The Last Empire
A rootless steamboat captain carved the King Ranch out of the frontier more than a century ago. Today Captain King’s descendants, rooted in the land he conquered, struggle to hold his legacy together.
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In 1966 Bob was visiting the Venezuela ranch. Terrorists had been attacking ranches nearby, and the Venezuelan government seemed powerless to stop them. As de los Reyes recounted the story to Charles Murphy, a Fortune writer, he turned to Kleberg and told him he wouldn’t blame him if he wanted to pull out of Venezuela in order to avoid a repeat of the Cuban affair.
Kleberg thought about that. “You ever run away from anything?” he asked.
“Nothing that I can remember,” the Cuban answered.
“Neither have I,” said Captain King’s grandson. Bob Kleberg then stood up, took off his King Ranch cowboy hat, and hung it on a hook in the ranch office, where it remained until his death. “I’ll need this,” he said, “when I come back.”
That was how Bob Kleberg worked, in ranching, in oil, in everything. He had an actor’s instinct for the dramatic gesture, particularly the one that would make him seem larger than life. But if he postured, as he did with his hat in Venezuela, he was also willing to back that posturing up. He might, for example, trot out some obscure fact about the Irish rebellion of 1797 to make a point, but if he was challenged, the chances were very good that he really knew what he was talking about. He did a great deal for effect, but he hardly ever did anything simply for show.
A sophisticated businessman, he was a determined foe of what passed for sophisticated business. After he made a deal he had his lawyers and accountants come in and make sure it was right, but until then they made themselves scarce. He had a healthy respect for such Professionals — his father and brother were both lawyers, and the ranch’s main attorneys, Leroy Denman, Sr., and Leroy Denman, Jr., were two of his closest friends and advisers. But he knew also that a rancher was not a lawyer, and that to be a rancher you had to know when not to return your lawyer’s urgent phone calls.
A Woman’s Touch
For the last two decades of his life Bob Kleberg spent most of his time on his foreign empire. His nephew Dick Kleberg stayed in Texas and ran the original ranch. When Bob was at the ranch his days almost always followed the same pattern: he was awakened with a steaming cup of black coffee at five or six, talked to all his foremen by phone, and then drove out onto the ranch in one of the special hunting cars he had designed. He never left without his pistols and his Mannlicher rifles. There was always the possibility that some hapless coyote — or, during hunting season, quail, turkey, or deer — might cross his path. Throughout the day he would work on horseback with the Kineños. At lunch they would break for barbecue, frijoles, and camp bread cooked in Dutch ovens over an open fire and smeared with molasses. It was a rugged, hardy, outdoor life; it kept Bob Kleberg in touch with his roots and with the frontier traditions of ranching; and it had almost nothing to do with how the ranch really made its money.
When he returned from his sojourns in Australia or South America, Bob made it a point to tour the ranch. His tours were legendary. Often he would take his nephew B Johnson along. “We’d leave at dawn and drive all day long,” B remembers. “We’d do two and sometimes three divisions in a day. He’d get to a pasture, take one look, and say, ‘I told you three years ago to do so and so. You didn’t do it. See what happened?’ He would work with the Kineños, straight through until we finished — no breaks for coffee, lunch, bad weather, anything. He did everything the hard way — he rode the hard way, with his stirrups fully extended; he roped the hard way, just using his shoulders; he studied the hard way, always poring over scientific journals. He hated the office. His life was outside.”
Bob and his brother and their few close friends entertained themselves much as Captain King had. They hunted, of Course — alone, with each other, and on a grand social scale at Christmastime. Both Bob and Richard were superb shots with rifle, pistol, or shotgun. Once Bob and a family friend shot out the streetlights of the nation’s capital with wild abandon and great accuracy. Bob and Richard often bet on horses and sneaked away from the respectable life of the family compound to the more plebeian pleasures of cockfighting.
Their mother, Alice, the last link with the old ranch of Captain King, viewed their excesses with the same blinders her mother had worn. When someone mentioned that her son Richard was spending a good deal of time with fighting cocks, she replied, “How nice. He’s the first member of the family to be interested in poultry.” But at home the brothers made the same concessions to respectability their grandfather had. They would, for example, hide liquor in the bathroom and answer a truly prodigious number of calls of nature during parties or in the long evenings they spent at home. Outside the house they were their own men; inside, they played by women’s rules.
