In the outer office on Kiewit Plaza’s eighth floor, Gladys Kaiser sat guarding Warren Buffett’s doorway. Rail-thin, perfectly made up, chain-smoke drifting through her platinum hair, Gladys dispatched paperwork, phone calls, bills, and nonsense with brisk efficiency.1 She kept Buffett off-limits to everyone—including, at times, his family. It made Susie seethe, but there was nothing she could do.
Susie blamed Gladys. Warren, of course, would never give Gladys an actual order to keep Susie out. But no one at his office would so much as cough if they thought he would disapprove. People had to follow hints and signals simply to work at the Buffett Partnership. Beetled brows and “hmmmf” meant “Don’t even consider it.” “Really?” meant “I disagree.” An averted head, crinkled eyes, and backpedaling meant “Help me, I can’t.” Gladys brooked no nonsense in following these unarticulated requests and orders, and sometimes people’s feelings got hurt. But her job was to protect her boss, and she had to be tough enough to take the blame.
On the dingy walls above her head hung some framed newspaper clippings, reminders of the 1929 Crash. Dented metal furniture, along with an old ticker machine, furnished the offices. Down the linoleum hallway beyond Gladys sat the other people who knew how to interpret Buffett’s signals and signs. To the left was Bill Scott’s little office, where he barked “Hurry up, I’m busy!” at the brokers to execute Buffett’s trades. In a file room, by the small refrigerator Gladys kept filled with Pepsi bottles, part-time bookkeeper Donna Walters kept the partnership’s records and prepared its tax returns.2 Just past Walters sat John Harding, managing the partnership’s affairs. Behind Gladys was Buffett’s sparsely furnished realm. Its most prominent feature was the large portrait of Howard Buffett on the wall across from his desk.
Warren arrived every morning, hung up his hat, and disappeared into his sanctuary to read the papers. After a while he emerged and told Gladys, “Get me Charlie.” Then he shut the door, got on the phone, and spent the rest of the day swiveling between the phone and his reading. Once in a while he would reappear and tell Bill Scott about a trade.
With the stock market high, Scott was less busy these days. Buffett, his pockets full of the money that National Indemnity produced, was delving for entire businesses, since their prices were less subject to the whim of investors. He had discovered the Illinois National Bank & Trust, one of the most profitable banks he had ever seen, run by seventy-one-year-old Eugene Abegg in Rockford, Illinois. Buffett wanted the crusty Abegg as part of the deal. Abegg resembled Ben Rosner, who had counted sheets of toilet paper.
“He carried around thousands of dollars of cash in his pocket, and he cashed checks for people on the weekends. He carried a list of the numbers of unrented safe-deposit boxes with him everywhere and would try to rent you a safe-deposit box at a cocktail party. Mind you, this is the biggest bank in the second-largest city in Illinois at the time. He set every salary and paid every employee in cash, so the head of the trust department did not know how much his own secretaries made.
“Gene had already made a deal to sell the bank to somebody else. But the buyer had started criticizing it, or they wanted an audit and he’d never been audited and he wanted out. So I went out there, and I named a number that turned out to be about a million dollars less than the other guy. And Gene, who owned a quarter of the stock, called up his biggest shareholder, who owned more than half the stock, and said, ‘This young guy from Omaha’s come here and offered this. I’m tired of those guys at XYZ Company. If you want to sell to them, then you come run this bank, because I won’t.’ ”
Sure enough, Abegg accepted his offer. And doing business with him cinched Buffett’s instinct that strong-willed and ethical entrepreneurs often cared more about how they and the companies they had built were going to be treated by the new owners than about grabbing the last nickel in a sale.
The Illinois National Bank, which Buffett soon came to refer to by its colloquial name of Rockford Bank, had been chartered in the days before the U.S. Treasury assumed the exclusive right to coin money. Buffett was fascinated to discover that it still issued its own currency. The ten-dollar bills featured Abegg’s picture. Buffett, whose net worth was now more than $26 million, could have bought almost anything he wanted, but not this.3 The idea of legal tender with your own picture on it captivated him. He began carrying a Rockford bill in his wallet.
Heretofore, Buffett had not wanted his picture on a bill or anywhere else. He had more or less shunned the spotlight while managing the partnership. True, a few more stories and photographs of his family had found their way into the local paper than might be expected of someone who wanted privacy.4 Nevertheless, except for his letters to the partners, he tiptoed through the “Go-Go” years of the sixties with his lips sealed—he didn’t want anyone coattailing him.
