The Oilman's Daughter (2 page)

What happened after that became all mixed
up in Ethel Louise Williams’s memory. She later recalled that M. A.
Wright became upset, hysterically so. He “couldn’t even lay his
pants on the bedpost,” he told her, without her getting pregnant.
It was no good for them to get married, he said, because she’d have
a dozen kids.

But he also told her that he would take care of everything. He
called someone—she thought it was a lawyer maybe. He argued with
the man. It was
his
property, Wright shouted, and he could
dang well do what he pleased with it. She later remembered he hung
up the phone and told her not to worry. “Go ahead and get your
picture in the paper,” he said. He had business in Houston, had to
get out of town in a hurry. He wrote down some numbers and told her
to hold on to them.

Something about it all made her feel cheap—“like a whore or
something,” she later said. So she tore up the numbers and threw
the scraps in the trash. The day he was supposed to leave they
fought again, and he stormed out of the hotel room, leaving her
crying and reaching after him. At the bottom of the stairs, just
above the marble floor of the Mayo Hotel lobby, he looked back at
her and told her that he’d never see her again. She knew in that
moment that he was speaking the truth.

“So when he left you knew he was gone?” she was asked in a
deposition 40 years later.

A: I knew he was gone. You know, I knew that I had—I was in a
spot. I knew that I was in trouble because I would never ever see
him again.

Q: Then why did you go get your pictures made?

A: I didn’t.

Q: Well—

A: I did get my pictures made. I went down and got pictures
taken, taken and everything because I was so proud of what I had.
You know, I come from nothing, you know, and if you’ve got—maybe
I’m wrong but the way I felt personally myself, back then, if
you’ve got some nice clothes and you’ve got real jewelry—I’m not
talking about stuff that’s cheap. I’m talking about something
that’s real. A real set of pearls, a real diamond watch. You knew
it was real, real. You want to show it off, you know.

…

So I went ahead and had a picture taken of me and—but I
didn’t—and I thought about putting it in the paper but then when I
got to thinking about it, you know, and then putting it all
together, piecing it together, and then him telling me that—that he
would never be back. I’d never see him ever again. And I didn’t
know very much about him. He hadn’t told me who his family was, you
know. How can I put something in the paper, you know?

So Louise gathered her things and her kids and moved home to
Baxter Springs. On January 30, 1956, she gave birth to a daughter
and named her Judith.

Louise’s own mother was furious with her, cursed her and
humiliated her. Louise was still married, but her husband was
missing, so she gave the child her maiden name, Bryant. Not long
after, she divorced and then married a local man. They had a son
and daughter, but that didn’t last either. In 1960,
she married Charles Williams and took his last name to become Ethel
Louise Williams. By then she’d given Judith up for adoption. 

As Louise told her story, Judith
remembers trying to keep from laughing in her mother’s face. Look
at this sad poor woman, she thought, telling me that my father was
a big oilman down in Texas. It was a strange way to assuage her
guilt over giving her up for adoption. But now she at least knew
who her birth mother was. She also found out that she had seven
half-siblings and got in touch with one of them, Louise’s oldest
daughter, Diana Stiebens, who lived in Kansas.

As the two were getting to know each other on the phone, Judith
brought up what her mother had told her. “Can you believe this
crazy story that my father was M. A. Wright?” she said. “How
ridiculous is this?”

“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Diana told her. “That is your
father. I met him.”

Stunned but still suspicious, Judith decided to do some research
of her own, just to find out if M. A. Wright was real. She started
with the library in Joplin, figuring that if the man had existed,
and he was as big as her mother had said, there would be some
record of him there. The librarian agreed to help her and a few
days later called back to say she’d found news stories about an M.
A. Wright meeting with politicians. Then she called the Tulsa
library, which sent her an article with a picture of an M. A.
Wright who had been an executive at Exxon.

His name was not Marcus Arrington but
rather Myron Arnold Wright, and he had been born in Blair,
Oklahoma, in 1911. As a child he’d moved with his family across the
state from one tiny town to another, from Altus to Shattuck to
Waynoka. Wright was industrious even in his youth, selling
newspapers as a boy and working his way through Oklahoma State,
where he captained the tennis team while earning a degree in civil
engineering. After graduating in 1933, he passed on a municipal
engineering position in favor of an $87.50-a-month job as an oil
field roustabout for Carter Oil, a division of Standard Oil of New
Jersey.

