The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

  When they landed in Omaha, the family had another surreal experience as the plane taxied straight into the hangar, where a hearse was waiting, rather than stopping on the tarmac, so that they could deboard without having their grief invaded by a band of paparazzi. Warren went straight home, walked upstairs into his bedroom, shut the door, turned off the lights, and got under the covers.

  Astrid knew what to do, which was nothing. She made sure he had his sleeping pills and left him alone. Now and then she went over to Susie Jr.’s and cried herself. The rest of the time she stayed at home to take care of Warren.

  The next day, Friday, he was still under the covers. Ron Olson, who had some legal obligations under Susie’s will and was a close friend and strong influence within the family, particularly with the children, arrived from Los Angeles with his wife, Jane. Warren came downstairs, and the Olsons sat with him for a while. Within an hour, the phone rang. It was Don Graham. “Where are you?” asked Susie Jr. “At the Hilton downtown,” he said. He had known to come without being told. Then Susie Jr. drafted a couple of her own friends to join them at the house. Over the next several days, they all sat in the living room to help distract Warren and make sure that he was never alone. At nine-thirty each night, he went up to bed and took his sleeping pill.

  A day or two later Warren tried to call a couple of people. When they answered, no words came out; his throat had closed. He gave up trying to talk and heaved with sobs for a few minutes. Then, when the storm of tears passed, he choked out, “I’m sorry,” and hung up the phone. They would never have known who it was, except that the sound of Warren sending out an SOS was so unmistakable.

  Susie Jr. had already sent for the people who were needed. The following week, Bill Ruane and Carol Loomis arrived to visit for a few hours. Sharon Osberg came. Bill Gates arrived. Kathleen Cole flew in. And Howie finally returned from Africa after “the longest trip home,” one that he never wanted to think about again.27

  Bill and Sharon went ahead with a bridge tournament they had been scheduled to play in—with Warren—that week. He managed to join them for dinner one night at the hotel where the tournament was being held, and he did watch them play for a while, which helped to distract him. Another night they were over at the house, where Warren wanted them to sit with him to watch the Charlie Rose video of Susie’s interview. Astrid didn’t want to see it, which was just as well, and he was afraid to watch it alone. They put it on the DVD player and it began to play. After a while, Warren was weeping. Bill left the room while Sharon crawled into his lap and rocked him as he cried.28

  The mere mention of Susie’s name sent Warren into tears. As the funeral approached, it became apparent to Susie Jr., who was planning the event, that something else was bothering her father. It dawned on her what this must be. “You don’t have to go,” she told him.

  Warren was overcome with relief. “I can’t,” he said. To sit there, overwhelmed with thoughts of Susie, in front of everyone, was too much. “I can’t go.”29

  Unlike Warren, hundreds of others did want to grieve for Susan Buffett in person, at some sort of memorial service. None was ever held. Only the family, a couple of Susie’s closest friends, Bono and his wife, Ali, and Bobby Shriver were invited to the funeral. Susie’s musician friend Dave Stryker played the guitar, and the Reverend Cecil Williams from Glide Memorial Church conducted the service. Bono sang “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” The grandchildren wept.

  And for several weeks more, that was all. Warren faced the emptiness. Many people, including Susie herself, had questioned how well he could survive without her. He had never recovered from the death of his father and still could not face the unfinished business of Howard’s boxes of papers in the basement. As Sharon put it, he had a tendency to think in the third person. But he suffered this time in the first person, grieving fully, living in the now, even though the now terrified him.

  Susie’s death carried with it deep intimations of his own mortality. His seventy-fourth birthday was approaching with its metronomic tick of doom. He wanted cheering up badly and talked to a couple of friends who then made plans, as he wished, to visit him in Omaha on his birthday. A few days later, Susie Jr. called them and said, Don’t come.30 Warren wasn’t ready. Indeed, distraction was not the best thing for him. The process of mourning could not be shortened; it could only be endured.

