Boone Pickens arched his left eyebrow into a silvery horseshoe and waited to hear exactly how much personal income he had earned the previous year. It was two days after Christmas in 2006, and he was dressed down in khaki slacks, a gray sweater, and a pair of loafers, which he had propped up on the desk in his Dallas office.

Pickens turned to check the computer screen behind his desk. Except for his thinning gray hair and the flesh-color hearing aids in his ears, he looked as lean and mean as he had in the 1980s, when his exploits as a corporate raider shook Wall Street and catapulted him onto the covers of Time and Fortune.

Since then, Pickens has endured a two-decade roller-coaster ride. In 1996, slumping natural-gas prices led to his ouster from Mesa Petroleum, once the nation’s largest independent oil company. The following year, he founded the energy hedge fund BP Capital. But even as he launched his financial recovery, his personal life had been shattered by two divorces and a continuing series of crises involving his two sons.

Jay Rosser, Pickens’ veteran public-relations aide, returned from an adjacent office with the 2005 personal-income figure his boss had requested. “You made $1.504 billion last year,” he reported. “That’s adjusted gross income?” Pickens asked.

Rosser nodded and went on to add, “You paid the I.R.S. $279 million in taxes.”

In that single year, Pickens had made more money—and paid more taxes—than he ever had in any previous year. And he did it at an age when most of his peers were either retired to their country clubs or six feet under the ground. Pickens’ fourth wife, Madeleine Pickens, entered the office. A statuesque blond with saucer-shaped brown eyes, she was dressed in tan pants, matching snow boots, and a sheepskin jacket.

“We just lengthened the runway up at the ranch to 6,000 feet,” Pickens said. He added that he was fixing to trade in his Gulfstream G450 jet for a new G550 model. Madeleine mentioned that Pickens had landed the plane the other day. Skeptical that the 78-year-old mogul could land a jet by himself, I asked if he really had been at the controls the whole time. “Boone’s always at the controls,” she replied.

Caught With His Flies Down

On June 11, 2006, Pickens’ elder son, Michael O’Brien Pickens, then 52, allegedly crept around to the back of the Housatonic Meadows Fly Shop in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut. It was late on a sultry evening. Trout were running in the evergreen-shrouded river in the state park directly across the highway. But the fly shop, a converted service station filled with Orvis and other top-brand fishing equipment, was closed.

The shop manager, Devin Booth, gave police the following account: Mike jimmied open a back window and climbed inside. He stuffed reels and other gear worth an estimated $3,000 into a cooler. Then he passed out underneath a desk. A short time later, Booth returned for a routine errand. Booth later told the Associated Press he recognized Mike because he had visited the shop earlier that day, portraying himself as a “big-shot stockbroker” who was “related” to Boone Pickens. When Booth roused him, he jumped up “like a jack-in-the- box” and staggered around groggily.

“You said I could use the phone anytime,” Mike told Booth over and over.

“Dude, even if I did,” Booth said, “you don’t break in and steal stuff and fall asleep under my desk.”

State police arrested Mike on burglary charges. This was hardly his first run-in with the law, but it proved to be a particularly fateful one. The arrest alerted authorities that Mike had violated bail terms after having been arrested on federal securities fraud charges. He remained in a local jail for three days in lieu of posting $15,000 bond. Then he was sent to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Pennsylvania.

On October 30, 2006, Mike pleaded guilty to three counts of securities fraud in federal court in New York City. The frauds were part of a pump-and-dump scheme to inflate the prices of three over-the-counter stocks by sending out more than a million faxes that appeared to contain a confidential tip from a stockbroker to a client. “In fact, as I know, there was no broker, no client, and no tip,” Mike admitted to U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska. She accepted his guilty plea and sent him back to rehab, pending a sentencing hearing scheduled for this spring.

