DALLAS’ M0ST ELIGIBLE MEN

First, the sad news: It isn’t all that much fun to be a bachelor anymore. For the past five years-ever since a couple of publications referred to Dallas bachelors as some of the most eligible men in America-it has been utter hell. Local bachelors have been watched, sized up and picked apart for so long that they now look about as bewildered as a family of raccoons caught in a car’s headlight beams amid some overturned garbage cans.

Bachelorhood has become such a depressing enterprise that most single men- instead of assembling good wall art or purchasing dark-hued, masculine couches for their condos-go out and buy books on abnormal psychology. In the end, they find themselves with a number of intriguing theories about sex, but with very little furniture upon which their houseguests may sit.

Are bachelors unable to love? Is it latent Freudian tendencies? The Peter Pan Complex? Do they live with a Calvinist lump of guilt under their worn mattresses?

All these questions for a poor bunch of guys who are really sort of bumbling along, starting out in one place and ending up in another, never quite knowing how they got there, perpetually expecting the unexpected. For the bachelor, it’s a long day’s journey into night.

The truth is that bachelors are rather simple creatures. They are distinct because they are usually the ones filled with the greatest dreams. Like Huckleberry Finn, bachelors are ceaselessly planning to light out and map unchartered territory, discovering fame and fortune and money along the way.

Deep down, bachelors are aware of the odds that they, too, just might end up to be ordinary people. But the always-endearing quality about them is that they believe that Eden lies in wait just over the next cluster of hills. A bachelor will go through any amount of absurdity just to prove that all is not lost.

The bachelors we’ve picked are some of the fortunate ones-they’ve been able to thrive in a city inundated with the philosophical ramifications of being single. Here, where everyone either gets together and practices being single or writes books about being single, these 20 men have persevered.

But we haven’t picked men who have made a career out of being single. They haven’t been written up by the society columnists; they haven’t entered any “Mr. Hunk” contests. In fact, many of them say they are willing to end their bachelor lives. If so, they’ll end them like Caesar Augustus, who, at the end of his reign as emperor, proclaimed these words: “I’ve played my part well. Dismiss me with applause.”



ROY CRANE

When photographer Roy Crane gets a model to pose just the way he wants, he makes a little cry that sounds like, “Woo-hoo! ” If he gets a really good shot, he yells out, “All right!” as if he’s just won a baseball game.

In his blue jeans and Nikes, Crane, 32, seems so boyish and non-threatening that it sometimes has an almost trancelike effect on the models he photographs. Crane, who charges $1,200 a day for advertising work, says that only once has he encountered a model with whom he had trouble working. “In the studio,” he says, “I try to nurture the women models, take care of them, put them in a different, relaxed mood. You have to keep things upbeat.”

He keeps quiet about his personal life. “It’s because my business is so un-private,” he says. “When I first came to Dallas, I went out with a couple of models. The next day, everybody who came to the studio knew where I had been and with whom.” But he never loses his infectious exuberance while he’s working; he does his little yelp and keeps on shooting.



JOE GRIFFITH

It all begins when Joe Griffith tells you he was born in a “log condominium.” Griffith, 42, is one of the most requested humorous after-dinner speakers in the country, yet almost no one has heard of him in Dallas. “That’s because I’m always traveling around the country,” says Griffith, who earns a six-figure salary from his speaking engagements.

Griffith was a stockbroker until he decided that he hated his job. Then he started giving speeches. “In many ways,” he says, “it’s similar to Neil Simon writing a play. You put together some jokes, try them out, take them home and polish them, reshape them and try to fit them into a running speech. What you’re doing is putting together a script.”

Griffith says that his personal life has suffered because of his work. He is out of town about 125 days a year, which doesn’t leave much time for being a bachelor. “Well,” he admits, “I did almost get married once, but we had a slight difference in opinion: I wanted a big wedding, and she wanted to back out.”



