Buffett was obviously preoccupied with thoughts of what it would be like to go to this meeting without Susie. News of her illness was sure to cause a stir simply because many of the people attending were finding out about it shortly before the meeting. For five days he was going to have to answer questions about her, accept sympathy, and keep his emotions in check. He would have to perform his role of master of ceremonies, maintaining interest in what was going on without striking any false notes of excessive good cheer. Buffett had mastered the art of compartmentalizing to such a degree that these skills were second nature to him—but under the circumstances, it was still going to be a hell of a performance. Once he was back in his hotel room at the end of the evening, he would be alone in the dark with his thoughts and his dreams.
“I dream a lot,” he said the day before leaving for San Diego, and the dreams could be disturbing. “I have a multiplex going on in there. It’s a full-time occupation.” That evening he ordered a club sandwich for dinner and ate with a visitor in his office, wanting to fill the time until Sharon took over to distract him with a bridge game, then conversation till all hours. Now he sat talking, at first struggling through a brittle discussion about business and politics. Eventually, the conversation wound its way to what had been bubbling beneath the surface for days: the surgery that would take place shortly after the meeting ended.
For the briefest fraction of a second, a look of surprise flickered across his face. Then his face began to crumple, and collapsed into his hands. His shoulders heaved and rocked and he slid forward in his chair, like a tower crumbling in an earthquake. Dry, desolate, heaving sobs, like silent screams, came gasping out of him. There wasn’t any consolation for this.
Gradually the wracking sobs spent themselves. Then he began to talk about Susie. He cried quietly, off and on, for about two hours. He was afraid of what she was going to have to suffer through. She was stronger than he; his main concern was the pain she would face. He was even more worried that she might accept death as a natural thing and not fight it as he would. He was terrified of losing her. Assumptions that were part of the very core of his being had been upended. He had always assumed that he would never be alone because she would outlive him. He had always assumed that he could count on her wisdom and judgment to handle any life-and-death decisions that might have to be made. He had always assumed that she would run the foundation after he was gone. She would keep peace within the family if he was not there; she would see to it that Astrid was taken care of; she would resolve any conflicts, soothe any bad feelings. She would handle his funeral and shape the way in which everyone would remember him. Above all, he had been counting on Susie to be there for him at the end, to sit beside him and hold his hand and calm his terror and ease his suffering when death was approaching, just as she had done for so many others. For the first time he had to contemplate that it might not work out this way. But these thoughts were so unbearable that he could only glance at them before shutting them down. He was sure that her doctors would take care of her and that she would live. By the time he left the office for his bridge game, he was in a somber mood but calm and collected.
The next morning he flew to San Diego. At the Buffett Group conference, he struck people as subdued but not despondent. He presided over three days of meetings that included a dinner at the Gateses’ house, a talk by Bill Ruane about his project to improve the schools in Harlem, Jack Byrne on management succession, and Charlie Munger on the life of Andrew Carnegie, the great industrialist, who had maintained that he who dies rich dies disgraced. Howie Buffett dropped in to describe the motivations behind the photographs in his book, Tapestry of Life, which showed scenes of human suffering in impoverished Africa; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at USC, gave a speech entitled “From Young Idealists to Old Bureaucrats,” about the aging of the so-called Silent Generation, those born in the 1930s and early ’40s, which comprised most of those who were in the room.11
While Warren was in San Diego, Astrid was at the Canyon Ranch spa in Tucson, where he had sent her because she was so upset about Susie that he wanted her to get away to a place where she might be able to relax. She had never been to a spa before and resisted at first. Pampering herself at a swanky hacienda was like attempting a triple lutz to a woman who had never so much as treated herself to a pedicure. Astrid had no vanity whatsoever; she packed just a few T-shirts for her week at the famous resort. Handed a turkey wrap for lunch on arrival, out of habit she began to badger the staff about recycling and Styrofoam packaging. At the reception area, a nurse took her into a small office to design a spa and wellness regime for her. When asked how she was feeling and what concerns she had, Astrid replied that her concern was her friend Susie. The nurse apparently recognized that she was dealing with one of those women who focus on everybody else at the expense of their own needs. Gently, she steered Astrid toward relaxing treatments, like “healing touch.” Astrid took a couple of yoga classes, went on a bird walk, took some cooking classes, got a facial, had a couple of massages, and learned some golf. She groused about being taken care of but, to her surprise, managed to survive it, and found that some aspects of it were not so terrible.
Buffett flew from the meeting in San Diego to San Francisco the day before Susie’s surgery. He had been scheduled to attend a NetJets marketing event that day and had made up his mind to go, but Susie Jr., who recognized this as a form of denial, told him he must come to San Francisco instead. Reluctantly, therefore, he joined the family for dinner at Susie’s apartment. Everyone behaved in character. Since Susie had no one to care for (but herself), she avoided discussing her feelings about the next day’s surgery with the family and busied herself talking on the phone. Warren spent much of the evening playing helicopter, with his eyes leashed to the computer.