“Self-Feeders Are Good”

T. Boone Pickens is one of the most complex characters in modern-day capitalism, an unlikely combination of King Lear, Lazarus, Robin Hood, and Amarillo Slim. He has made billions for himself and average investors by shaking up the moribund management of major corporations and by taking huge gambles in the energy industry. He has risen from his apparent financial deathbed at least twice. And he has donated hundreds of millions to various philanthropies. But like so many self-made monarchs, Pickens now finds his empire roiled by internecine strife. Some, if not all, of the turmoil is also self-made. As he has publicly admitted several times, his unrelenting quest for financial success has taken precedence over his family life for the better part of the past 50 years. And if his achievements in business were often hard earned, his pride in them has just as often been narcissistic.

Monuments to Boone Pickens abound across Texas and Oklahoma like the obelisks of an Ozymandias, king of kings. The old Mesa Petroleum building in Amarillo featured a bronze statue of Pickens playing racquetball. The football stadium at his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, is named in his honor. His office and ranch are virtual shrines, adorned with his photographs on magazine covers and in the company of American presidents and business potentates.

But even though Pickens has donated seven-, eight-, and nine-digit sums to his alma mater and such causes as hurricane relief, he has refused to pass on a significant share of his vast fortune to his five children. He claims he doesn’t want to spoil them, much less attempt to build a dynasty as the Rockefellers have. “Self-feeders are good” is the way he puts it.

And therein lies the rub: Pickens has shown he can get a whole football stadium full of college students to cheer for him. But can he get his own children to love him as he loves himself?

The Luckiest Guy in the World

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. began his life by very nearly killing his mother. On an otherwise auspicious day in the spring of 1928, Thomas Pickens Sr. learned that his wife, Grace, was experiencing serious complications with her pregnancy. The doctors at Keystone Hospital, in the rural hamlet of Holdenville, Oklahoma, presented Pickens Sr. with a horrific dilemma: They could save the mother or the child but not both.

Pickens Sr., a local oil-and-gas land man, insisted on trying to save both. He persuaded a surgeon, who was not an obstetrician, to attempt the first cesarean section in the hospital’s history. All the surgeon had to go by was one page in a medical textbook. “My dad said, ‘We’re gonna pray, and you’re gonna do it,’ ” Pickens recalled. “I don’t know how long it took, but when that surgeon came out of the operating room, he told my father, ‘You’ve got a little boy.’ ” That little boy’s rise to riches has long since become part of American financial lore—with numerous embellishments. Pickens has often boasted that when he was only 28 he founded his first oil company, Petroleum Exploration Inc., with a geology degree and $2,500 in cash. In fact, the crucial seed money came from his first wife’s uncle, rancher John O’Brien, and Eugene McCartt, a local supermarket scion. Along with putting up an equal amount of cash, they cosigned for a $100,000 line of credit, which was big bucks in those days.

In the spring of 1964, Pickens transformed P.E.I. into a public company called Mesa Petroleum. He reckoned he could increase Mesa’s energy reserves much faster and more surely by acquiring the producing properties of other companies rather than simply drilling for oil and gas. That same basic insight inspired his attempts to “drill for oil on Wall Street” by trying to take over allegedly undervalued and mismanaged major oil companies during the halcyon days of the 1980s.

Ironically, none of Pickens’ half a dozen big hostile-takeover attempts succeeded, but he certainly made plenty of headlines, becoming a variously reviled and celebrated corporate raider, greenmailer, and shareholders’ rights advocate. Pickens’ biggest score came from his 1983 bid for Gulf Oil. Although Gulf ultimately merged with Chevron, Mesa came away with a $404 million profit. The bid also boosted Gulf’s stock price to $80 a share, which translated into a gain of $6.5 billion for Gulf’s 400,000 stockholders.

As Pickens later conceded in an addendum to his autobiography, The Luck­iest Guy in the World, he should have quit the corporate-takeover game while he was still ahead. But in 1985, he went after Unocal. This time around, Mesa not only failed to win its takeover bid, it ultimately had to pay its target $42.8 million to settle the attendant lawsuits. In 1989, Pickens moved Mesa’s headquarters to Dallas. The relocation came in the wake of a nasty battle with the Amarillo Globe-News over the newspaper’s editorial coverage in general and its reporting on Pickens’ interests in particular that, according to him, left many otherwise neutral citizens with bitter and fearful feelings. The feud climaxed when general manager Jerry Huff Jr. was transferred and Pickens hung a banner across the Mesa Petroleum building that read Good-Bye Jerry.

