The Cadillac Ranch 
Big Feud at Cadillac Ranch
For years Stanley Marsh 3 has been sticking it to the up-standing Whittenburg clan. But his latest practical joke could land him in jail, and no one in Amarillo is laughing anymore.
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Marsh, who detested museum exhibitions, claimed that art needed to be “surprising and hidden. . . . The audience I’m designing for are people who will come across it unexpectedly and not know it’s there.” To that end, he commissioned work from famous sculptors to put on his ranch. One built twelve sculptures of crushed automobiles, another a towering structure of neon lights. In 1974, working with a group of offbeat San Francisco artists known as the Ant Farm, Marsh had ten Cadillacs planted at precisely the same angle as the sides of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Cadillac Ranch, as it was called, became an American icon, and even Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it. By the mid-seventies, Marsh had been featured in such publications as Newsweek, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. Forbes, noting his business acumen, said Marsh was “crazy like a fox.”
Marsh relished the attention, telling reporters that he was to Amarillo what the Astrodome was to Houston. “He was famous, all right,” says Stanley Blackburn. “People in town thought he was either a great genius or the silliest ass who ever walked the face of the earth.” There was, in truth, a contrarian bent to Marsh that wanted to annoy as much as amuse, outrage as much as amaze. “He always had this sense of outrageousness that kept him on the borders of propriety,” says Amarillo cattleman Bill O’Brien, a friend of Marsh’s. “Most people want order, but Stanley felt he had been put on earth to bedevil that part of the human race.”
It wasn’t just national figures he liked to lampoon. (Richard Nixon added Marsh to his infamous list of enemies after hearing about his derogatory letters to Pat Nixon and the shoeshine kit that he sent to Vice President Spiro Agnew, suggesting that he use it to make a living after his political career.) Marsh took great pleasure in ridiculing local people who he decided were acting self-important. When Ben Bynum (who happened to be the brother of George Whittenburg’s wife, Ann) beat one of Marsh’s friends in an election for state representative, Marsh drove a truck rigged with a bullhorn to the hotel where Bynum’s victory party was being held, shouting obscenities about Bynum. During a civic dinner, he began bellowing at public school officials for letting a church use the parking lot of an adjoining school on Sundays. (Marsh ranted that the policy violated the separation of church and state.) One morning Marsh discovered his favorite suit was still at the dry cleaners. In a rage he called the owner of the cleaners, demanded that the suit be brought to him immediately, and then marched out to the driveway in his underwear to wait for the delivery man. “As funny as he is, Stanley is capable of huge amounts of mean-spiritedness,” says a former Marsh employee. “He has no self-consciousness about how petty he appears. He just doesn’t care.”
It was difficult for Marsh to take aim at the entire Whittenburg clan, which had mushroomed since its arrival in Amarillo. The thirteen Whittenburgs of Roy’s generation had produced 41 children (George’s generation), who had produced 130 children. (Because of the way the family trusts were structured, a Whittenburg received extra money from the trusts for every child he or she produced, leading some Amarillo residents to joke that the family was engaged in a breeding contest.) The truth was that most of the Whittenburgs lived uneventful lives around the community. Marsh’s brother Tom even married a daughter of one of the thirteen, Charlene Cline. But S.B.’s and Roy’s sides of the family constantly irritated Marsh. An unabashed liberal Democrat, he thought Roy was an ultraconservative John Bircher. Marsh also believed that S.B. had banned the Amarillo newspaper from publishing photographs of African Americans unless they were sports stars or had been arrested. At one point, he hired an attorney to bring a lawsuit against the newspaper for its alleged anti-black picture policy (the lawsuit was never filed).
With Roy’s and S.B.’s retirements and eventual deaths, the Whittenburgs lost much of their public profile. In 1972 the family decided to sell the Amarillo Globe-News to a Georgia publishing company for about $35 million, with George Whittenburg handling the transaction. As Roy’s eldest son, George gladly plunged into the role as the leader of the next generation. Teeming with ambition, he was a workhorse who recruited young lawyers from top Eastern schools and fired anyone at his firm who didn’t maintain his pace. (He even suggested that his younger brother Burk, also a lawyer, leave the firm.) In person, George possesses a congenial personality, but during a lawsuit, he is a pit bull. When four of his own cousins (including Tom Marsh’s wife, Charlene) filed a federal lawsuit against the Whittenburg family trusts, claiming that the newspaper sale had violated securities laws, George flatly asked one of his cousins during a deposition if she was emotionally unstable.
