DFW Tycoons & Hollywood Roots

North Texas mints two kinds of legend: the fortune-builder and the screen star, and often the same towns produced both. This trail follows their public legacies only — the hotels, office towers, museums, and historical markers that anyone can walk up to — and never private homes. It opens in downtown Dallas at the first hotel ever to bear the name Hilton and the oil-company tower crowned by Pegasus, then crosses to the philanthropic landmarks the Perot and Bass families left in Dallas and Fort Worth, and finally drives west to the small-town markers that remember two of the region's biggest screen icons: Mary Martin and her son Larry Hagman of Weatherford, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II turned movie star, born on a farm near Greenville. It is a long day across a wide arc of country. The thread is ambition — the drive that built fortunes and the drive that carried small-town kids to the screen.