“I’d rather not talk about Boone Pickens,” said Richard Ware, a prominent Amarillo banker. “You can never say enough nice things about him. And if he thinks you’ve said something negative about him, he’ll get mad.”

Still a fervent believer in the future of natural gas, Pickens continued to borrow money to buy the producing properties of other companies. But by 1996, Mesa was burdened with $1.2 billion in bank debt, and gas prices were still in a long-term decline. That summer, Pickens resigned from the company he had run for more than 40 years and sold his stock for $35 million. His only surviving corporate asset was the right to use the Mesa name.

“A Creative Side That Can Sometimes Go Crazy”

Not coincidentally, Pickens’ ups and downs on the business front were paralleled by those on the home front. In 1949, he married Lynn O’Brien, whom former classmates described as “dreamboat beautiful.” At the time, Pickens was still in college studying geology, and Lynn, who came from a well-to-do Amarillo family, was a senior at Amarillo High. Their marriage produced four children and unremitting strife.

Some of the problems can be traced to Pickens’ workaholic habits. He typically returned to the office each night after having dinner with the family, and he was frequently on the road chasing deals. There were also parenting issues, especially ones involving Mike and his younger brother, Thomas Boone Pickens III, called Tom after his grandfather. “I believed strongly in the kind of discipline I had received from my own mother and applied it to the children,” Boone later wrote in his autobiography. “Lynn often disagreed with me.”

In 1971, Boone and Lynn divorced after 22 years of marriage. Their oldest child, Deborah, was already married, and Pam, their second oldest, was off at college. The girls suffered their share of pain from their parents’ breakup. But the split had an even more severe impact on their younger brothers.

Tom, then only 13, chose to continue living at home with his mother. Boone encouraged him to study finance. A self-described nerd, Tom would peruse the Wall Street Journal every day, and Pickens would drop by to quiz him. Soon after the divorce, Pickens opened a trading account for Tom at Merrill Lynch. But a short time later, Pickens dropped Tom off at Texas Military Institute in San Antonio. As Pickens drove away, all he said was “Be serious.”

Always the favored son, 16-year-old Mike moved into his father’s bachelor apartment following his parents’ divorce. An avid hunter, he further impressed the old man by becoming a scratch golfer. But since his father was often traveling on business, Mike was just as often left unsupervised. He not only fell in with a crowd of teenage drug and alcohol abusers, he also became the leader of the pack.

Victor Ayad, an Austin investment banker who was a schoolmate of both Pickens boys, attributes some of Mike’s acting out to the remote physical and social environment of the Texas Panhandle. “There’s something about growing up out there in the flatland that keeps you content in the desolation of a cultural void or cultivates a creative side that can sometimes go crazy,” he says. “Rich kids I knew in Houston and Dallas still conducted themselves with a certain amount of decorum in front of their parents even as they were messing up behind the scenes. The rich kids I knew in Amarillo went out of their way to be social misfits.”

Pickens finally shipped Mike off to the Schreiner Institute, a relatively permissive boarding school in central Texas. Around this time, Mike got interested in flying airplanes and started studying for his pilot’s license. He was a natural at flying, just as he was at golf and hunting.

Mike also displayed flashes of his father’s financial genius early on: He could keep track of 10 different positions in 10 different stocks without the aid of a calculator or computer program. But he had little interest in formal education. He attended four different colleges without earning a degree. According to John O’Brien, his great uncle, he also left a trail of unpaid bills. Eventually, he got a job at a Dallas brokerage firm, where he traded stock for Mesa and other accounts.

Meanwhile, Boone had embarked on a new life with a new wife and extended family. In April 1972, he married Beatrice Carr Stuart, an Oklahoma City socialite who had four children from her prior marriage. Pickens became especially fond of the youngest girl, Liz, and formally adopted her a few years later.

