Gone With the Wind 
The Last Pickens Show 
There Will Be Boone
The most famous wildcatter in Texas history is spending $58 million of his own money to promote the Pickens Plan, which proposes massive wind farms (which he’s already building), more reliance on natural gas (which he has a huge stake in), and ways to combat global warming (which loyal Republicans aren’t supposed to believe is real) to break America’s addiction to foreign oil. But does the 80-year-old have the energy to save the world?
Garry says: I am dissappointed that you have not included the wonderful pictures of T. Boone, his wife, and the lovely interior shots of his home. I am visiting friends out-of-state and was bragging on your magazine. I pulled up your website hoping to show my aunt the pictures, but was somewhat dumbfounded that the online article didn't include all of the photos. Why? It seems such a shame not to enhance the online article when you already have the photos. (December 10th, 2008 at 10:27am)
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And does Boone believe that this particular Patton should be none other than Boone himself? In every interview he gives, he adamantly says no, but a lot of people are convinced that the old wheeler-dealer would be perfect for the role. In fact, when I was with him in New York, I was amazed by the way he enthralled a new generation of reporters—almost exactly the same way he enthralled a generation of reporters when he was running Mesa in the eighties and coming to New York to make his quixotic takeover attempts of such Big Oil behemoths as Gulf. On Good Morning America, after he spouted off one of his well-known Boone-isms, as he refers to his folksy sayings, he told host Chris Cuomo about America’s existing energy policies, “A fool with a plan is better than a genius with no plan, and we look like fools without a plan.” Cuomo unabashedly shook his head in admiration and said to Diane Sawyer, “What a great line.” (Sawyer later added, “I just like to say, ‘T. Boone’!”) During his CNBC appearance, anchor Becky Quick, who was wearing an orange scarf around her neck in homage to Boone’s alma mater, Oklahoma State University (the other CNBC anchor was wearing an orange tie), asked him if he would consider making an independent run for president or be a candidate for vice president. (“No, Becky,” he chortled.) And when he finished his press conference at the Palace Hotel, some of the reporters actually burst into applause. A bearded young television cameraman in shorts said to Boone just before he walked out of the room, “Wow, like, what can I do to get my car to run on natural gas right now?”
As odd as it seems, Boone is, in the words of longtime lawyer and confidant Bobby Stillwell, “hitting his prime once again—an eighty-year-old going on thirty.” He even has a glamorous new wife, the former Madeleine Paulson, a sassy, 61-year-old blonde with a refined English accent who is the widow of Gulfstream Aerospace founder Allen Paulson. Wealthy in her own right—she owns the Del Mar Country Club, in California, a slew of championship racehorses, and a $35 million beach estate—Madeleine could probably have grabbed any available billionaire she wanted after her husband’s death, in 2000. “But when I met Boone in 2005, I knew I had found my John Wayne,” she told me one afternoon while I flew with the couple on their $57 million Gulfstream G550 corporate jet.
“We’re having such a good time that we’ve been talking about starting a family,” Boone said, the look on his face completely serious.
“Yes, we’re working very hard to have one,” Madeleine added, giving me an equally serious look, her perfectly plucked eyebrows rising slightly. “We’re trying every night.”
I stared at them, unsure what to say, until they both started laughing.
“The way things have been going, who the hell knows?” Boone said. “Who the hell knows?”
To be honest, there are plenty of signs that Boone is eighty years old. He’s hard of hearing. His eye muscles are weakening, which makes it difficult for him to read. Because of his poor eyesight, he’s also had to cut back on his beloved dove and quail hunting.
But he still exercises every weekday morning—his trainer shows up at his mansion in the Preston Hollow estates area of North Dallas at 6:30 and puts Boone through a rigorous 45-minute workout—and he’s always at his office, which is less than half a mile from his house, by 8:00. He doesn’t drink coffee (he loves to tell his younger employees that he’s never spent a dime at Starbucks), but he does nurse a Diet Coke or Diet Dr Pepper throughout the day. “I’ve told him he probably could afford to pop open a second soft drink after the first one gets warm,” his wry administrative assistant, Sally Geymüller, who’s been working for him since 1979, told me. “But Mr. Pickens doesn’t like to waste a penny. Just watch him whenever he walks out of a room. He always turns out the lights.”
BP Capital occupies the second floor of a high-end office building just off Preston Road. Only 35 people work there. The entire setting is almost ridiculously informal: One afternoon when I was visiting, I watched Geymüller’s seven-year-old son, dressed in his baseball uniform, lie on the carpet waving his arms in the air while executives stepped over him on their way to a meeting. Then along came Boone’s dog Murdock (another brown-eyed papillon; Boone did lose his first dog in the divorce), trotting from one room to another, looking for snacks.