Very early the next morning, the family accompanied Susie to the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, where the technicians hooked her up to an IV and drew a huge oval from her knee to her left ankle with a Magic Marker. This, they said, was to indicate the area where they were going to open her leg to take out what they needed for the bone graft. Dr. Isley, Susie’s surgeon, came by to tell them that he would leave the operating room after ninety minutes or so to let them know for sure whether the cancer had spread.
Then Susie took her daughter into the bathroom and shut the door behind them. She didn’t want Warren to hear what she had to say. “Listen,” she said, “he is a wuss. You need to understand that if they get in there and there’s more cancer, don’t let them operate. I’m so afraid he’s going to tell them to operate even if it’s really widespread, because he won’t want me to die.”
By eight a.m. Susie was in surgery, and the family went to the main surgical lounge, where they awaited word, along with all the other people who were passing the time watching Jerry Springer on television while their loved ones were in the O.R. Warren pretended to read the newspaper. From time to time, he closed the paper, held it up before his face, reached a hand behind to wipe tears from his eyes, then opened it again.
Dr. Isley returned only forty-five minutes later. Although he had found cancer in two lymph nodes, it had not spread from there, which was good news. The surgery would remove only the lower floor of her mouth, the inside of her cheek, and about a third of her tongue. She did not need a bone graft. After Dr. Isley left, Warren began to ask, “Well, now, Sooz, was that what he said would take an hour and a half, or is he going to come back out again? Are you sure? Will they really know?” Each time, Susie Jr. reassured him that they already had the answer, and each time he would wait a few minutes and ask her again. “Well, how did they know so fast?” He kept saying, “I don’t think this is good. Maybe he’s going to come back out.”
Sixteen hours later, Susie was in the intensive-care unit, breathing through a tracheotomy tube. Her left arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow where the surgeons had carved a slice of flesh for the skin graft inside her mouth. Because her
tongue was swollen out of her mouth, a feeding tube had been threaded through her nose into her stomach. She coughed continually, clogging the trach tube, which had to be cleared frequently so that she could breathe.12
The next morning at the hospital, Susie Jr. told her father, “You need to get really ready for this. It’s a shocking thing to see.” Warren steeled himself as he walked into Susie’s room. He knew he could not allow her to see any spasm on his face that would reveal to Susie how ghastly she appeared. Making a huge effort of will, he managed to sit unflinching with her for a little while. Then Susie Jr. told him and her brothers that they could go home. There was nothing further they could do. Having stuffed his feelings into a Pandora’s box while he remained at Susie’s bedside, after he left he says he “spent two days just crying, basically.”
He went back to San Francisco for the following two weekends. Then, just before Susie was going to leave the hospital and go home, he flew down to Georgia and spoke to a group of students at Georgia Tech. He didn’t talk about business much, but he invoked many of his familiar themes. He told them the fable of the genie, and he talked about philanthropy. He said the best investment they could make in life was in themselves. He told them about his hero Ben Graham and said to choose their heroes carefully, because heroes matter in your life. He told them to work for people they admired.
They asked him what had been his greatest success and greatest failure. He didn’t tell them about his business mistakes of omission this time. Instead he said:
“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.
“I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.
“That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”13
Warren continued visiting every weekend after Susie went home to her sunshine-filled apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. The egg-yolk-yellow rugs were gone, lest their dust clog the trach tube. Chair elevators carried her up the four flights of stairs. The nurses used a rented suction-tracheotomy system. The doctors began to prepare Susie for the six-week course of radiation, which was intended to kill any remaining cancer cells. It would begin in December and continue through the holidays. The radiation, which she had never quite agreed to in the first place, was going to burn her throat. The doctors had told her to bulk up before the surgery because she could expect to lose around fifty pounds over the entire course of the surgery and radiation. That was a lot of weight, but one of the thoughts that had comforted her before the surgery was that she could afford to lose a good bit of it. Now, as the feeding tube came out, the nurses began to feed Susie six units of liquid meal replacement a day. It took her much of the day to get it down, because of the pain.
Under stress, Warren had gained a little weight. He felt that he needed to lose twenty pounds and had decided to diet alongside Susie’s liquid meal regimen. “That can’t be a lot of fun,” he said, “so I won’t have any fun either.”