But Alice King Kleberg was the last woman of the family to embody the struggle of gentility against reality. The next generation of women was different, as likely to sip bourbon as the men, as eager to go out on roundups, as proficient at riding and shooting. The key woman of that generation was Bob’s wife, Helen, the model for Leslie Benedict in Giant. If oil opened the world up to the ranch, it was Helen who pushed and prodded her reluctant husband out into it.
The daughter of a congressman from Kansas, she met Bob Kleberg at a party in 1926. Only seventeen days later, they were married. Helen threw herself into the romantic and varied wonders of the ranch but always — always — tried to awaken her provincial husband to what lay beyond its fences. She encouraged him to enter the world of thoroughbred racing, which led them into friendships with the old families of the East. She bought her cowboy husband pinstripe suits, which he wore with good humor, even if they never quite seemed to fit. She carried her Episcopalian faith into the Presbyterian stronghold. And, determined that her daughter, Helenita, and other promising young Klebergs would be exposed to a wider world, she saw that they went east to prep school. She labored to keep up a sense of standards within the fairly rough-edged family she had joined; she even included the Queen of England on the family’s wedding-invitation list, a reminder to everyone of exactly where she pegged the Klebergs’ social position.
Every January at roundup time, Bob and Helen Kleberg worked cattle together. Everyone pitched in, for a veritable orgy of work and a hell of a good time. It was as if twice a year John D. Rockefeller went down to the oil field and drilled for oil. Few people of the Klebergs’ station remained so in touch with the work on which their fortunes were built, and few people of their station could perform the roughest and most challenging tasks as well as their best workers.
Holding the Family Together
The stock of the King Ranch corporation was distributed to the family in 1954. For the first time the five children of Alice King and Robert Kleberg were free to dispose of their shares as they wished. It was like the partition after Henrietta’s death on a smaller scale, though this time four of the five branches chose to stay in. But Bob’s sister Alice Kleberg East, even more of a fundamentalist rancher than her brother, decided to exchange her shares for part of the ranch. To her and her children, the King Ranch had become too civilized under Bob Kleberg; as they put it, there were “too many flowerpots to water.” They had little patience with the thoroughbred program and with Bob’s foreign ventures. The Easts wanted to run their own affairs.
But Bob Kleberg had not taken over Captain King’s ranch to preside over its dissolution. He was adamant. He would not give up part of the ranch. Luckily his cousin Richard King and his family were ready to stop ranching and devote their attention to banking and other urban interests. So Bob engineered a trade that gave Richard King’s Santa Fe property to the King Ranch in return for 10 per cent of the entire ranch’s oil royalties. Bob then traded the Santa Fe to Alice for her stock. Once again he had used oil to hold the ranch together.
In 1958, with the original lease running out, the ranch and Humble negotiated an agreement that would change the course of the ranch’s history and, in the seventies, become a bitter bone of contention. The new agreement extended the Humble lease and granted Humble the right to build on the ranch (only eight miles west of the Santa Gertrudis headquarters) what was then the world’s largest natural gas processing plant. In return Humble agreed to pay the ranch a one-sixth royalty on all gas and oil, instead of the customary one-eighth. By 1969 the ranch was producing. Fortune magazine estimated, $120 million a year in oil and gas, making its one-sixth share worth $20 million, or about fifteen times the profits from the entire ranching operation.
Wealth in those proportions could have turned the Klebergs into stereotypical Texas oilmen, the Jett Rinks whose roots were swept away in the flood of oil. They could have become mad eccentrics or idle rich who frittered away their birthright Instead, Bob Kleberg took the oil money and sank it into what the family knew best — more ranching. Millions of dollars went into Australia, Africa, South America. He was consumed with the idea of claiming as productive ranchland the deserts and jungles of the tropics, and claiming them using his own invention, Santa Gertrudis cattle. Bob Kleberg was convinced that with proper management the Santa Gertrudis could feed the poor people of the tropics.
In the space of twenty years, with an intense expenditure of energy, will, ingenuity, and money, he added eight million acres to the ranch, mostly under long-term leases. He never stopped acquiring new pastures. In his late seventies he was absorbed with Spain and Morocco, and when he died he was obsessed with winning for ranching the world’s biggest wilderness — the Amazon. It was one of the most impressive bursts of creative energy in the history of American enterprise, and it made him a world figure, the confidant of presidents and kings.
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