At the office, Boone himself rarely wears a tie. His usual outfit consists of a button-down shirt, pressed slacks, alligator loafers, and a Rolex that he bought in 1964 for $750. Unlike most CEOs, he doesn’t maintain a minute-by-minute schedule. He carries around a tiny calendar in his back pocket, but on the day I saw it, the pages were barely filled up. He seems to spend most of his time on the phone, talking to Wall Street insiders like Ace Greenberg, the former CEO of Bear Stearns (“Ol’ Ace,” Boone calls him), other billionaire investors such as Warren Buffett (“Ol’ Warren”), or Madeleine (“Ol’ Madeleine”). He constantly checks in with his own analysts and traders, who work down the hall from him, and at least twice a day he meets in the boardroom with his entire investment team, made up of ten to twelve men, half of whom are in their early thirties. (As soon as the market closes at three o’clock, a few of those younger guys throw on shorts and T-shirts and run across the street to a Catholic church to play basketball on an outdoor court; then they race back to the office, where they shower and put on their golf shirts and chinos in time for a late-afternoon meeting with Boone.)
In one meeting I attended, Boone sat toward the front of the room, a black cape draped over the top half of his body. He was getting his hair cut by his longtime barber, Keith Clark, and Clark’s wife, Frances (who now does most of the work on Boone’s hair because of the 68-year-old Keith’s fading eyesight). As Keith and Frances studied his sideburns to make sure they were even—“Real, real nice,” said Keith—Boone looked at his guys and asked simply, “What you got?”
It was part think tank and part bull session as everyone began throwing out bits of information that could possibly affect the fortune of Pickens’s hedge fund (BP Capital has approximately $4 billion under management) or any of his other projects. Boone constantly asked questions. He asked about the prospects of one company that was drilling for natural gas in the Barnett Shale, and he asked about the progress of another company’s solar energy project in Florida. He asked if anyone knew about a report that gas storage levels were down in the United Kingdom. Then he suddenly switched subjects to talk about a documentary he had seen on the Discovery Channel about pipe insulation, then he just as suddenly switched subjects again to discuss some complicated accounting concepts regarding the front-loading of taxes on the hedge fund. At one point during the meeting, when everyone was talking about an offshore oil drilling project, Boone leaned forward, spotted me taking notes in the back of the room, and said, “What do you think over there, Ol’ Skip?”
For the first time, I understood why Forbes magazine had sent along a reporter this spring to watch Boone have his brain analyzed at the University of Texas at Dallas Center for BrainHealth. (The scientist who studied him exclaimed to the reporter, “Mr. Pickens’s brain activated in places that young brains activate!”) “His mind really is like a sponge,” said Brian Bradshaw, a 32-year-old analyst for BP Capital. “He forgets nothing, and considering all his experience in this business, he still wants to know what other people are thinking. But he also knows when to tune out all the noise and make a decision. During a meeting, we’ll throw out five or six reports that suggest we shouldn’t make a particular investment, and after a while, he’ll shrug and say, ‘No, we’re going forward. Our strategy is right, and we’re not changing.’ He’s got ice in his veins.”
Boone, of course, has always loved playing the role of the contrarian. The son of an oil-patch land man, he was born in Oklahoma, moved to Amarillo during high school, went to work for a couple of years as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum after his graduation from Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State), and then impulsively struck out on his own in 1954, when he was just 26, soon forming an Amarillo-based exploration company with only $2,500 in borrowed money. By the late seventies, he had turned the company, which was then known as Mesa Petroleum, into perhaps the most successful independent in the country. In one of his most profitable plays, he invested $35,000 into drilling sites in Canada, sank the money from those sites into new wells, and in 1979 sold his entire Canadian operation to another oil company for $600 million.
Then, in the early eighties, he made a peculiar statement to his board of directors: “Fellas, it’s cheaper to drill on the New York Stock Exchange.” At the time, it didn’t exactly strike anyone as the kind of line that would one day be studied in business schools: What in the world did a folksy wildcatter from Texas know about the intricate machinations of Wall Street? But Boone persuaded the board to let him use Mesa’s money to buy stock in publicly held oil companies that he believed were undervalued and poorly managed. After he accumulated 10 percent or so of stock in one of them, he pounced, calling a press conference to announce that he would be attempting to get controlling interest in the company so that he could bring in a new team of executives who cared more about their shareholders than about their perks. He once famously proclaimed that Big Oil executives “have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa.”
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