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Nothing Complicated." Once Murchison has made up his mind on a deal, he turns the details over to someone else—often to the aide's consternation. When he sent a friend to Jackson, Miss, to buy the Lamar Life Insurance Co. not long ago, the friend decided after he got there that Murchison had underestimated the complications and the size of the deal. But when he phoned back, Murchison snapped: "There's nothing complicated about it—100,000 shares at $105, that's $10.5 million. Just a simple business deal." To Murchison, a deal is right when both sides profit from it; that way, "they can do business together again." When he figures a deal is right, he will not quibble about terms. One time when Murchison was trading some life-insurance and oil properties with a partner named Toddie Lee Wynne, they were $498,000 apart on price. They flipped a coin for the difference. Wynne won. But Clint made a fat capital gain anyway.
Murchison has built his empire on credit. He now owes millions and is considered vulnerable by some Texans, who think that he is already spread too thin. Murchison thinks not, as long as he is able to borrow more against his oil reserves and other holdings. Says he: "Cash makes a man careless." Both he and Richardson pride themselves on the fortunes they owe. "Murchison," Richardson once said, "I'm a bigger success than you are. Some of my paper is held in London." When Murchison once decided to get out of debt, Richardson talked him out of it: "Don't do it. The day you do you'll be dead, and I haven't got time for a funeral."
Melon & Coke. Murchison has built such a wheeling-dealing reputation that propositions pour into his downtown Dallas office at the rate of more than 600 a year. Only a handful are acted on. Murchison does most of his thinking about these while others sleep. He gets up as early as 3:30 a.m., brews himself a pot of coffee and sits for hours, thinking and listening to the Rev. W. E. Hawkins, a fundamentalist preacher on Dallas' Station KRLD. After breakfast (a slice of melon or a bottle of Coke) he drives himself to work in a 1953 Ford. He works in shirtsleeves with no tie, throws papers that he wants filed on the carpeted floor.
Unlike many a financial operator, Murchison is not interested in managing a company, will not take on a property unless it is already doing well. He personally heads only two of his many companies (Canadian Delhi and Delhi), has not even set foot in many of their offices. (His only advice to Henry Holt was that it should publish a book on gin rummy.) He leaves all the details to a crack team of young financial brains headed by his sons John Dabney, 32, and Clint Jr., 30, along with James H. Clark, 45, a former executive in a Chicago firm of management consultants. Around Dallas, they are known as "Clint's Whiz Kids."
Skunks for Sears. Murchison got his start in business as a boy in Athens. His parents were of Scotch Presbyterian pioneer stock and, for Athenians, fairly well off; his father was head of the First National Bank. Nevertheless, young Clint, the second of nine children, used to get up at 3 a.m. to run a trap line for coons and skunks, sold the pelts to Sears, Roebuck.