The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [207]
Thus, while Susie was in charge of the family foundation, they worked together on funding and donations. She would have given away huge sums had Warren not put on the brakes. The foundation made small grants to education, and it didn’t have professional management. To do a proper job of managing it required thinking forward: What was going to happen to all that money someday when it ended up in the foundation? Warren felt that someday was far away. Susie had a passionate desire to help in the here and now, but someone needed to strategize for the future.
A year before, Warren had had what for many forty-year-olds would have been a wake-up call. During a dinner at the Sarnats’in California, one of his fingers started to swell. He had taken a double dose of delayed-action penicillin earlier that day for a minor infection. Bernie Sarnat, a surgeon, suspected an allergic reaction. He gave Warren antihistamines and advised him to get to a hospital.45
Buffett didn’t want to go to the hospital. He had already had enough of sickness in 1971, after a recent bout of salmonella.46 Besides, said Susie, he was a bad patient and had a palpable horror of doctors and hospitals, sickness and medicine.47 He had Susie drive him back to the house they were renting for the summer. But as he continued ballooning and grew dizzy and sick, she began an urgent search for a doctor who could see Warren in a hurry. The one she finally reached insisted that they go to an emergency room immediately instead. By then Buffett was barely conscious, and the emergency room team started working to save his life.
Three days later, he was still in the hospital. He was lucky, the doctors told him. His penicillin allergy was so severe that if he took it again, he would be dead. As he recovered, Roy and Martha Tolles tried to cheer him up by bringing him a copy of Playboy magazine, but he was too weak to hold it himself and had Susie turn the pages for him. Warren complained, however, that she flipped the pages too fast.
Yet even after this encounter with his own mortality, back home in Omaha he remained as fixated on business as ever. Retirement, in Buffett’s special sense, meant no longer acting as a fiduciary. He would be investing as long as he was breathing. He could not help but be competitive—so much so that recently, when six-year-old Jonathan Brandt, son of his friends Henry and Roxanne Brandt, had taken him on in chess, Warren couldn’t bear it when it looked as though he was losing. As the game neared its conclusion, he began Buffetting little Jonny until he won.48
By the time her husband had vanquished little Jonny Brandt, Susie had cultivated an attitude of ironic detachment about Warren’s stubbornness. “Whatever Warren wants, Warren gets,” was her way of describing the man who, as his little sister Bertie had observed all those years ago, always got his way.49 On a visit to Des Moines with a friend to hear the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel speak at one of the local synagogues, Susie had spent hours talking to Milt Brown, who now lived there, at a dessert party at somebody’s house.50 For some time she had been filled with feelings of regret about that interrupted relationship; she now wondered openly to close friends whether it was too late to go down a different path. While she rarely talked about her problems or showed self-pity, she acknowledged being depressed about the state of her marriage. But despite her unhappiness, she made no move to address her issues directly or to leave; rather, she rekindled her relationship with Milt. And increasingly she seemed drawn to California. She had “fallen in love” with the place they had been renting at Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach, perched fifty feet above the ocean among a group of other luxury