As the daughter of the world’s richest man, Swanee Hunt might have grown up to be one of those big-haired Texas ladies lunching at the Dallas Country Club and shopping at Neiman Marcus. It was beside the point that her father, Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, and his bizarre triple-family situation, blackballed him from the club and he didn’t allow his children to shop at Neiman’s because the owners were Jews.
With a father like that and a mother who was a conservative evangelical crusader, Hunt might have grown up to be a conservative too. As a teenager, she formed a religious folk group and trolled the high school cafeteria line for converts.
But instead, once out of the house (called Mount Vernon), Swanee Hunt took a 180-degree turn from her parents. A religious liberal, she became a feminist and social reformer, self-described as “gutsy, sometimes almost noble – and always flawed.” And in a move that might have made her communist-baiting father turn over in his grave, she embraced Bill and Hillary Clinton and was named Clinton’s ambassador to Vienna. While there, she pressured the administration to help end the depravations in Bosnia.
That the journey of Swanee Hunt – she was not named for the river but for her mother’s friend Swann – would be a strange one was evident from the beginning. Her father, still married to his first wife, Lyda, visited his second family only on Thursday nights, Lyda’s bridge night, and it was years before his four children by Ruth, Hunt’s mother, knew that the weekly visitor was their father. When Lyda died, Ruth and her children were moved into Mount Vernon, and the parents eventually married. (H.L. Hunt’s third family was barely acknowledged.) But the move, nonetheless, was traumatic for Hunt, who recalls her father once stopped her in the hall and asked, “Now, which one are you?”
Hunt desperately wanted to be loved and accepted by her father and spent her teen years in fervent religious activity, while at the same time giving anti-communist speeches to gain his approval. Indeed, she might have well asked herself who she was. Searching for her own identity and eager to get away from a bizarre household — she once said her family tree resembled a weeping willow – she married a young minister and eventually wound up in Denver.
“The Half-Life of a Zealot” is part biography, part philosophy, part laundry list of challenges and accomplishments, and while the author has accomplished an impressive number of things, the book gets tiresome in places as she recounts them.
Still, Hunt has much to be proud of. Money, she admits, has been enormously helpful in setting up foundations that aid mostly women and children, but she doesn’t gloat in her wealth. In fact, as a young woman, she lived on her husband’s meager salary and what she made at odd jobs on the side.
Although following her father’s death, she was an owner of Hunt Oil Co., she had to ask for money, until she and her two sisters went to their brother, president of the company, and demanded a regular income. Much of Hunt’s portion has gone to good works. She lives well, but not extravagantly. Instead of buying a home in Denver’s Country Club district or the Polo Grounds, Hunt lived in a nice but hardly extravagant home on East 12th Avenue, between Josephine Street and Colorado Boulevard, across the alley from a coffee house.
To her credit, Hunt bares her soul in the book, writing about her first husband’s infidelity (although fudging a little on her own). She tells about the suicidal tendencies of her manic-depressed daughter and of marital conflicts with her second husband, the popular former conductor of the Colorado Springs Orchestra, Charles Ansbacher. She threw a tantrum at the marriage ceremony in Florence when the two were pronounced “man and wife.” “Man and what?” she cried. “Why not ‘man and cow?’ ” It hasn’t been an easy marriage.
If the book is tedious and overlong in spots, it is, nonetheless, an extraordinarily frank account of an unusual life, and one that is only half over. There is much more to come from Swanee Hunt. In fact, you get the impression that while the old man might have been apoplectic at his daughter’s philosophical and religious beliefs, he would be favorably impressed by her determination and drive to accomplish all but impossible goals. Lord knows, readers will be.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who also writes a monthly column on regional nonfiction.
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Half-Life of a Zealot
By Swanee Hunt
Duke University Press, 360 pages, $29.95
