Susie’s friends would say that she created a separate life for herself within her marriage as a way to accommodate Warren’s obsessions. As one put it, Warren’s “real marriage was to Berkshire Hathaway.” There was no getting around that fact. However uneasily, however, their routine had worked for them. At least, that is, it worked for them until another of Buffett’s obsessions—with Katharine Graham—reached the point that it began to push Susie offstage. That was when she finally took action.
Warren now spent much of his time elephant-bumping at black-tie events in New York and Washington with Graham, or staying at her house for her Kay Parties. Despite his residual awkwardness and cackling laugh, he was meeting a circle of powerful, celebrated friends and acquaintances of Kay’s that opened his eyes to a new world.
“I met Truman Capote,” he says about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, who had thrown the legendary Black and White Ball in Graham’s honor at the Plaza Hotel in New York; the event became known as the “party of the century.” Capote had been a confidant of many rich international society women.
“The one person he really liked was Kay. Unlike the rest, he just didn’t feel she was a phony, I think.”
Buffett had even been summoned by former ambassador to Great Britain Walter Annenberg, who owned Triangle Publications, which held, among other lucrative properties, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Buffett’s childhood favorite, the Daily Racing Form.
“Walter read about me in the Wall Street Journal in 1977. I got this letter that read, ‘Dear Mr. Buffett,’ and he invited me to Sunnylands,” his California estate. Having heard stories about the famously thin-skinned ambassador, Buffett was intrigued. Annenberg’s father featured in many of the stories. Besides the publishing interests that he had bequeathed to his son, Moe Annenberg had also left him a legacy of scandal and shame. He ran a racing wire that telegraphed horserace results to bookies all over the country. Of dubious legality, it was linked to organized crime. Reportedly to save his son from prosecution for tax evasion along with him, Moe Annenberg copped a plea and was led into jail wearing a homburg hat and chains. Walter was later to say that his gaunt, pain-racked father, dying of a brain tumor, whispered as his last few words, “My suffering is all for the purpose of making a man out of you.”1 Whether this scene was real or imagined, Walter would later act as though he believed it.
Consumed by a drive to redeem his family’s honor, Walter learned the publishing business through trial by fire and proved a gifted entrepreneur. He dreamed up Seventeen magazine, then a booklet-size magazine called TV Guide, a brilliant conception that fed the public’s appetite for information about television schedules, shows, and stars. By the time he met Buffett, he had not only become a great business success story but had reached the pinnacle of social respectability after Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to England’s Court of St. James’s. Yet even though he restored the family name, he never overcame the personal scars of his legacy.
Buffett arrived at Sunnylands filled with curiosity to meet Annenberg. The two already had a connection; Annenberg was the brother of Aye Simon, the “spoiled, spoiled” widow whom Ben Rosner had decided to screw when he sold the Associated Cotton Shoppes to Buffett. On the one occasion that Buffett had met her, Aye Simon had entertained him in her vast art-filled apartment in New York City. Maids tiptoed back and forth carrying silver trays of sandwiches; Aye explained to Buffett that her “Pop,” Moe Annenberg, once had his goons, known as “the boys,” “take a few shots at” her husband, Leo Simon, to improve his attitude toward Moe. You can still see the bullet holes on a certain corner of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, she said. Aye then asked for her son to join the Buffett partnership. Warren, “envisioning bullets” if he turned in a year of bad results, had “tap-danced” his way out of the situation.
Her brother, Walter, had spent decades establishing a reputation for propriety about as different from the image of bullets on Michigan Avenue as could be imagined. Annenberg had entertained Prince Charles, hosted Frank Sinatra’s fourth wedding, and given his friend Richard Nixon peace and quiet to write his last State of the Union address.
“He had a courtly way about him and was very formal. We went outside in back by the pool, and Walter sat down. He was beautifully dressed and looked as though everything he was wearing had been bought that morning. He was about seventy at the time, and I was about forty-seven. And he said, in a nice, kind manner, as if he were talking to a young man he was trying to help, ‘Mr. Buffett, the first thing you should understand is, nobody likes to be criticized.’ That was setting the ground rules for getting along.”
Nothing could be easier for Buffett. “I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Ambassador. I’ve got it. Don’t worry about that one.’
“And then he started in on ‘Essentiality.’