BOB EVERSON

When Bob Everson arrived in Dallas back in 1971, he had a wife, a sailboat and $600 in his pocket. He no longer has the wife or the sailboat, and he probably wouldn’t miss the $600 if he lost it. Everson, 42, may be the top independent television commercial producer in the city. As such, he’s in great demand these days-a lot of companies would like for him to come up with the kind of commercial that practically guaranteed the success of Frito-Lay’s Doritos. (The well-known “Nacho Cheese” commercials won Everson a highly touted Clio award.) Since then, he has produced commercials for dozens of local and national clients, including several Dallas banks and Owens’ Country Sausage.

Everson spends about four months a year in New York and Los Angeles, but he refuses to move to either city because he says that almost 20 percent of all network commercials are now produced in Dallas. “And,” he says, “it’s only going to get better.”

When it comes to his work, Everson is strictly no-nonsense, but after a three-week stretch of 15-hour days to finish a commercial, Everson might go bass fishing in East Texas, “and then get home in time to hit a singles bar.

“A lot of what happens in this town is by reputation,” Everson says. “You make one good commercial and people will search you out. The only problem is, you’d better make sure the next one is just as good.”



PETE NORTHWAY

There is a well-known nucleus of young, upper-class Dallas men who have been friends since they were practically infants. They all come from prominent families who have left their mark on Dallas-such as the Murchisons, Coxes, Bettises, Becks and DeClevas- and just about all of the young men have gone into oil and real estate.

All of them except one. Pete Northway, 29, is part-owner of an ad agency, still wants to become a rock musician and believes that all the women he goes out with “are destined to get married to someone a couple of months after they break up with me.”

He took his last girlfriend to the airport so she could say goodbye to her old boyfriend. When she came back, she told Northway that she had decided to marry the guy. Northway didn’t miss a beat. “Gee,” he said. “That’s the last time I’ll ever take you to the airport.”

Northway might be the comedian of his Old Money Dallas gang, but he is also one of the most perceptive. “When we were growing up in Dallas,” he says, “almost everything depended on who you knew. Now there has been a huge change here. The whole order of life is different. It makes it kind of exciting because you know you have to make it on your own.”



STUART JACOBSON

Stuart Jacobson, 29, son of a prominent Dallas dermatologist, is not only a highly paid Kim Dawson model, but he also has become a respected collector of modern art, is writing a book on famous private art collections, hangs out with people like Andy Warhol and generally jet-sets around the country in search of what he calls “the essence of living.”

“What is important,” he says, “is never to lose that innate desire to learn. The journey never ends, but I have found it a magnificent experience.”

Although his father’s first words upon hearing of Stuart’s career were, “No son of mine is going to become a male model,” Stuart’s Ivy League/preppie looks netted him several top modeling jobs around the country. But his first love is art, and he says he spends “a small fortune on it just because I can’t walk out of a gallery empty-handed.”

Jacobson says he hates nightclubs (“you just don’t meet quality people”), but he dates a variety of women, including older women “because, for some inexplicable reason, they hold a fascinating trance over me.”



HARVEY McLAIN

Harvey McLain, 41, says he decided to leave his home in Shreveport one night “When I was at a party and both of my ex-wives were there.” With degrees from Harvard and Virginia and an astute cultural sense, McLain is typical of the bachelors who have come to Dallas to find a better life. After a highly successful career as a Louisiana real estate developer, McLain came roaring into Dallas with a 6.2-acre apartment project in Oak Lawn.

Another thing McLain did upon arriving in Dallas was to join the board of the Dallas Opera. “There is a vitality in the arts here that I’ve never seen anywhere else. In New York and Boston-two very cultural cities -the people are in the process of preserving their culture, while in Dallas we’re building a cultural substrata.”

Just as amazing to McLain are Dallas women. “[They] tend to be more aggressive than I imagined. They sure don’t hesitate to call you up and ask you for a date.”



KEVIN MILLER

The most interesting event at Tango isn’t the entrance of the flashy New Wave bands, the parading of Dallas’ jetty teeny-boppers or even the strolling jugglers. It is, oddly enough, the spectacle of Kevin Miller, 28, lugging in a keg of beer. The women of Tango-the women who allegedly are the definition of the trendy Dallas lifestyle-will suddenly turn and stare open-mouthed at the blond, muscular Budweiser delivery-man with his sleeves rolled up.

