Dethroning the King

by Julie MacIntosh

  As one executive who used to scope out the company’s breweries with August III joked, “The floors were always wet when you went on a tour with August. When he visited a brewery, you’d better wear shoes with rubber soles because before he got there, they were washing down everything.”

  There were complaints that the company’s brewing operation was given carte blanche when it came to spending, even when it didn’t seem necessary. “It was almost hilarious to go to a capital screening committee meeting,” said one top executive. “Whatever brewing wanted, they would get. We had 300 engineers on staff at one time, creating projects just to do stuff.” Still, it was worth every penny to August III.

  At one time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a group of ad agency staffers and marketing executives was running a series of focus groups out at a mall near St. Louis.

  “I want to see one of those,” August III said, and the marketers, of course, agreed. So The Third showed up at the mall that night as a group of consumers took their seats around a table, preparing to discuss Anheuser-Busch and its advertising. The Third and his cadre of marketers settled in a room off to the side, behind a plate of one-way glass.

  The focus group caromed back and forth between various beer-related topics before settling on the concept of beechwood aging. A middle-aged man piped in with his two cents. “Oh yeah, I’ve been down at the brewery there where they’ve got those big wooden beechwood barrels. Yeah, the giant barrels, I seen ’em myself.”

  August III, stationed behind the glass, cocked his head to the side. “That guy is full of shit,” he told the rest of the observers. “That’s not what we have, that’s not it at all.” The man had clearly never seen any of the aging tanks at Anheuser-Busch’s brewery, which were giant vats made of steel, not wood, whose bases were lined with beechwood shavings.

  “I know, August, but that’s what he thinks, so that’s reality to him,” said Steve Kopcha, who was running the focus group. As the group listened politely, the man continued spouting off phony bits of knowledge about the beechwood aging process until August III couldn’t take it anymore. He got up, strode into the focus group’s room with his hand outstretched in greeting, and said “Hi, I’m August Busch. Let me tell you how we do it.”

  “These guys are just sitting there with their mouths open,” Kopcha recalled later. “For about an hour, he told them about beer and how you make it right. And I tell you what, there were ten new Budweiser drinkers for life. He sold a lot of beer that night. That’s the kind of guy he was. If it wasn’t right, he wanted it fixed.”

  For all of The Third’s dedication to quality, however, and his efforts to pull everyday drinkers onto the “fanatic” side of the fence, Budweiser and Michelob haven’t been viewed by the American public as premium beers since the 1950s. To many American drinkers and even more to drinkers in Europe, Bud and Bud Light are keg beers meant to be enjoyed five or six at a time in front of the television.

  “People don’t really care how you make the stuff,” said Kopcha, echoing in blunt terms what Anheuser insiders try to skirt around more delicately. “They assume it’s sanitary, and that’s all they really care about.”

  “I wish I had a dollar for every time we tried to talk ingredients in a focus group, and somebody would say, ‘Look, I don’t care if it’s made out of panther piss. If I like it, I like it and if I don’t, I don’t.’ We could never convince August, although intellectually, he knew people were saying that.”

  August III’s meticulousness filtered through the entire Anheuser-Busch organization, from its executive suites all the way down to the people who hosed off the Clydesdales or hauled cases of beer. Budweiser deliverymen during his era would routinely turn each can in their store displays so that the labels faced outward, and salesmen would stop by their local grocery on the way home from work to refill the beer cooler from the stockroom out back. It was that grassroots-level intensity that helped Anheuser triumph over Miller during The Third’s first 15 years at the helm.

  “We can second-guess, but you look at so many things that were so on and so right,” said Buddy Reisinger. “There was no one who would outwork him, and no one who cared more about the place.”

