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.