Bum Bright: “I’ve been broke once. I know what that was like.”

The early morning sun is still struggling to push itself over Dallas’s skyscrapers, and Bum Bright is already on the phone, ready to seal up another business deal. One man stands in the way and Bum, always the charmer, is going to do some sweet-talking.

“Bob,” he says, his matter-of-fact voice as flat as the prairie, “from what I’m hearing, you’re the fly in the ointment. Now I’ve considered nearly everything about this thing and I just want to say, ’Piss on it.’”

Oh well, no one has ever accused the famous millionaire of subtlety. But neither has Bright, who started out broke only to become one of the fifty wealthiest men in the country, ever apologized for lacking the trait. Bum Bright might be the most unabashedly straightforward, old-fashioned deal maker of all the great Dallas tycoons. He loves to dicker-and he dickers over everything, from his oil well ventures to the cost of a cup of coffee. It is an obsession that brings him into the office by seven o’clock every morning. At the age of sixty-Five, when he should be playing golf five times a week at the Dallas Country Club (instead of just on Sunday mornings), Bum Bright, worth at least $500 million, sits behind his desk, puffing on a cigarette like a trucker, wondering how he can talk a savings and loan institution into lowering its interest rate on a loan.

“I can get them down, maybe, to 11 percent,” says his partner, Jim Francis, who meets with Bright for a couple of hours at the start of each morning along with Bright’s thirty-one-year-old son. Clay.

“Make it 10,” Bright snaps and rubs his hand through hair cut so short it looks like it’s been caught in an electric fan. He is wearing his trademark white short-sleeved shirt with the bottoms of the sleeves rolled up. His stubby fingers curl around a cheap Number 2 pencil that he uses to write notes to himself. No matter how important he might be. Bright still looks for all the world like an old oil field worker who can’t get used to the idea that his job is to sit in an air conditioned office.

Francis, who started working for Bright as a young man and now has become a politically powerful and well-known businessman in his own right, has watched Bright make a lot of gambles. Once he even bought a company that exports fruits from the Central American country of Belize. While the Hunts, the Murchisons, and other well-known Dallas empire builders are working feverishly to save their fortunes, Bright has been charging around buying up stuff like a young man on the hunt, hot to strike it rich,

“He never gets tired of the game,” says Francis. “It’s always like he’s doing it for the first time.”

In the last couple of years Bright led a group of investors that bought the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Stadium for $85 million. During one long stretch of negotiations for the team, a Cowboys representative asked Bright if he could borrow a cigarette. Bright charged him a dollar for it. While the thrift industry was going through financial woes, Bright stepped in and bought two large savings and loan institutions for $171 million. In his typically relentless business style, he offered $71 million for one of the S&Ls but gave the board of directors only twenty-four hours to make up their minds about the offer. They accepted.

On this day, he cuts off his meetings early so that he can go to the $5,000-a-plate fund-raising luncheon for his friend, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Clements. Ronald Reagan is the featured guest. Bright gives a speech in which he thanks everyone for shelling out $5,000 just to get a look at the president. “But the one thing I want everybody to be sure of,” says Bright, always thinking money, “is that you’ll definitely be given another chance before this campaign is over to give money to Bill Clements.”

Bright might occasionally come across to the public as a cantankerous old cuss, but he can be devastatingly charming. Sitting in his wood-paneled office filled with an array of manly art-old guns and knives on the walls, sculptures of Indians and deer and medieval warriors, and a Davy Crockett figure standing on a rock-he interrupts a meeting to recite a stanza of poetry from Rudyard Kipling or Robert Service.

When a young businessman calls him during the day to ask Bright for a $12 million loan for a water system in East Texas, Bright, sensing a kill, stealthily tries to persuade him to let one of the Bright companies own part of the deal. By the time the phone call is over, the young man on the speakerphone sounds dazed. But he still tells Bright that it was an honor getting to talk with him.

It is odd. Bright continues to work twelve-hour days, looking for the next opportunity to expand his fortune. He rarely takes vacations, and his penny-pinching is renowned. He once walked out of a cafeteria when it wouldn’t lower its price of eighty-five cents for a cup of coffee.

The truth is that Bright, incredibly, worries that a day might come when he could go broke. “I worried about it until 3 a.m. the other night,” says Bright. “Don’t ask me why. I’ve been broke once, I know what that was like, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

And so, his work never ceases. At one point during the day, a package arrives in the mail, a surprise gift from Texas A&M football coach Jackie Sherrill. Bright, former chairman of the A&M Board of Regents, loves the Aggies with such fervor that he sits in a big swivel chair with an A&M insignia on the back and has A&M pillows on his office couch.

He opens the box to find a huge ring honoring the Aggies1 1985 Southwest Conference football championship. Bright tries it on-a perfect fit.

“That’s beautiful,” says his son, Clay, also an A&M graduate. “That is really beautiful.”

“You really like it?” says Bright, innocently enough.

“Yes, sir,” says Clay.

Bright lets the light bounce off the gem in the ring. His eyes flash, and a smile begins to play at the corner of his lips. The ultimate deal maker pauses for a second, and then he asks, “So how much do you want to give for it?”