But Pickens’ daughters by Lynn remained distant from their father, and their youngest brother became ever more bitterly estranged. In fact, Tom had to work his way through Southern Methodist University, doing odd jobs such as driving a forklift. He started a small computer hardware firm and sold it for a tidy profit. After graduation, he showed his acumen as a financier by turning around a small closed-end fund and a savings and loan. At age 30, he arranged financing for Catalyst Energy Corp. The opening of its Louisiana plant was a gala affair presided over by then Louisiana senator Russell Long.

Tom felt as though his father managed to turn what should have been moments of joy into embarrassments. When Tom got married, friends say, Pickens wouldn’t attend the reception because Bea didn’t feel like she was seated properly. When Tom’s son was christened, Pickens was late.

Tom subsequently moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to renovate a historic-district home and start an independent capital fund, hoping he and his wife, Jennifer, could raise their children outside his father’s shadow. Unfortunately, one of the 26 investors in his fund was Dana Giacchetto, a money manager recommended by Merrill Lynch. In the course of defrauding a roster of Hollywood clients, Giacchetto allegedly invested some of their money in Tom’s fund but defaulted on repayments. Giacchetto later went to jail, and Tom returned to Texas to specialize in salvaging embattled companies.

The consensus among several longtime Pickens family friends was that Tom was unfairly victimized in the Giacchetto affair. Tom Treadwell, a former Holdenville, Oklahoma, banker who has known three generations of Pickens men, affectionately refers to Tom as “Triple.” “Tom is a fine young man,” Treadwell insists. “But Mike is a goddamn outlaw.”

For a time, Mike showed signs of cleaning up his act. Following his father’s remarriage, he got married and began to gravitate to the Boone-Bea-Liz family circle. He even posed for a photograph with Boone, his grandfather, and his newborn son, Michael Jr.

But within a few years, Mike divorced and resumed a precipitous downward spiral fueled by alcohol and drugs. After moving to the town of Nocona, Texas, on the Oklahoma border, he married again and fathered another child. Then he promoted a series of dubious financial schemes that drew the scrutiny of the I.R.S. In 1991, Boone barred Mike from managing Boone’s personal and corporate stock accounts. Evidently feeling that his son had taken advantage of him, Boone reportedly deposited a treasury check made out to Mike.

In 1996, just as Boone was exiting Mesa, his 24-year marriage to Bea hit the rocks. As if to underscore the pettiness on both sides, the couple fought over custody of their dog, a papillon named Winston. After a two-year battle, they agreed to split assets worth an estimated $78 million. They sold their Dallas mansion, Pickens kept his ranch in the Texas Panhandle, and Bea got Winston.

Amid the fray, Pickens’ divorce lawyer told him that he appeared to be suffering from depression. Pickens has said that he took prescription antidepressants for “about a month.” Although antidepressants typically require much more than 30 days to take effect, they evidently worked overnight magic on Pickens. He bought a new papillon puppy, changed the name of his ranch from 2B to Mesa Vista, and told his friends and business associates that he was feeling better than ever.

As if to attest to his emergence from depression, Pickens tried to repair his relationship with his children. Two days before Christmas 1999, he sent a letter to Deborah, Pam, Mike, Tom, and Liz. He confessed that he had neglected them in his pursuit of business fame and fortune and asked for a chance to make it up to them. Pam, then a Tulsa restaurant-industry executive, and Deb, a career schoolteacher, responded in kind. But his sons were unimpressed—especially Tom.

“He thinks he can just fire off a letter and that takes care of everything,” Tom complained. On Thanksgiving Day in 2000, Boone Pickens gazed out on the table-flat Texas Panhandle and made a snap decision with life-changing implications. He was in the new main house of his Mesa Vista ranch, a lavishly appointed prairie palace whose turreted walls give it the look of a Moorish castle. Before him sprawled 25,000 acres with a maze of artificial water features on par with the aqueducts of ancient Rome. As Amarillo attorney Wales Madden, one of Pickens’ most trusted business associates, observes, “It’s the kind of place God would own if he could afford it.” Recently, Pickens added another 25,000 acres to his spread.

