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?

by Skip Hollandsworth

September 2008

(Page 4 of 5)

With his new fortune, Boone had become a world-class philanthropist, bestowing hundreds of millions of dollars upon Oklahoma State, hospitals, and numerous charities. Of course, Boone being Boone, he doesn’t give away his money like a typical tycoon. When he wrote a $100 million check to the University of Texas System (split between the UT Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston), he stipulated that both institutions had to invest the money and grow it to $1 billion ($500 million each) within 25 years. Otherwise, Boone said, they had to give whatever profit they made on his original investment to Oklahoma State. “You know they’re going to grow that money,” Boone told me. “UT is never going to write a check to Oklahoma State for anything.”

He had also used his fortune to transform his dusty 68,000-acre Panhandle ranch, Mesa Vista, into an oasis filled with man-made lakes, creeks, and waterfalls, plus more than ten thousand trees trucked in from as far away as Colorado, Illinois, and Tennessee. His ranch house, which is at least 11,000 square feet, looks more like a castle—the Dallas Morning News society columnist Alan Peppard once described the place as “Hearstian”—and there is a seven-bedroom guest lodge, as well as a two-story kennel for the hunting dogs that is bigger than anything I have ever lived in.

It was Peppard who, after meeting Madeleine at a luncheon in Kentucky, suggested to Boone that he take her out on a date. Boone, however, was just coming off another marriage—right after his divorce from Bea, he had wedded a Dallas woman whom Condé Nast Portfolio magazine would later describe as “a voluble divorcée”—and he wasn’t certain he wanted to jump into another relationship. “Besides,” he told me, “I had never dated a woman outside Texas or Oklahoma.” Born in Iraq, where her father, a native Englishman, worked in a minor position for an oil company, Madeleine spent her youth in English boarding schools, where she learned to speak in a distinctly non-Texan manner, pronouncing the word “either,” for instance, as “eye-ther.” Perhaps most disturbing to Boone was that she was a vegetarian. He had no idea what she was going to eat if he ever took her to Bob’s.

He flew her to the ranch anyway. When she walked through the front door, dressed to the nines, he turned to a friend standing beside him and said, “Uh-oh.” Within three months, they married at her California home, and he gave her a heart-shaped wedding ring that was the size of a small atomic bomb. “I knew Madeleine already had some big jewelry,” Boone said, “but I wasn’t going to be out-ringed.”

To his friends’ astonishment, he was genuinely head over heels. He went to Congress to testify for one of Madeleine’s favorite causes—the abolition of horse-slaughtering plants—and after Hurricane Katrina, he funded another one of her passions: the rescue of some eight hundred stranded dogs and cats from New Orleans, which he loaded onto a cargo plane and flew to new homes in Colorado and California. He even decided to give up his cherished 1997 blue BMW (which he called, predictably, “Ol’ Bluey”) and ended up with a top-of-the-line Mercedes because Madeleine thought he’d look good in one.

In turn, Madeleine treated him like royalty. For his eightieth birthday party earlier this year, she rented out the entire Dallas Country Club, covered the walls with photos of his ranch, and hired comedian Dennis Miller to be the party’s emcee. (Miller’s best line: “Boone is one of the few people who can watch Giant and think it’s a home movie.”) For entertainment, she flew in the blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, British soprano Sarah Brightman, American Idol star Katharine McPhee, and Belgian singer Lara Fabian, whom Madeleine described as “better than Streisand.” They performed their various hits and, for the finale, gathered onstage and sang “My Way” while they gazed fondly at Boone (well, all of them, that is, except Bocelli).

“Good Lord, that sounds over the top,” I said to Madeleine when she recounted the evening.

“Hey, it was a festival of love,” she gaily replied. “I wanted the best to sing to the best.”

When I turned to Boone and asked if he was a big fan of those singers, especially that Fabian woman, he glanced at his wife, nodded, and said, “Oh, yeah, I really like their music.” I tried not to laugh. I knew he was telling a big old fib.

But it must be said that Boone has changed Madeleine in plenty of ways as well. When I watched her shopping one afternoon at the Neiman Marcus in Newport Beach, California, while Boone was attending a meeting, she squealed in delight when she came across a garish bright-orange handbag (price: $1,475) that in her previous life she wouldn’t have looked at twice. “This will be perfect for our trips to Oklahoma State,” she said. And what’s particularly amazing is that she can now do Boone’s energy speech just about as well as Boone can. On one occasion when I was with them, Boone suddenly stopped talking about the Pickens Plan so he could take a phone call to talk to one of his brokers, and she stepped right in and said, “It’s absolutely insulting what these politicians are doing, selling a pipe dream to the public about oil. They should have listened to my dear Boone years ago.”

Boone claims he’s been trying to get politicians to listen to him about energy since 1996, when he was asked to be the Texas chairman of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. During a meeting with the candidate, Boone fired off his ideas to break the country’s addiction to foreign oil. According to Boone, Dole replied, “My friend, let me give you a lesson about politics. One thing you don’t do in politics is kick a sleeping dog, and energy is a sleeping dog. If Bill Clinton doesn’t mention energy, I’m not going to mention it, and that’s that.”

Nevertheless, Boone said, he kept trying. Last year, he told Rudolph Giuliani he would support him for president only if Giuliani would meet with him to discuss his energy plan. “He gave me all of five minutes,” said a disgusted Boone, who later wrote a letter to all of his friends whom he had asked to support Giuliani, apologizing for directing them to a candidate “who rode up to the grandstand and fell off his horse.”

Earlier this year, he went to visit President George W. Bush at the White House, bringing with him the whiteboard that he carries on his jet. Standing before Bush, marking all over the board with a black pen, he gave the president his speech: Total global production of oil was at 85 million barrels a day, total global demand was hitting 87 million barrels a day, and oil producers were unable to make up the difference. The hydrocarbon era—the very era that had made Boone a rich man (and, by the way, also made Bush a millionaire)—was over, Boone proclaimed. The age of alternative energy must begin immediately.

“And what did the president say?” I asked.

“He said, ‘No shit! T. Boone, you’ve got to be shitting me!’”

I started writing down everything Boone had said.

“Oh, hell, come on, you know I’m kidding,” Boone said. “The president politely told me that what I had to say was very, very interesting.”

“In other words, your talk didn’t affect him all that much.”

Boone then said something pretty frank for a big-time Republican. “Well, he hasn’t done anything so far, has he?”

It was in May, not long after his meeting with Bush, that Boone decided to take his Pickens Plan to the public. When he signed off on its $58 million budget, which could very well be the most expensive public policy ad campaign ever funded by a single individual, his public relations man, Jay Rosser, told him that his face would probably be seen this fall on television commercials as frequently as McCain’s and Obama’s. Boone said that wasn’t good enough. He also wanted to hit the road, he said, giving his whiteboard presentation to just about anybody who would listen.

One afternoon, I went along with some other reporters to hear him talk to about three hundred residents of Pampa, the Panhandle town that will be at the epicenter of Boone’s wind farm. On the way there, a young reporter from Wired, the high-tech magazine, told Boone she had watched several episodes of Dallas, featuring none other than the character of J. R. Ewing, to prepare for her meeting him. Boone stared at her in bewilderment. She told him she wanted to know about the early days of the oil industry.

“Well, to be honest with you, I was one of H. L. Hunt’s illegitimate children,” he said, his expression totally deadpan. “I came from his fourth family.”

This time, the reporter gave him a bewildered look. “Really?” she said.

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