Even when the opportunity to promote himself arrived on his doorstep, he hadn’t used it. A few years earlier, John Loomis, a securities salesman, visited Buffett at Kiewit Plaza. Loomis’s wife, Carol, wrote the investing column for Fortune magazine. She had once interviewed a money manager named Bill Ruane, who told her that the smartest investor in the United States lived in Omaha. Some time later, her husband arrived at Kiewit Plaza and made his way upstairs to the 227½-square-foot space that looked nothing like the office of one of the richest men in town.
Buffett took him over to the Blackstone Hotel, where he downed a strawberry malt and told Loomis what he did. Loomis talked about his wife’s job as a journalist. Buffett said that if he had not become a money manager, he would have pursued journalism as a career.5
Warren and Susie met with the Loomises when they were in New York not long after. The well-connected young money manager from Omaha with the stellar track record and the ambitious reporter for Fortune found they shared many attributes: a zeal for unmasking flimflam, a magpie obsession with minutiae, and a streak of competitiveness. Carol Loomis was a tall, no-nonsense woman with short brown hair who tolerated shoddy journalism about as well as Buffett tolerated losing money. They began to correspond and she ushered him into the world of big-league journalism. He began helping her with her story ideas. “Carol very quickly became my best friend other than Charlie,” he says.6 At first she did not publish anything about Buffett.
By the late 1960s, however, the rising market had made investing in stocks less viable. The advantage of celebrity when trying to buy entire businesses began to outweigh the benefit of secrecy in buying stocks. And thus it was in the late 1960s that Buffett’s longtime interest in newspapers and publishing came together with his newly recast investing goals and his desire for personal attention in a way that would fundamentally change his world.
Before long, Buffett was immersed in the black-and-white world of journalism. Page by page, newspapers fell to cover financial reports from newspapers and magazines that lay scattered on his desk. When he slept, more newspapers—pulled from a bundle and folded into tidy packets—flew through his dreams. On his most restless nights, he dreamed of oversleeping his childhood paper route.7
Buffett’s fortune had grown large enough for him to afford the purchase of a newspaper or a magazine, or both. His dream was to be not just an investor but a publisher—to have the influence that went with owning the means through which the public learned the news. Around 1968, he and some friends tried unsuccessfully to buy the entertainment newspaper Variety.8 Then another acquaintanceship bore fruit. Stanford Lipsey, a friend of Susie’s, showed up in Warren’s office and said he wanted to sell the Omaha Sun Newspapers. Buffett was immediately interested.
The Sun was a chain of weekly neighborhood newspapers that published seven editions in the Omaha suburbs. Its meat-and-potatoes stories were neighborhood doings; the Sun’s editor, Paul Williams, also competed by publishing stories that the leading paper, the Omaha World-Herald, missed, often stories that exposed the follies and misdeeds of city bigwigs.
Despite his own elevation to the Omaha establishment, Buffett took a particular interest in the muckraking aspect of the Sun. Ever since collecting license-plate numbers to catch bank robbers, he had wanted to play the cop. And “I recognized intuitively that Warren understood the role of newspapers in our society,” Lipsey says. “I didn’t like the Sun’s business prospects, but I knew that Warren had enough money that the journalism wouldn’t suffer because of the economics. In twenty minutes, it was done.”
“I figured we’d pay a million and a quarter for it and take out a hundred thousand a year,” Buffett says. This return was eight percent, about as much as a bond would provide—less, far less, than he expected to earn on a business or a stock, and the long-term outlook suggested that return would decline, not increase. But the partnership’s money was lying fallow, and he really wanted to be a publisher. Buffett wanted the Sun so much that he agreed to make Lipsey a partner even though he was beginning to consider shutting the partnership down.
Berkshire Hathaway became owner of the Omaha Sun Newspapers on January 1, 1969. But it was only a beginning; Buffett wanted to be a publisher on a national scale. Buffett was introduced through a political connection, West Virginia’s Secretary of State Jay Rockefeller, to Charles Peters, an idealist whose start-up magazine, the Washington Monthly, seemed like the right national voice to express viewpoints on important ideas.