Pickens picked up the phone and called a local county judge. He told the judge he’d decided to marry Nelda Cain, a voluble divorcée who had just spent two years pursuing a singing career in Nashville. They wanted to get their marriage license and say their vows that very day.

By 1:30 p.m., Boone and Nelda had made a round-trip to the courthouse and were back at the ranch. Both wore khakis. Daughter Liz supplied a boom box with a CD of Jim Nabors singing “Ave Maria” and “The Lord’s Prayer.” The couple borrowed rings from Liz and her husband, Lou Cordia. Steven Patterson, a Methodist minister, presided over a brief ceremony, and by 2:15 p.m. everyone was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner.

“Nelda started crying, and I had a big lump in my throat,” Pickens recalled in his autobiography’s addendum, published the same year as the wedding, adding that he had told his bride on a previous trip to California that “neither one of us could book another loss.”

For the first time in nearly half a decade, Pickens did not have to worry about booking losses on the business front. After a very shaky start, BP Capital, his first major post-Mesa venture, was virtually minting money. He had opened the energy hedge fund in the spring of 1997 with $10 million of his own money and another $26 million supplied by a group that included his Dallas billionaire buddy Harold Simmons and former Mesa directors Fayez Sarofim and John Cox.

Within only two years, BP Capital’s funds had dwindled to $3.4 million, down 90 percent. The losses were due mainly to Pickens’ overly optimistic bets that crude-oil and natural-gas prices would rise. But in 2000, gas finally began the ascent he had long predicted. He commenced what an associate later described as “one of the greatest trading runs of all time.” By the end of 2000, the fund was up to $252 million—a stunning gain of 7,300 percent.

Just as amazing, Pickens once again seemed to be his hands-on, energetic self. He would call into the office at 6:15 a.m. to get an update from his analysts and traders on the market’s overnight performance. Though he no longer played racquetball or golf, or refined the shooting skills that had made him a high-school basketball star in Amarillo, he still worked out every morning with a physical trainer and graded his performance on a scale from 1 to 10. When he wasn’t traveling, Pickens would usually be in his Dallas office before the U.S. equity markets opened at 8:30 a.m. Central time. He frequently presided over a noon luncheon meeting with the dozen people who made up BP Capital’s investment committee. Having cut his commodity trading teeth in the cattle market in the 1970s, he remained a fundamentalist when it came to energy. He was not a day trader, but he proudly described himself as a speculator who didn’t hedge his bets.

“Pickens is one of the few people left who wants to earn an outsize return,” says BP Capital analyst Brian Bradshaw. “Most hedge funds want to justify their returns on a risk-reward basis. We just want to make money.” And making money was exactly what Pickens continued to do for the four years following his marriage to Nelda. According to an internal spreadsheet, BP Capital earned $146.8 million in 2001, $56 million in 2002, $432 million in 2003, and $340 million in 2004. Along the way, he started an energy equities fund, and he grew Pickens Fuel (later renamed Clean Energy) into the nation’s largest supplier of natural gas as an alternative vehicle fuel, with more than 150 stations from British Columbia to Southern California.

Using the rights he’d retained to the Mesa name, Pickens also diversified into the water business but with rather mixed results. In 1999, he and a dozen other landowners joined forces to market surplus groundwater contained in the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Texas Panhandle. Mesa Water offered to supply 320,000 acre-feet of water annually, enough to satisfy the needs of 1.5 million people. Over the ensuing seven years, he would invest nearly $100 million in the project, only to wait through successive droughts as municipalities like the city of Dallas mulled his offers. Apparently frustrated by local politics, Pickens continued his contributions to Republican candidates and causes. A longtime supporter of Ronald Reagan and a close friend of Nancy Reagan, he helped fund the relocation of the former president’s Air Force One jet to the Reagan library. In 2004, he gave $3 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, $2.5 million to the conservative advocacy group Progress for America, and $250,000 to President George W. Bush’s second inaugural celebration.

