In January 1978, a cash-strapped Larry Hagman arrived in Dallas on a bitterly cold day. Seven years after the cancellation of his hit show, I Dream of Jeannie, he had script that excited him. He would play a fictional rogue named J.R. Ewing.

In an old bread van that he converted into a camper, he drove from L.A. to North Texas.

As he cruised down Main Street in Frisco, Hagman turned into the dramatic entrance of the Box Ranch and followed the asphalt road beneath an elegant canopy of live oaks. At the end of the drive was an awe-inducing white mansion.

For just one season, this would be Southfork, home of the fictional Ewings.

It belonged to the charismatic millionaire Cloyce Box.

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In business, he was a hybrid of overwhelming charm and focused intimidation. To friends and employees, he displayed stunning generosity. As a father, he applied Marine Corps training to raise four sons.

For the 1982 Cattle Baron's Ball, he was the grand host who opened the ranch gates for his rich friends to see Willie Nelson perform.

At 6-foot-4, Box had been a star wide receiver for the Detroit Lions. With teammates Doak Walker and Bobby Layne, he led the Lions to consecutive NFL championships.

At his Frisco ranch, he entertained close friends like fellow football greats Frank Gifford and Don Meredith and developer Trammell Crow. After the NFL, he entered the construction business, cement and then oil.

A towering manifestation of idiosyncrasies, Box liked to have everything at the ranch — especially the house — painted white. "Then I'll know whether or not it's clean," he said.

The 14,000-square-foot mansion, the barns and the metal fences around the horse track were all white and clearly visible from the road. Now called the Brinkmann Ranch, it still has the barns where Box bred thoroughbreds and the track where he trained quarter horses. What remains of his home stands as an eerie relic of an era that died with Box.

Richer, more handsome and more controversial than a TV Ewing, Box was a Cinemascope Giant. He was dashing like Bick Benedict and reckless like Jett Rink.

With TV's Jock Ewing he shared one principle: Box expected, in fact he demanded, that his sons Don, Gary, Tom and Doug join his often-risky business.

"I knew he was highly leveraged," said youngest son, Doug. "I never had much faith in the future. My whole life, I thought it was all gonna come tumbling down."

In his just-released book, Texas Patriarch: A Legacy Lost, Doug Box reveals that is precisely what happened.

His father personified the image of a Texas wheeler-dealer. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated him. He spent $40 million of his own money to build a $177 million cement plant with Trammell Crow and lost it. During a 1987 remodel of the ranch house, it caught fire and was destroyed.

But those were challenges he handled.

"He thought he was invincible," said his in-house counsel Kathy Boyett.

At the Box Ranch, a modern, fireproof replacement of the mansion began to rise from the ground. Steel beams were erected and a roof was put on before the exterior wall was added.

At that time, Box was being sued by one of the richest men in the country, Idaho potato billionaire J.R. Simplot, the largest stockholder in the publicly traded Box Energy.

As in his previous scrapes, Box hoped to negotiate a peaceful conclusion.

But fate intervened when Cloyce Box died of a heart attack.

"I think, had he lived, somehow he would have pulled out the issues that caused all the division," said Boyett.

1 / 6Dallas TV stars Linda Gray and Larry Hagman with businessman Cloyce Box at the 1982 Cattle Baron's Ball at the Box Ranch.(Courtesy of Doug Box) 2 / 6Cloyce Box with Dallas TV star Linda Gray at the 1982 Cattle Baron's Ball at the Box Ranch.(Courtesy of Doug Box) 3 / 6The original house at the Box Ranch was used as Southfork during the first season of the TV show Dallas.(Courtesy of Doug Box) 4 / 6Cloyce Box (right) at his showplace Box Ranch with his sons Gary Box (left) and Doug Box (center).(Courtesy of Doug Box) 5 / 6Then-President Gerald Ford, former Gov. John Connally with Dallas businessman Cloyce Box at the home of developer Trammell Crow.(Courtesy of Doug Box) 6 / 6Frequent business partners Cloyce Box (left) and Trammell Crow (right) sign documents.(Courtesy of Doug Box)

Frank Gifford gave Box's eulogy. Kathie Lee Gifford sang at the service.

