The Oilman's Daughter Read Free Page B

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. 

Six
    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