Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog
Oilman Oscar Wyatt reveals how his world really works—from freeing the hostages in Iraq to doing deals with China and keeping up with his jet-set marriage.
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In the private memory of Texans, Wyatt occupies an equally contradictory corner. Rough-hewn and self-made, Wyatt would rather spend the weekend hunting on his South Texas ranch than dining with royalty. Yet he is married to one of the most beautiful women in Texas, Lynn Sakowitz, an international socialite who summers in the South of France. (Jordan’s King Hussein is said to be wild for her zucchini bread.) In Houston society circles, Lynn and Oscar are known as Beauty and the Beast. They live adjacent to the River Oaks Country Club in the mansion formerly owned by Houston oilman Hugh Roy Cullen, Jr. There they entertain royalty, movie stars, politicians, and barons of industry in one of three ways—dinner for 50 with dancing, dinner for 22 with piano music, or Oscar’s favorite, dinner for 8 in the wine cellar with controversial conversation.
“I hate to see my name in the society pages,” barked Wyatt during an interview at his office in Houston’s Greenway Plaza. “I do all that jet-setting horseshit because it gives my wife pleasure. I don’t want to know who’s sleeping with whom or what jewels Mister So-and-So gave his wife for her birthday. I just don’t give a damn.” Yet he benefits from Lynn’s preoccupation with social detail. She brings to the marriage something he couldn’t provide on his own: prestige, good breeding, a place at all the right dinner parties, all of which come in handy for an X factor. She travels in Europe with the same ease that he roams the Middle East and South America. Clearly, Wyatt’s lack of pretense is one of the things that drew Lynn to him. “Once, after I’d made the international best-dressed list, I came home and told Oscar,” Lynn said. “His only comment was: ‘Good. Does this mean you don’t have to buy any more clothes?’”
Lynn and Oscar have been the subject of constant gossip. In the eighties Lynn was said to be having an affair with Prince Ranier of Monaco. She laughed off the suggestion, telling the press that the rumor was preposterous—the prince was far fonder of his yacht than of her. When I asked Oscar to identify his favorite rumor about himself, he didn’t hesitate. “Years ago, there was a story making the rounds that I threw Lynn down the stairs when she was seven months pregnant,” he replied. “Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? For one thing, just think how expensive that would have been.”
Lynn Wyatt has a strong husky voice, smooth, white skin, and a firm handshake. As she poured English breakfast tea in her living room, I asked her why she, a Sakowitz, born to a life of polish and privilege, is attracted to a man like Oscar Wyatt. “Oscar is a genius,” she said. “I would be bored to death married to a man who likes to go to all of the parties I go to. Oscar is alive and always thinking. That’s what keeps me interested.” When she talks about Wyatt, her voice is filled with genuine affection. “He’s extremely protective of me,” she said, adding that when she is in Europe he always telephones her hotel to make sure she has arrived safely and that he has forbidden her to travel to the Middle East because he doesn’t think the region is safe for a Jewish woman. They have been married for 28 years; yet there is persistent talk around Houston that theirs is more of a business arrangement than a real marriage, which really infuriates Lynn. She is rarely seen in public with Oscar. One of her sons usually escorts her to society functions. She went alone to California to attend Ronald Reagan’s eightieth birthday party. “I arrange my schedule to be in Houston when my husband is here,” she said. “When he’s traveling on business, I do my own traveling.”
Both Oscar and Lynn have stormy marriage histories. Oscar had been married to three other women before he married Lynn in 1963. He and his first wife, Yvonne, were married for nine years and had a son, Carl, now a businessman in Houston who has little to do with his father. After Yvonne and Wyatt divorced, she told one of his oldest friends, “Oscar is the only man I know who has a mattress strapped to his back for convenience.” Of his second wife, Mary Margaret, who is now deceased, Wyatt says: “She was a real sweetie. I cared for her a lot.” His third marriage only lasted six weeks, and this former wife, Bonnie, married John Swearingen, the former chairman of the board of Standard Oil of Indiana.
Oscar and Lynn have two sons: Oscar S. Wyatt III, nicknamed Trey, is a banker in Corpus Christi, and Brad, who is called Little Oscar by the family because he looks and acts so much like his father, is a traffic-safety deputy for a Harris County constable and a student at Texas A&M. He still lives at his parent’s mansion.
