“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,10 “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.’”11
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.12 “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.”13
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.”14
He and Annenberg shared a fascination for media and publishing. TV Guide was Annenberg’s greatest asset. It had the same “essentiality” as the Daily Racing Form, but a much bigger audience. 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. “And we wouldn’t give our stock away,” says Murphy. “Warren never gave his stock away; neither did I if I could possibly avoid it. You don’t get rich that way.” Giving stock in exchange for TV Guide was saying, in a literal sense, that they thought it would earn more in the future than whatever share of Berkshire Buffett swapped for it. Paying with stock showed a sort of contempt for your own business versus whatever it was that you were buying—that is, unless you were paying with stock that had gotten wildly overpriced.15 As a rule, the way they ran their businesses and dealt with their shareholders meant that didn’t happen, so they didn’t buy TV Guide.
Nevertheless, Buffett continued to work as the go-between for Annenberg and Graham, who had been taking Buffett to etiquette school and preparing him for these elevated doings. She called him constantly about the smallest details of her life. He visited her rambling shingle mansion on Martha’s Vineyard overlooking Lambert’s Cove, and they traveled together often to business meetings and 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.”16
Friends observed, as one put it, that the pair had “zero chemistry.” Yet Graham discussed an affair candidly with her friends.17 She was obviously sexually insecure but tried to project the opposite, as illustrated in her memoir.18 Her mother, notably, was famous for pursuing (and flaunting) obsessive, flirtatious, but platonic relationships with powerful, brilliant men. Buffett himself would go on to develop a history of romanticized friendships with women. Whatever genuinely romantic elements the relationship with Kay may have had initially, however, at the heart theirs was a friendship.
But 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.19 Kay showed the letter to people as though it let her off the hook.20
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 a renovated warehouse in the quaint, cobblestoned Old Market district downtown, and suggested that she sing in their lounge, the Underground. They were astonished but gladly agreed. Susie had once hosted a benefit there for African relief—barefoot, in gingham, wearing a bandanna.21 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,”22 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 in the French Café’s stone-lined basement cabaret. 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.23 Within weeks, Bill Ruane had said to her, “This is Broadway Bill. I’ve lined you up with 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.”24 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.25
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.26 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.27 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.”28 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.29
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 that said things like “Love Is Here to Stay” and “Damn Everything but the Circus.” 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.”30
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, gazing down at Hamilton with a small smile and looking at her hands on the piano keyboard. 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.31 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.32 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”33—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, which had sprung from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.34 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 truck everywhere with a couple of big shaggy dogs in its cargo bed. After sending the newlyweds a gift, Kay Graham called Buffett to say how disgusted she was that Howie had spelled three words in the thank-you note wrong.
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 like warm honey, “languorous and sensual.” She come-hithered the audience with “Let’s feel like we’re in love, okay?”35 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.36
At her best Susie gave people part of her soul. Now panicked, she reached out to people and made her problems their own. Friends listened to her agonize in parks, on walks, on long drives. She stockpiled little sums of money and gave them to f
riends 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.37
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.”38 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.”39 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.40
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