Buffett brought Fred Stanback and Rosenfield in as partners on the Washington Monthly, warning them not to expect big profits. In fact, he thought the financial prospects might vary in inverse proportion to the magazine’s journalistic success. But the scandals it might uncover—the ideas it could promote—the exposés it could expose! They put in a little money.9
In short order, the Washington Monthly ran through its initial capital stake. Buffett held out the possibility of another $50,000. He and Peters had a fifty-minute phone conversation, in which Buffett’s hard-nosed business instincts and his good-citizen journalist side went to war. “As an investment it reeked of the potential for failure,” says Peters. “He was worried about his business reputation.… Warren kept finding new plausible escape routes, and I tried to block the exits.”10 Buffett said that the editors had to put in some of their own money, and raise some outside, which Buffett said he would match eighty percent.11
Peters was a better journalist than an accountant. They raised the money; the checks went out; then nobody heard from the Washington Monthly. “They just vanished,” says Buffett.12 Although the Washington Monthly was indeed putting out strong stories, it wasn’t enough. He had known from the beginning that it would not make money, but he thought it ought to be accountable for the money that it had. He was embarrassed at having drawn in Stanback and Rosenfield. Buffett wanted to be a partner in journalism, not just the guy who bankrolled idealism.
Yet even with mixed results, Buffett was now pursuing the personal concerns of which he had spoken in his October 1967 letter to his partners. Meanwhile, the market continued to dry up. Spending part of his time as a publishing magnate was no help in adjusting to that reality. Whatever else occupied him, he remained wholly committed to the partnership, too, and it turned out that a “less compulsive approach” to investing was not in his nature. He says he received offers from a couple of people to buy the management firm, which would have meant the opportunity to sell at a large profit, but he thought this was not right. So far, Buffett had shown no inclination to avoid getting richer, but he had always stayed on the same side as his partners, harnessing his avarice to their benefit as well as his own. So he started to figure out the best way to wind down the partnership. Around Memorial Day 1969, Buffett wrote the partners to tell them that simply lowering his goal hadn’t lessened his intensity:
“If I am going to participate publicly, I can’t help being competitive. I know I don’t want to be totally occupied with outpacing an investment rabbit all my life. The only way to slow down is to stop.”13 And then he delivered his bombshell: He gave notice of closing down the partnership in early 1970. “I am not attuned to this market environment, and I don’t want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don’t understand just so I can go out a hero.”14
What would he do now?
“I don’t have an answer to that question,” he wrote. “I do know that when I am sixty, I should be attempting to achieve different personal goals than those which had priority at age twenty.”15
The partners howled with disappointment, and a few with fear. Many were naïfs, like his aunt Alice. They were ministers, rabbis, schoolteachers, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law. His announcement amounted to a market call on stocks. He had taught even the inexperienced to be wary of an overheated market. Some trusted no one other than him.
Susie Buffett was happy that Warren was shutting down the partnership, at least for the kids’ sake. They cared desperately what their father thought of them. Susie Jr. had always gotten most of what little attention Warren provided, and Peter felt rewarded for being quiet and staying in the background. But fourteen-year-old Howie, who had always sought some emotional connection to his father that was never forthcoming, had grown wilder as he grew up. Howie climbed on the roof in the gorilla costume to spy on Susie Jr. when she came home from dates and drenched her with the sprayer from the kitchen sink when she appeared in her prom dress. When their parents were in New York City, Howie seized the chance for an experiment in anarchy.16 Warren assumed Susie would take care of everything. But by now, Susie herself had stopped trying to control her children. And she had long since let go of any idealistic expectations regarding her marriage. Her attention was increasingly taken up by an expanding number of “vagrants,” as one friend put it, who wandered through the house, sought her help, and occupied her time.17
Since she almost always accepted people unconditionally, some of those “clients” had pasts as felons, con men, addicts, or, in one case, as the purported proprietor of a bawdy house. Some even conned her out of money and she didn’t really mind. Buffett was infuriated at the thought of being cheated himself, but he had eventually come to think of her attitude as part of Susie’s charm.
Her large group of women friends, which included Bella Eisenberg, Eunice Denenberg, Jeannie Lipsey, Rackie Newman, and others, continued to expand. Though Warren recognized most of them, this was Susie’s circle, not his. Other ties of hers came from the activist community; another set of friends centered around the tennis courts at Dewey Park. And there was always the family.
Even though Susie was a fountainhead of generosity to her many fans, friends, and dependents, she was starting to need a little attention too. It wouldn’t have taken much, according to her friends. She disagreed that making money was life’s purpose. She felt impoverished denying herself travel, museums, theater, and other forms of culture because of Warren’s lack of interest. He praised her effusively in public but when at home, lapsed into his normal preoccupied state. If he would make an effort to go to an art gallery with her now and then, or take her on a trip just because she wanted to go, it would make a difference, she said. But while he did sometimes show up when asked, if she had to ask, it was a favor, not a gift.
