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

handing out bonuses to his crew, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check to each of five men. He built clubhouses for Luling—one for whites, one for blacks—then gave his hometown back in Massachusetts a check for one million dollars.
    His fortune was already streaming through his fingers when, on a trip to San Antonio, Davis ran into an old friend, a onetime newspaperman named J. Frank Davis. Frank was down on his luck, so Edgar, on a whim, suggested he write a play. They came up with a topic, reincarnation, and Edgar pledged to finance the whole thing. In no time Frank Davis banged out a three-act drama he called The Ladder. It followed a group of characters from an English castle in 1344 through three reincarnations, the last in New York circa 1926. It was by all accounts a spectacularly awful play, which did nothing to dampen either Davis’s enthusiasm for it. Edgar enlisted a Broadway producer and staged tryout performances that summer in Detroit and Cleveland.
    Despite reviews that were at best lukewarm, Davis insisted on conquering Broadway. The Ladder opened at the Mansfield Theatre on October 22, 1926, with a stalwart cast led by Antoinette Perry and Hugh Buckler. It was a colossol flop, but Davis paid to keep the play open for two long years at a cost, it was said, of $1.5 million. It was the beginning of the end. As his money ran low, the state of Massachusetts sued Davis for back taxes. He couldn’t pay, and the Depression wiped him out. He went bankrupt in 1935. A writer for The New Yorker found him living in Luling in 1948, broke, a man in his late seventies passing his last days playing bridge. He died in 1951, forgotten.
    In the 1920s Texas was littered with men like Edgar Davis. Most remain forgotten. Some made millions. A few would make history.

II.
    Neck-deep in this adrenalized rush were two lifelong friends, keen-eyed country boys from the town of Athens, sixty miles southeast of Dallas. During their boyhoods Athens was a dirt-road-and-buggy village deep in the East Texas pines, three thousand or so farmers struggling to pry cotton from the infuriating sandy soil. The area had been settled only in the 1840s, and by 1900 its first family was the Murchisons, whose patriarch, Thomas Frank Murchison, migrated from Mississippi to East Texas and finally in 1855 to Athens, where he clerked at the general store. b T.F., as he was known, soon started his own store and, after years of loaning money to men who couldn’t pay their bill, founded Athens’s first bank in 1890. The two-story brick building went up right on the square, adjacent to the Murchison store.
    T. F. Murchison had six children, and when he died in 1902 he left everything to his three sons. Over time the second boy, John Weldon Murchison, took control of the bank. Wed in 1893, John and his wife, Clara, raised eight children in a Victorian home that took up an entire block on Tyler Street, known as the “street of plantation homes.” A whiff of the antebellum clung to all the Murchisons. Though he hadn’t fought in the Civil War, T.F. liked to be called “Colonel Murchison,” and he famously had little use for Yankees, easterners, or railroad men, attitudes that permeated his clan. In a town where dusty overalls were the rule, the Murchison children and grandchildren could be seen walking to the private Bruce Academy in polished shoes and tailored woolen clothes. The Murchisons “were sort of snobby,” one family acquaintance recalled. “They thought they were better than the rest of the people in Athens because they were Murchisons.” 1
    Except, that is, for John and Clara’s third child, small, homely Clint, 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. But what Clinton Williams Murchison lacked in physical appeal he made up for with a mind that whirred like a Swiss timepiece. Headstrong and independent, disdainful of his father’s stuffy ways, young