Miller is your basic blue-collar stud. He delivers 950 cases of beer a day to the bars around the Lower Greenville area. At night, he drives to the bars of Upper Greenville in his Formula Firebird. He is the strong, silent type who can stand alone all night and stare right through you with piercing blue eyes. Some women fall madly for that look.

“Thursday through Saturday, it’s like a big game out here,” he says. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like one huge conglomeration of passion. All these men and women chasing each other. Sometimes I don’t know if I can stand it.”

BOB FRANKLIN

Bob Franklin, 48, the president of Costa Resources Inc., is experiencing his bachelorhood at a later age than most. After many years of marriage, Franklin has embraced his new single life with unbridled enthusiasm. He has constructed a lavish 212-acre ranch north of Dallas, bought a home in Los Angeles and an apartment in New York and has made several trips to Europe. He has learned how to play polo, is a member of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club and keeps race horses in California. But he says he still prefers Texas women “because they haven’t been exposed as much to the hustling, rat-race world that you find in New York.”

If it all seems ostentatious, Franklin has a ready reply. “I make no apologies for enjoying the single life. It was something I just didn’t get a chance to do 20 years ago.”



ERIC MOYE

In 1972, Eric Moyé, an 18-year-old kid who had grown up in Harlem, decided it was time to see another part of the world. So he headed for SMU, which is not exactly a haven for New York City street kids. Since then, he’s broken a couple of other barriers as well. Moyé,29, was the first black lawyer in Dallas to work for a major law firm.

“It wasn’t surprising that I was the first black,” Moyé says of his job with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. “I think it was only distressing that it hadn’t happened before.”

Moyé left the law firm to begin his own one-man firm specializing in business litigation. For him, nothing compares to the excitement of the courtroom: “Winning a lawsuit is better than sex. It’s the ultimate rush.”

But Moyé, who can be as cool as ice in the courtroom, also enjoys such unpretentious things as sitting on the hood of a car and sharing a bottle of wine. He may zip around town on a motorcycle, but he has so enamored the city’s political establishment that Mayor Starke Taylor picked him to head the committee to improve South Dallas business development.



JIMMY KRAUSE

Jimmy Krause, 31, says that his biggest problem today is “keeping up with the Jewish street kids who have moved to Dallas and play basketball with me at the Jewish Community Center.” Krause, who began his own advertising agency four years ago, is a wildly funny man who never loses his perspective. He says that he and the friends he grew up with were expected to “go to college, marry girls that your parents knew, live in North Dallas and join the all-Jewish Columbian Club.”

Krause already has made attempts to improve the cultural climate of Dallas. With a partner, he brought the cast and crew of an off-Broadway show, Key Exchange, to Dallas. “The whole thing, shall we say, cost me an unbelievable amount of money,” Krause says. He is also on a crusade to encourage what he calls “the non-makeup woman” in Dallas. “I hate the ’Dallas look,’ the style glorified by Morgan Fairchild. There are 800,000 of those kinds of women in this city. I just appreciate anyone who never feels they have to look at themselves for a long time in the mirror before they can be seen in public.”



CHUCK ROBINSON

For seven years, Chuck Robinson, 42, was the band director at Sunset High School. Then, one day he watched a friend during a music recording session and decided that he wanted to produce record albums. Somehow, beyond all odds, Robinson has found himself the president of Permian Records, one of the hottest country/Western music companies outside of Nashville.

Robinson traveled around the country, got a lot of people to tell him how to run a record company, hired a well-known entertainment lawyer on the West Coast and within a few months had stunned the country-music industry by signing singer Lynn Anderson to a long-term contract. Although Robinson has invested more than $1 million in the company and has added more recording artists, he continues to act like the last man on earth who could operate in the fast-paced, hard-bargaining music world.

He plans to stay that way. “I wouldn’t dream of moving Permian Records to Nashville,” says Robinson, who is often seen with professional businesswomen. “I like the fact that we’re a little out of the way. You don’t get in any Nashville mind-set. Besides, Dallas is where the finest people are.”



DAVID DAWKINS

David Dawkins had been in Dallas about six months when he decided to throw a party for mayoral candidate Jack Evans. After that huge success, Dawkins was soon making the rounds, talking to politicians, glad-handing Bill Clements, calling up everyone with any big name at all and generally putting on the smoothest act imaginable.

