The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [130]
With the help of well-oiled family connections, he brazened his way into Harvard Law School after the war without ever having finished his undergraduate degree.10 By then he was married to Nancy Huggins, an impulsive match entered into when he was twenty-one and she nineteen. He had sprouted into a medium-height, well-dressed young man whose close-cut dark hair and alert eyes gave him a polished look. But his most prominent feature—apart from his ears, now only slightly winged from his skull—was a hallmark skeptical expression. He wore it often while racing through Harvard—without learning anything, he says.11 Then, he later told his friends, he looked at a map and asked himself, “What city is growing and full of opportunity, so that I could make a lot of money, but not so big and well developed that it would be hard to rise into the ranks of the city’s prominent men?” He chose Los Angeles.12 Pasadena—the gracious old Spanish-flavored Los Angeles suburb where he had attended Caltech—had impressed him. It was there that he had met his wife, the daughter of a locally prominent family. Nancy was “willful, indulged,” says her daughter Molly, not exactly ideal traits given her new husband’s temperament.13 Within a few years their marriage was in trouble. Nonetheless, after Harvard they hightailed it back to her hometown, with their son, Teddy, and settled in Pasadena, where Charlie became a successful lawyer.
By 1953, after three children and eight years of incompatibility, fighting, and misery, Munger found himself divorcing at a time when divorce was a disgrace. Despite their problems, he and Nancy worked out a civilized arrangement regarding their son and two daughters. Munger moved into a room at the University Club, bought a dented yellow Pontiac with a bad paint job “to discourage gold diggers,” and became a devoted Saturday father.14 Then, within a year of the separation, Teddy, now eight years old, was diagnosed with leukemia. Munger and his ex-wife scoured the medical community but quickly discovered the disease was incurable. They sat in the leukemia ward with the other parents and grandparents in different stages of watching their children waste away.15
Teddy was in and out of the hospital often. Charlie would visit, hold him in his arms, then walk the streets of Pasadena, crying for his son. He found the combination of his failed marriage and his son’s terminal illness almost unbearable. The loneliness of living as a divorced single father in the 1950s also chafed at him. He felt a failure without an intact family, and wanted to live surrounded by children.
When things went wrong, Munger would set out toward new goals rather than let himself dwell on the negative.16 That could come across as pragmatic, or even callous, but he viewed it as keeping the horizon in sight. “You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three through your failure of will,” he would later say.17
So even as he cared for his dying son, Munger decided to marry again. His method of analyzing the odds of a successful match made him pessimistic, however.
“Charlie was despairing over whether he would ever meet anyone else. ‘How can I find somebody? Out of twenty million people in California, half are women. Of these ten million, only two million are of an appropriate age. From that group, a million and a half would be married, leaving five hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand of them are too dumb, fifty thousand are too smart, and of the remaining hundred fifty thousand, the number I would want to marry would fit on a basketball court. I’ve got to find one of those. And then I’ve got to be on her basketball court.’”
Munger’s mental habit of setting low expectations was well established. He equated this with the route to happiness, since he felt that high expectations led to fault-finding. Low expectations made it harder to be disappointed. Paradoxically, however, they could also confound success.
Out of desperation, Munger started reviewing divorce and death notices to find