Late last week my mom texted me, “Only the good die young.”
Then, “Oscar Wyatt.”
The 101-year-old oil tycoon was primarily famous for turning an $800 loan in 1955 into a pipeline company that became the Coastal Corporation — a national energy conglomerate that earned him billions.
He passed away in Houston last week “peacefully of old age and natural causes,” which, I’ve been told, was not at all how he lived.
“Who puts his own plane into a dive while proposing marriage to scare his lover into saying yes? Who shoots feral hogs from a helicopter at his South Texas ranch to entertain (or shock) his wife’s hoity-toity guests?” Mimi Swartz wrote last week in Texas Monthly. “I’m sure there are a lot of folks who will only attend Oscar Wyatt’s funeral to make sure he’s dead.”
My mom, Carol Messer, worked as in-house counsel for several subsidiaries of Coastal from 1986 until it was acquired by El Paso Corporation in 2001. She was based in Houston’s 9 Greenway Plaza — also known as The Coastal Tower, or, as employees in the building used to call it: “The Tower of Terror.”
That was all Oscar, she said. Larger than life, hilarious, terrifying, sentimental, and offensive. Some called him “amoral.” He was an infamous scoundrel whose exploits were so wild that they were nearly impervious to exaggeration.
That particular euphemism — “Tower of Terror” — has never been reported, as far as I can tell.
And it sent me down a rabbit hole of research. In the process, I learned more about my own family. Oscar shaped the lives of millions of Texans, including mine. But if I’d heard his name before last week, I didn’t remember it.
It turns out mine and Oscar’s worlds were more closely linked than I could have guessed.
In his life, Oscar was the subject of weighty features in Vanity Fair and Texas Monthly. In his death, he was given a lengthy obituary in The New York Times. But outside of the oil industry, Houston, and the highest tiers of government, the general public wasn’t particularly familiar with Oscar. What’s more, I found that very little has been publicly shared by his former colleagues and employees who worked alongside him in the building.
It’s easy to see why. I reached out to a dozen former lawyers, executives, and managers after his death. Seven declined to speak about him at all. Three preferred anonymity. Two were willing to use their actual names. In part, as my mom will tell you, “Nothing in today’s anti-woke employment environment could touch the oil and gas business in the early ‘80s and ‘90s in Houston.”
Mimi Swartz’s piece was titled, “Oscar Wyatt Typified the Texas Tycoon. We May Never See His Like Again.” The more research I did, the more I wondered about that second half.
I was ready to say we’re not likely to see such a larger-than-life, archetypal, rabble-rousing figure again — one who defies presidential orders, broke the law, and made billions — but frankly our president fits a lot of those descriptors. Donald Trump’s just not as cunning or sentimental. And he doesn’t hunt whitetail deer in South Texas.
In truth, from what I can gather, Wyatt was less like Trump and more like the love child of Jay Gatsby, Anna Wintour, and J.R. Ewing — the ruthless oil baron from “Dallas.” He enjoyed riding horses, carrying guns, and hunting. He also hosted luxurious parties with guests like Grace Kelly, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Liza Minelli, and John Travolta. He employed “his own ad hoc intelligence community,” public relations executives, lawyers, and detectives.
In his obituary last week, The New York Times called Oscar “one of the last of the storied wildcatters” whose “hydra-headed empire” became a conduit for oil imported from the Middle East into the Americas, raising him to immense power, with which he “courted presidents and dictators, dabbled in foreign intrigue, and went to prison for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government under the cover of a United Nations oil-for-food program.”
His business was huge.
In the 1990s, Coastal’s revenues exceeded $12 billion and had 20,000 employees, 962 gasoline stations in 33 states, and fleets of oil tankers and trucks, according to the Times, but he also reportedly “reneged on contracts, left municipalities short of power, raided corporate rivals, battled lawsuits and hostile takeovers, paid fines and civil misconduct penalties, and left a trail of enemies.”
My mom and several other former colleagues I spoke to over the last week observed that Oscar enjoyed that his spotlight enabled him to get close to presidents and dictators — and he was prepared to subject everyone else in his company to scrutiny, too.
A government relations manager who worked for Coastal in the 1990s told me that all Coastal employees were expected to do work travel on personal time and only through Coastal’s in-house travel service. If you failed to comply, your name was put on a list and published to the division and corporate president as a warning.
