![]() ![]() “He was a strange man,” writes Burrough, “a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind,” and who was convinced that he had superhuman qualities. Hunt made much of his money not in oil but in real estate. ![]() The first generation, writes Burrough, was “the original Beverly Hillbillies, counting their millions around the cement pond as they ogled themselves on the corner of Time.” But they were no simpletons. Thus, with some tailoring, the course of Burrough’s “big rich” families: the Hunts, Richardsons, Cullens and Murchisons, who came out of the West Texas dust or the South Texas swamps to make astounding fortunes, turn Dallas into a prairie paradise and build mansions that you could lose a herd of cows in. No matter how the fortune was made, the pattern is the same: The first hardscrabble generation fights, thieves and kills to get rich the second becomes respectable, makes lots more money and gives money away the third generation drinks, snorts and whores its way to the poorhouse. ![]() An “epitaph,” as Texas expat and Vanity Fair special correspondent Burrough ( Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 2004, etc.) calls it, for a storied, moneyed time that defines the Lone Star State’s self-image. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |