River Oaks 77019
Will Oscar bleed Bobby dry? Did Lynn betray her daddy for money? Was Doug pals with an alien? Has Fergie given Steve the heave-ho? Will the Wyatt-Sakowitz feud blow Houston society apart? It could be this summer’s hottest miniseries.
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Next thing you know, it’s fairy tale time. Christmas at Allington, this humongous estate that once belonged to Houston’s most famous oilman before Oscar, Hugh Roy Cullen. Now it’s the Wyatts’ little swankienda, all duded up in Louis this and Louis that—furniture Lynn bought in just five days. For a minute, you think this scene is going to be sad. Everybody’s hanging around the Christmas tree, and everybody has a present—everybody but Lynn. You see on her face that she’s thinking maybe she has been a bad girl, but then Oscar points to the top of the giant Christmas tree. “Well, aren’t you going to open your present?” he asks. Someone gets a ladder, and we see Lynn climb the rungs, higher and higher, close to the top of the tree. (Get the symbolism, Mr. S?) She finds an envelope up there. She reaches for it—maybe the ladder wobbles a little—and inside is … the deed to the mansion, transferred to her name. The attached love note ends, “P.S. And the taxes have been paid.” Oscar is a good guy after all!
Or is he? Flash-forward to the courtroom. Opening arguments have drawn to an end. Oscar eases from his seat. Slowly, he moves toward Douglas, ignoring his brother-in-law and his mother-in-law as he passes by. He leans down and, in front of everybody, kisses his son. Then he walks out of the courtroom, alone. Maybe he’s leaving Douglas to fight his own battles, but maybe he’s thanking him for fighting his daddy’s. You aren’t sure. You gotta tune in tomorrow to find out.
RETAILING’S WILDCATTER
Monday Night
Open in the courtroom. The jurors have taken one look at the Wyatt and Sakowitz wardrobes and come back in their best clothes. The first witness is testifying. It’s Lynn. Only she’s on video; Vickery doesn’t want to put her through the agony of a public appearance, so the jury is seeing her deposition testimony. So the jury is seeing a rerun—even so, they’re hooked. It’s like watching Dallas, only set in Houston. Lynn, see, is Houston’s heroine. Decades of charity work, decades of Women’s Wear Daily walk-ons, decades of proving that Texans know which fork to use. And that’s how you see her here: poised and coiffed. She even admits that the family business wasn’t her first priority. But—and this is a big but—her family was. “In my mind,” Lynn begins, “for someone to sue someone in the family was horrifying to me… .” The question is, which family?
Flashback: We see a picture from the Houston Opera Guild Calendar, 1966. A pretty blond woman sits on a rattan throne, holding a baby: It’s Lynn and her youngest son, Brad. The other three boys—Douglas, Steve, and Trey—pose beside her. Everybody’s dressed like they’re going to the Easter parade, except for an unidentified guy, off to one side, who wears a welding mask over his face. Could it be Oscar? The calendar page is sponsored by Wyatt’s original company, Coastal States. The caption reads, “Our expansion program is right on schedule.” It’s scary, like there’s trouble for this family hidden off to one side.
The picture tells you something else—Lynn has entered a new phase. You might see the next scenes as pages from Lynn’s social scrapbook: Lynn learns to summer on the French Riviera; Lynn wins a spot on the International Best-Dressed List; Lynn, in 1978, is named to the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame, along with Jackie O and the Duchess of Windsor. “Does this mean,” Oscar asks his wife, “I don’t have to buy you any more clothes?”
Robert is doing great too. Houston’s crazy about him. He teaches rich ladies how to dress—and boy, does he have the stuff to dress them in! He has pulled off retailing coups by getting famous French designers like Yves St. Laurent to sign exclusive deals with him. When he meets the girl of his dreams, he has to do something great, because she’s gorgeous Pam Zauderer, the heiress to a New York real estate fortune, and she expects the best. So Robert takes her to a Harvard-Yale game and hands her a box of Cracker Jacks. But it’s not just any box of Cracker Jacks. What’s the prize? An engagement ring! Cut to the roof of Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel. We’re surrounded by 10,000 yellow roses—it’s the 1969 wedding reception of the Houston Chronicle’s most eligible bachelor of 1967! Hey, isn’t that Lynn and Oscar in the crowd? Look out, Bobby’s gainin’ on ya!
We move forward in time, and way down the economic ladder. It’s 1973, the year of the energy crisis. Families across South Texas are doing without heat because a Coastal subsidiary ran out of gas. In San Antonio, Oscar faces down a mob of furious customers who say he sold Coastal’s gas reserves to keep profits up. You start to see that this guy is not Albert Schweitzer. We hear a gavel rapping, as armies of lawyers work to settle this mess without sending Oscar to the poorhouse. Coastal stock takes a nosedive, and Oscar has to give up the subsidiary. It looks like Oscar is broke, but he manages to hang on to Coastal.
While Oscar’s got thunderheads, Robert’s got nothing but blue skies. A Sakowitz business meeting, 1975: Bernard passes his son a small box. All conversation stops. Robert takes the box from his father’s hands. He opens it. Inside is a gavel. Robert looks at his father; Bernard looks at his son. An understanding passes between them. Robert is now the president of Sakowitz. He’s in charge of not just the store but also his family’s legacy. Big moment. Cut to a commercial.
Back to another courtroom, another gavel, more bad news for Oscar. 1980. This time he pleads guilty to violating price controls, a misdemeanor. Today’s fine—$40,000 from his own pocket, $9 million from Coastal’s. How’s Lynn handling this? Like a pro. A Women’s Wear Daily reporter quizzes her about the judgment. She waits, just a beat, then: “My friends are my friends. And my enemies are delighted.” What class! But it’s important too, because, you see, she has made a deal of her own: She is part of Oscar’s world now, no matter what.
Okay. Oscar makes a decision. If he can’t get along with the U.S. government, he’ll find a government he can get along with. We see Coastal employees unloading crude oil from mainland China, Oscar meeting with a young Saddam Hussein, Oscar sitting down with sheiks in robes at a conference table. He even makes deals with those bad, old Libyans. But nobody gets the best of this guy: When a Coastal shareholder complains at the annual meeting that he doesn’t see Oscar often enough, Oscar says, “Listen, you only get one kiss at the pig each year.” At his Duval County ranch, Oscar builds himself a house that looks like a cross between a bunker and a Saudi palace. You see him there, alone, against a searing Texas sky (Lynn’s off, doing stuff like the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala with guest cook Truman Capote), and all around him are fields and fields of scaly cacti, with, like, Texas-size thorns. I hear music here, Mr. S, music that says Oscar is making plans. He names his ranch Tasajillo, after that cactus. It’s tough, sharp, and takes the heat. Just like him.
Back to Robert. The company is his. He’s a CEO, but he wants more. He jets from Paris to New York to Houston in one day. He moves among three simultaneous meetings through a secret passage in the downtown store—an idea he borrowed from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. His board, made up mostly of loyal family friends, is dazzled. The oil boom has hit Texas, and Robert’s got the fever. He makes deals to add more stores outside of Texas—and to own the land beneath them. He borrows $1 million from the company to invest in an oil well and makes a $5 million profit. He wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat with pheasant feathers to the Paris fashion shows. Get it, Mr. S? He’s retailing’s wildcatter!!!
At some point, you begin to feel weird about Robert, but you don’t know why. Turns out Lynn did too. Back in the courtroom, she says so on TV. She admits that she let Robert run the store; she didn’t keep track of the family business like she should have. Now she’s sorry, but she wants to make it right for her kids. “I’m not good at specific things,” she says. “But I do tell you one thing. I trusted my brother. I no longer trust him. I love him, but I don’t trust him.”
THE DAGGER UNSHEATHED
Tuesday Night
Open in the courtroom. Robert is nervous, hunched forward on the witness stand. He admits that he never funded the trusts called for in his father’s will and that the estate taxes have not been paid. But while Douglas charges that Robert borrowed $1 million from the company and never paid it back, Robert says he lent the company that money in the first place. Today he wears a stunning blue suit and tie—by now, the couture cowboy has ridden off into the sunset. Robert even swears he didn’t wear a cowboy hat to get attention, but because “it rains a lot in Paris.” It’s humble pie time. “I talked to anybody who would listen to try and save the company,” he says.
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