In one story, Oscar wandered around the floors asking random employees what they were doing, my mom said. If he wasn’t satisfied with their answer, he’d fire them.
It wasn’t unusual, the government relations manager noted, to have Oscar interrupt a conversation between two colleagues and admonish them to “get back to work.”
According to employee urban legend, if you were on the tower’s elevator and he got on, you were expected to get off — or you might wish you had. The first time my mom met Oscar, she was leaving for lunch in that same crowded elevator in 1987 when it stopped on the executive floor. Oscar, whose jowls she said were unmistakable, got on.
“No one was moving,” my mom said, “so I breathed a sigh of relief.”
Then, Oscar looked back at my mom in mock horror and said loudly, “Honey, how much weight have you gained?” She was 5’2,” seven months pregnant with my older brother, and worried she looked like she was carrying twins. She mumbled that she didn’t know the answer. The rest of the crowd in the elevator snickered.
“Seriously, how far along are you?” he asked again.
“Seven months,” she muttered.
He shook his head and said, “Well, you’re in for a world of hurt.”
‘The Only Woman in the World I Truly Trust’
In the pantheon of Oscar stories, that one is “pretty tame,” my mom admits. But it’s a classic example of how he regularly engaged even lower-level employees whom he didn’t know.
A few years later, in April 1991, Texas Monthly’s Jan Jarboe Russell crafted a profile of Wyatt titled “Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog.” In photographs, he appears lumbering with shrewd eyes, wearing pinstripes and combed-back hair. Russell wrote that he was “paunchy, with skin the color of biscuits and jowls the shape of hams.” He was 66 at the time. I wouldn’t be born for another two months.
In that interview, Oscar told Russell, “I’m a male chauvinist.” He added, “If you don’t like it, sorry.”
He had no qualms about commenting on women’s bodies, including my mom’s, but she also pointed out that Wyatt was far ahead of the curve at a time when it was extremely difficult to even get hired as a female lawyer.
“It was not for sissies, but if you could hold your own, you could get promoted,” my mom said, noting that many of the women who graduated in her law school class had a hard time getting a position as a lawyer at all.
“It was better than most places where we didn’t even have a chance,” she added. Oscar allowed women a seat at the table, even if it meant being subjected to his jokes and barbs.
My mom was born in 1950s Georgia to a family with three boys, so the fact that she eventually had a tremendously successful career in corporate law meant that she had to learn how and when to pick fights, how to handle demeaning and inappropriate comments, and how to stand up for herself when she was underestimated. It makes sense that her years in Oscar’s tower were where she was most challenged and forced to rise to the occasion.
“It was not an environment for the faint of heart,” my mom says. “There were things that were maddening about it, but at the end of the day, it was probably a huge benefit to me.”
How much do I — the rare female head of a Texas newsroom, who has built a portfolio of sexual harassment investigations holding politicians of all stripes to account — owe to men like Oscar and the legacies they left?
With his immense wealth, his personal life rivaled his professional — at least in terms of intrigue. He split his time between a villa in the south of France, his River Oaks mansion, and his 9,000-acre South Texas ranch in Duval County called Tasajillo, the Times reported.
“If Oscar were marooned in Alaska,” his fourth wife, Lynn Wyatt, said in a 1984 interview with The Wall Street Journal, “he’d survive somehow and by the next week he’d probably be doing business.”
Lynn was a beautiful and glamorous international socialite who charmed Jordan’s King Hussein with her homemade zucchini bread, per Texas Monthly, which reported that the couple, who married in 1963, were known in Houston society as “Beauty and the Beast.”
Lynn covered Town & Country and was featured in Vanity Fair, where photos showcase her voluminous blonde hair, gigantic glistening diamonds, and piercing green eyes. They were married for 62 years, and Lynn herself was the subject of constant gossip — including an alleged affair with Prince Rainier of Monaco in the 1980s. Her polished and privileged life will be given the documentary treatment at Round Top Film Festival next month.
In 1991, Oscar gave one particular jaw-dropping quote about his wife I’ve been turning over in my head. He told Texas Monthly that his “favorite” rumor about himself was easy to pick out.
“Years ago, there was a story making the rounds that I threw Lynn down the stairs when she was seven months pregnant,” he said. “Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? For one thing, just think how expensive that would have been.”
According to my mom, Oscar also kept a suite at the hotel next door to the office and was often seen going in between the buildings with his two German Shepherds and one or two blondes in tow. (He once told Vanity Fair he had nine pet German shepherds, some of which were trained to attack on site.)