  If there was one thing The Third loved nearly as much as brewing beer, it was flying. Anheuser-Busch was one of jet maker Dassault’s top clients, and The Third, who started flying at the age of 15, relished the opportunity to rack up extra flight hours by taking the company’s planes for a spin. Anheuser actually leased its fleet of jet aircraft and Bell helicopters from a company August III had formed, Ginnaire Rental, for several hundred thousand dollars per year and disclosed the cost in its annual statement to shareholders. Anheuser’s fleet of pilots never minded the intrusion when The Third would assume the controls on the way home. “August was one hell of a pilot,” said one former staffer. “And the pilots absolutely loved and respected him. He knew everything.”

  Rather than brave the St. Louis highway traffic and endure forced handshakes and small talk on the short walk from the company parking lot to his office, he also preferred to fly his helicopter to work each morning from his secluded farm in St. Peters, 40 miles to the east. He had a phobia of elevators, and flying to the office allowed him to descend just one flight of stairs from the roof each morning rather than having to hitch a lift up from the bottom of the building. The Third showed up each day by a quarter to seven, and his subordinates marked the promptness of their own more pedestrian arrivals by whether his helicopter was already perched ominously on the roof when they steered their cars into the parking lot. Anheuser-Busch operated on “Busch” time—events were dictated by The Third’s arrival, not by the positioning of two hands on the face of a clock. Anyone scheduled to accompany him for a trip on one of the company’s corporate jets knew to arrive at least half an hour early because “as soon as August gets there, you leave.”

  “Mr. Busch’s omnipresence at the office—the helicopter ceremoniously on top of the building—always got you,” said one top former executive. “Every day I’d drive to that office the years he was there, you’d see that helicopter and you knew your ass could be in that office at any minute answering questions—and not usually in a very friendly way. So it made you get there on time.” Company staffers who were already in the building tried to ignore the thwack of the rotors each morning as the chopper settled on the roof right above their heads, but disregarding The Third’s arrival was never easy.

  “The helicopter used to come in over my head when I worked up on the ninth floor, and I found it very distracting,” said another top former executive. “After a while, I took the bottles off my bookcase because I was sick of having them fall off.”

  Many companies would think hard before letting their CEOs helicopter to and from work each day, especially publicly traded companies with executives as influential as August III was. But August III was never bound to the laws of common men. Thanks to a mix of extreme wealth and a sheltered and provincial upbringing, he tended to circumvent life’s harsher realities—or was never presented with the opportunity to face them in the first place. During one visit to New York for a business meeting, his security detail stopped traffic on busy Sixth Avenue as he exited an office building to allow him to get into his car. “This is a man who is not troubled by self-doubt,” said the chief of a rival beer company.

  One oft-repeated story concerned a trip by August III and a group of other executives to Barcelona. The Third refused to push back his usual dinner hour—which fell around 6 P.M., to make room for his early bedtime—even though Spaniards eat much later. They had to find a restaurant that would open early to accommodate The Third’s wishes.

  “Coming from one of the world’s wealthiest families, he was not well traveled or well read,” said one former ad agency executive. “He was extremely provincial in his viewpoints. Everything was St. Louis and hunting and fishing and the brewery.”

  Whether he was in or out of his element, however, strings were relatively eas
y for The Third to pull. On one particular Super Bowl Sunday, August IV hosted a party at his house with a few dozen friends and marketing executives to watch the game and, more importantly, to monitor Anheuser-Busch’s exposure during the big event. The Fourth had a detailed rundown of when each Anheuser spot was scheduled to run, which said that right after the first series of commercials, the game’s announcer would cue up a live aerial view of the stadium from the Budweiser blimp hovering above.

  As the last scheduled commercial faded to black, everyone leaned forward in their chairs, waiting for the blimp shot. And then . . . nothing. No bird’s-eye view from Budweiser’s costly perch above. Just a bunch of sweaty football players prepping for their next drive down the field.

  The Third erupted in anger and demanded to be connected with the head of the network immediately. There was no sense in starting at the bottom when he was paying wads of sponsorship dollars. Within what seemed like 30 seconds, August III had his intended target on the phone. And minutes later, the network abruptly cut to a shot from Budweiser’s strategically placed airship.