In a 1990 front-page article about Whittenburg in Texas Lawyer magazine, a state district court judge said, “George has the ambition to take on anything and would do what it took to be a dominant force in the legal community, not only in Amarillo, not only in Texas, but in the United States.” Saying that lawyers should be held accountable for their mistakes like anyone else, Whittenburg received national attention for his successful legal malpractice suits against other law firms. He won $50 million in damages from lawyers who had worked at one of Dallas’ largest firms after he charged they had botched a savings and loan case. He has represented plaintiffs in five malpractice cases against Amarillo firms alone, which is no doubt part of the reason why other Amarillo lawyers usually use terms like “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “vengeful” to describe Whittenburg. According to Texas Lawyer, Whittenburg liked acting as “the self-anointed conscience of the Amarillo legal community.” When a group of lawyers left Whittenburg to start their own firm, the joke around the Amarillo legal community was that they split because of religious differences: Whittenburg thought he was God, and the rest of them disagreed. “If all the other lawyers in town think you’re a great old guy,” Whittenburg retorts, “then you’re probably not representing your clients well.”
Just like his father, Whittenburg refused to cozy up to Amarillo’s old-money establishment. Instead of living in Wolflin Estates, he and his wife, Ann, an Amarillo rancher’s daughter, and their nine children resided in a newer neighborhood in West Amarillo. “We have always lived a pretty hokey, straight life,” says Ann, a real estate broker. “We don’t drink, we don’t go to parties, and we don’t care to run with Amarillo’s fast set. We devote ourselves to raising our children.”
Before the chicken coop incident, Whittenburg and Marsh ran in such different circles that the two of them had never had a substantive conversation. But that did not stop Marsh from needling the Whittenburg family whenever he got the chance. In The Plutonium Circus, a documentary filmed in early 1994 about Amarillo’s Pantex plant—ironically the filmmaker, George Ratliff, was a grandson of one of the original thirteen Whittenburgs—Marsh gave a rambling description of Amarillo. Amarillo was still a nice place, he concluded, “despite having had to have the Whittenburgs live in our town.”
IN LATE 1993 MARSH AND HIS EMPLOYEES (whom he called members of the “Dynamite Museum”) began placing “artistic” road signs throughout Amarillo. The first one, near downtown, showed a bee with the words “Killer Bee” underneath it. Other signs included a painting of a shark with the inscription “Man Eater,” a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, a human skeleton holding a gun, and a sign that simply read “If I Were You.” Another read “Bates Motel, Each Room With Shower. Knives Sharpened. Free Taxidermy.”
Marsh had at least 750 signs put in empty lots or in alleys, beside highways, and on lonely country roads outside town. Most Amarillo citizens driving past the signs just shook their heads. Many teenagers, however, loved the signs and stole them for souvenirs. One former Marsh employee who was paid $5 an hour to put up the signs, Ben Periman, the twenty-year-old son of an Amarillo physician, says Marsh initially took the thefts in good fun. “It became a game to see if we could create the unstealable sign,” Periman says. “We used concrete and we started welding the signs to the poles.” Marsh even had one sign erected that read, tantalizingly, “Steal This Sign.” It was promptly stolen.
But Marsh was also determined to catch the culprits, going so far as to hire a private investigator to interview students at a high school. When the youths were identified, Marsh often would show up at their houses at night, bringing along four or five employees who wore Lone Range-style masks. Marsh would then launch into a tirade, shouting that he was going to get the boys’ parents fired from their jobs. “It was all theater, but Stanley had some of those kids completely terrified,” scoffs 21-year-old Clint Pierce, who worked for Marsh. “He made one of the kids cry when he said he was going to have the names of the kids’ parents read on the six o’clock news on Marsh’s television station.”
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