  He could not escape from grief, even in sleep. The nightmares haunted him, every night the same. The separation from Susie, the split that he had never been able to contemplate during all the years of their living apart, was happening right before his eyes. He was captive on the endless ride to the hospital in Cody, locked inside the ambulance, helpless to help her, unable to stop the momentum of the wheels. The silent mountains stood silhouetted against the July stardrift in the thin evening air. Silently the driver picked his way through the winding hills. The road unreeled before them, mile after mile, rows of trees passing like pilgrims up to the foothills above. In the back, Susie lay on the cot, pale and still. The sounds in the ambulance faded as the miles went by. Strands of juniper hung like dim moss from the mountainsides while the road ahead stretched thinner in the distance. The stars fell still in the vast black overhead. Time slowed to eternity.

  All he had ever asked of her was not to leave him, and she had promised that she never would. No matter how many other people she had cared for and supported, no matter which way her heart had tugged her, through all her travels, no matter how many different directions she had run, Susie had always come back to him. She had never let him down.

  Now there was no response. He needed her so much that it was impossible that she would leave him. He would hold on, he would not let go; therefore she must stay with him.

  The ambulance crept onward through the darkened mountains. The quiet hum of the oxygen tank mingled with his tears. In the back there was only calm, a bare whisper of breath, no obvious sound of pain.

  It was Warren’s chest that burned, it was his heart that exploded with each revolution of the wheels. You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, please don’t leave me.

  But Susie was already passing beyond his reach; she was now in other hands. And the force of her withdrawal from his world to the next was tearing him apart.

  62

  Claim Checks

  Omaha and New York City • 2004–2008

  The first aftershocks of Susie’s death occurred at the reading of her will, even though most of its provisions were not unexpected. She left nearly all of her Berkshire stock, worth almost $3 billion, to the newly renamed Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, now headed by her daughter. Another six hundred shares, worth $50 million at the time, went to each of her children’s foundations.

  She had been generous to people she cared about, although her husband’s influence doubtless dampened her generosity. Her children each received $10 million. A long list of other people, headed by Kathleen Cole and her husband, received smaller amounts. She had amended her will in the year before her death through a codicil executed by a new lawyer; the codicil gave John McCabe $8 million. It also left $1 million to Ron Parks, the friend who had spent so many years as the de facto chief financial officer of “STB Enterprises.”1

  The secret codicil shocked nearly everyone. Susie had never reconciled the divisions within her world and in the end chose to leave them unexplained. The life she lived for others was her legacy; her inner truth would remain forever unspoken. Thus it would be left to others to form their own interpretations.

  Warren had long loved his wife as an ideal. She had been the “grounding person who was his connection to the outside world” as well as the “glue that held the family together.”2 After her death, he was never able to look at Susie’s photograph without crying. But he did not lapse into a years-long depression, or commit suicide, as Susie had suggested he might. Instead he mourned. For about two months, he seemed deeply depressed. And then, as most people do, he gradually returned to living his life. The
bathtub memory went to work and his love for Susie overcame the rest.

  “That was the most important relationship he had personally,” says Howie. “No question about it. And he depended on it heavily. But my dad is a survivor. Anybody who thought he was going to fall apart because my mom died, I think didn’t know him. Because he is not going to fall apart over anything. He’s got his own toughness, even though people may not see him that way. He didn’t get to where he is because he’s some kind of wimp.”3

  That toughness helped him not just to survive but to adapt and even to grow. When the dreamlike assumption that “Susie will take care of everything” popped like a soap bubble, Warren began to show a newfound realism. As each month passed, he began to deal more acceptingly with endings and mortality and to connect with his children in a new way. As his sister Bertie would say, Susie seemed to have willed him some of her strength, a little of her emotional fluency, and a lot of her generosity. Warren seemed to be acquiring unexpected dimensions to his inner life. He reclaimed some of the responsibility for the emotional territory that he had always left to his wife. He became more aware of his children’s feelings, of what they were doing and of what mattered to them.