Then, as if to belie recent media reports of a kinder, gentler Pickens, his personal life began to unravel again. One day in the fall of 2004, he came home and informed Nelda that he wanted a divorce. Friends say she was stunned and immediately burst into tears. The couple’s only apparent point of contention was divergent travel agendas. Nelda wanted to stay in Dallas and attend social events, but Pickens liked to spend nearly every weekend at the ranch, situated in the middle of nowhere—so isolated that there is no cellular reception except for one place known as Telephone Hill.

Wales Madden, the Amarillo attorney, attributed the split to Pickens’ age. “Boone may feel like he doesn’t have too many more years to spend,” he noted, “and he doesn’t want to have any conflicts.”

But by the summer of 2005, Pickens was ready to marry again. His new love was 58-year-old Madeleine Paulson, the widow of Gulfstream magnate Allen Paulson. Born in Iraq to a British father and Lebanese mother, Madeleine had once operated a business providing flight attendants and supplies for private aircraft. Following Paulson’s death, she inherited the Del Mar Country Club in California, a slew of championship racehorses, and a legal battle with one of her stepsons over the management of her late husband’s estate.

Not surprisingly, Madeleine’s friends wondered if she could keep up with her fiancé’s frenetic lifestyle. “Nelda goes 30 miles an hour, Madeleine goes 100 miles an hour, but Boone goes 150, and he’s always on the move,” one of them noted.

On July 16, 2005, Pickens was on his way to Madeleine’s home overlooking the fairways of the Del Mar Country Club when he got an urgent phone call from his son Mike’s wife, Donna. Mike had just been arrested in Nocona for marijuana possession. Worse, the pot bust alerted federal authorities, who were trying to question him about the alleged pump-and-dump securities fraud scheme.

Pickens married Madeleine the same day in a small private ceremony as scheduled, but his minions spent the weekend doing damage control related to Mike’s wife and daughter.

Mike eventually pleaded guilty to the stock fraud scheme, which went something like this: He and a colleague used his stock research firm, M3, to hype three penny stocks traded over the counter: Data Evolution, a computer firm; Infinium Labs, which develops videogame delivery systems; and the motion-picture firm Soleil Films. M3 sent out handwritten faxes that appeared to contain confidential tips from a stockbroker to a client; the faxes were false bait intended to lure the unwitting people who “accidentally” received them into investing their money.

“I have been trying to get you for two hours,” read a fax sent to a fictitious New York doctor. “I have a stock for you that will triple in price just like the last stock I gave you. Either call me or call Linda to place the new trade. We need to buy now.”

The ruse netted Mike upward of $200,000.

If Mike’s pre-wedding arrest loomed as a bad omen, Madeleine appeared to be a lucky charm for Pickens’ business interests. Natural gas and crude oil prices skyrocketed through the remainder of 2005. By year’s end, BP Capital had earned an astonishing $1,281,260,649, according to an internal spreadsheet Pickens supplied in an interview last December. He said his major share in the energy hedge fund combined with his interest in an energy-focused equity fund to boost his personal income to more than $1.5 billion.

At the same time, Pickens began giving money away almost as fast as he was making it. He and employees of BP Capital were among the first to contribute to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, with a donation of $7 million. Much less publicized was the fact that Madeleine Pickens, whose principal charitable cause was saving horses destined for the slaughterhouse, made half a dozen trips to Louisiana to round up dogs stranded by the disaster.

Pickens played Santa Claus again in December 2005 by donating $165 million to Cowboy Athletics. The stated purpose of the donation was to expand the athletic program at Oklahoma State University and to upgrade the football stadium already named after him.

The gift made him No. 5 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the nation’s most generous charitable donors in 2005, and it was but a part of the more than $500 million he’d donated to charity so far. But Pickens’ Cowboy Athletics philanthropy also sparked a media controversy about possible self-dealing and conflicts of interest. As it turned out, the foundation’s board was controlled by Pickens and a few of his longtime cronies. A few hours after receiving his donation, it reinvested the money in BP Capital’s energy hedge fund. “It was bulletproof; there was no Mickey Mouse,” Pickens insists. “I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to earn Cowboy Athletics a 25 percent return on their money.”

