The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [228]
The taxi swiveled left at the corner, between a pair of stone gateposts. The sight ahead was breathtaking. As the taxi began to crunch its way up the wide sweep of white pebbled drive, the Buffetts saw in the distance a dignified three-story cream-colored Georgian mansion with a green mansard roof. The broad lawns that surrounded it lapped all the way to the top of Georgetown’s Rock of Dumbarton, so that the house looked down on the cemetery. To the right, down the hill past a deep colonnade of trees, were the neighborhoods leading to the old Buffett house in Spring Valley not far away, and just beyond that, Tenleytown, where Warren had delivered papers at The Westchester and stolen golf balls from Sears.
The Buffetts were ushered through Graham’s front door to join the other guests, who were having cocktails in the living room. Asian art from her mother’s collection hung everywhere on eggshell-white walls swagged with blue velvet curtains, along with a Renoir painting and Albrecht Dürer engravings. Graham began to introduce the Buffetts to her other guests. “She told them nice things about me,” Buffett says. “Kay was doing everything in the world to make me comfortable. [Yet] I was so uncomfortable.”
He had never attended a gathering of such formality or grandeur. When the cocktail hour ended, crossing the hallway to the huge dining room where Graham held her famous parties, its paneled walls lit by the glow of tapered candles in bronze sconces, did nothing to make Buffett feel more at home. This setting intimidated even more than the living room. Crystal candlesticks and armorial porcelain gleamed on the round walnut dining tables, although the guests whom Graham had invited outshone the splendor of the surroundings. The room at any given time could be filled with a selection of U.S. Presidents, foreign leaders, diplomats, administration officials, Congressional members of both parties, senior lawyers in town, and people chosen from her group of perennial friends—Ed Williams, Scotty Reston, Polly Wisner,31 Roy Evans, Evangeline Bruce, Joseph Alsop, along with people like the Buffetts who, for one reason or another, suited the occasion or were interesting to her.
Buffett found himself seated next to Edmund Muskie’s wife, Jane, an obvious dinner partner, since the Buffetts had entertained her husband in Omaha. On his other side was Barbara Bush, whose husband was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations but would soon become the Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Peking, with the important role of steering the United States through the delicate process of renewing its diplomatic ties with China. Graham pressed a button to signal the kitchen, and waiters began to move around the antique Georgian tables and serve. Warren tried not to gape at the protocol. “Susie’s over there sitting next to some senator. And he’s trying to make out with her, he’s got his hand on her leg and all these things. But me, I’m dying, because I don’t know what to talk to these people about. Barbara Bush could not have been nicer. She could see how ill at ease I was.”
The waiters began to follow an American version of service à la russe, serving the first course followed by a fish course, then the main course, all borne on trays from which the diners served themselves. On and on the courses went as wine was poured to the sound of Washington chatter. The waiters added and removed unfamiliar sterling implements like fish knives. As they offered him food that he would never eat and wines that he would never drink, he found the meal increasingly more complex and intimidating.