Luck of the Irish

Even blase Hollywood was impressed by the invitations from Houston. They were in gold, on white doeskin. For this week's opening of his $21 million Shamrock hotel, hustling Oilman Glenn McCarthy had requested the company of a trainload of movie and radio stars. He had the forethought to rent a Santa Fe Super Chief to carry his guests free to Texas and back. As a St. Patrick's Day touch, McCarthy had ordered 2,500 shamrocks flown over from Eire.

Some 2,000 of Houston's wealthy and others forked over $42 a head to eat imported pate de foie gras in the Shamrock's Emerald Room, rub elbows with the notables, and tour the hotel which McCarthy had built in an effort to make Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria look like a lodging house.

Roughneck Start. What the guests saw were 18 floors decorated in an eclectic style advertised as "the best of all periods." There were seven acres of grounds, a huge fan-shaped swimming pool, 500 paintings in the guest rooms, employees in 25 different uniforms, and three penthouse apartments that would rent furnished for $2,100 a month apiece (the rooms below began at $6 a night).

All in all, the Shamrock was the kind of sweeping, lavish gesture that Texans love --and that 41-year-old Glenn McCarthy loved to make.

When hotelmen warned him that he could not make money on such a hotel in these days of high operating costs and falling revenues, McCarthy snapped: "I went into the oil business in 1933 when everybody said I was a damn fool. Now they're saying it again about my hotel."

A 200-pound, hell-raising son of a Beaumont (Tex.) oilworker, McCarthy worked in the oilfields, began wildcatting on his own in 1933. He was in & out of the money before he brought in the League City field in 1939 and put his fortune, now estimated at around $50 million, on a reasonably permanent basis. He branched out into the natural-gas business, began picking up choice real estate, including Houston's profitable, 22-story Shell building.

Empire Abuilding. In the past three years, McCarthy has galloped off in all directions. He bought a radio station, a cluster of throwaway newspapers, a Detroit steel plant (to get pipe), export and import companies, a chemical firm.

With all his business responsibilities, harddriving, hard-drinking egoist Glenn McCarthy (he keeps a full-length color photograph of himself in his office) is still as truculent as he was in his days as an oilfield roughneck. The tales of his business deals are almost matched by the stories of his rough & tumble brawling which has caused him to be barred from more than one Houston club. He likes expensive hobbies. Last year his planes came in one, two and four in the Bendix air race. He is rumored to be spending $100,000 to enter a car in this year's Indianapolis auto race. A crack shot, he spends much of his spare time hunting on his 15,000-acre ranch with his wife and five children. There are weeks when they see little of him. He likes to dash around the country in one of his two planes, sometimes takes the whole family along.

The Shamrock opening alone was not enough to keep McCarthy busy this week. The next day, he had the world premiere in two Houston theaters of The Green Promise. An earnestly wholesome movie about the 4-H Clubs, it was the first film of Glenn McCarthy Productions. Says McCarthy: "Of course I have several other things planned, but I can't tell about them now . . . You don't just stand still, you know."

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