Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [103]
Since 1953, Edgar and Clyde had spent extended summer vacations as guests of Clint Murchison at the Del Charro, a hotel he owned in La Jolla, in southern California. Edgar had been a regular visitor to the town since the thirties, and told the press it was a place where he ‘felt God was near.’ His annual pilgrimage was dedicated to the horseracing at nearby Del Mar, as was that of Murchison and Sid Richardson, racing refugees from Texas, where betting on horses was illegal.
Murchison had bought the Del Charro in a fit of pique when another establishment failed to place a complete floor at his disposal. ‘Our father which art in Dallas,’ went the prayer of the hotel staff, ‘Murchison be thy name.’ The Lone Star flag fluttered in the Pacific breeze when the millionaire and his pals were in residence. Celebrities such as John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor and a couple of her husbands, along with the less famous but much monied, came and went in private planes. The hotel was small, and its astronomical room charges – the equivalent of $1,000 a night at today’s rates – drastically limited the clientele.
After Murchison took over in 1953, Edgar and Clyde never stayed anywhere else. Their stay in Bungalow A, one of seven reserved for the tycoon’s special friends, became an annual ordeal for local FBI agents. A respectful tap at the door would bring first a delay, then Clyde snapping, ‘What the hell do you want?’ He is remembered as petulant, unreasonable, ‘madder than a scorpion’ over trifles. Even Murchison nicknamed him ‘Killer.’
Former agent Harry Whidbee long kept the list of Edgar’s vacation requirements: direct phone lines to Washington; three oscillating fans – the Director detested air-conditioning; new light bulbs for every lamp; two 5" x 8" unlined white paper pads; two rolls Scotch tape, with dispenser; six sharpened No. 2 pencils; two bottles Scripps Permanent Royal Blue ink, No. 52 – no one else in the Bureau was allowed to use this brand; a basket of fruit; and whiskey – Jack Daniel’s for Edgar, Haig & Haig for Clyde, gift-wrapped and paid for by the local Agent in Charge, whether he liked it or not.
There was panic one year when subordinates forgot a vital item – Edgar’s favorite ice cream. When he insisted on having it, late at night, agents persuaded a local manufacturer to open his plant after hours. An FBI stenographer then dressed up as a waitress to serve the boss his precious dessert.
Even on vacation, the pair were rarely seen in anything but suit and tie. Edgar’s alternative uniform, a staff member recalls, was a ‘loudest of loud, shocking blue Hawaiian shirt, worn with suit pants.’ Edgar never used the hotel’s kidneyshaped pool. Proximity to water, he told the Nixons at La Jolla, made him ‘desperately uneasy.’ ‘The two of them always sat with their backs to the wall, even when they had dinner by the pool,’ recalled longtime hotel official Arthur Forbes. ‘That was for security. It was sad, watching the way those two men lived.’
Clint Murchison made sure Edgar and Clyde wanted for nothing at the Del Charro. When Edgar mentioned that on Florida vacations he ‘could pick fruit right from the trees at the door,’ he awoke the next morning to find his patio planted with orange, peach and plum trees, and a grapevine. The grapes, the staff recall, had been laboriously wired to the branches during the night.
The favors Edgar accepted from Murchison made a mockery of his public pose as a man of thrift and incorruptibility. ‘It came to the end of the summer,’ recalled Allan Witwer, the Del Charro’s first manager. ‘Hoover had made no attempt to pay his bill. So I went to Murchison and said, “What do you want me to do?” “Put it on my bill,” he told me. And that’s what I did.’
According to Witwer and his successor, Arthur Forbes, Murchison and associates paid Edgar’s huge accommodations charges at the Del Charro every year until his death, nearly two decades later. Witwer preserved a copy of the 1953 bill, covering July 28 to August 28. It was marked simply ‘Murchison,’ and was sent on to the millionaire