In May 2006, Madeleine gave Pickens a This Is Your Life-style surprise party for his 78th birthday at the Del Mar Country Club. The master of ceremonies was Merv Griffin. Special guests included Nancy Reagan and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the party’s entertainment included Natalie Cole, a squad of cheerleaders with boone emblazoned on their uniforms, and Rod Stewart, who sang American standards, concluding with “The Way You Look Tonight.” On the Monday before Valentine’s Day in 2007, Boone Pickens huddled in a corner of his Dallas office watching a videotape of himself on television. In February 1986, 21 years earlier, he had appeared on ABC’s Nightline with host Ted Koppel and former treasury secretary John Connally to discuss the impact of a sudden collapse in oil prices. Pickens told Koppel that the 1986 oil glut would disappear once the OPEC nations led by Saudi Arabia lowered production. Connally called for a $120 billion fund to bail out Latin America and plugged a vulture-capital energy firm he had just started.

“We could be saying pretty much the same thing today,” Pickens observed when the tape of the Nightline segment ended. “It’s interesting that John Connally, the great economic guru, went bankrupt before he died.”

Like déjà vu, energy prices had been declining from record highs in recent months.

Pickens said that in 2006, BP Capital’s energy hedge fund had earned more than $420 million by making what were for him uncharacteristic bets that natural gas prices would fall. The fund had slumped by as much as 6 percent during the first several weeks of 2007 by going long, but he remained bullish for the longer term.

“We didn’t have much of a winter,” he said. “But I think we’ll get back up over $80 a barrel for crude this year.”

It was certainly a winter of discontent as far as Pickens and his sons were concerned. With the exception of a session with a psychotherapist, he and Tom had barely spoken to each other in several years.

Mike was still in rehab pending his sentencing hearing, set for this spring, on the stock fraud charges. Rosser, Pickens’ spokesman, issued only a brief statement on the matter: “Mr. Pickens is proud of Mike for accepting responsibility for his actions,” Rosser said. “This is an important step and a significant milestone. Boone and his whole family are fully supportive of him in his rehabilitation efforts.”

In the meantime, Pickens was declining to comment further in public. But he clearly had some things to get off his chest. “I’ve done the best I could with my children,” he declared in a thundering voice. “One of ’em says they want to go to a therapist, and they pick the therapist, I say fine. I’ve never missed a single meeting with a therapist.” The office got real quiet, and Pickens added in a much softer tone, “I’m old.”

Pickens’ longtime executive assistant, Sally Geymuller, told him Madeleine was on the line. His face lit up as he turned around to take the call. He chatted happily about what he wanted to eat for dinner that night. When he hung up the phone, he said, “She’s one of those European women who know how to take care of their husband.” Pickens started reminiscing about his youth in Oklahoma. He summoned a female staffer who had been researching the circumstances of his birth by cesarean section for an oral history.

“You know, I’ve always been critical of my dad,” Pickens said as the staffer sat down. “My mother was the family disciplinarian, and he left all that to her.” He paused, and pursed his lips.

“My father was a good guy,” he added, almost spitting out the words, making it sound like being a good guy was about the worst thing a man could be.

“My dad used to criticize me for three things,” he confided. “He said, ‘You don’t smoke cigars. You drink scotch instead of bourbon, and I’ve never trusted anybody who drinks scotch. And you think geologists can find oil better than land men.’

“My dad really loved to hunt quail,” Pickens continued. “One of the people he most liked to hunt with was a guy a few years younger than me named Willie Price. Willie was a great wing shot. I think my dad treated Willie Price more like a son than he did me.”

Pickens paused with a faraway look in his eyes. “But you know,” he said at last, “I think about how my dad talked that surgeon back in Holdenville into performing a cesarean section, and I say to myself, ‘Hey, pal, look what he did for you.’ ”