The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [104]
Leila dissolved in a pool of misery. Through the reflected glory it bestowed on her, Howard’s position in the world may have meant even more to her than it did to him. Her sister Edie was now living in Brazil, Bertie lived in Chicago, and her relationships with Doris and Warren were unsettled at best, so she had only twenty-two-year-old Susie to lean on. But Susie was a busy, pregnant young mother, who had her hands full caring for Warren as well.
And soon, Susie would no longer be in Omaha. For two years, Warren had kept corresponding with Ben Graham. He suggested stock ideas like Greif Bros. Cooperage, a company he and his father had bought for their partnership. He traveled to New York periodically and dropped in on Graham-Newman.
“I would always try to see Mr. Graham.”
Surely it wasn’t typical for former students to hang about at Graham-Newman.
“No, well, I was persistent.”
By the time the local Republican Party slammed the door to the Senate nomination in his father’s face, Warren was already on his way to New York. “Ben wrote and said, ‘Come on back.’ His partner, Jerry Newman, explained it by saying, ‘You know, we just checked you out a little further.’ I felt I’d struck the mother lode.” Whether he would accept the position was never in question. And this time, the National Guard said yes.
Warren was so excited about being hired that he arrived in New York on August 1, 1954, and showed up at his new job at Graham-Newman on August 2, a month before his official starting date. There, he discovered that a week earlier, tragedy had struck Ben Graham. Four weeks shy of his own twenty-fourth birthday, Warren wrote his father: “Ben Graham’s son Newton (26) who was in the Army in France committed suicide last week. He had always been a little unbalanced. However Graham didn’t know it had been a suicide til he read it in the New York Times on an Army release, which of course is really tough.”18 When he went to France to collect his son’s remains, Ben met Newton’s girlfriend, Marie Louise Amingues, known as Malou, who was several years older than Newton. He returned a few weeks later but was never quite the same afterward. He also began to correspond with Malou and made periodic visits back to France. But in those days Warren knew nothing of his idol’s personal life.
Instead, he had to attend to his own, for one of his first tasks was to find his family a place to live. Susie and Little Susie had remained in Omaha during his first month in New York City. “I tried to live at Peter Cooper Village first, one of two big projects built by Metropolitan Life immediately after World War Two. My friend Fred Kuhlken from Columbia lived in Peter Cooper. Walter Schloss lived in Peter Cooper. Everybody wanted to get into Peter Cooper. Under some kind of special section of the law, it was really reasonable, seventy or eighty bucks a month, and very nice. I applied before I went and got a postcard about two years later saying I’d been accepted. If I had been accepted earlier I would have lived in the city.”
Instead, Warren searched far and wide for a cheap apartment. Discounting the impersonal location and long commute, he finally settled on a three-bedroom apartment in a white-brick building in the middle-class suburb of White Plains, about thirty miles away in Westchester County, New York. When Susie and Little Susie arrived a few weeks later, the apartment was still not ready, so the family moved into a room in a house in Westchester that was so cramped they had to devise