Before she married Oscar, Lynn had been married to Robert Lipman, a New York property developer. She and Lipman had two sons, Steven and Douglas. After they divorced, Lipman was found guilty of manslaughter in the death of a young French girl in London. He told the court that he had been on LSD and had no memory of the killing.
Lipman’s murder trial was apparently never discussed in the Wyatt household. “I always heard that my mom’s first husband was run over by a streetcar in Vienna,” said Trey. “Neither of my parents ever talked about their former marriages.” After Lynn and Oscar married, Oscar adopted her two sons. Steve, who lives in London, has been linked with the Duchess of York by the London tabloids. Fergie visited the Wyatts on her swing through Texas in 1989, and her photograph, signed, “To my dearest and most special friend, Lynn,” adorns the desk in the Wyatt’s living room. “I just hate all this gossip about Fergie and Steve,” Lynn said. “Of course it’s not true, but it’s very embarrassing. Prince Andrew is so nice. He even called Steve to tell him how sorry he was about it all.” Her son Douglas is a Houston lawyer who has attracted his own share of publicity. Douglas was once under the spell of the late New Age guru Frederick von Mierers, who, according to Vanity Fair, believed that he was from the star Arcturus and that the vibrations from precious gems protected the wearer from “falling into delusions.”
The most publicly painful part of Lynn and Oscar Wyatt’s marriage occurred in 1986, when Oscar sued her brother, Robert Sakowitz, claiming that Sakowitz had driven the upscale chain of specialty stores founded by his grandfather into bankruptcy. “It was and still is a very painful subject for me,” said Lynn. “The only way I get through it is to keep telling myself that there is nothing I could do about it.” To this day, she and her brother do not speak, and her mother has sided with Robert in the family feud. Sakowitz settled the suit with Wyatt out of court by, among other things, giving him a promissory note for $412,000. Now Sakowitz’s primary legal fight is with Douglas Wyatt, who along with Lynn’s other sons, is seeking to have him removed as executor of the Sakowitz estate. “Prior to being in banking, I was in law enforcement for seven years,” Trey said, “and I have more respect for some of the common criminals I arrested than for Robert Sakowitz.” Oscar has no regrets about his celebrated battle with Sakowitz. The fact that his wife asked him not to sue her brother makes little difference to him. “My wife,” he said, “doesn’t run that part of our marriage.”
“GUYS LIKE ME LIKE IRAQ”
The first thing I saw upon entering Wyatt’s office, just beyond the two matronly secretaries who busily arrange his workday life, was a giant German shepherd named Tasa curled up on a smelly piece of carpet next to Wyatt’s enormous desk. Tasa’s full name is Lady of Tasajillo. Tasajillo is Wyatt’s ranch in Duval County, which is his legal residence and where he votes. He named his dog for his ranch. “She’s the only woman in the world I truly trust,” said Wyatt, as he plunged into the pile of newspaper clippings on his desk. “Here,” he said, shoving a Wall Street Journal article at me. “Read this. It says we have hit eighty percent of our Iraqi targets from the air. That’s bullshit. The Russians say it’s more like twenty percent, and my sources in the Middle East tell me the Russians are—for once—telling the truth.”
Wyatt, always a tense and moody man, was in a frenzy over the war in the Middle East. To his right sat a television tuned to the Cable News Network, and he provided his own running commentary on the coverage of the war. When anchor Bernard Shaw reported that Saddam Hussein wasn’t fighting back, Wyatt offered, “That’s right, Bernie. Saddam is a mean old bear, hiding behind a log, trying to draw Bush into a ground war so he can kill as many of our boys as he can.” Behind him was a bank of telephones, which rang constantly. One of Wyatt’s contacts called from Amman, Jordan, and told him that after only seven days into the Gulf War, there were already anti-American demonstrators in the streets clamoring for a holy war. King Hussein wouldn’t survive if he continued to support the Allied coalition, the caller predicted. A shadow crossed Wyatt’s face. He held his head in his hands. “In nineteen years of trading with the Arabs, the one and only thing I’ve learned,” he whispered, “is to stay out of their chickenshit conflicts. Let Arabs fight Arabs.”
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