I decided I had to get rid of the rest of the family, and that required a two-pronged assault. It was like a military campaign on two fronts. The first thing I needed was money to fight the war against the family and to pay them off, and so I went to the banks. The president of the Texas Savings Bank, Oscar Cummings, was the man who really swung his weight behind me. He’d been a friend of my father’s, but there was more to it.
He said to me, ‘Sonny, I’m giving you the money because I like the way you behaved in that Bender Hotel incident. I like the fact that you didn’t whine and snitch and send those men to jail. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I have to admit that one of those crooks was my cousin.’
I borrowed $400,000 from Texas Savings, pledging my inheritance as collateral.
That was the first step. The next thing I needed to do was get myself legally declared an adult, as opposed to a minor – and of course my relatives who owned the other 25% of Toolco were adamantly opposed to that happening. They still wanted to run that company. They saw that they would have another two years before I reached the legal age of twenty one, by which time they could… well, I don’t want to accuse them of being thieves, but surely they figured that they could do a hell of a lot better with the company than I could. Their attitude was: what does a snot-nosed nineteen-year-old kid know about business?
As a matter of fact I didn’t know much at all. At this point, I think, stubbornness and momentum carried me through far more than any reasonable intelligence. But I did know enough to hire a powerful lawyer, Norris Messen, and I went to court against the family. The judge – an old upright Texan who wore a black string tie – was a close friend of Oscar Cummings of the Texas Savings Bank, whose cousin I’d declined to send to jail.
I won the case. Technically the judge couldn’t declare me an adult, but under a provision of the Texas Civil Code he was able to declare me competent at the age of nineteen to handle the business affairs of Toolco and enter into contractual agreements as though I were legally an adult.
And that’s exactly what I did. The cousins and other relatives couldn’t control anything with their measly 25%, and they kept squabbling among themselves, which I’d counted on, and finally I made them all a good fair offer for their shares. I wound up paying a total of $355,000 to all of them. That took about six months to negotiate and wrap up, and at the end of that time – still nineteen years old – I became sole owner of Toolco, about which I knew hardly anything.
If they hadn’t sold out to you, how much would their $355,000 be worth today?
Probably in the neighborhood of $700 million. But you can’t think that way. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a marketplace. Nobody would sell anything to anyone else. There would be no progress.
Anyway, now I was sole owner of a thriving company. It finally occurred to me: in my ignorance, and at my age, what was I going to do with it? I hadn’t the slightest idea how to run it.
2
SHORTLY AFTER TAKING CONTROL of the Tool Company in 1925, I decided to get married. This was part of my effort to become an adult as quickly as possible.
My bride was Ella Rice, a member of the famous Rice family of Texas, the people who built the Rice Hotel and founded Rice Institute, now Rice University. I’d spent nearly two years there as a student. I’d known Ella for quite a while, and we bumped into each other at social events in the Houston of that era. I don’t know if I was in love with her or not. I thought I was, but what does a nineteen-year-old kid know about love? He knows what a hard-on is, that’s all, and he figures if he gets a hard-on quickly and often enough, he’s in love. He’s more to be pitied than scorned, like the poet says.
Ella was twenty-one. She reminded me of my mother quite a lot – she was slim, curly-haired, soft-voiced, and she had quiet hazel eyes – and it was a socially correct marriage. Most of those people in Houston didn’t have a dime to their names before they struck it rich, but then they wanted to scrape off the mud and spray themselves with French perfume and pretend there was a society and they were part of it. When I was a kid, when things were going well for my father, before he’d blow it on a trip East or run up more bills than he could pay, my mother used to drag me off to concerts. Even though those cowboys and their womenfolk didn’t know Bach from Verdi, they organized concerts and I got hauled along. You could die of heatstroke in the concert hall, but you were obliged to show yourself off to the gentry. I remember my mother took me once to Prince’s Theatre – not a concert that time, but Shakespeare’s As You Like It – and she fainted from the heat. We had to carry her out of there.
Despite my intelligence and craftiness in getting control of Toolco, I was still a crazy kid. Getting married at the age of twenty is certainly proof of it. I wooed Ella, convinced her that we’d be together for the rest of our lives, and chemistry did the rest.
Ella and her parents wanted to know where we’d live. They meant what part of Houston.
I said, ‘Hollywood, California.’
That upset everyone. Why did I want to go off to California?
I explained that I wanted to go into the movie business.
‘And do what?’
‘Make my own movies,’ I said.
That shocked everyone. I’d been nurturing this ambition in secret for many years, ever since I’d first gone out to Hollywood with my father and my Uncle Rupert had taken me to MGM and the other studios. At a deeper level, where did it come from? Who knows? It just seemed to me an exciting thing to do. And I had the money to do it.
I didn’t dare tell Ella and her parents about my other ambition, which was to fly fast planes. I kept that one to myself.
Money conquers all. I was determined, I didn’t seem to have anything of the crackpot in my makeup, and I had the wherewithal to fulfill my fantasies. That’s a hard combination to beat. Ella and the Rices said, ‘Well, all right… let’s see what happens. Maybe it’s something he has to get out of his system.’
So we got married in Houston on June 1, 1924, a garden wedding at my in-laws’ house, and we went off on a honeymoon to New York City. I spent most of the time going to the movies, with or without Ella. I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good husband even then. I had the movie bug and that was all I thought about. When we came back to Houston, almost immediately I said, ‘Let’s not wait any longer. Let’s go to Hollywood.’
But first I had to put my financial house in order. It was 1926, and I had a growing, prosperous company on my hands and little or no knowledge of how to run it. If I wanted to indulge my two ambitions, Toolco had to do well – better than well.
Norris Messen, my lawyer, advised me. Right there in the higher echelons of the company I found two experienced oilmen, Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose, and I put them in charge of operations under Colonel Rudolph Kuldell, who was president and general manager, although he really didn’t know that much about the business. He was just a crony of my father’s with good government connections.
A lot of people have told tales in the past years that Holliday and Montrose and Colonel Kuldell wanted me out of there and paid me to keep my hands off Toolco because they thought I’d wreck it. Sonny, or ‘Junior,’ wasn’t competent to run things, so: ‘Okay, Junior, we’ll send you a few hundred thousand dollars a year. You go off and play with your toys out in Hollywood.’