• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Image 38

The Buffetts in the mid-1970s. Left to right, Howie (holding Hamilton), Susie, Peter (behind Susie), Warren, Susie Jr.

Image 39

Susie Buffett glows in sequins before one of her singing performances at Omaha’s French Café, shortly before she moved to San Francisco.

Image 40

The Buffetts celebrate the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Sun Newspapers after the Boys Town exposé.

Image 41

Susie Buffett Jr. at her November 1983 wedding to Allen Greenberg, who later became executive director of the Buffett Foundation.

Image 42

Buffett and Washington Post publisher Kay Graham began a close, lifelong friendship in 1973.

Image 43

Astrid Menks in 1974, age 28. Four years later Susie Buffett encouraged her to take care of Warren, and she ended up moving in with him.

Image 44

Russian immigrant Rose Blumkin overcame hardship to build the largest furniture store in North America. She worked until age 103, a benchmark Warren often cites for himself.

Image 45

Buffett at home in his kitchen, wearing a favorite threadbare sweater.

Image 46

Buffett playing bridge with George Burns in 1991, at Burns’s 95 birthday at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles. Not shown: Charlie Munger and a sign reading: “No smoking by anyone under 95.”

Image 47

Throwing out the first pitch before the Omaha Royals’ home opener, April 11, 2003.

The answer, she said, was sing. Her nephew Billy Rogers had made her some instrumental guitar tracks so that she could tape herself and listen to her performances. Rogers had been playing jazz guitar at Mr. Toad’s, Spaghetti Works, and other clubs in Omaha, and along with him, Susie was now a familiar face in the local music scene. But when she first started practicing, “I was scared, really scared,” she said. “I was bad.” The last time she had performed in public was ten years before at a charity benefit at Central High. So she got coaching and worked on contemporary love songs and ballads. Susie first debuted as a chanteuse that July, before a friendly audience at a private party at Emerald Bay. “People seemed to like it pretty well,” she said.6 And it thrilled her husband to see his friends applauding his wife’s talent.

While the Buffetts were in Emerald Bay that summer, Warren invited Graham for a visit in connection with a trip she was making to speak to an analysts’ meeting in Los Angeles. Sensing that Graham was going to talk to him about joining the Post board, Buffett had been dancing around his office at Kiewit Plaza for days ahead of time, happy and excited as a kid on Christmas Eve.7

The Buffetts’ house at Emerald Bay, down a steep driveway set well back from the beach, still had the feeling of a modest rental house; it lacked most of the personal touches that spoke of a family. Warren had no sense of what kind of impression the place might make on Graham, who owned several enormous, impeccably decorated and maintained mansions, including the farm at Glen Welby and a vast, shingle-style waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

Apparently, however, he must have impressed upon his wife that they would have to make an unusual effort for Graham. The first morning after Kay arrived, Susie rose at an unheard-of hour and feigned domesticity: She cooked a full breakfast for the three of them, which both of the Buffetts pretended to eat. Her husband spent the rest of the day wrapped up in Graham, talking to her about newspapers, journalism, politics, and bringing up every opportunity for her to invite him on the board.

At some point, he put down his newspapers, donned a bathing suit purchased specially for the occasion, picked up a brand-new beach umbrella bought in Graham’s honor, and left the house with Graham to walk the hundred or so yards down a steep path to the shore to join the family. Previously, his attitude toward the ocean had been: “I think having the ocean nearby is an attractive feature, and fun to listen to at night, and all that kind of stuff. But actually getting in it—I feel I’ll save that for my old