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By Root 3110 0

was the fountainhead of all this generosity, she was starting to need a little attention too. It wouldn’t have taken much, according to her friends, just an ounce of effort on her husband’s part. She disagreed that making money was life’s purpose. She felt impoverished denying herself travel, museums, theater, art, and most other forms of culture because of his lack of interest. Warren praised her effusively in public but when at home or work, lapsed into his normal preoccupied state. If he would make an effort by going to an art gallery with her now and then, or take her on a trip just because she wanted to go, it would make a difference, she said. But while he did sometimes show up when asked, if she had to ask, it was a favor, not a gift.

Now that Susie realized that Warren was never going to take off to Italy for weeks on end, she began to travel on her own or with her women friends, sometimes to visit family—such as Bertie, who now lived in California—and sometimes to attend personal-growth seminars.

One day at the Chicago airport, a man stopped in front of her as she sat on a bench. “Are you Susie Thompson?” he asked. She looked up, embarrassed to have been caught with a mouth full of hot dog. It was Milt Brown, her high school sweetheart, whom she had not seen in years. He sat down and they began to get reacquainted.20

Susie, who was always reaching out for emotional connections, would later say that her husband wasn’t lacking in emotion, he was just cut off from his own feelings. And it certainly seemed as though his strongest emotional bonds were with his friends and partners, to whom he felt an intense obligation, and with whom he had created a de facto family. The other Buffetts could not help but notice the way he lit up in their company, in contrast to the dutiful but preoccupied manner he displayed while attending his own family events.

Thus, even now that he was preparing to close the partnership that had consumed most of his waking hours for the last thirteen years, he remained fully engaged with his partners and seemed a little reluctant to let go of his connection to them. He went to extremes to help them place their money in good hands, writing them another letter describing their options in meticulous detail.

Explaining his dedication to them, he says, “The question of finding other advisers is a tough one. When I wound up my partnership, I had these partners that had counted on me and I was going to be distributing a lot of money. I felt an obligation to at least suggest some alternatives for them.”

This was unusual behavior for a money manager, to say the least. Even Ben Graham had only said, “Oh, buy AT&T,” when asked, and mentioned Buffett offhandedly to a few people. But Buffett made elaborate efforts to shepherd his partners on to their future investing life. Some of them were already in the Munger partnership, and Buffett sent one or two more to him. But Munger was queasy about the market. “Who wants to be around people when you’re disappointing them?” he says. “Particularly when you sucked them into the relationship?” He also lacked Buffett’s genius for promotion.

“I recommended two people to the partners whom I knew were exceptionally good and exceptionally honest: Sandy Gottesman and Bill Ruane. I’d been around the investment world for a long time at that point, and I’d gotten to know them over the years. So I not only knew their results, but I knew how they’d accomplished their results, which was terribly important.”21

So the richer partners would go to Gottesman at First Manhattan. But Sandy didn’t want the small-fry, so Buffett sent the rest to Ruane, who was now leaving Kidder, Peabody to set up his own investment advisory firm—Ruane, Cunniff & Stires—with two partners, Rick Cunniff and Sidney Stires, and creating the Sequoia Fund specifically to take on the smaller accounts. They hired John Harding, who would be out of a job when the partnership dissolved, to run an Omaha office for the new company. John Loomis, the securities salesman who was Carol Loomis’s husband, and Buffett