The Cowboy and his Elephant (8 page)

His interest in Texaco, because of his granduncle, went deeper than stock and assets. His father had sat on its board. The Texaco brand was part of the Norris family legend. Bob had no use for the company’s managers, who he felt were seriously out of touch with reality. How could they have done such a stupid thing? he wanted to know. Of course they knew that Pennzoil had already tendered an offer for Getty, which had been accepted. Why take the risk?

The company’s CEO did not feel beholden to the shareholders, Bob was convinced, and that angered him. These were thousands of small and large investors who stood to lose everything, and Bob felt responsible to them as individuals. He was not just one man or one investor. He was the grandnephew of Texaco’s founder, and it was up to him to defend the company from itself.

Bob hated the business world. He seethed when Texaco’s CEO told him he was “naive” and warned him to stay out of the fray. Of course he was naive: He was a cowboy who knew animals, not balance sheets. But he knew that he had a few lessons to teach, and he replied to Texaco’s CEO with straight talk. “You put on your pants one leg at a time, same as me,” he told him. “Hell,
yes
, I’m naive. I
know
I’m naive. But I also know the smell of bullshit. I call a spade a spade. I learned a long time ago not to tell a lie. You never have to worry about what the hell you said when you always tell the truth. Guys like you live in a different world. You lie, and you set people up, and you do all kinds of underhanded things.
You don’t know how to deal with someone who is straight. It makes you squirrelly.”

As it happened, Carl Icahn suddenly became one of Texaco’s larger stockholders, quickly loading up his portfolio with Texaco stock in hope of a windfall brought about by the calamity of the bankruptcy. Icahn, the fabled greenmailer, maverick investor, and takeover king, viewed the “little stockholders” like Bob as hayseeds who were over their heads in New York City’s corporate offices.

But Texaco’s Equity Committee had already elected Bob its chairman, before Icahn had bought in. At one of the committee’s later meetings in the Waldorf Hotel, Icahn took his place at the other end of a long table and began to harangue the whole committee. He shook his finger at them, scolding them as if they were dunces. Bob leaned over on his hip, reached in his pants pocket, and pulled out a steel-handled knife ten-inches long. Honed on a whetstone sharp as a razor and needle-pointed, the knife was designed to carve meat. As Icahn watched, Bob jabbed the knifepoint into a stack of documents on the table. “We’re not going to take this from you, Carl,” Bob told him. “If you try this again I promise you I’ll not mess with these lawyers around this table. You and I will settle this personally.”

Icahn left the meeting, but ten minutes later he called Bob to apologize, then asked, genuinely confused, “Why don’t you like me?”

“Hell, I never said I didn’t like you, Carl. You’re just like a
pet rattlesnake, that’s all. But I appreciate the apology anyway.”

“Why don’t you go back and run your ranch? Let me run Texaco.”

“I respect you and your word, Carl, but I know you’ll pull Texaco apart.”

“Oh, God, Bob. I’d
never
do that. I’d need to raise thirteen billion dollars to do that, and it would take months.”

Bob said, “Gee, Carl, we all have our problems.”

A
s the bankruptcy negotiations dragged on, Bob saw that Texaco’s CEO did not want to settle. He wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to decide on the matter instead, while everyone else seemed to acknowledge that the Supreme Court probably would never even review the case. Clearly someone had to step in. “We’re running out of time and bullets,” Bob told the Equity Committee.

In a bold, straightforward move, Bob sat down with Pennzoil’s CEO and founder. Face-to-face, he named a settlement figure—$3.01 billion. “Take it or leave it,” Bob told Hugh Leidke.

The money would come from the portfolios of shareholders like Bob. But settling for $3 billion was better than paying the original $11 billion levy. The figures whirled in front of Bob’s eyes as the two men talked. To his utter relief, after a tense moment’s deliberation, Leidke said, “Bob, I can live with that.”

_____

N
ow the bankruptcy fight was over.

Bob was no longer Texaco’s Man in the White Hat.

And something more—he was no longer the Marlboro Man.