The four Box sons, men their father rode harder than any employee, wondered whether they could salvage the beleaguered business and their family legacy.

When they began to sue each other, it all came crashing down.

"Would he have built his empire with the same vigor and unrelenting drive if he'd known that it would someday tear his family apart?," Doug Box asked.

They lost the company to Simplot. Nine years later, it was sold. Thanks largely to an aggressive growth program started by former CEO Tom Box, the price was $1.36 billion. The family got none of it.

Dallas businessman Baxter Brinkmann bought and developed most of the Box Ranch, but he has never touched Cloyce Box's unfinished mansion. Visible from Main Street, it stands like a hollow steel tombstone.

"There's no longer a company," said Doug Box. "There's no ranch. His estate was insolvent. Everything had to be sold off. There's really nothing other than photographs and memories."

Box flies high

During Cloyce Box's lifetime, his Frisco ranch was far removed from his office in Preston Center. He loved his rural paradise.

"My father poured millions of dollars into it," said Doug Box. "Every square inch of the property had been rebuilt or remodeled at least once."

But he hated to drive. Instead, he would fly. To attend a black-tie gala in Dallas, he'd climb in a small plane at the ranch and fly to Love Field. In the summer of 1992, he piloted his family to the South of France in a massive Gulfstream IV.

His time as an owner of a lavish ranch and expensive planes was at the peak of an arc that began in Central Texas during the Great Depression. He was 12 when he watched his father leave the home in a horse-drawn wagon, abandoning a wife, four kids and failing farm.

Backbreaking physical labor became Cloyce Box's daily routine until an athletic scholarship to West Texas State Teachers College (now West Texas A&M University) eased his poverty. A stint in the Marines hardened him. Finally, he was drafted into the NFL. That paid for law school.

"It was not at all like it is now," Boyett said of his football career. "It was a job. It was a job that would enable him to get his law degree."

He was hired by New York's eminent Fuller Construction firm to work in its Dallas office. Soon, he borrowed money to buy his own cement plant in Oklahoma and form OKC Corp. Next, he expanded into oil and gas. By 1965, he was successful enough to buy the ranch in Frisco and bring his mother to live at the showplace.

Father knows best

The skill set he learned as a hard worker and tough Marine was what he applied to fatherhood.

"Not unlike the thoroughbreds stabled down at the barn, my brothers and I were born and bred to work for our father," said Doug Box. "There was an implicit understanding that we were not allowed to consider a life outside our father's endeavors."

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Eldest son Don was the first to learn the risk of those endeavors.

Fresh out of business school, Don Box was unsettled by articles in Barron's, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times about an SEC investigation into his father's operation of the publicly traded OKC Corp.

To distance himself, Don formed his own company called Flight Fuel Trading and used OKC's accounting staff to keep the books. But his father soon found Flight Fuel's books useful to make a $1 million loan to an employee. Unknown to any Boxes was that the employee was being investigated by the FBI. In 1983, he was arrested and a grand jury indicted him on five counts of embezzlement.

That grand jury subpoenaed Don Box.

"There's no chance I could get into hot water is there?" Don asked his father.

"Oh, I doubt it, son," Box answered. "The worst possible thing is you might have to do some time."

The father was not kidding. Don testified and was not implicated in any criminal activity. At the office, he stayed on the payroll but distanced himself from his father.

"Don lost faith in Dad over the incident," said Doug.

Circle the Box wagons

By the time Doug graduated from the University of Texas, he was ready to go into radio and television production.

"Cut the [expletive], son," his father said. "You can't get a job in any kind of business like that. We don't know any of those kinds of people."

Doug was about to break with his father's plans when he saw May 13, 1980, headline on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. It read, "Texas Cover Up: Why did OKC Chief Conceal His Oil Sales to Friendly Brokers."

Cloyce Box hated to trade with anyone he could neither control nor trust. Instead, he sold all of OKC's oil and refined products through a tight group of associates, the friendly brokers. The problem was that OKC was publicly traded and open to federal scrutiny.

"The friendly brokers were a sham," Doug said. "All their transactions took place on paper only and each of the brokers collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits on deals arranged by OKC — all so Dad didn't have to deal directly with people he didn't know."

