The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [247]
The night of Susie’s first public performance, before a crowd made up of about thirty-five friends, she was so anxious that she asked Warren not to come. Talking and greeting people in a long sequined dress, she stalled until Denenberg pushed her out onto the stage. From Aretha Franklin’s “Call Me,” to Sinatra’s “You Make Me Feel So Young,” to Blood, Sweat & Tears’s “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” to what she said was one of her favorites, Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” her choice of music was soulful, passionate, and romantic. Susie found that the audience responded to and returned her warmth.1 The same pulse and flow she got from connecting with people individually came through in a wave when she sang to a group in an intimate space. This was her special gift, transmuted and magnified. She wanted to become a cabaret singer.
A few weeks later, however, Susie was pulled away from rehearsals for her next performance to go to Carmel, California, to help her sister-in-law Bertie, whose youngest daughter, Sally, was dying of a brain tumor. Bertie’s marriage to Charlie Snorf was crumbling at the same time.
When Sally died, Bertie discovered that the tragedy had unlocked her frozen emotions. “Sally was a wonderful person, amazing and intuitive and so strangely insightful about people and feelings for a seven-year-old,” Bertie says. “Once she told me, Mom, you and Dad are lonely together. I think when someone dies who’s very close to you, they will you something. When Sally died, what she willed to me was that I couldn’t deny my feelings to myself anymore. It was like a copper wire went straight into my heart, and I couldn’t cover up my feelings from then on.”
Bertie had always had a special relationship with Susie, but when her heart opened after Sally died, suddenly they connected on a different level. “Susie was somebody I loved who was so important to me,” says Bertie. “She was the only person I could talk to about my feelings when there was nobody else in my family whom I could do that with.”
Her brother, however, reacted differently to his niece’s death. He called some friends who had visited the Buffetts in Laguna and told them about Sally. “We were so shocked because we’d all been together a week or two before,” says Mary Holland. “I asked him what happened, and he said, ‘I can’t talk anymore,’ and got off the phone.”
Warren at the time had many distractions to assist him in evading his feelings. He was finishing up the SEC investigation. He was so fascinated with Kay Graham that he literally could not get enough of her. When Warren got obsessed with something—especially someone new—he could not stop thinking about it or them; this came across to a new person as a wholehearted, flattering, and even overwhelming attentiveness. When business arose, however, he snapped back to it in a split second with all the fierce intensity his steely mind could muster. As Munger put it, Buffett “never let his minor obsessions interfere with his major obsession.”2 Katharine Graham, however, was no minor obsession. Some time earlier, he had decided to see what sparks would fly when she brushed up against Munger, the greatest smart-ass he knew. “Kay was the kind, if I gave topics of things for her to do, she was very dutiful. If I told her to read some terribly complicated financial statements, she was going to follow my instructions, no matter what. I told her, ‘You have to meet Charlie.’ I was laying it on thick. Finally, she was out in Los Angeles and went to meet Charlie.
“So she sat down in that scrubby office of Charlie’s, and immediately she pulls out a yellow pad so she can take notes on what he’s saying. Charlie just loved it—the idea that