The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [218]
Katharine Graham, born just before the twenties started to roar, was the daughter of a rich father, investor and Post publisher Eugene Meyer, and a self-absorbed mother, Agnes—“Big Ag,” as the family called her behind her back because of her imposing stature and, as the years passed, increasing girth. Agnes, who had married her Jewish husband at least in part for his money, was passionate about Chinese art, music, literature, and other cultural interests, but indifferent to her husband and their five children. The family shuttled among their pinkish-gray granite mansion in Mount Kisco, overlooking Westchester County’s Byram Lake; their full-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City; and a large, dark, red-brick Victorian house in Washington, D.C.
Katharine spent her early years under the rule of Agnes at the Mount Kisco estate, which the family referred to as the “farm” because it contained a large orchard, garden, dairy, and an old farmhouse where the farmhands lived in bachelor quarters. Every vegetable and piece of fruit on the dining table came from the surrounding fields and orchards. Kay ate meat from the farm’s own pigs and chickens and drank milk from its Jersey cows. Lavish bouquets of flowers appeared on the tables of each of the family’s houses every day, even in Washington, sped there from the Mount Kisco gardens. The Westchester mansion’s walls were covered with magnificent Chinese paintings; it boasted every status symbol of the era: an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, tennis courts, a massive pipe organ.
Kay chose her riding horses from a stable of steeds handsome enough to draw Cinderella’s carriage and was taken on incredible vacations, once visiting Albert Einstein himself in Germany. When Agnes took the children camping to teach them independence, they roughed it accompanied by five ranch hands, eleven saddle horses, and seventeen packhorses.
But the children had to make an appointment to see their own mother. They gobbled down their meals because Agnes, served first at the long dining-room table, began eating as the footmen moved around serving everyone else—and had the others’ plates snatched away the instant that she herself had finished. By her own admission, she did not love her children. She left them to be raised by nannies, governesses, and riding instructors; she sent them off to summer camps, boarding schools, and dancing class. Their only playmates were one another and the servants’ children. Agnes drank heavily, pursued flirtatious and obsessive (although apparently platonic) relationships with a number of famous men, and treated all other women as inferior, her own daughters among them. She compared Kay unfavorably to America’s sweetheart, Shirley Temple, the singing, dancing, smiling child star with golden blond ringlets.4 “If I said I loved The Three Musketeers,” Graham recalled, “she responded by saying I couldn’t really appreciate it unless I had read it in French as she had.”5 Kay was trained like a hybrid orchid, beautifully pampered, savagely critiqued for her show potential, and otherwise largely ignored. Still, by the time she reached the Madeira School in Washington, D.C., she had somehow managed to learn the skills of popularity and was elected head of her class—most surprising at that time and in that place because she was half Jewish.
In Protestant Mount Kisco, the family had been socially shunned. Since at Agnes’s insistence the children were raised as Protestants—albeit nonobservant ones, for the most part—and were not even aware that their father was Jewish, Graham did not understand the reason for their isolation. Indeed, she would later be stunned at Vassar when a friend apologized because someone had made a bigoted remark about Jews in front of her. She reflected with hindsight that this clash in her