“ ‘There are three properties in the world,’ he said, ‘that have the quality of ‘Essentiality.’ They are the Daily Racing Form, the TV Guide, and the Wall Street Journal. And I own two out of three.’
“What he meant by ‘Essentiality’ was that, even during the Depression, he saw the Racing Form being sold for two and a half bucks down in Cuba.”
The Racing Form had that quality because there was no source of better or more complete information about handicapping horses.
“It sold a hundred fifty thousand copies a day, and it had for about fifty years. It cost more than two bucks, and it was essential. If you were headed to the racetrack and were a serious racing handicapper, you wanted the Racing Form. He could charge whatever he wanted, and people were going to pay it. It’s like selling needles to addicts, basically.
“So every year, Walter would go in and say, ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how much should I raise the price of the Racing Form this fall?’
“And the mirror would always say, ‘Walter, charge another quarter!’ “
This was when you could buy the New York Times or Washington Post for a quarter. And yet, thought Buffett, the Times and the Post were great businesses! That meant the Daily Racing Form was an incredible business.
Annenberg wanted to own all three of the Essentialities. The visit to Sunnylands was the beginning of a reel that he and Buffett would dance from time to time: talking about whether and how they could buy the Wall Street Journal together.
But “the real reason that he had me out there was to send a message to Kay.”
The Annenbergs and the Grahams had once been friends.2 Then, in 1969, during the confirmation hearing for Annenberg’s appointment as ambassador to Great Britain, he had taken offense at columns written by the Post’s muckraking Drew Pearson, which described at length Annenberg’s editorial vindictiveness at the Philadelphia Inquirer, said that his fortune “was built up by gang warfare,” and repeated an unsubstantiated rumor that his father had paid $1 million a year in protection money to mob boss Al Capone.3 Annenberg, enraged, accused Graham of using her paper as a political weapon against President Nixon, the man who had restored his family to respectability by taking the risk of nominating him for the ambassadorship. He called Graham to ask for a retraction. She tried to soothe his feelings, but said she never interfered with the editorial page.
After his Senate hearing, Annenberg stalked out of a Kay Party in his honor over what he felt were major, and others felt were unintentional, social slights.
“Kay was distraught about it. She wanted enormously to get along with Walter.
Kay was not looking to have fights with anybody. That was not her style.… She liked big shots, and she liked big-shot guys, particularly.… But she also wanted Walter to understand that she wasn’t going to tell Ben Bradlee what to write about in the paper.
“So by the time I went out to see him, he was thinking about having a book commissioned about Phil Graham, and how Phil’s teeth were in a funny way.”
Phil Graham’s teeth.
“Walter had a theory that if you were gap-toothed, that was a sign of mental instability. And if Walter had a theory, you didn’t argue with it. Walter liked me, but one reason that he liked me was that I never disagreed. If Walter said to me, black was white, I just wouldn’t say anything.
“So I became the go-between with Kay.” Annenberg expected Buffett to deliver the message that if he published the book about Phil Graham’s teeth, well, that’s show business.
“Meanwhile, he couldn’t have been nicer to me. He put me in this super-fancy guest room. And he took me into his office, where he had a little display in a glass case of a Prussian coin, a pocketknife, and one other thing. It was all that his grandfather had in his pocket when he landed in this country from Prussia. And he said, ‘Everything you see here is a product of that.’ In a period of not that many years, Walter had rehabilitated his family. He did his father proud. And that was his number one goal in life, to do his father proud.”
Buffett understood Annenberg, yet never seemed to notice certain resemblances between the ambassador and himself. Probably this was because they were so different in other ways. Annenberg’s humorlessness, his fondness for opulence and formality, and his enmity toward the Grahams set him strikingly apart from Buffett, and they were at opposite poles politically. Nonetheless, beneath their similarly paper-thin skins, these two shrewd businessmen shared a deep drive to prove themselves—both in business and socially—and a reverence for fathers whom they felt the world had treated unjustly.