Buffett’s manner of dieting was as eccentric and unhealthy as the rest of his eating habits. He decided to stick with his usual approach, which was to consume only a thousand calories a day and budget it however he liked. That meant he could spend the thousand calories on licorice, peanut brittle, hamburgers, or whatever else he wanted to eat so long as he didn’t exceed the self-imposed limit. The easiest step was to cut back on all the Cherry Coke, replacing it with nothing and thereby dehydrating himself. The idea behind the thousand-calorie starvation regimen was to get the pain of dieting over with fast. He was impatient and cut off debate over the health merits of such a diet. At my height and age, he said, I reckon that I can eat about a million calories a year and maintain my weight. (The nice round, even number of a million calories pleased him.) I can spend those calories however I want. If I want to eat a bunch of hot-fudge sundaes in January and starve the rest of the year, I can do that.
It was completely rational (on the surface) yet totally ludicrous. But since he had never been either seriously overweight or seriously ill, it was pointless to argue with him. (He went on this crash diet every year right before the shareholder meeting; it is possible, however, that all that dehydration may have had nothing to do with his earlier kidney stone.) Regardless, Buffett had a way of winning arguments before they ever occurred. The one extremely rare exception was when he argued with the press over how it presented him. He never sparred with the Financial Times or the New York Times, both of which he read religiously. His problem, always, was the Wall Street Journal.
Through the years, his penchant for letting the rubes in on the fact that Wall Street was a sort of speakeasy inhabited by people who were out to fleece them had made trafficking with the Journal, Wall Street’s official broadsheet, dangerously fraught. He had once done an “editorial board” luncheon at the Journal that backfired on him. Editorial board meetings were an opportunity for Buffett to put on his teaching hat and explain the economic issues of the day to editors—something he relished—but this time, an off-the-record quote had shown up in the paper. Kay Graham’s rule of journalism had tripped him up—Graham’s maxim being that a statement given off the record means the quote will not be used—unless it is really good.14 Buffett had been furious, and obtained excuses and apologies from the Journal over its betrayal, which could not be undone. Moreover, the Journal’s editorial page poured vitriol on him periodically because he supported shifting the tax burden away from the poor and middle class and toward the rich.
He would not dream, however, of skipping a day of reading the Journal, even on Fridays, the day he drove out to Eppley Airfield for the three-hour NetJets flight to San Francisco. Sharon Osberg picked him up at the airport and took him straight to Susie’s apartment in Pacific Heights. Not wanting to disturb her or to be awakened by the light that came in through Susie’s huge uncurtained windows, he slept down in the ground-floor apartment that Susie used mainly for storage. While Susie napped and slept, he went to Sharon’s much of the time to watch football on TV and cry on her shoulder. Sometimes they went to midnight movies.
When Warren was in town, Susie saw no visitors, only her daughter, her nurses, and a couple of people like Kathleen who were caring for her day to day. Nearly everyone, even Jeannie Lipsey Rosenblum and Warren’s sister Bertie, who had bought apartments in the same building, were kept away all the time—not just during the weekends—the feeling being that even a soupçon of attention would be too draining for Susie. Every day Jeannie wrote Susie a card and left it downstairs for her. Like many of Susie’s loved ones, Bertie was sad about not being able to see her sister-in-law. She had always looked up to Susie for her wisdom about people, and now, in the wake of her husband’s recent death, she felt that she had gained a similar wisdom herself. “Hilt was a psychologist,” she says, “and even without trying, he could see what people’s meta message was. When Hilt died, what he willed to me was that I can see things about people that I never saw before. All of a sudden my eyes opened about things I had never understood.” Bertie felt that now her relationship with Susie would be different, more equal, so that she would no longer have to lean on Susie. She also felt she was starting to understand Susie for the first time.
As her brother traveled back and forth to San Francisco every week, he, too, was learning about things he had never known before—medication, radiation, and the
ins and outs of dealing with doctors and nurses and hospital equipment. And he was also exploring a new emotional territory—facing Susie’s fears as well as his own. When talking about this new world he had just entered, he measured out his words, keeping his feelings private, adjusting how much he shared according to how well he knew his audience. Sometimes he used as a distraction a favorite prop, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow elephant friend whom he had recently endorsed as the Republican candidate in a recall election to unseat Gray Davis, the governor of California. “My wife had an operation in San Francisco about six weeks ago, and I’ll be out there a couple of days every week. (Pause) Well, you know, Arnold, sometimes people can’t tell which one is which, when we’re next to each other. When we’re stripped down, nobody has a chance.”
When someone he knew better called, he struggled to talk about a subject that formerly he would have avoided at all costs.
“Oh, hi, Chuck. Yeah. Well, she’s doing better in every respect than people have told us would be the case going in. She doesn’t have any energy and it’s—it’s been an experience like she hasn’t had before. But in terms of her mouth healing, in terms of swallowing—everything, it’s all going fine. And the people are terrific. Not a lot of pain right now. I think it’s psychological more than—I mean, she’s not finding life any fun at all at the moment but.
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