O
ne morning Bob woke up to facts that were only then emerging about the dangers of smoking cigarettes. These were not part of the cowboy myth that Bob believed in. What was this Marlboro thing that had been good to him for twelve years? he asked himself one day as he looked in the shaving mirror. Then during a week when he was traveling on a commercial “shoot” in Texas, he told the advertising agency’s producer, “This is going to be my last deal.” He thought, My kids are calling me a hypocrite to my face, and they are right. Being the Marlboro Man is a kick, but the kick is over.

The producer seemed amazed. “No one ever quit as a Marlboro cowboy before,” he told Bob.

“That’s probably true,” Bob replied.

“You can’t.”

“I just did.”

T
he Old West had changed. The young ranchers now were raising kangaroos, ostriches, and llamas; they worked the stock markets on Wall Street as well as the stockyards. People
were being told to avoid red meat. Cheaper beef was coming over the borders of Mexico and Canada. The Marlboro Man was a broken icon. His children now had their own children; he was older; his horse Big Bob was sunken eyed and getting swaybacked. No one needed Bob quite as they used to.

Where had the time gone? he wondered. The kids and Jane and I were having a good time and then the end of it rolled around awfully fast, and it left a void. It was the same with life. It just came and went, it seemed, and I was too busy living it to watch it pass by.

He thought about it. The lambs rescued, Lulu lost, his horses now old and tired, and the herds of cows moved on—he was an animal lover, and it was over. “It just came and went.”

He asked himself, What more can there be?

A
my searched with the tip of her trunk for the lost scents of her mother, the Sengwa, and the river below the falls. Her eyes could not see over the steel door. She tentatively explored the air and paused her trunk over the nose of a horse standing in front of the stall. Its smell blended with baled alfalfa and the pungence of Western cows. The horse flared its nostrils. Amy’s trunk turned inquisitively upward to catch the scent of Bob’s aftershave. He was sitting on Big Bob, and when he spoke to her, she lowered her trunk out of sight below the door.

Bob had attended the unloading supervised by the owner of the baby elephants. They had arrived in a horse trailer, backing down the ramp into the morning sun one by one. This new place smelled and looked not unlike Africa, with puffy cloud-filled skies and green hills, dun grass, and sagebrush.
The sounds of motors, which the babies feared, and of men, of whom they were uncertain, filled the dry cool air that came off the snow-peaked mountains. The six babies searched for a place to hide.

Bob had never felt sorrier for any living creatures. These six orphans were just babies without any grown-up creature like themselves to lead them. Everything they smelled and saw must have seemed very strange. Bob felt the natural urge to calm them, but he knew he would make them more afraid if he tried. He watched as their owner pulled them along by their trunks into the barn gallery and straight down the covered walkway to the stalls.

Bob stood on the outside looking in. “They sure are cute,” he said.

“They’re not properly weaned yet,” their owner, Barry Jackson, said. “They’ll eat some hay, but they need milk.” He looked around him. “I got buckets in my truck. They need to be fed right now.”

Of course they would be hungry. They had come from Africa only days ago, Jackson told Bob, who could not take his eyes off them. He did not know what it was that attracted him to them. He had never seen an elephant up close like this before, and he decided that baby elephants were just more of almost everything than he had ever imagined. They looked at him with expressions that he thought showed intelligence and emotion, as if they were asking him, with their brown eyes, to protect them.

Both men got to work. The milk was poured into the
buckets, and Bob fetched oats and grain from the horses’ bins and filled a tub with fresh water. By the time he got back to the stalls, Jackson was squatting down feeding one of the babies. The milk was sloshing out of the bucket onto the floor. He was impatient, cursing under his breath.

Bob patted the baby elephant’s head, stroked her side, and talked to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, just as he would talk to a skittish colt. He looked at Jackson. “I think you might want to be a little more patient with that,” he said. “She’s scared and too upset to eat right now.”

Jackson darted him a glance.

“Mind if I try?” asked Bob.

Jackson stood up, clearly glad to hand over the task.