They struck up a correspondence. Annenberg would come to think of himself, in an avuncular sort of way, as training Buffett in philanthropy. He thought rich people should give it all away before they died lest their appointed stewards dishonor their obligations.4 Mistrustful by nature and always testing people—again, like Buffett in both respects—Annenberg had made a close study of failed foundations and the perfidy of foundation trustees. He sent Buffett examples, along with chitchat about stocks and courtly correspondence. Buffett—a budding philanthropist and a publisher whose paper had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the failed stewardship of a major charity—read this material with interest. Annenberg conveyed to him his dread of an imperial administrator for his money, one who would conduct what he referred to as “foundation rapings” after he was gone.
“Dear Warren,” he wrote, thanking Buffett for sending an article about Mac Bundy, who ran the Ford Foundation in a way that Annenberg deemed abhorrent,5 “Henry [Ford II] once described McGeorge Bundy as ‘the most arrogant son of a bitch in the country, who developed the lifestyle of an Arabian prince on Ford Foundation money.’ ”6
Annenberg spent immense amounts of time scheming to avoid being double-crossed after he was dead. He told Buffett about the Donner Foundation, whose executive director had changed the name of the foundation to the Independence Fund, obliterating the founding donor.7 “I respectfully suggest you make sure that no one can tamper with the name of your foundation after you’re gone,” he wrote. “Remember Mr. Donner.”8
Buffett thought otherwise about the foundation he and Susie had set up. “It should not have been named the Buffett Foundation,” he said later. “It was dumb to name it the Buffett Foundation. But it would also be dumb to change it now, because it would be too obvious.”9
He and Annenberg shared a fascination for media and publishing. TV Guide was Annenberg’s greatest asset. Once Buffett got the idea that Annenberg was going to sell TV Guide; he and Tom Murphy flew out to Los Angeles to see if the imperious ambassador would sell it to them fifty-fifty. But Annenberg wanted to be paid in stock, not cash. Neither Buffett nor Murphy believed in giving away stock if they could possibly help it. “You don’t get rich that way,” says Murphy. So they didn’t buy TV Guide.
As his relationship with Buffett developed, the proper, traditional Annenberg seemed to take at face value Buffett’s relationship with Graham. He continued to use Buffett, in his role as a Post board member, as emissary to Graham. All the while, Graham was calling Buffett constantly about the smallest details of her personal life. Buffett visited her rambling shingle mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and they went, on a lark, to Niagara Falls. He took her to see one of his totems, the Berkshire textile mills. As the flirtatious, fifty-nine-year-old Kay was spotted tossing the forty-six-year-old Warren her house key at charity benefits and the two were seen together ever more often in public, by early 1977 the gossip columns had taken note, and, as Graham put it, “eyebrows shot up.”10
Friends observed, as one put it, that the pair had “zero chemistry.” Yet Graham presented their relationship as an affair to her friends.11 She was obviously sexually insecure but tried to project the opposite, as illustrated in her memoir.12 Whatever genuinely romantic elements the relationship with Kay may have had initially, at heart theirs was a friendship. But the publicity upset the delicate equilibrium between Susie and Warren. Whatever else was going on in her life, she still cared very much about her husband. Moreover, Susie needed the people in her life to need her, even to be dependent on her. Now she felt discounted and trivialized. Yet she would never allow herself to look like the spurned Daisy Mae in public. She continued to stay at Kay’s house when she traveled to Washington and smiled benevolently no matter how often her husband was seen with Kay.
Some of Susie’s friends believed that she was, in fact, indifferent. Others felt that she needed to be in control or that Warren’s relationship with Kay gave her cover to live her own separate life in peace. Nevertheless, she made it plain to several friends that she was furious and humiliated. Her way of dealing with the situation was to send Graham a letter granting her leave to pursue a relationship with Warren—as if Kay had been waiting for any such permission.13 Kay showed the letter to people as though it let her off the hook.14
Susie was now working hard on a serious singing career. In 1976, she had approached the owners of Omaha’s French Café, a formal restaurant located in the quaint, cobblestoned Old Market district downtown, and suggested that she sing in their lounge. They were astonished but gladly agreed. Ads went up verifying the rumors that Susan Buffett would become a chanteuse. “This is very scary, but I’ve always wanted to live to the hilt,”15 she had told a reporter before her first performance.
