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.41 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, but 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 married to Hilton Bialek, lived in San Francisco and Carmel. Jeannie and Stan Lipsey 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, on whom she had grown to rely, 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.42
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 either delighted or sludged Jay with the carbohydrate count of 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 in Gramercy Tower 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, where she connected in Paris with Tom Newman, son of her friend Rackie. Susie and Tom, who would soon be joining his mother in her new home in San Francisco, became instant friends.43 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. Since the Quicksilver wedding, she had spent much of her marriage calling her mother in tears. Big Susie was gently assisting her out of the marriage at the same time that she was extricating herself from many of the conventions that tied her to her own marriage. 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 apparently 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 way from her own. His understanding was that this was temporary and that when Susie got divorced, they would marry.44
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 never thought of 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?”45
Susie knew her target well. Born in West Germany in 1946 as Astrid Beaté Menks after her parents “walked out of Latvia when Russia took it,” 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 in to 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 that included a retirement home, an orphanage, a hospital, a church, and a recreational hall. 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. After a stint at Mutual of Omaha, for a while she worked 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.46
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,47 she could out-Susie Susie any day.
Faced with all this badgering about calling Warren, Menks wasn’t exactly sure where Susie was headed, so she was terrified. But finally she made the call.48 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 why Susie left this way:
“It was preventable. It shouldn’t have happened. It was my biggest mistake. Essentially, whatever I did in connection with Susie leaving would be the biggest mistake I ever made.
“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, informative report on how the businesses were doing. Now he started drafting a lesson on how managements’ performance should be measured, an explanation of why short-term earnings are a poor criterion for investment decisions, a long dissertation on insurance, and a paean to his friend Tom Murphy’s skills in running 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.49
42
Blue Ribbon
Omaha and Buffalo • 1977–1983
By early 1978, with encouragement from Susie, Astrid Menks was coming to Farnam Street from time to time, cooking and caretaking. Susie was calling Astrid to cheer her on, saying, “Thank you so much for taking care of him.” Gradually, however, the relationship with Menks became something more as Warren began to accept that Susie wasn’t coming back to him.
At first, he and Astrid spent time at her tiny place down in the old warehouse district. In May she moved in with him, giving up the apartment where she had played after-hours hostess to la bohème Omaha. By the time Peter came home from Stanford that summer, she was growing tomatoes in the yard on Farnam Street and searching for Pepsi at thirty cents off a gallon. After so many months, “I never gave it a thought,” Astrid says. “It just happened naturally.”1
Astrid “just disappeared” from the downtown scene, says an acquaintance.2 Meeting her, Buffett’s friends were taken aback at the match. She was sixteen years younger, a blue-collar girl. Nonetheless, she knew everything that Buffett didn’t about haute cuisine and fine wines, shellfish forks and chef’s knives. In contrast to Susie’s spending habits and preference for all things modern, Astrid haunted junk shops looking for bargain antiques. She prided herself on paying the least amount possible for her thrift-shop wardrobe; so parsimonious was Astrid that she made Buffett look like a wastrel. Far more of a homebody than Susie, her interests—cooking, gardening, bargain hunting—were narrow compared to Susie’s constantly expanding and evolving tastes. Although modest, Astrid had a blunt-spoken, provocative wit that bore no resemblance to Susie’s sly sense of humor and warm-hearted interest in others; Astrid’s down-to-earth manner was as unlike Kay Graham’s patrician refinement as could possibly be.
The advent of Astrid caused an upheaval in Buffett’s other relationships. The unusual triangle clashed with Leila’s religious tenets and her sense of public propriety—although of course she had little contact with and no influence on her son. Peter, on the other hand, knew his father was reaching out for companionship. He had been raised to take the remarkable in stride, and thought little of it. Howie was bewildered. To Susie Jr., it meant the classic stepmother problem: a barrier between her and her father and the problem of accepting that anyone besides her mother could be good enough for him. To Gladys Kaiser, Warren’s chief protector, who guarded the office door, answered his phone, and handled his—and now Big Susie’s—money, Astrid’s arrival meant an additional level of stress, which she resented.3
Susie herself was shocked. This wasn’t what she had had in mind when she stressed to her husband that they both had needs. In her mind, Warren’s dependence on her was absolute; how could he need a relationship with anyone else? But it might have been predicted. Warren had searched his whole life for the perfect Daisy Mae, and whatever he wanted, Astrid did: buy the Pepsi, do the laundry, take care of the house, give him head rubs, cook the meal
s, answer the telephone, and provide all the companionship he needed. Astrid never told him what to do and asked for nothing in return except to be with him. The previous Daisy Mae, Big Susie, had fled Omaha partly to escape this endless well of neediness. As she adjusted to the shock, she came to accept the relationship, which did make her new life easier. Susie, however, was possessive by nature. No matter how she divided her own attention, she did not really want Warren to divide his. And thus it was Susie’s expectations—not Warren’s—that would come to define all of their roles.
The pieces of Buffett’s life began to come back together into some sort of coherent whole. But he had been shocked into realizing the truth of Susie’s insistence that sitting in a room making money was no way to spend a life; he began to see what he had missed. While he was friendly enough with his kids, he hadn’t really gotten to know them. The reality behind the jokes (“Who is that? That’s your son”4) meant that he would spend the next few decades trying to repair these relationships. Much of the damage could not be undone. At age forty-seven, he was just beginning to take stock of his losses.5
Warren, who placed a high value on honesty, was perfectly open about living with Astrid. Everybody knew (except Doc Thompson). Both Susie and Astrid, however, remained closemouthed about the situation, saying merely that they liked each other. Warren made only one public statement: “If you knew the people involved, you’d see that it suited all of us quite well.” That was true, at least if compared to the alternatives. In this sense and others, the situation bore a resemblance to the life of Warren’s idol, Ben Graham.
In the mid-1960s, Graham had proposed a novel arrangement to his wife, Estey, in which he would live half the year with his deceased son Newton’s former girlfriend, Marie Louise Amingues, or Malou—ML, as she was called by the family—and half with Estey. Marriage was a concept that Graham had always honored more in the breach than in reality, but Estey had her limits, and had reached them. Ever since she said no, the Grahams had been separated but they never divorced. Ben and ML were in La Jolla and spent part of the year in Aixen-Provence. Estey lived in Beverly Hills. Ben felt perfectly friendly toward Estey, and ML was content to live without marriage.6
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