Now that Susie realized that Warren was never going to take off to Italy for weeks on end, she began to travel on her own or with friends, sometimes to visit family and sometimes to attend personal-growth seminars.
One day at the Chicago airport, a man stopped in front of her as she sat on a bench. “Are you Susie Thompson?” he asked. She looked up, embarrassed to have been caught with a mouth full of hot dog. It was Milt Brown, her high school sweetheart, whom she had not seen in years. He sat down and they began to get reacquainted.18
Susie, who was always reaching out for emotional connections, would later say that her husband wasn’t lacking in emotion, he was just cut off from his own feelings. And it certainly seemed as though his strongest emotional bonds were with his friends and partners, to whom he felt an intense obligation, and with whom he had created a de facto family. The other Buffetts could not help but notice the way he lit up in their company, in contrast to the dutiful but preoccupied manner he displayed while attending his own family events.
Thus, even now that he was preparing to close the partnership, he seemed a little reluctant to let go of his connection to his partners. He wrote them another letter describing their options in meticulous detail.
This was unusual behavior for a money manager, to say the least. Even Ben Graham had only said, “Oh, buy AT&T,” when asked, and mentioned Buffett offhandedly to a few people. But Buffett made elaborate efforts to shepherd his partners on to their future investing life. Some of them were already in the Munger partnership; Buffett sent a few more to him. But Munger was queasy about the market.
“I recommended two people to the partners whom I knew were exceptionally good and exceptionally honest: Sandy Gottesman and Bill Ruane.… I not only knew their results, but I knew how they’d accomplished their results, which was terribly important.”19
The richer partners would go to Gottesman at First Manhattan, but Sandy didn’t want the small-fry. Buffett sent the rest to Ruane, who was leaving Kidder, Peabody to set up his own investment advisory firm, Ruane, Cunniff & Stires, with two partners, Rick Cunniff and Sidney Stires, and creating the Sequoia Fund specifically to take on the smaller accounts. He hired John Harding, who would be out of a job when the partnership dissolved, to run an Omaha office for the new company. John Loomis, Carol Loomis’s husband, and Buffett’s trusty researcher Henry Brandt also went to Ruane, Cunniff—giving it in effect a full staff. These connections also kept Harding, Loomis, and Brandt in Buffett’s extended “family.”
Buffett brought Ruane to Omaha and promoted the Sequoia Fund to the partners. He endorsed Ruane in typically mathematical terms. Unremarkably, even though he had known Ruane for years, he still felt it necessary to leave a small escape hatch, fearing blame in case things didn’t work out, and wrote: “There is no way to eliminate the possibility of error when judging humans … [but] I consider Bill to be an exceptionally high-probability decision on character and a high-probability one on investment performance.”20
Yet while Buffett made arrangements to close the partnership, the first signs appeared that the market’s sparks were going to cool. By July 1969, when U.S. troops began withdrawing from Vietnam, the Dow had dropped nineteen percent. Exotic stocks like National Student Marketing and Minnie Pearl’s Chicken System, Inc. were starting to collapse.21
Blue Chip Stamps, the trading-stamp stock painstakingly accumulated by Buffett, Munger, and Guerin, now became a striking exception to the general trend. The three of them had been betting on whether the company could settle its antitrust lawsuit with Sperry & Hutchinson. When a settlement was reached, this stock—which the Buffett partners didn’t know they owned—showered nearly $7 million in profit on them in return for a $2 million investment less than a year ago.22 Now Blue Chip decided to have a public offering, and Buffett elected to sell the partnership’s shares as part of that deal.23 It seemed that the partners were going to have a splendid final year in 1969.
That October, Buffett called another meeting of the Grahamites from San Diego the year before, sans Ben Graham himself. This time the wives were also invited, and although they did not join the meetings in which the men talked about stocks, their presence made the atmosphere more festive, like a vacation. Buffett delegated the planning to Marshall Weinberg, who lived in New York City and liked to travel. But Weinberg, who also liked to shave a dime and had no more experience of the jet-set life than Buffett, asked around and then made the unfortunate choice of the Colony Club, a Palm Beach, Florida, resort, where they were treated like rubes. Ruane reported at the first night’s dinner that the bellhop had handed back his five-dollar tip, saying, “You need it more than I do.”