She “lacked self-confidence,” said a reviewer, but her “Ann-Margret youthfulness,” “stylized jazz,” and desire to please won over the crowd. The audience was described as being made up of “uncritical friends” and people who attended out of curiosity to see a rich man’s wife.16 Within weeks, Bill Ruane had lined up auditions in New York. She did a three-week gig as an opening act at Yellow Brick Road, See Saw, Tramps, and The Ballroom. Afterward she said, “I’ve been asked back, but I’m going to be loose about the timing. Maybe after the first of the year. First I plan to find a musical director and put a package together. Now I know how hard it is, but I’m hooked on it, and when I go back, I want to do six months without stopping.”17 She signed up with the William Morris talent agency.
That summer had taken both Buffetts to New York. Warren played bridge in Kay’s apartment, and on other evenings Susie sang while he gazed at her rapturously from the audience. Her musical career bound them together—he was thrilled for her success. They considered buying an apartment in a landmarked building just off Fifth Avenue in New York City, which would have given them a permanent base in New York—but decided to pass.18
Susie was indeed loose about the timing, and by the fall of 1976 had made no plans to go back to New York. She still spent more time at Laguna than Warren. Moreover, her “clientele” around Omaha was a distraction. From Leila, who besieged Susie with hours of stories about the 38½ wonderful years with Howard; to Howie, who was running a backhoe outside Omaha; to Dottie, who seemed to be sleepwalking through her life, so passive that one day when she called and reported that there was a big fire at her house, Susie had no sooner hung up the phone than she wondered whether Dottie had called the fire department. Susie phoned her sister back. Dottie said no, she had thought only of calling Susie.19 And all these responsibilities came only from the family; outnumbering them by miles were Susie’s “vagrants,” lonelyhearts, and local relationships.
Instead of setting up commitments to sing in New York, therefore, she scheduled another round of performances for the spring of 1977 at the French Café in Omaha. With that, a magazine published by the Omaha World-Herald decided to do a cover piece on the millionaire’s wife who set out to become a cabaret singer in midlife. The reporter, Al “Bud” Pagel, started out with a routine story, approaching Susie’s friends and asking them simple questions about her life. What makes Susie sing? he wanted to know. Like many people in Omaha, of course, he had heard the rumors about Susie’s extracurricular activities.20 Susie’s friends were “defensive” and “protective.”
Eunice Denenberg “bristled” and declared, “Susie is one of those old-fashioned GOOD people that lots of folks today don’t think exist. So they attribute some of their own baser behavior to her because it bothers them.”21 The worshippers circled to protect the saint. Pagel admitted that, faced with such an aggressive pack of defenders, yes, it did bring out a subconscious urge in him to toss a handful of mud at Susie’s best white party dress.22
For her interview, Susie sat down with Pagel on the couch by the fireplace in the Buffetts’ family room, with its Ping-Pong table and the posters on the wall. She struck him as vulnerable.
“Being a performer is kind of the opposite of being a mother,” she told him in her interview. “I’m not used to the care and feeding of Susan Buffett. Maybe I am a reinforcement for someone who is on the verge of thinking, ‘I want to try something but I’m afraid to do it.’ I’m just one more person who tried something but was afraid to do it.” She paused. “That’s the only story I have.”23
The reporter gave some indication he was looking for more of a story than that. His curiosity had been piqued rather than muzzled by her pit-bull defenders. Susie opened up and talked about herself for five hours, without getting into her personal relationships. Still, by the end, she said she was astonished at what she had done: The woman whose lips were sealed like a mollusk’s when people tried to pry her open at dinner parties had given herself to Pagel. In the process she managed to win him over as a friend.
When the story was published, the cover of the magazine read, What Makes Susie Sing? and featured a photo of her with a “who knows?” expression, tentative smile, eyes tilted up, avoiding the camera. Inside, Susie faced away from the camera in the photographs. Something inward, an uncertain dream, had replaced the open-jawed grin that nearly always appeared in pictures of her.
