(2 of 6)
At 42, after 17 spectacular years in the Texas oilfields, he looks like nothing so much as a Hollywood version of a Mississippi River gambler—a moody and monolithic male with a dark, Civil War mustache, a cold and acquisitive eye, and a brawler's shoulder-swinging walk. He affects dark glasses, wears a diamond ring as big as a dime on one rocklike fist, and on the flat Texas highways drives his royal blue Cadillac at 100 m.p.h., often with a whiskey bottle at his side. He likes to shoot craps at $1,000 a throw, and has a longshoreman's uninhibited propensity for barroom fights.
His office in Houston's Shell Building boasts gleaming brown morocco leather furniture, a five-foot tinted photograph of Glenn McCarthy, five bronze-plated baby shoes (he has four daughters: Mary Margaret, 18, Glennalee, 17, Leah, 15, Faustine, 12, and an eleven-year-old son, Glenn Jr.) and Miss Houston of 1945. The ex-Miss Houston, an imperious and well-endowed young woman named Averill Knigge, serves him as secretary.
Though McCarthy's interest in literature is largely confined to oil leases, he sometimes sums up his personal code by exhibiting an anonymous piece of verse which was presented to him by Airman Eddie Rickenbacker. It is entitled The Little Red God of Guts, and reads, in part, as follows:
He is neither a fool with a frozen smile, Nor a sad old toad in a cask of bile; He can dance with a shoe nail in his heel, And never a sign of his pain reveal . . .
[He can) worship a sweet, white virgin's glove,
Or teach a courtesan how to love . . . Build where the builders all have failed, And sail the seas that no man has sailed.
McCarthy's incessant, explosive extracurricular activities, plus the luck, deadly nerve and ferocious vitality with which he has sought and found oil, have made him one of the most highly publicized Texans since Sam Houston. This does not mean that he is popular; many of his fellow citizens grudgingly envy him his wealth and audacity. As many more deprecate him, and point out, correctly, that he is hardly typical of the Texas millionaire (see box). Nevertheless, Glenn McCarthy is as peculiarly a product of Texas as the famed San Jacinto monument; the Lone Star State is one of the few places left in the world where millionaires hatch seasonally, like May flies.
Surrealist Jungles. Texas throbs with prosperity. In a fevered decade of war and boom it has not only produced new fortunes in crops and cattle, but become one of the nation's great industrial areas.
Its cloud-hung Gulf Coast bristles with a staggering concentration of chemical plants—enormous, surrealistic jungles of piping, gleaming spheroids of tanks and stacks—and with miles of great oil refineries, tank farms and factories. The combined Gulf ports handle more export tonnage than New York. Texas produces 80% of U.S. sulphur, almost half of its natural gas, and a lion's share of that Texas delicacy, chili powder. Texans make B-36 bombers in the Consolidated Vultee