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“I needed her like crazy,” he says. “I was happy in my work, but I wasn’t happy with myself. She literally saved my life. She resurrected me.13 She put me together. It was the same kind of unconditional love you would get from a parent.”

Warren wanted a lot of things from his wife that you would ordinarily get from a parent. Not only that, he had grown up with a mother who did everything for him. Now Susie took over. Although their basic model of wedded life was typical of the time—he made the money, she took care of him and covered the domestic front—their arrangement was extreme. Everything in the Buffett household revolved around Warren and his business. Susie understood her husband was special; she willingly became the cocoon for his embryonic ambitions. He spent his days working and his nights hunched over the Moody’s Manual. He also arranged his schedule to give himself leisure time to play golf and Ping-Pong, even signing up as a junior member of the Omaha Country Club.

Susie, barely twenty years old, was no Betty Crocker, but she had taken up rudimentary cooking and basic housekeeping like any 1950s wife—at a time when Omaha women were auditioning to appear on the show Typical Housewife on local television station KTMV. She devoted herself to fulfilling her husband’s few but specific requirements: Pepsi in the refrigerator, a lightbulb in his reading lamp, some indifferently cooked version of meat and potatoes for dinner, a shaker full of salt, popcorn in the cupboard, ice cream in the freezer. He also needed help getting dressed, assistance in dealing with people, tenderness, head rubs, cuddling, and hugs. She even cut his hair, because he claimed he was afraid to go to the barber.14

Warren was “nuts about Susie, and she felt things” that were inside him, he says. He describes her role as the giver, his as the receiver. “She was absorbing more about me and sensing much more about me than I was sensing about her.” They were always seen kissing and cuddling, Susie often in Warren’s lap; she frequently said this reminded her of her father.

Six months after the wedding, Susie was pregnant and had dropped out of the University of Omaha. Her sister, Dottie, was pregnant, too, with her second baby. She and Susie had remained particularly close. A dark-haired beauty, Dottie resembled her father in intelligence, and, according to family lore, she had possessed the highest IQ in the school when she attended Central High. But in both looks and domesticity, she was more like her mother.15 She had married Homer Rogers, a pilot and war hero with a big baritone voice whom everybody called Buck Rogers, although he was modest about his war exploits. Homer was a convivial, energetic cattleman, as beefy as the oversize steers he bought and sold. The Rogerses always had a crowd at their house, Dottie playing piano while Homer sang something like “Katie, Katie, get off the table, the money’s for the beer.” Susie and Warren did not take part in the Rogerses’ active social life, since they tended to be more serious-minded and they did not drink, but the sisters spent a lot of time together on their own. Dottie had always had difficulty making decisions, and since having her first son, Billy, she seemed dazed at the demands of motherhood. Susie, naturally, took charge and helped her.

Susie had also become close to her sister-in-law Doris, who was working in Omaha as a schoolteacher now that she was married. Her husband, Truman Wood, was a handsome man with a pleasant personality who came from a prominent Omaha family, but Doris was starting to wonder if she was a racing filly hitched to a Clydesdale. A girl of action, Doris told Truman to giddyup. He ambled along a little faster, but not much.

Susie’s protectiveness toward Warren and his sister ticked up a notch in January 1953 after Eisenhower was sworn in, when Howard’s final congressional term ended and he and Leila returned to Nebraska for good. Doris and Warren felt the strain of having Leila back in town. Warren could hardly bear