For the next five days, as the group enjoyed bad food, small rooms, high winds, and lashing rains, the men sat classroom style, with Buffett most often in his usual place at the front. They batted thoughts back and forth in an encoded shorthand derived from many years of conversation and a closely shared set of concepts and values.24
Buffett posed the Desert Island Challenge. If you were stranded on a desert island for ten years, he asked, in what stock would you invest? The trick was to find the company least subject to the corroding forces of competition and time: Munger’s idea of the great business. Buffett delivered his own choice: Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. His interest in newspapers was growing and would only become more intense, yet curiously he did not actually own this stock.
The gathering ended much as it had begun, with more displays of rudeness from the hotel staff, who had no idea they were hosting anything other than a third-rate group of stockbrokers at a time when the market was falling.25
Buffett would go on to describe the Colony Club as “a friendly family hotel—that is, friendly if you were the Kennedy family.”26 Later, when a Fort Lauderdale businessman who held the mortgage on the Colony Club asked Buffett to advise him on a financing deal, Buffett told the man he would be happy to do it without taking a fee, but “if you ever have a chance to foreclose on them, do it.”27
One of those Buffett had invited to the Colony Club was Hochschild-Kohn’s Louis Kohn. Buffett had grown fond of Kohn and his wife, and he and Susie had even vacationed with the Kohns in Cozumel. But no sooner had the meeting been planned than Buffett and Munger started to realize that Hochschild-Kohn was not going to work out for them.
“Retail is a very tough business,” says Charlie Munger. “Practically every great chain-store operation that has been around long enough eventually gets in trouble and is hard to fix.” Their experience had given them a deep wariness of retailing—one that would only grow, not lessen, over time.
They wanted businesses that would marmalade them with money, businesses that had some sort of sustainable competitive advantage and could outwit the natural cycle of capital creation and destruction as long as possible. Not long after the meeting in Florida, Munger and Buffett sold Hochschild-Kohn to Supermarkets General for about what it had cost them.28 Buffett wanted to act fast in order to unload the company before winding down the partnership. And along with the company, the Kohns disappeared from the Buffetts’ lives.29
Diversified Retailing had issued unsecured debt (“debentures”) to finance the Hochschild-Kohn purchase. Buffett had taken special care with this, his first public financing.
“That was the first bond issue I ever sold, and I put a few things in there that the underwriters had no interest in whatsoever. But I had thought a lot about bond issues over the years. And I had thought about how bondholders got taken.”
Bondholders historically earned less than stockholders because they gave up the potentially unlimited opportunity of a shareholder in favor of lower risk. But Buffett knew that in the real world this was not necessarily true.
“One of the things I put in was that if we didn’t pay the interest on the bond for any reason, the bondholders took over voting control of the company, so they didn’t have to get Mickey-Moused by bankruptcy and all that kind of stuff.” Ben Graham had written about this in Security Analysis, with as much passion as he mustered on any subject, describing how courts rarely allow bondholders to seize the assets that back those bonds unless the assets are nearly worthless. Unsecured bondholders’ interests were worked over in receivership through a strangling process that delayed payment almost to the point of irrelevance. Thus, DRC’s debenture also provided that the company could not pay dividends while interest on the bonds was in arrears.
The second unusual provision was that, depending on the company’s earnings, the debentures could pay up to an extra one percent on top of eight percent.
Buffett added a third provision. The bonds would be redeemable if he sold enough stock in DRC that he was no longer the largest shareholder.30
“Nobody had ever stuck anything like this in a covenant. I said, ‘You know, they’re entitled to have this in there.… They lent money to me, basically.’ ” When his banker, Nelson Wilder, protested that such clauses were unprecedented and unnecessary, Buffett overruled him.31
Now that interest rates had risen, and banks were newly reluctant to lend, the debentures suddenly became a valuable form of cheap financing, a powerful consolation prize. Nonetheless, since Buffett thought of a dollar today as the fifty or hundred dollars that it could become someday, it was as if he had lost many millions on Hochschild-Kohn because of the forgone opportunity to use the money more effectively. He drew a conclusion that he would later state as:
Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.… It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. Charlie understood this early; I was a slow learner. But now, when buying companies or common stocks, we look for first-class businesses accompanied by first-class managements. That leads right into a related lesson: Good jockeys will do well on good horses but not on broken-down nags.32
Even as Buffett and Munger were working on the sale of Hochschild-Kohn in the fall of 1969, Forbes hit the newsstand with a story about Buffett titled “How Omaha Beats Wall Street.” The article opened in such an arresting manner that other writers covering Buffett would copy it for decades afterward.33
“$10,000 invested in his Buffett Partnership in 1957,” Forbes said, “is now worth $260,000.” The partnership, which now had assets of $100 million, had grown at an annual compounded rate of thirty-one percent without a single losing year. The anonymous columnist for Forbes then wrote one of the more insightful statements ever made about Buffett:
“Buffett is not a simple person, but he has simple tastes.”
