Business
Oscar Wyatt
Oil’s well that ends well: Oscar Wyatt and Michel Halbouty say the wildcatter’s world is gone. So why is Houston thriving?
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When Houston’s passion for the myth collided with its passion for the future, the Wildcatter’s Club was shuttered. “I’ll tell you, but don’t say I said it,” Halbouty confided. “I am the last one. The last wildcatter.” He wasn’t sad. In fact, he was laughing.
“I don’t want to talk about Harold,” Carolyn Farb said, referring to her ex while displaying the selective amnesia common to the most successful of Houstonians. We were having lunch at Ibiza, a spare, trendy restaurant close to downtown. In the old days we might have met at Tony’s, but he stopped serving lunch in 1996 (“We were getting the ladies who lunch, and they were sitting there with their crabmeat cocktail,” he told me). Just as she did in the late seventies, Farb made an entrance. She breezed into the restaurant, long yellow locks streaming under a straw hat the size of a small Pacific atoll. She had on a chartreuse blouse and chartreuse pants, and a gossamer, leopard-print chartreuse jacket. The manager bounded across the cement floor to divert her to a better table right away.
The case could be made that Farb’s life today is better than it was during the boom. Indeed, few in Houston have ridden out the ensuing years as shrewdly as she, who was once dismissed by old money—such as it was in Houston—as a parvenue. Carolyn Freedman was actually the granddaughter of a predictably flamboyant gambler named Jakie Freedman, who left his Domain Privee casino on the outskirts of Houston to start the Sands in Las Vegas. Growing up suitably starstruck—“Cary Grant used to take my grandmother to dinner,” she said—she met her soulmate in Harold Farb, a native with Broadway dreams. Because Harold’s day job then was owning more apartments than almost anyone else in the world, the couple soon became the oil boom’s poster children. They supersized the myth, starting with the mansion on River Oaks Boulevard. They founded Ultra, a Town & Country clone, and opened the Carlyle, a fancy supper club where Harold performed show tunes and competed, unsuccessfully, against Tony Vallone. The obligatory Texas divorce coincided with the oil bust, during which Carolyn told interviewers that when she and Harold met, “He didn’t know a Chloé from a flavor of Baskin-Robbins ice cream.”
Like many self-made people, Carolyn was relentless about fulfilling her destiny. So in 1983, as the bust settled in, she won a court ruling that invalidated her prenuptial agreement and gave her a settlement worth $20 million. Spoils included the River Oaks mansion, two Rolls-Royces, a Jaguar, and $8 million in cash.
While Harold was trying to fill more than a million square feet of new office space, Carolyn proved that she possessed the skill most valued by Houstonians. She was entrepreneurial. If her gift for fundraising went unappreciated during the boom, during hard times her tirelessness was such that people forgot that she’d once saddled the Houston Ballet’s ball with an antebellum theme. She raised $1 million in a single evening for cancer research in 1983 and signed on for AIDS fundraising before it was chic. She had a corporate approach that was comforting to money-conscious donors: Here was a socialite who could tout her “zero-budget philosophy” and who sold fundraising software from her own Web site, carolynfarb.com. As Houston recovered and diversified, she did too: Her escort during the nineties was not an oilman or a developer but techie Eckhard Pfeiffer, the CEO of Compaq Computers.
Farb relocated to an understated street in River Oaks and started citing local heroines like Nina Cullinan and Dominique de Menil as her role models. Chairing the Houston Grand Opera’s “A Night at the Alhambra,” she raised the usual million and was praised by the CEOs of Enron and Continental Airlines. In other words, Farb’s recovery is complete, as is Houston’s. As local energy giants like Dynegy and Reliant dodged charges of price gouging last summer, the city bid for the 2012 Olympics. (“I think that’s as optimistic as a person can be,” Halbouty asserted.)
When I asked Farb to describe the difference between her life—and Houston’s—then and now, she was a little stumped. “Would you say we’re more cautious? More corporate?” she asked. “A loss of spontaneity?”
Then she got it. “I’d just say we’re mindfully watching where we tread.”
“Everyone is getting out of the oil business,” Oscar Wyatt told me. He was calling on his cell phone on his way to the villa in the South of France that he shares with his wife, Lynn. His gravelly voice was free of regret. “A lot of people in the oil business are doing something completely different.” Certainly that is true in his case. Wyatt retired from his oil company, Coastal, in 1997, and started buying produce farms in the Valley. He’s now in frozen-foods, which is so impossible for some Houstonians to accept that they have started the rumor that he is running guns across the border. It’s an understandable response: Wyatt was the man who left San Antonio without heat during the 1973 energy crisis, who over the years cut deals with Libya and China, who flew to Baghdad to free American hostages in 1990. A Houston without Wyatt threatened to be a Houston without drama. But the Wyatts put their storied River Oaks Boulevard mansion up for sale in 1999—the one that had belonged to oilman Hugh Roy Cullen—and sent the message that they were ready to cede the stage.
The Wyatts were the Farbs’s polar opposites. Lynn, the daughter of the city’s toniest merchant, became, like her self-made husband, global, sophisticated, as authentically powerful in society as Oscar was in the oil business. (Her family’s store, Sakowitz, was a casualty of the bust.) The Wyatts proved that “Texan” and “sophisticate” weren’t mutually exclusive terms. That you could be rich and successful in the way of people in Manhattan or Los Angeles or even St. Louis as opposed to anyone in Giant. This Houston is more willing to go along to get along. Its nineties boom came not from oil but from the stock market, just like everywhere else. Residents blithely shop at the Old Navy store on the site of Sakowitz’s once-grand Galleria emporium, willfully throw off their suburban McMansions for Manhattan-like downtown lofts, casually consume food from Istanbul and South Korea, brazenly do business around the globe, and don’t even think about the novelty of it all. “Since we’ve sent so many of our children off to the East Coast to study law, it takes a lot more to do what we used to do in three-page contracts,” Wyatt griped, but he didn’t expect anyone to take him seriously.
The Wyatts had a party in their River Oaks mansion just before the movers came, and the guest list that night was strictly local. Tony Vallone, having diversified like everyone else, catered the affair, offering omelettes at eleven o’clock and cookies in the shape of houses and moving vans. The scions of the oldest oil families were there—Alkeks, Blaffers, and Wiesses—but the hostess had also invited a newer crowd that included pretty youngish things desperate to become the Next Lynn Wyatt. Her spirits were good; she told her guests that she’d been happy in the house, but that she wanted to move on, and you could almost believe, then, that Houston had shed its old skin completely.
But not entirely. Wyatt had invited the mansion’s new owners to the party, a husband and wife in their late-thirties. He was an independent oilman from Louisiana. In the ensuing years, the couple have honored one of Houston’s grandest traditions: conspicuous consumption. They added a substantial new wing. They built a small hill to hide the swimming pool, which they moved from its original location. And they bought the mansion next door. It will serve as a guest house.
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