The problems of that arrangement drew Doug into the business.

"Because of the controversy, I was led to believe that my dad needed me there emotionally," said Doug. "The family was under siege and we were circling the wagons. I thought I'd do that for a year or two but I got sucked into the vortex of the family business."

His father spent several years fighting civil and criminal charges and finally made a deal. He pled guilty on 23 misdemeanor counts and paid $115,000 in fines. He was also ordered to liquidate OKC.

Box did so. Then, he immediately started a new publicly traded firm called OKC Limited Partnership.

A year later, on Oct. 21, 1981, a Dallas Times Herald headline read, "Controversial Oilman Ends Up On Top Again."

"No less than three government agencies had been after him," said Doug. "If Dad were a horse, you wouldn't bet on him. Yet, rather than imploding, he came out of the tangle with the moral equivalent of a slap on the hand. Dad wasn't just the underdog, he was the underdog who won."

By 1984, Dallas was glitzy and glamorous due to an oil and real estate boom. To capitalize on it, Cloyce Box partnered with Crow to build a cement plant in Midlothian.

Box took out a loan on his ranch to finance his $40 million investment. On Oct. 18. 1987, eight months after the cement plant opened, the stock market crashed and the American economy went into a tailspin.

The cement plant went into bankruptcy.

Up in smoke

On the home front, Box lost his most precious personal asset. On Nov. 3, 1987, he watched his white mansion as it was engulfed in flames ignited when a spark hit a painter's bucket of lacquer. The entire house was destroyed.

Six days later, billionaire J.R. Simplot filed his first of many lawsuits against Box. He was the largest stockholder in Box's publicly traded company. When it sold its profitable pipeline to a private firm owned by the Box family, Simplot thought he'd been hustled.

"Dad paid for the pipeline," Doug said. "But it was a related-party transaction and Simplot did not like it."

In September 1992, a jury awarded Simplot $28.5 million in damages.

'Dad was like a cat'

For once, it looked like a problem Box could not negotiate his way out of.

"Dad, I'm worried about you," Doug said.

"Don't you worry about me son," he answered. "We'll get this all straightened out."

"Dad was like a cat," said Doug. "He'd always land on his feet." But Cloyce Box was on his ninth life.

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In October 1993, he flew his Beechcraft King Air to North Carolina for a checkup at Duke University Medical Center. The night before his appointment, Box was in a hotel bed with his wife, Ashley. She awoke and found that her husband was dead.

After the funeral, arguments began among the four sons about how to solve the Simplot problem.

"Three out of four of us realized that we can settle the case and walk away with a bunch of money," said Doug. "Tom did not want to do that. He was vehemently opposed to selling the business. We lawyered up and ended up suing each other."

At that time, Doug lived in a guesthouse on the ranch. As the brothers fought each other, a lender foreclosed on the largest portion of the ranch to collect $25 million borrowed for the father's Midlothian cement plant.

"That morning, I watched the sun rise over the remains of the big house," said Doug, "feeling helpless and dejected at the loss of my childhood home."

That same month, Trammell Crow and his family won a $15 million judgment against Cloyce Box's estate.

On Aug. 29, 1997, the brothers gathered with an army of lawyers in a Dallas courtroom. "The last time I had seen so many attorneys in one place at been at Dad's funeral," said Doug.

The Boxes sold their interests to a trust controlled by Simplot.

"We had a lot," Doug said. "We pretty much lost it all."

In 2002, Don Box was paralyzed from injuries in a car accident. He died from complications in 2010.

"Gary owns a convenience store in Canton," said Doug. "He and his wife have been married for 35 years."

Tom Box works domestically and overseas as a cement consultant.

Using the experience from the turmoil, Doug wrote a book about life on the ranch called Cutter Frisco and the current Texas Patriarch. He also founded Box Family Advisors.

"We try to go in and do all the things that my family didn't do early enough," he said. "We create a system of governance for a family to govern its own affairs."

Doug is philosophical about choices he made and choices that were made for him.

"When I went off to college, I wanted to do something that would differentiate me from my father," he said. "I went at that mightily, but I ran out of steam. Whether or not we liked it, we were fated to enlist in my father's tumultuous business world."