The morning the story came out, Susie showed up on Pagel’s doorstep with a huge box of See’s Candies, excited as a child at the portrait he had drawn of her. She put him on the guest list to her opening at the French Café and sent him an invitation.24 He and other guests remember her as looking young and radiant that night, wearing a brunette shag wig and a sequined dress that hugged her newly svelte figure. Raven-feather eyelashes fluttered around her beaming eyes. The look on her face suggested that she was discovering that the care and feeding of Susan Buffett was not so bad. By now she had developed some polish as a performer, and smiled seductively while the crowd hooted and hollered in between songs.25 Her guests saw the glow of a woman emerging from behind her role as a wife and mother onto the stage of her own life. The audience found her tender delivery and smooth liquid styling of pop standards and sentimental favorites engaging and sweet. Her repertoire of medleys—“Daddy” songs like “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”; cabaret classics like “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”; and her personal favorite, Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns”26—moistened eyes. When she sang, Susie’s torchy side came to life and she opened up emotionally. Standing in the back with his arms crossed, watching his wife vamping and flirting and romancing her audience, Buffett, in good humor, remarked, “This is pretty good of me to let her do this.”
Yet by the summer of 1977, Susie still had not followed up on her New York opportunities. Warren thought it was because his spontaneous wife resisted the structured time commitments required of a professional singer. Some of the Buffetts’ friends questioned whether Susie’s pretty warble and her appealing stage presence could compete with established singers of greater artistry. While Susie loved to perform, it was Warren’s dream that his wife might become a singing star with a recording career. Her ambitions had always been harnessed on behalf of others, not herself. Meanwhile, the care and feeding of Susan Buffett was something separate, a more private matter.
There was the rub. Being a rich man’s wife opened doors that would have helped her pursue a serious singing career. But it also opened doors that invited others to peer into her personal life, doors that she would prefer remained shut. Warren could stay at Kay Graham’s house and be seen as her date in public in perfect freedom, while the gossip columns did no more than wink. Yet as a married woman, Susie had no such liberty. The women’s movement had changed many things, but not that. With her privacy eroding, the question of how to deal with her increasingly divided feelings was beginning to tear her apart.
Stan Lipsey, their Sun publisher friend, was also having some issues with his marriage, and he and Susie sat on park benches in the mornings, sharing confidences. Both of them were interested in Eastern thought and the human-potential movement.27 They somehow convinced Warren, as well as Stan’s wife, Jeannie, and Susie’s sister, Dottie, to join them at a weekend workshop in a Lincoln hotel. The idea was to get in touch with yourself. The workshop started with an exercise to get people to open up to one another nonjudgmentally, a skill of Susie’s. Warren’s reaction to such an outpouring was nothing like his wife’s.
“There were five hundred people who had come from as much as a thousand miles away. And they started doing all these crazy things. First we had to get a partner. And one of them was to start talking, and the other person, no matter what, just keeps saying, ‘And then what?’
“So I paired up with this nice woman from Oklahoma, and she starts talking. Then she pauses and I say, ‘And then what?’ In ten minutes, she’s sobbing uncontrollably. I’ve destroyed her, just by saying, ‘And then what?’ It was like I was boring into her. I felt like I was running a torture chamber or something.”
After having misinterpreted this exercise in every possible way, Buffett left his tear-drenched companion, eager to move on. The leader told the participants to find another partner. “Now, when I hear the leader say, ‘I want you to choose a partner of the opposite sex,’ Lipsey says, “I’m looking for someone attractive.” Buffett stood looking around like someone who didn’t quite know what to do. “The next thing you know,” says Lipsey, “he’s paired with this very heavy woman.”
“She was wearing a muumuu and weighed about four hundred pounds. My job was to get down on the floor. And then the leader said this woman was to give me the ‘gift of her weight.’ Which meant she flopped right down on top of me. There was this whale coming right at me. I was just—ack! It turned out to be the gift that never stopped giving.
“Meanwhile, in the other room, they were having people bark like dogs. I could hear Dottie—who was so uptight she could hardly say hello to somebody—trying desperately to bark.”
Following a session of being blindfolded and led through the streets of Lincoln to experience sensory deprivation, Susie and Stan gave up and they all ran away to a movie theater to watch Annie Hall—“a nervous romance”—and “spent the rest of the weekend gorging ourselves on fried food and ice-cream sundaes,” says Lipsey.
The summer of 1977, while Buffett again played bridge marathons at Kay Graham’s apartment in New York, Susie stayed away from home at all hours of the day and night.
Howie got married that August to Marcia Sue Duncan, despite her father’s warnings that she would not be happy with a guy who dug basements for a living and drove a pickup with a couple of big shaggy dogs in its cargo bed.