  “Forget that it happened period, it happened almost immediately,” said one of the people who were in the room that night. “If you can do that all day long, to have someone say you can’t eat dinner at 6, it’s like, ‘Bullshit. I’m eating dinner at 6. Look what I just did!’ That’s how things happened for them. It’s his reality. He truly doesn’t understand, because it’s like ‘When I ask for stuff, I get it.’ ”

  “If you literally fly from St. Peters to the roof of One Busch Place, and then fly from that roof to Spirit of St. Louis airport . . . He’s not even driving anywhere, except maybe from his house to the duck blind. It just didn’t happen. As connected and as in-tune as he was with so many things, he was disconnected from reality. He wasn’t delusional, he just had no idea what it was like to, like, drive in traffic.”

  He was very much accustomed to a life of wealth, but The Third wasn’t obnoxious about it. He was “personally humble,” said a former Anheuser staffer. “I never heard him say a braggy thing his whole life. ’Course if your name is Busch, you don’t have to brag.” The Third simply seemed to believe that bending the rules of “normal” life allowed him to be more efficient. And he was right.

  “Could he have done all the things he did if he was a normal person and had a two-hour commute?” said another former employee. “Probably not.”

  August III made plenty of great decisions, but he was perhaps never more right than he was about his belief that Anheuser-Busch could win control of half of the U.S. beer market. Former Anheuser executive Frank Sellinger, who left the company to run Schlitz in 1977, spoke for many of Gussie’s old guard when in 1980 he said: “I don’t see any consumer product like beer having a 50 percent market share. You can’t predict the likes and dislikes of the younger generation.” That year, Anheuser-Busch controlled 28 percent of the U.S. beer market. By August III’s last year as CEO in 2002, that number had swelled to 52 percent. More than one out of every two beers quaffed in America at the start of the new millennium was brewed by Anheuser-Busch.

  The Third devoted far less time to family obligations than he did to his brewery. His own upbringing had been difficult, with so many half-brothers and sisters from his father Gussie’s other wives, and those tenuous ties frayed further in the wake of his boardroom coup. He was semiestranged for that reason from Adolphus IV. Other half-brothers, meanwhile, struggled at points with legal troubles. Although the Busch family has seemed to have a propensity for getting into messy scrapes with the law, they’ve demonstrated an equally uncommon talent for bouncing back.

  The family’s fascination with—and prolific ownership of—guns turned deadly when Peter Busch, one of Gussie’s sons, shot a friend at Grant’s Farm in 1976, the year after August III’s coup. Peter pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Billy Busch, another of The Third’s half-brothers, endured his own stint of notoriety after getting tangled up in a 1981 barroom brawl in which he allegedly bit off part of someone’s ear, as well as a child custody battle that wended its way all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. Billy ratcheted down his profile in the wake of those scandals, investing in a giant Houston distributorship with his brothers Adolphus and Andy and, in mid-2009, forming a new company to brew and sell craft beer and other beverages.

  Many of Gussie’s kids and their spouses were involved with the business in some way or another, and most of them lived either in St. Louis or down in Florida. August III, though, the most powerful of the children, had the heaviest cross to bear. “He was pretty much raised on Grant’s Farm, with a family about as dysfunctional as it gets, and then he was handed this behemoth worry,” said one person close to the company. “He ran it exceptionally well, but that was his life.”

  The Third married Susan Hornibeck, a native of the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, on August 17, 1963, at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. It was as close as St. Louis would come to a royal union, joining together the Busch brewing empire with the daughter of a cosmetics distribution magnate. According to Susan—who, in a cruel twist for someone who married into a beer dynasty, was born with four kidneys—the two met while The Third was out on the West Coast to introduce Busch Bavarian beer. She was a lithe, blonde, 23-year-old tennis and volleyball player, and he just 24. They hit it off immediately on a blind date and were engaged six months later. Following a wedding reception held in her parents’ backyard, she moved halfway across the country to The Third’s Waldmeister Farm west of St. Louis. By the fifth year of their marriage, Susan realized the relationship wasn’t working. They tried to reconcile their differences for another year but got no results, so they split.