That’s not too shabby for a 28-year-old commodity broker who moved to Dallas from a little town in Mississippi to run a cotton/rice/soybean brokerage company. Dawkins and his brother, who is still based in Mississippi, do $50 million worth of business a year, but what is fascinating is the way Dawkins does it.

Dawkins comes across as the biggest country gentleman since Sam Ervin, regaling people for hours about his William Faulkneresque family, including a mythical Uncle Tony, who runs a liquor store. But when Dawkins plays the commodities market, he’s a keen businessman, and as soon as the day ends, he says, “I do everything I can to stay away from the telephone. The business is too intense to take it home with you. If the phone rings too much, I’ll just pick up and get out of town.”



WINN MORTON

Six years after abandoning Broadway for Dallas, Winn Morton has become one of the most elegant party designers in Dallas. “That means no balloons, no rented lattice and no fake greenery,” says Morton, 55. While in New York, he worked with the nation’s leading directors and choreographers, designing sets for Broadway plays and for hundreds of television productions. He is still an art director for some nationwide theatrical productions, but now he spends most of his time designing parties.

Often spotted at social functions with public-relations executive Julia Sweeney, Morton is gracious to everyone, yet he refuses to handle any assignment that involves such things as painted scenery. “We do not do cardboard cutouts,” he says. “It sounds a little snobbish, but people want a professional job.”

Morton’s services range from $25,000 to $200,000. He lives in a stunning farmhouse in south Dallas County.

JACK VAUGHN

When Jack Vaughn was 23, his father died and Jack found himself president of one of the most prominent oil companies in Dallas. “It was a scary, insane feeling for about two years,” Vaughn recalls. But now, the company is more prosperous than ever, and Vaughn, 30, is the young symbol of Old Money Dallas. He is committed to the tradition of the family company. He takes a conservative approach to oil exploration. He gradually plans to involve himself in local politics and has developed, from his travels to some remote corners of the earth, a remarkable interest in foreign affairs.

Vaughn bristles at the suggestion that the old families of Dallas are snobbish and resentful of the city’s nouveau riche. “It is absolutely not true that Old Money Dallas people marry each other. Some of my friends are from the same background as myself, but the reason this city is so fascinating now is because of the variety of residents. Dallas is still the best place in the world to make your fortune.”



WAYNE DeWALD

When Wayne DeWald went into business for himself, he packed up everything he owned in his pickup truck: two plates, two forks, one borrowed couch, an old television and an architectural drawing table. During his days, he supervised the construction of custom-built houses; during his nights, he designed new ones; and on weekends, he sold the ones that were already built.

Then, when he opened his own real estate/development company with partner Willy Lauterbach, he went after one of the hottest pieces of land in Dallas: the corner of Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs. Last year, he finally negotiated the contract, and pretty soon, everyone in the real estate industry began to ask, “Who are these guys?”

DeWald, 32, who had to hustle to get the $10 million loan for the development, also persuaded the City Council to approve a high-rise development composed of luxury condominiums, office space, retail stores and a health club. All that from a Pleasant Grove native who plays the harmonica in his car when he gets stuck in traffic jams and who has aspirations of one day running for the U.S. Senate.

DeWald, an impeccable dresser, has slowed down his hectic work schedule, but he still dreams of the kind of woman who is busier than he is: “I want her to call me up from New York, ask about business and then make plans to meet me in Paris.”



DAVID DAVIDSON

David Davidson is in the top echelon of land brokers in Dallas because of his amazing reservoir of energy. Sitting with him in his office is like sitting in on a motivation seminar: He bounces around, his mind shifting from long philosophical looks at the real estate business to enthusiastic discourses on the best places to travel in the Caribbean. He refuses to stand still. He doesn’t like to leave his desk for lunch because it might waste time. The result: He earns more than $1 million a year.

But Davidson, 39, plays as hard as he works. He eats out every night, goes to a lot of parties and regularly hits such spots as St. Tropez every year. “It’s ridiculous to do anything in life halfway,” he says.