  Susie Jr. quickly stepped into the leadership role that her mother had played, especially when it came to philanthropy, a job for which she had been preparing much of her life. She began to hire and to enlarge the foundation’s offices to plan for the much larger sums of money it would now be giving away. Running two foundations seemed to her a wonderful opportunity, not a burden.

  Peter was taking Spirit—The Seventh Fire to the National Mall in Washington as part of the celebration for the grand opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. One day he called his father to say, Dad, we’re setting up the tent! Afterward he realized that, in the past, he would have called his mother, who would have told his father. It felt good to have a direct connection.4 Warren gathered a group of friends and flew to Washington to attend the cocktail party and opening night. By the time Spirit opened, Peter had released or contributed to thirteen albums and soundtracks. But with the show, Warren felt a different connection with his son—not just because of Peter’s success, but through the effort they were making to be part of each other’s lives.

  When Spirit arrived in Philadelphia, it got the kind of recognition that Buffett understood: It was compared to “a Native American version of Philip Glass’s dance performance/opera 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof” with “guitar rolls that would put U2’s The Edge to shame.”5 Its costly production, however, meant that even with high ticket prices, Spirit was losing money as a touring show. Peter put it on hiatus and while working on a new CD, Gold Star, the first in which he would perform as a singer, began to consider what to do about Spirit’s longer-term future.

  Howie had published On the Edge and Tapestry of Life, books of his photographs, and had given exhibitions and lectures on his photography and work in the Third World. His foundation office still looked like a teenage boy’s bedroom, with toy jeeps and backhoes and equipment reminiscent of his old teenage CB radio. But his business experience had ripened; he now served on the board of Lindsay Manufacturing and ConAgra and had faced the task of firing two CEOs. Savvy about money, he had kept his CCE stock and had invested in Berkshire Hathaway stock. This latter gesture bonded him to his father as nothing else could. Warren observed how much his son had settled down and matured in the past ten years. Howie, a “marshmallow” emotionally who had always been so close to his mother and had yearned for a warm connection to his father all his life, now saw an opportunity to have a different sort of relationship with him. He and Devon bought a house in Omaha so they could be nearby.

  The events following Susie’s death affected Astrid deeply. She had lost someone she considered a dear friend, then found out that Susie’s life had run on parallel tracks—one of which had always been invisible to her. Years of staying behind the scenes out of deference to Susie and to a marriage that, however unconventional, had been held up to all as some kind of ideal suddenly was revealed as based on a falsehood. She knew Susie’s mesmerizing power over Warren and had seen Warren’s bathtub memory at work many times, but she was furious that Warren had allowed this to happen and felt betrayed and used. Belatedly, he recognized how high a price Astrid had paid for the arrangement he and Susie had worked out, the realities of which they had both avoided facing all these years. He took the blame and went to work setting things right. Gradually, as he passed through the stages of mourning, he brought Astrid more and more into his public life.

  In December, Warren sent all of his grandchildren large checks as a Christmas gift. He had always paid for their college tuition, but he had never before given them money without any strings attached. He wrote each of them a letter offering advice on how to spend it. Do a little something fun, he said, and also pay down your mortgage. But I won’t judge you if you blow it. You’ll get another check next year.6

  Buffett made two exceptions to the checks. He did not include Nicole and Erica Buffett, Peter’s adopted daughters. Big Susie had loved Erica and Nicole. They had shown up at her funeral dressed in long flowing outfits and wailed like a pair of brunette banshees. Susie had left each of her “adored grandchildren,” including Nicole and Erica, $100,000 “as a hug” in her will. But ten days after Susie’s funeral, Warren had told Peter, “By the way, I don’t consider the girls my grandchildren. I don’t want them to expect anything from me in my will.” Peter found this inexplicable. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. His father was undeterred. That Susie had given the girls money and specified that they had the same status as her other grandchildren in her will seemed to have roused Warren’s feelings of possessiveness about money. Peter let it go, however. He figured that if his father cut the girls out of his will, they would never find out the reason. And indeed, when Christmas came and they did not receive checks, they never found out.7