Over Labor Day weekend, Susie gave her final performance in Omaha, appearing at the Orpheum Theater as the opening act for singer/songwriter Paul Williams. In a pink chiffon gown, she smiled and beguiled as her smooth contralto oozed romantic jazzy ballads, “languorous and sensual.” She come-hithered the audience with “Let’s feel like we’re in love, okay?”28 But in a small, gossipy city like Omaha, that announcement probably could have been left unmade.
That fall, Susie apparently began to realize what a mess her life had become. She went out until four o’clock in the morning, driving all the way to Wahoo—where she had spent her wedding night—playing music at top volume on the radio of her Porsche before returning at dawn to her lonely home.29
At her best Susie gave people part of her soul. Now panicked, she reached out to people and hoped they would reciprocate. Friends listened to her agonize in parks, on walks, on long drives. She stockpiled little sums of money and gave them to friends to hold, as if planning an escape. She appeared at Berkshire Hathaway’s office in her tennis pal Dan Grossman’s doorway, sobbing and asking for advice, while her husband sat in his office next door.
Susie seemed to realize on some level that she was compromising numerous people by letting them know more than her husband did about his troubled marriage and the secret yearnings of his disillusioned wife. You can’t tell Warren, she said to one person. If you love him, you won’t hurt him that way. If he ever found out, he would kill himself.30
So powerful was Susie, so beloved, so apparent was Warren’s devotion to his wife, and so thoroughly had Susie trained everyone to think that he was helpless without her, that people accepted this burden. Some did it automatically, some did it out of loyalty, some did it uneasily, half aware of the flaws in her logic. But they all now felt responsible for keeping her secrets on the pretext of Warren’s vulnerability.
Yet nothing appeared amiss at Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch in Arizona, where the Graham Group was meeting that fall. Most of the group—now usually referred to as the Buffett Group—had long ago accepted the idea of “Warren-o” and “Susan-o” as an affectionate couple who lived separate lives. This year proceeded like any other, with Susie in attendance along with the rest of the wives. Bill Ruane presented Warren’s Fortune article “How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor.”31 Buffett explained that stocks, especially stocks of companies that can raise prices as their costs increase, are the best protection against inflation—but their value is still eroded by severe inflation, a problem that he referred to as a “giant corporate tapeworm.”32 At a social break, Marshall Weinberg told Warren and Susie about his niece, who was living and working on a reservation with Native Americans. “Oh!” gushed Susie. “I would love to do that! It would be so wonderful to live so simply and help those poor people on a reservation that way.” Warren looked at her. “Sooz, I’ll buy you one,” he said, deadpan.33
At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.34 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich.
All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He knew Susie thought he was obsessed with money, just as she always had, yet they had managed to lead their lives in such a way so as to honor their differences while staying a united team for twenty-five years. Or so it seemed to him.
Later that fall, after the Buffett Group meeting, Susie went to visit a high school friend who lived in San Francisco. She stayed for four or five weeks. One relationship after another seemed to bind her to California. Her nephew Billy Rogers had moved to the West Coast to join the music scene. Susie had told him she would give him any help he needed to kick his heroin addiction, but she worried about him on his own in California. Bertie Buffett, who was now remarried, to Hilton Bialek, lived in San Francisco. The Lipseys were thinking of moving to San Francisco. Susie’s widowed friend Rackie Newman now lived there. Susie Jr. and her husband were living in Los Angeles. Peter was now a sophomore at Stanford in Palo Alto. And she and Warren already had their own foothold in California—their vacation home in Emerald Bay, just south of Los Angeles. Fewer and fewer ties pulled her back to Nebraska. The house in Omaha was spooky empty: As soon as Peter left for college, Hamilton the dog ran away and went to live with one of Peter’s friends.35
Spending this extended time in San Francisco, Susie found it a beautiful, creative, spirited city. At every angle from its rising hills, the bay and ocean and bridges and sunsets and rickrack rows of Victorian houses beckoned, Come look at me. A delirious mosaic of people, neighborhoods, architecture, culture, art, and music said, You’ll never be bored in San Francisco. The thermometer never registered 110 degrees in San Francisco. The city’s air raced through your lungs, clean and liberating. In the spontaneous, hot, do-anything-with-anyone mood of the 1970s, San Francisco was the capital of mind-expanding, hedonistic spirituality, a magnet of tolerance where people didn’t judge one another.
