The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [168]
Whatever message he and Susie were trying to give the children about money, one unvarying theme came through: Money was important. They were growing up in a household where it was routinely used as a tool of control. Warren would take Big Susie to a store for her birthday and give her ninety minutes to race through and buy whatever she could grab. The Buffett side of the family had always been about making deals. Although Susie felt that Warren’s obsession with making money was unworthy, she still angled to get more of it from him. Now she was struggling with her weight and this too became a money deal. Warren’s childhood obsession with weighing machines—he would have weighed himself fifty times a day—had been no passing phase; he was obsessed with his family’s weight and preoccupied with keeping them all thin.
The family’s eating habits helped neither his cause nor their health. Susie, who had suffered from a mysterious and excruciating abdominal adhesion two years before, cooked unenthusiastically. She and Warren both willingly ate the same thing day after day: mostly meat and potatoes. Unlike Warren, Susie would eat vegetables, but she refused every fruit except watermelon. She picked at healthy food while living on chocolate and Rice Krispies treats, frosting out of a can, cookies, Tootsie Rolls, and milk, milk, milk. Warren breakfasted on Fritos and Pepsi, ate handfuls of chocolate and popcorn, and chose steaks, hamburgers, and the odd sandwich as his mainstay meals.
Finally, Susie asked him to make a deal to pay her to keep her weight at 118 pounds. Since she cared less about money than her husband did, however, motivation was a problem for her. All month long she picked and snacked; but then, as the weigh-in date approached, she would get on the scale. If the news was bad and she had to take the pounds off fast, “Uh-oh,” she’d say to one of Susie Jr.’s friends: “Kelsey, I’ve got to call your mom for her diuretic pills.”12
Warren disciplined himself to maintain his own weight by dangling money in front of his kids. When they were younger, he made out unsigned checks to them for $10,000 and said that if he didn’t weigh 173 pounds on such-and-such a date, he would sign the checks. Little Susie and Howie went crazy trying to tempt him with ice cream and chocolate cake. But the prospect of giving up money pained Warren far more than giving up a treat. He made out those checks over and over, but he never had to sign a single one.13
Instead of his children, one of the last new partners Warren allowed to join his partnership was Marshall Weinberg, a stockbroker friend of Walter Schloss who had taken Graham’s seminar twice. A cultivated man with a bent for the arts and philosophy, Weinberg had met Buffett at one of Graham’s lectures at the New School in New York. Lunching together a few times and talking of stocks, they had become friends. Weinberg soon gave up on interesting Buffett in music, art, philosophy, or travel, but Buffett traded through him at times and Weinberg became interested in joining the partnership. So on one of the Buffetts’ frequent trips to New York, Warren agreed to meet with him to discuss it.
Loping downstairs from his room at the Plaza, Warren met Weinberg in the lobby. Then Susie glided in, and Warren lit up. She sidled over to him and gave him a hug, then put her hand behind him as if he were a child and gazed at Weinberg with her large brown eyes. “How are you?” she asked, beaming at him. She wanted to know everything about him. He felt he was being welcomed into a family and went away thinking that he had made a new friend in Susie. He also intuited that he had just met Buffett’s most powerful asset.14
Weinberg had squeaked through the door just in time. Through 1966, the urban riots continued, the war in Vietnam escalated, and