  One of the most persistent rumors that arose during their divorce was that Susan had become romantically involved with marble-mouthed baseball sportscaster Harry Caray. Caray, who was hired in 1945 as an announcer for the Cardinals, served as the voice of the team for 25 years until a dispute with August III that was never publicly explained prompted the two former friends to part ways. Amid rumors that the argument involved Susan, Caray left St. Louis and eventually moved to Chicago to cover the White Sox and later, the Chicago Cubs. Susan consistently denied the rumors, calling her relationship with Caray “a friendship item, but not a romance item by any means.” She said her dinners with Caray were friendly in nature, and attributed reported phone calls from her house to Caray to her card-playing habits. She and The Third used to get together with Caray and his wife, Marion, to play gin rummy.

  Susan raised The Fourth and his sister, Susie, largely on her own after the divorce was finalized, while The Third generally saw them on weekends. Yet in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch years afterward, Susan nonetheless had good things to say about her ex, who had always impressed her with his “brains, and his personality, his sense of humor.” She called Ginny, his second wife, a “lovely gal,” and said she had spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with their family.

  Virginia “Ginny” Lee Wiley, an attorney and former public defender who married The Third in 1974, five years after his divorce from Susan, was regarded by many in St. Louis as one of the few ball-busters who could handle marriage to The Third. Their relationship marked a stark improvement on The Third’s marriage to Susan. “His second marriage was very different from his first,” said Buddy Reisinger. “They were very close; they spent a lot of time together. He valued her opinion, and she’s a very intelligent lady.”

  In 1980, when August IV and Susie were in their mid-teens and The Third and Ginny had two children of their own, The Third indicated that he realized his brutal work schedule had contributed to the collapse of his first marriage. “I learned in my 20s and 30s that it is important to have stability at home,” he told a reporter over a hamburger and two Michelobs at the Pierre hotel in New York.

  The Third demanded unquestioning loyalty from his staffers, and had a puzzlingly strong magnetism—even though his underlings knew that the closer they came to his inner
circle, the more likely they were to suffer a blistering burn.

  “He was a very, very powerful presence,” said one strategy committee member. “He was very intense; he was very quick to judge people. You had to look at the paradigm in which he was raised, being born into a family like the Busch family. I’m sure you could probably find examples of him in just about any storied, moneyed families, in terms of how that type of upbringing shapes a person.”

  “If he trusted you, it was incredible loyalty. He would go to the ends of the Earth for people he thought had the best interests of the company in mind. If he didn’t trust you, look out.”

  Those who couldn’t help themselves worked their fingers to the bone to win an occasional mark of his approval. The further he progressed into his tenure, the less room he left for people to diverge from his tastes and viewpoints. Critics of the way The Third operated say that Anheuser’s corporate planning staffers largely served as his sycophantic “validation committee.”

  “He surrounded himself with people he was very comfortable with,” said one of the company’s advisors. “This is not a guy who was going out on the street and is going to find someone very unlike himself to go spend time with. That’s just not who this guy is. It was amazing to me how he could impact people with his persona. I looked at him and I just thought, ‘This guy is just a bully.’ ”

  The Third had a particularly strong level of distrust for the media. When one trade magazine published an article he didn’t like, he launched an investigation to trace the leak. As part of the probe, he grilled a St. Louis dentist who was suspected of passing on information he had heard while drilling an Anheuser executive’s teeth.

  “His general philosophy was ‘When the press asks questions, circle the wagons,’ ” said Harry Schuhmacher, a well-known chronicler of the beer industry who failed to snag a single interview with The Third despite years of trying. The first time Schuhmacher met The Third was at the dedication of a distributorship in San Antonio, where he walked up to introduce himself.