When he started his own company, he was $90,000 in debt and was working out of his back bedroom. Then in 1978, he arranged a $27.5 million sale of land to Canadian developers. This year, his company will do more than $500 million worth of business. But Davidson says he’s worried about getting too successful: “I don’t want an excuse to stop working. There is no thrill like being on the chase of the deal.”



GILBERT GONZALES

Gilbert Gonzales was one of 10 children. His father never earned above minimum wage. “I never was used to being rich,” says Gonzales, 42, “so I decided to enter beauty school. I figured I might not get rich, but I’d meet a lot of women.” Gonzales has made more money than he ever thought he could. He has a clientele of both men and women, almost all of whom are business executives who have followed him around for more than a decade.

Gonzales, whose latest salon is in the Knox-Henderson area, doesn’t dress in the glittery clothes typical of many hair stylists. “You don’t have to put on any slick look for people,” he says. “I just don’t stand for pretension anywhere.”

Divorced, he singlehandedly raised a son (who now has his own business) and spends a lot of time counseling the women who come to see him. “The tragedy of this city is that there are so many professional women who cannot meet interesting men. Of course, for me, after being a hair stylist all day long and talking to women, it’s really a struggle to go make myself talk to one after work.”



AL BOWMAN

In many ways, Al Bowman, 38, is one of the last of Dallas’ fine craftsmen. He has developed a successful business centered on the art of restoring 15th- to 17th-century furniture, from the intricate method of gold leafing to the surgeonlike patience required during the stripping of finish that was applied to a piece of wood 500 years ago.

Bowman, who has restored furniture used by Napoleon, has taken a year off to design and build two 16-and-one-half-by-18-foot doors that will be the entranceway to an exclusive residential development near Lake Travis. The doors will be covered with meticulous carvings that Bowman will create. He is also developing his own line of furniture, much of which is patterned after a 4,500-year-old chair, which is considered to be the oldest in existence.

Bowman is the portrait of the “natural man,” with rugged looks, thick red hair and hands as tough as a farmer’s but so gentle across a piece of wood that it looks as though he’s not even touching it.

“I don’t know if there is any beauty like that of a piece of wood worked by hand,” Bowman says. “I am sometimes bewildered that I have found a field that has allowed me to combine my interests of art, sculpture, restoration and painting.”



RICK CLINE

Rick Cline could very well be the supreme example of what many people envision when they picture the “Dallas man.” At 36, he not only is the top Porsche salesman in the country, but he also has deliberately groomed himself as a sophisticated, fun-loving, success-driven bachelor.

A man with dark German-Lebanese looks and a developed sense of expensive taste, Cline cherishes his single reputation: “It’s very hard to think about being attached in this city because there is a tremendous variety of women to choose from.” The only kind of woman Cline doesn’t like, he says, is “the kind of professional women who do everything they can to make you feel uneasy. It’s unattractive not because they’re so successful, but because they try to drill that fact into you.”

As for being successful himself, Cline is the crème de la crème of car dealers. His Porsche sales earn him an annual six-figure salary. “I’m success-motivated,” he says. “That’s why I’m fit for this city. Success is what makes people thrive here.”



HARRY FRIEDMAN

Harry Friedman, 32, may be a blue blood from Fort Worth (his father was chairman of a bank; his mother, part of an old ranching family), but he has never rested on his family’s laurels. He got interested in real estate, he says, “only so I could work on projects that were not architecturally boring. They were so unique that no one bought them.” He then got into film production, producing such diverse projects as the following of a major-league baseball trade to the filming of a live performance of Marilyn Home at Lincoln Center.

That job led him to the director’s position of the Dallas Communications Complex, where the city’s movie industry is based and where Friedman could one day become one of the most influential people in Dallas. Almost 50 percent of his time is spent getting new work for the complex; this year, he will bring in more than $100 million of business.

But Friedman doesn’t find the film industry glamorous-in fact, he says he rarelygoes to the movies-but there is a fascinating, intellectual side of him that seems to attract other moviemakers. He says he doesn’thave much time to date, “but if I did everdate someone for two weeks, she wouldn’tlike me. She’d decide, as they always decide,that I’m too cantankerous.”