  Warren spent New Year’s with Astrid at the home of Sharon Osberg and her husband, David Smith, in California’s Marin County. He, Osberg, Gates, and the rest held one of their bridge orgies while Astrid shopped at Trader Joe’s. At the beginning of November, Buffett had overcome some earlier reservations that Gates’s powerful personality might dominate the Berkshire board, and had invited him to join it. Sharon and Bill had been talking for some time about the challenges that the Buffett Foundation faced. To give away several billion dollars a year after Warren was gone, it would have to change dramatically. No foundation in history had ever succeeded in such a transformation, because no foundation had ever tried. With one exception—the Gates Foundation—no other philanthropic organization had ever worked with such large sums.

  Warren had also been thinking about the problem. In the fall, he had videotaped a question-and-answer session with his foundation trustees, making sure they understood his wishes and that these were memorialized. Like Walter Annenberg, he wanted to reduce the chance of being double-crossed after he was dead. After all, Boys Town had eventually double-crossed Father Flanagan. If even Father Flanagan wasn’t sacred, then how to handicap the odds on Warren Buffett?

  Early in 2005, Osberg “trumped up some pretense” and made a trip to Omaha to speak to Buffett. Given his admiration for Gates, she said, shouldn’t he consider leaving his money to the Gates Foundation after he died? Though Buffett reacted noncommittally,8 he had in fact been considering leaving at least some of the money to the Gateses since well before Susie died.

  Charlie Munger had already been encouraging the idea. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they had Gates running it eventually,” he said shortly after Susie died. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Warren doesn’t like conventional pomposity. Gates is unconventional in the way he thinks, and he’s fifty instead of seventy-four.”9

  For a long time Buffett had felt that society was best served if he carried on compounding the money, rather than giving it away, so that there would be more to give away. But delaying the gift until his
death also amounted to the White Queen’s “jam tomorrow”—a postponement in his struggle with endings, with loss, with death, with letting go. Over the years he had gradually evolved from a boy who stole his sister’s bicycle and got other people to buy his barbells, from a father who said no to every request for money from his children, to a man who gave them a million dollars every five years on their birthday, a man who bought a pink heart-shaped diamond ring for his daughter. But he still had some issues with money, which, for example, seemed to have been triggered by Susie’s will. Nonetheless, in a profound shift, he was working his way through the problem of whether to serve some of tomorrow’s jam today.

  That did not mean, however, that the encroachments of time would become easier for him. A year after Susie died, Buffett found himself shocked once again by the impending arrival of another birthday. Could he actually be three-quarters of a century old? He spoke of it with disbelief. Then he seized on examples of health and vitality lasting well into old age: his mother, who had lived to ninety-two; his aunt Katie, who had lived to age ninety-seven; Walter Schloss, who was still playing tennis at almost ninety. And of course, there was his icon, Rose Blumkin.

  His seventy-fifth birthday party took place at Sharon and David’s, with Astrid, Bill Gates, and his sister Bertie in attendance. His birthday cake was a white-chocolate replica of a $100 bill. On Saturday morning, Smith had arranged for Buffett to take on Ariel Hsing, a nine-year-old Chinese-American Ping-Pong champion. With the video camera rolling, the little girl crushed him. After a fierce bridge tournament the following morning, an artist whom Osberg and Smith had hired came over to amuse Buffett and Gates by trying to teach them the art of landscape painting. Buffett gamely swiped away with a brush at acrylics, but painting, unlike Ping-Pong, was not rhythmic and repetitious, and the results were hilarious. He produced a canvas adorned with trees that resembled brown lollipops. Meanwhile, the previous day’s Ping-Pong game was fermenting an idea. Why not add the video of him getting trounced by Ariel Hsing to the ever-expanding movie at the shareholders’ meeting?