His first wife told Russell, “Oscar is the only man I know that has a mattress strapped to his back for convenience.” And later, when she asked about the rumor that he once had cancer, Wyatt mischievously answered his interviewer, “Cancer. Hmmm. Maybe I have. What was her last name?”
One of Oscar’s German shepherds was named Lady of Tasajillo, after the family ranch. “She’s the only woman in the world I truly trust,” he told the Monthly. “Tasa” appeared beside him on the magazine’s cover, as she often did in breakfast meetings and at his office.
“Oscar’s German Shepherds were his emotional support animals long before that was a thing,” my mom said. “There was another urban legend that one of the dogs bit a pizza delivery man when being walked by the mail boy, and — when animal control services arrived to take the dog to get tested — he swapped her for a dog from the pound.”
A Man of Contradictions
The more I looked, the more strange and contradictory stories I found.
And it turned out that my 91-year-old grandpa — my dad’s father, Henry Messer — also worked with Oscar in the 1960s. They met at an offsite well when my grandpa was in his 20s. In my dad’s telling, my grandpa, who was later with Mokeen Oil Company, ran a gathering plant for gas fields close to Baffin Bay near the coast. The oil and gas wells were metered there — measuring what came down the well and sent to the market, via Coastal.
“Coastal tended to manipulate the measurement on their end to look like they were buying less gas, but dad was careful to compare input to output and catch those manipulations,” my dad said about Oscar’s employees’ dealings. “He didn’t really think much of it. Shenanigans seemed a normal part of the business, and he was always on the watch for inconsistencies.”
“He always watched Oscar because he was tricky,” my dad said. He was in third grade and used to play on the equipment, sometimes bonking his head after being warned to be careful.
Former colleagues tell me Oscar was somehow both tough as nails and a gentle giant. An angry lion who called nearly everyone “baby,” including Texas Monthly’s Russell and Vanity Fair’s Marie Brenner. Tense and moody, with an outrageous sense of humor. Sentimental, even an emotional crier — but also boorish, brutish, and unapologetic. He wanted to be liked, but he was prepared to make an audience angry.
Though Coastal’s employees whispered from inside his Tower of Terror, so, too, did many come under his loyal protection. Stories swirled of Oscar helping strangers pay their rent or hospital bills, sometimes after reading about them in the newspaper.
At an Aruba refinery, one former executive at Coastal who worked with Wyatt for many years told me that a strike was being threatened over multiple issues, including a requirement that all workers wear steel-toed boots. Employees were struggling to acquire them outside of the U.S. When Wyatt learned of the problem, he personally ordered them for everyone and ensured they were worn, according to the former executive. He was also known to offer his private jet to fly employees to Houston to receive medical care from his friend Michael DeBakey, whom he believed to be the best doctor in the country, the former executive said.
I’m told that he enjoyed sharing a Kroger rotisserie chicken and coleslaw on his jet, and his Houston Chronicle obituary claims he sent thousands of smoked turkeys to his employees. But he also had a habit of forcing his employees to bend to his most arbitrary whims.
Ron Milam, now a history professor at Texas Tech University, worked for the Coastal Corporation and its affiliates from 1973 to 1999. Milam shared one memory of a meeting that Oscar had catered with his favorite food: rice cakes.
“We finished the important meeting and had to go act quickly as the futures markets were closing, but he made us stay and eat those damn rice cakes,” said Milam.
Oscar believed his salary as CEO should never be more than 10 times the salary of his workers, Milam said. At the time, this was remarkably rare.
Many of Oscar’s former colleagues attribute his ambitiousness, his sense of empathy, and his fear of failure to his humble beginnings.
Oscar was born in Beaumont in 1924.
When his father left, he was raised by his mother Eva in Navasota, where he was on his own financially from the age of 13, according to several news reports. He worked on a farm and as a physician’s driver and assistant — even helping deliver babies. He also reportedly worked in a gas station before earning his pilot’s license at just 16. He was a star tackle on the Navasota High School football team. Then, during World War II, he volunteered at the age of 17 to serve as an Army Air Forces bomber pilot.
In 1945, Oscar’s plane crashed in the Pacific while delivering supplies to an air base; his jaw was broken, both of his legs were crushed, and his head was fractured in seven places.