Bob stayed with the baby for an hour or more. When he next looked up, Jackson was gone. The little baby had eaten some of the oats and drunk half of the milk in the bucket. She was calmer now, but when he touched her skin she trembled and shied away. He straightened up. “Quiet down, now,” he told her. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Jackson was getting ready to leave.

“What’s their feeding schedule?” Bob asked him.

“I’ll come back, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I was asking how often they need to be helped to eat. I’m not trying to get in your way, Mr. Jackson. They’re your animals, and you’re renting the stalls from me, fair and square.”

Jackson sighed. “They need constant attention,” he told Bob. “But it’s not possible, not the way things are. They’ll
have to get by. I’ll be around a few times a day. They’ll be fine.”

“Then what are your plans for them?” asked Bob.

“Sell them off. I already put out the word. It shouldn’t take long.”

“To a zoo?”

“Or a circus. I’ve got my price, and anyone who meets it is fine with me.”

“What is it—their price—if you don’t mind my asking?”

He paused a couple of seconds. “Eighteen thousand dollars each.”

Bob whistled through his teeth. He had no idea what elephants cost. Maybe eighteen thousand dollars was a bargain; he calculated more than a hundred thousand dollars in total for the six elephant babies.

“How the heck did you get here?” asked Bob. Baby elephants in southern Colorado? For an importer to bring them here all the way from Africa to sell them to zoos and circuses required a word or two of explanation.

“I’m pretty sure they’ll sell in Mexico,” Jackson replied. “They have a lot of circuses with animals down there. I hope so, anyhow.”

“And this is the closest you could get them?” Bob persisted.

“This is where the airplane landed. I didn’t want to load them up in another airplane without knowing where I’d be selling them.”

Bob nodded. In the end it didn’t matter. They were his
boarders now, and he felt partly responsible. “It’s quite an investment you’ve got there,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s worth looking out for.”

He nodded. “I didn’t count on it getting this cold. Elephants don’t like the cold. It’s why I’m renting the covered stalls from you—to keep them warm.”

Jackson said good-bye, and Bob went back into the barn.

A
fter checking on the babies one last time that evening around dusk, he went home to tell Jane. He knew she would be excited, too. She collected elephant figurines on a marble-topped table in a corner of their living room and over the years had acquired a miniature herd of Asian and African elephants, babies and cows and bulls. Taken together as a group they represented the many sides of a long elephant-human history. There were cute, cuddly Dumbo figurines in light pastels, and some of idealized, helpless baby elephants that were hardly meant to seem real at all. Then there were proud, aggressive bulls with trunks raised and ears out as if they were frozen in the act of charging; and there were female elephants, rounder than the bulls, and yet commanding too, sheltering their young by their sides. Altogether the table tableau was a conversation piece hard for anyone visiting the house to miss.

Jane loved her elephants’ mystical appeal. It was said that Asian elephants brought good fortune to pregnant human mothers who walked under their bellies three times.
By extension, they brought luck in general. But they had to be facing east, the superstition went, or else the magic was gone. If by some chance in dusting them, one of her figurines was turned away from facing the right direction, Jane always turned it back.

To Bob the figurines represented something different. The idea of elephants appealed to him as great beings that were both powerful
and
vulnerable in the sense that they were easily hunted, sighted, and shot, yet they were strong enough to defeat any enemy on even terms.

“They’re hardly bigger than the figurines,” he told Jane, wanting her to understand that the orphans were not difficult to manage. “Wait till you see them,” he said. “They’re
so
darned cute. They come up to my belt buckle.”

Jane almost laughed. She could see he was already falling in love. But she focused on the practicalities of keeping the babies: It was October and getting cold at night, and the babies did not have mothers to take care of them. “How will they survive?” she asked Bob.

“I’ll put heat lamps in their stalls to keep them warm.”

“What about their owner?”

Bob told her, “To him they could be any damn thing.”

“What a shame.”

Jane saw in Bob’s eyes at that moment an excitement that had gone out of them in the last months. The arrival of the baby elephants had revived his curiosity; he had found new animal friends like old Lulu.

“The grandchildren would love to see a baby elephant,” she said.