The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [14]
The two men had been each other’s best audience ever since they first met through mutual friends over lunch in 1959. After they talked their hosts into exhaustion, they wound up alone at the table, jabbering to each other. Since then, they had carried on an uninterrupted conversation for decades. Eventually, they could read each other’s minds, stopped talking, and carried on by telepathy. But by then their other audiences had expanded to include their friends, business partners, shareholders—indeed, the whole world. People reeled out of Buffett’s office or away from Munger’s speeches, figuratively smacking their foreheads and saying, “My God!” at some insight one of them had about a seemingly intractable problem, which now, in hindsight, seemed obvious. No matter how much either talked, demand for their words only increased. Like most things in their lives, they found this role easy and comfortable, engraved in their beings by long habit.
But, accused of being a creature of habit, Buffett responded with a wounded look. “I’m not a creature of habit,” he said. “Now, Charlie—Charlie is a creature of habit.”
Munger rose in the morning and set his quarter-inch-thick, old-fashioned cataract glasses on the bridge of his nose. He climbed into his car at precisely the same time every day, carefully placed his father’s briefcase—which he now used—on the seat next to him, and drove from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles.4 He changed lanes on his left side by counting the cars in his rearview mirror, then watching them pass in the front to sense when there would be a gap.5 (For years he drove with a can of gasoline in his trunk in case he forgot to stop for gas, but was finally persuaded to give up this particular habit.) Once downtown, he often met someone for breakfast at the sandy-brick art deco California Club, one of the city’s venerable institutions, where he strode automatically to the first table in the dining room after grabbing a clutch of newspapers from the console table by the third-floor elevator. He tore through the papers like gift wrap on Christmas morning, until they lay around him in a heap.
“Good morning, Mr. Munger.” The members of the L.A. business establishment genuflected as they passed by on their way to lesser tables, pleased if he recognized them and chatted for a moment or two.
Munger regarded them through his right eye. His left had been destroyed in a failed cataract operation.6 Now, while he spoke, his left eyelid hung at half-mast as his head swiveled back and forth across the room, taking in the scene. The rotating half gaze gave him an aspect of eternal vigilance and permanent disdain.
After finishing his blueberries, Munger repaired to the modest, cluttered office he rented from Munger, Tolles & Olson, the law firm he had founded in 1962 and retired from just three years later. Tucked away on an upper floor of the Wells Fargo Center, his domain was watched over by his longtime secretary, the Teutonic Dorothe Obert. There, surrounded by science and history books, biographies of Benjamin Franklin, an enormous portrait of aphorist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, plans and models of his latest real estate deal, and a hydrocephalic bust of Franklin next to the windows, he felt at home. Munger admired Franklin for espousing Protestant bourgeois values while living as he damn well pleased. He frequently cited Franklin, and spent his days studying his works and those of other “eminent dead,” as he put it, like Cicero and Maimonides. He also administered Wesco Financial, a subsidiary of Berkshire; the Daily Journal Corporation,