Susie looked at some apartments. She came back to Omaha and went to the French Café, where she had been singing, and talked to Astrid Menks, who was the maître d’ there on Monday nights as well as a sommelier and sometime chef. She and Menks were friendly; Astrid served her tea between sets at the French Café, and had catered a dinner at the Buffetts’ earlier that year when Peter Jay, the new British ambassador to the United States, had visited Omaha. Knowing the Buffetts’ tastes, Menks had sludged Jay with Warren’s favorite meal: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn on the cob, and hot-fudge sundaes.
Now Susie asked Astrid to look in on Warren and cook an occasional meal for him. Then she had a talk with him and said she wanted to rent a funky little cubbyhole on Nob Hill so she could have a base in San Francisco.
Warren’s tendency not to listen, to hear only what he wanted to hear, worked in Susie’s favor as she explained that she was not leaving him. They were not “separating.” They would stay married. Nothing would really change if she had a room of her own, a place where she could be herself in San Francisco. She simply wanted to surround herself with a city full of art and music and theater, she reassured him. Their lives were already on such different courses, and they both traveled so much anyway, he would barely notice the difference. With the children grown, it was time for her to tend to her needs. She told him, over and over, “We both—we both—have needs.” That part was for sure true.
“Susie wasn’t totally leaving, either, that was the thing. She just wanted a change.”
In all of Susie’s travels, in her talk of buying this place or that place, it had never occurred to him that she would leave, because it would never occur to him to leave her. “Wanting a change” and “not totally leaving” were the kind of ambiguous Buffettesque statements they both tended to make to avoid feeling as though they were disappointing anyone.
And then she left.
Susie went off to Europe for a few weeks with her friend Bella Eisenberg. She returned to Emerald Bay for Christmas with the family but left to go back to Europe again. Increasingly, it was clear that for Susie, having a place of her own in San Francisco did not mean renting a pied-à-terre that she would escape to for a week every now and then. Warren was hopeless at taking care of himself and Susie Jr. came back to Omaha for a couple of weeks to lend a hand. Susie Jr. tried to explain to her father that, given how much time he and her mother had been spending apart, his life was not going to be that different from before. But Warren had not previously thought of himself and Susie as living virtually separate lives. In his mind, Susie lived for him. She certainly acted as if she did when they were together. So it was a hard concept to grasp, that Susie wanted her own life and would not be there for him all the time.
Susie and Warren talked for hours and hours on the phone. Now that he understood, Warren would have done anything she asked to get her back, submitted to any conditions, met any demands—move to California, learn to dance. But it was too late. He could not give her what she wanted, whatever that was. She explained it in terms of her freedom, her need to be separate and to fulfill her needs and find her own identity. She could not do that while spending all her time taking care of him. So he wandered aimlessly around the house, barely able to feed and clothe himself. He came to the office most days with a raging headache. In front of the staff, he maintained his self-control, although he did look as though he was not sleeping well at night. He was calling Susie every day, weeping. “It was as if they couldn’t live together and they couldn’t live without each other,” one person said.
Seeing her husband helpless and destroyed, Susie wavered. She told a friend, “I might have to go back.” But she didn’t. They both had needs. One of her needs was for her tennis coach to move to San Francisco. She installed him in a tiny separate apartment down the street from her own. His understanding was that this was temporary and that when Susie got divorced, they would marry.36
While Susie waffled, she made no move to get divorced. “Warren and I don’t want to lose anything,” she told a friend who inquired about her plans. It wasn’t the money she was talking about; she had enough Berkshire stock of her own. Susie was the type of person who never subtracted from but only added to her life, and she didn’t consider acting differently now.
Meanwhile, she phoned Astrid Menks at the French Café over and over. “Have you called him yet? Have you called him yet?”37
Susie knew her target well. Born in West Germany in 1946 as Astrid Beaté Menks after her parents walked out of Latvia after the war, Menks had emigrated to the United States at age five with her parents and five siblings on a converted, broken-down battleship. Her first sight of America as they pulled into the harbor was a huge object approaching through a fog bank—the Statue of Liberty.