It was a gamble for an educated young man in the thick of the
Great Depression, eschewing the security of a civil servant’s job
for life on an Oklahoma pipeline gang, living in a $4-a-month
bunkhouse. At the time, the oil industry in the United States was
suffering as a result of market surpluses, a situation compounded
by the country’s broader economic woes. When the business started
to pick up, though, Wright’s engineering background proved
valuable; college graduates with technical skills were few and far
between on the oil patch. He soon moved into management, and the
company relocated him from Oklahoma to New York City.

Mike, as his colleagues called him, held executive jobs at two
Jersey subsidiaries and eventually became the production
coordinator for Jersey itself, overseeing the company’s expansion
in Libya. He earned a reputation, as a profile in the company
magazine
The Lamp
described it, of a corporate everyman
who “enthusiastically tackles the mountain of paper that daily
rises on his desk” and made his way through half a dozen cups of
coffee before lunchtime.

Wright was “a full-briefcase man,” in the words of one
associate. “He always does his homework and always knows what he’s
talking about,” another executive explained. “There’s no magic
about getting ahead in a corporation,” Wright told an interviewer,
“but you do have to work harder than the fellow next to you.” In
hiring, Wright said he looked for similar qualities, judging “how
hard a man works, for one thing, and his determination to succeed.”
But he also looked at a man’s “character, his integrity, basic
honesty, his personal life—all of these things are also extremely
important.”

Wright and his wife, Izetta, an Oklahoma native he’d married
just out of college, settled down in Scarsdale, New York, as he
climbed the ranks of the company. Wright was active in a local
civic group and kept up his tennis game. He passed the summers in
Colorado Springs with his family and filled his office, one visitor
said, “with paintings of Indians and the Old West.” The oil
business over which he presided, meanwhile, was shedding its cowboy
past and growing into a transnational colossus. In April of 1955,
around the time that Ethel Louise Williams boarded the bus for
Tulsa, world oil output hit a record high, with U.S. production
averaging 6.9 million barrels a day. At age 44, Wright “had the
looks of a streamlined John Wayne,” as one interviewer put it, and
had climbed his way to the top of the industry that powered the new
American empire. 

In 1966, Wright was named the CEO of Humble Oil, at the time the
country’s largest producer of crude. That same year he was made
president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. He’d already
served on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Water Commission,
and by the late 1960s he was named to the board of governors for
the U.S. Postal Service by President Richard Nixon. On his desk he
kept a ceramic tiger representing Humble’s famous slogan, “Put a
tiger in your tank.”

In demand on the business speakers’ circuit, Wright hired on a
sharp young economics graduate student named Kenneth Lay as his
ghost writer, who helped him pen speeches decrying the creeping
dangers to capitalism from government regulation and
environmentalism. (A published version of one of his stem-winders
was deemed worthy of a 1974 hatchet job in
The New York
Times
by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who described
Wright as “a man of profound, even perverse, inadequacy in
communication.”) Then, in 1973, Humble and other Jersey companies
were realigned under the name Exxon, and Wright was chosen as the
first chairman and CEO of the new conglomerate, commanding one of
the most profitable and powerful companies in the United States—one
that could project more influence in some corners of the world than
the U.S. government itself. He presided over a corporate structure
known for its ruthlessness and enforced loyalty, along with a value
system that preached faith and piety above all.

Wright finally retired from the company in 1978 and worked for
another decade as the CEO of Cameron Iron Works. After retiring
from Cameron, he returned to a kind of emeritus position at Exxon.
He was in his office in the company’s Houston offices one day in
1990 when he received a surprising phone call. 

At the time she began digging into M. A.
Wright’s life, Judith was divorced and living in Joplin, the mother
of her own teenage son. The details of Wright’s ascent seemed like
dispatches from another universe, and she was seized with the
desire to know whether the man in the newspaper clippings was truly
her father.

One day in 1990, she called the number for Exxon’s corporate
offices in New York and managed to get the chairman’s secretary on
the phone. Judith told her she was trying to reach an M. A. Wright
whom she believed worked for Exxon. The secretary asked what the
call was about. “I’ve found out I’m his illegitimate daughter,” she
said.

The secretary told her she’d have to look into it. “We can’t
help you,” Judith recalls the woman saying when she rang back. “But
you sound like a determined person. You’ll find him.”

Next, Judith tried Exxon’s office in Houston, where she worked
her way through the company’s automated voice mail until she
reached a man in the royalties and deeds department whom she
remembers as Mr. Fitch. Fitch appeared sympathetic to her story and
told her that yes, M. A. Wright did still have an office there. He
put through a message to Wright’s corporate secretary with details
that Judith had given him, like Louise and Diana and Rickey’s
names.

