The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [237]
Buffett sat down in the living room of Graham’s large apartment situated on an upper floor of the modern UN Plaza, overlooking New York City’s East River. Surrounded by Asian art and antiques from Agnes Meyer’s collection, they started to work.
“She kept imagining these questions they were going to ask, like how much are you paying for your newsprint per ton? She thought it was a quiz. And I said it doesn’t make any difference. You’re paying what other people are paying for newsprint, so what? But that was a big thing. She was just convinced. I kept trying to get her away from trying to remember facts. Just have a theme.” Graham wanted to say that good journalism makes good profits. Buffett snorted to himself over this notion and refocused her. “You know, good journalism is not inconsistent with good profits, or something like that. The hell with all the other stuff. I just tried to convince her that she was a hell of a lot smarter than all those dumb males that were out there. That’s what really sort of bonded us initially.”
In an ironic turnabout, Buffett became Kay Graham’s personal Dale Carnegie instructor. He, of all people, could sympathize with someone who tended to freeze in front of a crowd. Moreover, thanks to Susie’s gentle tutelage over the years, he had learned a subtler way of dealing with people. He knew how to anticipate their reactions and to phrase things in a nonthreatening way. His letters, which had always been self-conscious, were now more deftly worded and empathetic. He had learned to listen and show interest in other people and to converse on topics other than stocks. It helped that he was genuinely fascinated by Graham.
After they finished preparing and rehearsing, Graham said she was going to a party at the Agnellis’ that night. “You might find the sightseeing entertaining,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me?” Buffett always stressed how uncomfortable and out-of-place he felt at glamorous events and how uninterested he was in attending them. So he told Graham that, yes, he would go. That evening he left his room at the Plaza to pick up Graham and ride to the Upper East Side.
“We were this very improbable couple—her mid-fifties, me early forties, and we got to this apartment, which was more than an apartment, it was like a triplex, it was huge. And everybody was bowing and scraping to Kay. There was every character from the party scene in the film La Dolce Vita. I was the required walk-on, the potted plant. You wanted it to go in slow motion so you could see everything. Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat, and his wife, Marella, weren’t there. It was almost like a costume party, except it wasn’t.”
Buffett returned to Omaha afterward having seen a new side of Graham. As he continued getting to know her on a personal level, he saw her as a bundle of paradoxes. “Fearful but willful. Patrician but democratic. Wounded by the people she cared most about.” He was surprised how much she still talked about her former husband a decade after his suicide.
“When you first met her, she would often get off on the subject of Phil very quickly, almost like Charlie getting off on a subject. And she described him in terms that were sort of hard to believe, considering how badly he treated her. But after I got to know her better, she told me everything about him and the relationship. She had found it impossible to conceive of herself as being in the same league as him. She felt she was a fraud, almost, even pretending to be in the same room with him. They used to hang out a lot with the Kennedys, and she just felt that she shouldn’t be there. Anything he said was funny, anything he did was right. When he used to chop up the children right in front of her, she wouldn’t stop him