The Menks family was assigned to sponsors in Verdell, Nebraska, where they lived on a farm with a potbellied stove and no electricity or indoor plumbing. When Astrid was six, the family moved to Omaha. Shortly afterward, when their mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Astrid and her two younger brothers entered the Immanuel Deaconess Institute of Omaha, an all-purpose facility operated by Lutheran sisters. Her father, who spoke little English, worked as a maintenance man on the grounds while the children lived at the orphanage. Astrid’s mother died in 1954. When Astrid was thirteen, she was sent to a succession of three foster homes. “I can’t say I had wonderful experiences in foster care,” she says. “I felt more secure at the children’s home.”
After high school, Menks attended the University of Nebraska, until she ran out of money. For a while she worked at Mutual of Omaha and as a buyer and manager for a women’s clothing store, although she dressed herself in thrift-store finds. Eventually she wound up working as a garde-manger in restaurants, slicing fifty pounds of zucchini and preparing cold foods. She lived in a little apartment downtown in the Old Market close to work, which was convenient because the rusted-out floor of her Chevy Vega had holes through to the street.38
She was always broke but knew everybody in the perpetually gentrifying warehouse district, and was one of a restaurant crowd that would help organize the area’s would-be artists, stray singles, and gay men to put on a meal or a holiday feast. Small-boned, fair-skinned with ice-blonde hair and refined features, Astrid had a Nordic beauty with a subtle hard-knocks edge to it. At times she looked even younger than her thirty-one years. She always made light of her life struggles, but when Susie Buffett got to know her, Astrid was depressed, empty, and unfulfilled. Nonetheless, when it came to caretaking people in need,39 she could out-Susie Susie any day.
Faced with all this badgering about calling Warren, Menks wasn’t exactly sure what Susie intended, so she was terrified. But finally she made the call.40 Arriving at the door to cook a homemade meal, she found a cave filled with books, newspapers, and annual reports. Warren, who was incapable of functioning without female companionship, was desperate for affection; he had been trying to fill the void by taking Dottie to the movies and spending time with Ruthie Muchemore, a divorcée and family friend. Yet he was obviously still a lonely, miserable man who had been reduced emotionally to an eleven-year-old boy. He needed feeding. His clothes were a wreck. Astrid was the least pushy woman imaginable. But—as Susie had known would happen—when faced with a problem, she knew what to do.
Warren would eventually come to explain “whatever he did” to make Susie leave was his “biggest mistake”:
“Parts of it are sort of not understandable. It was definitely ninety-five percent my fault—no question about that. It may even have been ninety-nine percent. I just wasn’t attuned enough to her, and she’d always been perfectly attuned to me. It had always been all in my direction, almost. You know, my job was getting more interesting and more interesting and more interesting as I went along. When Susie left, she felt less needed than I should have made her feel. Your spouse starts coming second. She kept me together for a lot of years, and she contributed ninety percent to raising the kids. Although, strangely enough, I think I had about as much influence. It just wasn’t proportional to the time spent. And then she lost her job, in effect, when the kids were raised.
“In a sense, it was time for her to do what she liked to do. She did a lot of volunteer things along the way, but in the end, that never really works that well. She didn’t want to be Mrs. Big the way a lot of wives of prominent guys in town do. She didn’t like being a prominent woman because she’s the wife of a prominent guy. She loves connecting with people, and everybody connects with her.
“She loved me, and she still loves me, and we have an incredible relationship. But still … it shouldn’t have happened. And it’s totally my fault.”
No matter how huge the wound or its reasons, as each day passed Warren discovered that he was still alive. And so eventually he fell back on the one role that suited him best: the teacher, the preacher. As long as he had his brains and his reputation, people would listen to him.
In the winter of 1978, Buffett turned with renewed intensity to writing his annual letter. The previous letter had been a brief report on how the businesses were doing. Now he started drafting lessons on how managements’ performance should be measured, why short-term earnings are a poor criterion for investment decisions, a dissertation on insurance, and a paean to his friend Tom Murphy’s Cap Cities. His neediness at the time was of an almost unfathomable depth. He reached out to Carol Loomis for companionship, partly on the pretext of making her the letter’s official editor. She filled the hours on trips to New York as together they put a great deal of thought into how he wanted to convey these lessons to the people who had stayed with him throughout, those who had placed their faith in him: the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.41