“Those names got you through the door,” Judith recalls Fitch
telling her when he called her back. But Wright had denied that he
was her father, he said, and refused to speak with her. Then Fitch,
for reasons that Judith could only guess at, gave her Wright’s
office number, in exchange for the promise that she wouldn’t call
for a few days.

Judith dialed the number the next day. When Wright’s secretary
put her through, she told him who she was. “This is kind of an
awkward situation,” she said, “but I’ve been told that you are my
biological father.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else,” Judith recalls
Wright saying. She apologized and hung up.

But Wright’s answer did not sit well with
Judith. She didn’t want to accuse the wrong man of having a child
out of wedlock, but the more research she did, the more the details
of Louise’s story seemed to point right back to the man from Exxon.
So she called him again.

This time Wright was unexpectedly polite, and he answered
Judith’s queries with an enigmatic question of his own. “What’s
this about, your grandmother?” she remembers him asking. “Let me
ask you a question,” he said when she seemed confused. “Is your
mother’s husband bothering you wanting money?”

“No, they’ve never asked me for anything,” Judith said. But when
she thought about it, it was strange how her mother had suddenly
sought her out after all those years. “I will be honest with you,”
she told Wright. “I do think it was about money that they looked me
up.”

“Your thoughts are the same as mine,” he said, according to
Judith. “I don’t want to talk anymore, I think this is blackmail.”
And with that, he hung up again.

Judith pulled out the document that her mother had written, the
one telling the story of how she and Wright had met, and called him
back. Before he could get out another denial, she said, “I have a
transcript of detailed things that only you and my birth mother
would know. I want to send it to you.”

“Read it,” he said.

She did. Before she finished, she remembers, she could hear him
crying on the other end of the line. “I owe you an apology,” he
said. “This was not what I thought it was. You have not gotten what
you deserved.” 

After that conversation, Judith would
call and speak to Wright regularly. They talked about their lives,
Judith says, and he peppered her with questions about her family.
Wright would never fully admit to being her father, and after a
while she decided not to press him on it and risk what little
relationship they had. “I said, ‘All I want is just to meet you,’”
she later told me. “‘Just meet me one time. I’ll go away and never
see you again.’” He said it wouldn’t do either of them any good to
meet. “I have a family, too, you know,” he said. His first
wife, Izetta had passed away in 1967, but he’d married again two
years later, to Josephine Primm Wright, who had five children from
her first marriage. And he had his own daughter to think about.

But Judith says that he apologized, at least, that he couldn’t
seek out more of a connection with her. “He said, ‘This is not your
fault,’” she told me. “If he said it once he said it a hundred
times.” He warned her to be careful around her birth mother’s
family, even though he was never clear on why exactly. “You do not
belong in that circle,” he told her.

One day in the late summer of 1991, finally feeling like she
wanted answers, she called and confronted him with the facts she
had acquired in her research. “I know you were married at the time”
of the affair, she told him.

“A lot of what you are saying is true,” he said.

“I know that you are my biological father!”

Wright stayed on the line but didn’t say anything. She repeated
herself, and still he remained silent. Finally, she hung up on
him.

Over a year passed before she called him again. When she did,
his secretary, whom Judith had come to know well, picked up. “Mr.
Wright passed away,” she said.

Some people might say that what Judith
did next was about greed. But those people wouldn’t understand how
close she’d grown to the man she now believed was her father.
Precisely because she felt so much for him, she also felt aggrieved
by his silent rejection, his refusal to own up to her existence or
complete the fragmented story she’d begun to assemble. “My thoughts
weren’t about money but that I could find the truth,” she told me.
“This was a big mystery to me. It was like a jigsaw puzzle.”

She’d never asked Wright for anything when he was alive, except
for the chance to meet him. But now that he was dead, she began to
think that maybe she was owed something. That phrase he’d once
uttered was lodged in her mind like a splinter:
You have not
gotten what you deserved.

A few weeks after Wright’s death, she got a lawyer down in
Tulsa, a friendly ex–Marine Corps JAG officer named Terry Funk,
to file a claim on the Texas estate of Myron A. Wright in Houston.
Wright had died with a substantial fortune; how much exactly Judith
didn’t know. But a portion of his will later released in court
showed that he held $7 million in stocks and bonds alone. Most of
his assets were to be divided between his second wife, Josephine,
and his daughter from his first marriage—unless, of course, Judith
could prove that he was her father as well.