Word: neill
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...helped put together the group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and plotted a run for Governor. It was as if someone had thrown a cosmic switch and his future came into focus. "Let's face it, George was not real happy [in Midland]," says oilman Joseph O'Neill, one of his closest friends. "It's the first-son syndrome. You want to live up to the very high expectations set by your father, but at the same time you want to go your own way, so you end up going kicking and screaming down the exact same path...
...friend O'Neill told him he should learn the oil business by working for an established company a few years. George was too impatient for that. He hired himself out for $100 a day as a landman, searching mineral-rights titles in county courthouses around West Texas. "I basically taught myself," he says. Bush's move to Midland is at the heart of his official myth. Driving out in an old Cutlass with $20,000 and a dream, scraping by in tatty chinos and beat-up shoes. It's as close as the son of a President...
...talk about the Trilateral Commission. And I look over their shoulders, and there was Hance. I take my hat off to him." Bush lost, 47% to 53%. Never again would he let a rival paint him as an elitist. "George has got a lot folksier since then," says O'Neill...
...prospects; Spectrum had a network of investors. The merger doubled the size of Bush's operation, and the Spectrum people wanted to upgrade his image with fancy furniture and a company car, but Bush wouldn't hear of it. "Those were the doodah days in Midland," says O'Neill's wife Jan, "and a lot of people couldn't resist--jets, boats, cars. George didn't go for that." He liked the image...
...Then there was actress Marion Davies. When her lover, publisher William Randolph Hearst, fell on hard times, she sold off her real estate, stocks and jewelry to keep his creditors at bay. There was the scandal of Charlie Chaplin, who married the very young Oona O'Neill and actually got to live happily ever after with her. And of course Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, battling and drinking in their epic '50s melodrama. Ernest Hemingway said all great love affairs end in tragedy: either disillusion sets in and people "settle" or separate, or one member of the affair dies, leaving...