“On one occasion, he was presumed dead, covered with a white sheet, and transported with deceased service members until discovered alive,” said his obituary in the Houston Chronicle.
Once he recovered, he worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico before earning a mechanical engineering degree in 1949 from Texas A&M University, according to the Times. The following year, he began selling drill bits on oil fields — then he started buying natural gas and selling it to pipeline operators.
Five years later, he founded Coastal.
But he didn’t stop at oil. Within ten years, he’d started a cattle operation that eventually grew to include five cattle ranching divisions across seven counties, according to his obituary.
Alongside rumors of misdeeds, investigations, legal violations, and later criminal convictions, Oscar also was rumored to have made large anonymous contributions to myriad causes, including the families of slain police officers.
Noblesse oblige has seemingly fallen out of fashion for the wealthiest among us — when was the last time you heard about Elon Musk donating to a hospital instead of secretly funding a political effort?
The way Oscar discussed “Arabs” and “white slaves” offended many.
It’s also true that in 2024, he received a lifetime achievement award from the founding chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens in Corpus Christi in recognition for his civil rights advocacy.
‘I Didn’t Give a Damn’
Of course, Oscar’s most notorious relationship — the one that ultimately sent him to prison — was with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Oscar met him in 1972 and soon became one of the largest importers of Iraqi oil in the country. Over the years, he publicly and privately urged both the first President Bush and his son not to invade Iraq.
Then, in 1990, 21 American oil workers were taken hostage by the Iraqi government. Incredibly, Wyatt took it upon himself to travel to Baghdad with $500,000 worth of medical supplies — over the direct objections of then-President Bush. He secured their release by negotiating with Hussein personally, The Washington Post reported at the time.
At the end of the negotiations, Hussein reportedly held Oscar’s hand and told his cabinet, “You see there are Americans who tell the truth.” None of the hostages worked for Coastal, but all the same, Oscar brought them home to Houston just before Christmas on the corporate jet, where his crew made them Texas chili in a crockpot — and wept in relief with their families.
The following January he warned in a speech to the Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce that a war in the Middle East would become a “meat grinder” for America’s sons. He choked back tears; people stormed out. Afterwards, according to the Monthly, Wyatt was about as popular in Corpus Christi as was Saddam himself.
By 2007, Oscar was indicted on federal charges of paying millions in bribes to Hussein. During the scandal, NBC News reported that Oscar had provided the Iraqi government with information about when the United States would invade and how many soldiers would be sent. His legal team argued the documentation of that alleged tipoff — in the form of an Iraq State Oil Marketing Organization employee’s diary — should be excluded from his trial, writing, “This document essentially alleges that Wyatt has committed the deplorable crime of treason and aided an enemy of the United States.”
Many have theorized over the years that Oscar’s position on Iraq came down to his time in World War II, and subsequent nightmares of war, just as much as it had to do with his business interests.
“He never believed Saddam was anything but the dictator he was, but he believed it was in the best interest of the United States to maintain a relationship with an Arab country hostile to Iran in the region,” said one of the former executives who spoke to me this week.
“Many criticized him because of it, but Wyatt believed — as much as he wanted their oil — that Iraq was a vital counterweight to the Ayatollah in Iran,” he added.
Hussein was executed in Baghdad a year before Wyatt was tried in New York, where he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud. He served 9 months in prison before being released in 2008.
It was one of his last legal scandals — but certainly not the first.
The earliest was in 1960, according to the Wyatt Ranches Foundation, when he was jailed for disturbing the peace in Abilene. More than a decade later, when Coastal failed to fulfill gas contracts to Austin and San Antonio in the 1970s, it was sued and ordered to refund more than $1.2 billion to customers. It was a scandal so meaty that it knocked Watergate off the airwaves.
The following decade, Wyatt pleaded guilty to federal oil-pricing violations, for which he paid $9 million to the Treasury and another $1 million in penalties, according to the Times.
The thing is, he always seemed to find a way to earn that money back later — through his frugality, international exploits, and rabid commitment to his business interests above all else.
As Oscar told reporter Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair’s April 1991 issue: “Remember, baby, your Texas buddy told you that bullshit walks and money talks.”
I’m sure we’ll see that belief embodied in a larger-than-life Texan again. Just maybe not in the form of a man who also gave so much to others, openly cried over the deaths of soldiers, insulted my mom, and knew my grandpa.