The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [107]
For Warren, holding on to every penny this way, since he had sold that first pack of chewing gum, was one of the two things that had made him comparatively rich at age twenty-five. The other was collecting more cash. Since Columbia, he had started making money at an accelerating rate. Now, much of his time Warren spent in a reverie, statistics about businesses and their stock prices swirling in his head. When he wasn’t studying something, he was teaching it. To keep his Dale Carnegie skills limber so he would not freeze in front of an audience, he got a gig teaching investing for the Scarsdale Adult School at the high school in a nearby suburb. Meanwhile, the Buffetts’ social set consisted of couples whose breadwinners were mainly interested in stocks.
Now and then he and Susie were invited to a country club or to dinner parties with other young Wall Street couples. Bill Ruane had introduced him to several new acquaintances like Henry Brandt, a stockbroker who looked like a disheveled Jerry Lewis and had graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Business School, and his wife, Roxanne. Among the Wall Street set, Warren struck people as the “hickiest person you ever saw,” as one of them put it. But when he started holding forth about stocks, the others sat transfixed at his feet, like “Jesus and the apostles,” said Roxanne Brandt.27
The wives sat by themselves and had their own conversations, and there Susie stood out as much as her husband did among the men. Warren wove his financial spells, and Susie charmed the wives with her engaging simplicity. She wanted to know all about their children, or their plans to have children. She knew how to get people to open up to her. She would ask about some big life decision, then, with a soulful look, say, “Any regrets?” Out would come pouring the other person’s most intimate feelings. Soon someone she had met half an hour before felt she had a new best friend, even though Susie never confided intimacies in return. People loved her for being so interested in them.
But mostly Susie was on her own as she waited for their second child to be born, her days filled with laundry, shopping, cleaning, and cooking, as well as feeding, changing, and playing with Little Susie. All this felt right and normal to both of them. As Ricky Ricardo had said in the first season of I Love Lucy three years before, “I want a wife who’s just a wife.”28 Lucy’s ambitions and her fruitless efforts to fulfill them made the show comical. So, as Susie fed Warren dinner, she supported him at his work as if it were a daily sacrament; she recognized the reverence he felt for Mr. Graham. But she also observed from a distance. Warren didn’t share the details of his job, which in any case didn’t interest her. She continued the patient work of bolstering his confidence, and of “putting him together” by showering him with affection and teaching him about people. One thing she was firm about at home was the importance of his bonding with their daughter. Warren was not the type to play peekaboo or take over the diaper changing, but he would sing to Little Susie every night.
“I sang ‘Over the Rainbow’ all the time. It got to be hypnotic, almost like Pavlov’s dogs. I don’t know whether it was too boring or what—but she’d fall asleep as soon as I started. I’d put her up on my shoulder, and, basically, she would just sort of melt in my arms.”
Having hit on a reliable system, Warren never messed with it. While singing, he could easily be off rummaging around in his mental files. So “Over the Rainbow” it was, night after night.
On her own, housekeeping, raising a baby, and taking care of Warren in a sterile suburb of New York, Susie may have welcomed anybody who showed up at the door. One day in late 1954, a salesman for Parents