This not-simple Buffett with simple tastes had insisted on total secrecy in his stock dealings when he ran his partnership, and was never once profiled in an interview. Now, however, when secrecy was no longer important, he had cooperated with a high-profile article about himself.
The article did not print, or even whisper, his net worth. The reporter did not know that since Buffett closed the partnership to new partners in 1966, his fees, reinvested, had quadrupled his net worth to $26.5 million in just three years—nor that, with no money coming in from new partners, his share of the partnership’s assets had risen from nineteen percent to twenty-six percent. Instead, the story focused on his “rambling old Omaha house”34 and the lack of computers and the minimal staff in his unimpressive office. And it was true that the man with simple tastes still chugged four or five bottles of Pepsi a day, asked for it instead of wine at dinner parties, and ate only the dinner rolls if anything more complicated than a steak or hamburger was served. A helpless captive of whoever happened to be doing the laundry at home, he still sometimes turned up in public looking little better than a hobo. He would have been happy in a two-room garage apartment; the money was just his scorecard.
Nonetheless, the Buffetts had for some time lived the life of a well-to-do couple—though not, of course, a life as luxurious as they could have afforded. It was Susie who cared about living well, and it was she who thought that money was pointless unless used for some purpose. Susie had even upgraded Warren to a Cadillac like her own, but only the most stripped-down version with no extra features, and only after she had called every dealer within miles to get the cheapest deal. People found the contrast between his homespun tastes and his ever-growing fortune refreshing. His genial manner, self-deprecating wit, and air of calm put them at ease. He had shed some of his earlier gracelessness and most of his arrogance along with the more obvious signs of insecurity—though his tolerance for criticism had not increased. He was learning to hide his impatience. Even though he worried constantly about how associating with others reflected on him, he showed great loyalty to longtime friends. People were especially struck by his fundamental honesty.
Those who spent long periods in his presence, however, found the unleashed whirlwind of his energy exhausting. “Insatiable,” they whispered, and sometimes felt a guilty relief when his attention lapsed. He was prone to deluging his friends with mountains of clippings and reading material that he thought would interest them. Even apparently casual conversations were less casual than they seemed. They always seemed to have a purpose, however obscure, which sometimes involved his testing people. Buffett vibrated with an inner tension that belied his outwardly casual style.
It was hard to imagine what he was going to do with all that energy and intensity without the partnership. Many of the partners found it hard to imagine what they were going to do without him. Many of them were reluctant to let go. Their reluctance struck an ironic note next to the fate of the other Buffett family business. Concurrent with its centennial, Fred Buffett threw his hands in the air and gave up on the Buffett grocery store. Even though it had a half million dollars a year in sales, when he tried to find a buyer, there were no takers. The grinding wheel of capitalism had spoken.
The Buffetts were not socialites and had never thrown a really large party. But with both the store and the partnership closing, they celebrated with a bash one night in late September 1969. Nearly two hundred people of all ages and races poured into their house. Businessmen, society matrons, friends and poor adopted “clients” of Susie’s, teenagers, partners, assorted priests, rabbis, and ministers, and local politicians made their way through a string of flashing lights, past the three-foot Pepsi bottles in the windows. Susie had chosen a New York theme—Stage Door Deli food and decor—and told people to dress in “casual kosher.” They showed up in everything from culottes to cocktail dresses. A half-cut beer barrel burst with chrysanthemums in her favorite color, sunshine yellow. A table set up like a deli cart, hung with sausages and a real plucked chicken, offered pastrami sandwiches and cheeses. Next to the beer keg in the sunroom, a piano player encouraged guests to sing along. The racquetball court became an impromptu basement movie theater, its ceiling bobbing with giant helium balloons; films with W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Laurel and Hardy ran all evening long. In the solarium, the elderly Fred Buffett “protected” two bikini-clad models as the guests covered them with body paint.
“I had such a good time that I hate to think it’s over,” Susie said afterward.35