also planning tobuild a new, much bigger house for themselves, having decided togive their current one to their servants.6 One key member of the postwar Big Rich club was D.Harold (‘‘Dry-hole’’) Byrd, who wouldinvite the Texas and Oklahoma football teams over to his estateevery fall, along with hundreds of other guests.One year, an entireIF I WERE A RICH MAN: 1946 –1964107tribe of Indians from Oklahoma was hired to dance around a foun-tain.7It was readily apparent, especially to East Coast sticks-in-the-mud, that this brand of rich was quite unlike anything seen before.Regional ‘‘distinctiveness’’ and the origins of Big Rich wealth sepa-rated them from the Old Money crowd like oil and water.Marketersto the wealthy often found themselves having to adapt to the ratherunorthodox lifestyles of Big Rich.Clothing and jewelry salesmenand models from Neiman Marcus, for example, regularly made tripsto outlying ranches and oil fields, thinking that if Mohammedcouldn’t come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mo-hammed (or Tex, in this case).8 Many, if not most, Texan millionaires, however, didn’t care a whit about what they wore betweentheir head and feet, but they were more than happy to pay topdollar for a well-made ten-gallon hat and pair of boots.Three- andfour-carat diamond rings were also popular among the oil and cat-tle set, as were solid gold belt buckles with diamond and ruby studs.Ranchers and wildcatters in Odessa and Midland often lived intrailer camps, shacks, and even open tents, but the woman of thehouse not unusually insisted on using sterling silver for the table,on which she served the family’s favorite vittles—salt meat andblack Mexican beans.9Dust Bowl refugees who settled in California’s southern SanJoaquin valley represented the West Coast branch of Big Rich.JessGoforth, for example, who left Oklahoma in 1931 with his wife andinfant son and made it to California with just $1.50 left in hispocket, was growing cotton, wheat, barley, and cantaloupes on hisown 6,400-acre ranch twenty years later, his grapes of wrath nowquite sweet from the fertile soil.Although a millionaire many timesover should he cash out, the aptly named Goforth worked as hardas ever and saw no need to get a telephone for his home on theedge of the prairie.10‘‘Big Rich’’ was all relative, however.In 1957, only one Ameri-can, H.L.Hunt, was among the top five richest people in the world,he lagging behind four men who could be considered ‘‘giant rich’’:108R ICHKing Saud of Saudi Arabia; the Sheik of Kuwait; the Sheik of Qatar;and the Nizam of Hyderabad (who, unlike the others, was not richfrom oil money).King Saud, who earned $300 million a year, per-haps lived more lavishly than anyone in history, even the Pharaohs,who weren’t exactly cheapskates.Included in his personal house-hold of 10,000 were three wives, eighty to ninety concubines, and‘‘about’’ twenty-five sons (daughters weren’t considered full-fledged children), each of whom received his own Cadillac andchauffeur at age 12.It was known that his own cars were gold-plated, but few people, probably including the King himself, knewexactly how many were in the fleet.And despite owning twenty-four palaces, the King was building a new one at a cost of $50million, almost certainly the most expensive home in the world.11Although over a million barrels of oil gushed from Kuwait’swells every day, compared to King Saud, the Sheik lived like amonk.For one thing he had only one wife, despite Muslim lawallowing four, and he owned only one house and one car (albeit aCaddy).Unlike his partner in oil, the Sheik was in the process ofcreating what was arguably the world’s first true welfare state, in-vesting much of his country’s fortune in education, housing, healthcare, and utilities.Little was known about the Sheik of Qatar ex-cept that he raked in at least $50 million from oil, spending a goodchunk of it on his four hundred relatives (which did not includehis immediate family of wives, concubines, and children).TheSheik also enjoyed giving handouts to the needy from the frontsteps of his palace, which, with its red neon lights, looked ‘‘verymuch like something in Coney Island,’’ reported the New YorkTimes.The Nizam of Hyderabad had a much different story, having fallen on rather hard times when the Indian government strippedhim of his sovereignty.His annual income reduced from about $50million to $2 million, the Nizam felt the need to put himself on a$20 a month budget, sleeping on a hospital cot in a 10- by 12-footroom.Fortunately for the Nizam, a descendant of Mongol rulers,the Indian government had at least for the moment not seized the$2 billion he had socked away for a rainy day nor his fleet of thirty-IF I WERE A RICH MAN: 1946 –1964109plus luxury automobiles.Rather than drive one of these, however,the Nizam preferred to cruise around Hyderabad in a 1934 Ford,and he spent a good deal of his time planning the daily menu forhis household, which consisted of three wives, forty-two concu-bines, thirty-three children, dozens of grandchildren, and hundredsof servants.12Hunt, sixty-eight years old in 1957, had fewer wives, concu-bines, children, and cars than the other richest men in the world,but with his $2- to $3-billion nest egg and $40- to $50-million an-nual income, he was not exactly scraping by.His only extravaganceappeared to be his home, a five-times-the-original-size copy ofGeorge Washington’s Mount Vernon.Hunt walked the streets ofDallas largely unrecognized, preferring to stay out of the spotlightand, quite literally, laugh all the way to the bank.13 By the end of the fifties, however, the inescapable forces of Ben Franklin’s onlytwo constants took a heavy toll on independent oil millionaires.The deaths of Cullen and Richardson left only the other half of theindustry’s Fantastic Four—Hunt and Murchison—alive and kick-ing, but high taxes and changes in the oil business itself wouldsignal the end of the decade-and-change run for Big Rich.Techni-cal skills in geology and engineering and business skills in manage-ment and marketing were surpassing the roll-the-dice approach ofthe wildcatter and, with college graduates with majors in financeentering the business, oil now wasn’t that much different thanbanking [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]