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By Root 3117 0

“Kay really wanted to buy newspapers. But above all, she didn’t want other people to buy them instead of her,” Buffett says. “Tell me what to do,” she would beg. Buffett had gotten her to stop pleading for help from the rest of the board, but she still pleaded for help from him. “I would just make her make the damn decision,” he says. He helped her understand that it was always a mistake to pay too much for something you wanted. Impatience was the enemy. For a long time, the Post did very little and grew slowly. Buffett taught the Grahams the immense value of buying their company’s own stock when it was cheap to reduce the shares outstanding. That increased the size of each slice of the pie. Meanwhile, the Post avoided making expensive mistakes and became much more profitable as a result.19

Buffett, used to doing the taking, for the first time found himself in the giving role and discovered that, with Graham, he liked it. “She would talk to me about some business policy and then she’d talk to some other guy back home, and they’d know how to scare the hell out of her. She knew they were doing it, and she didn’t like it, but she couldn’t get over it.

“Eventually I told her my job was to get her to see herself in a regular mirror rather than a fun-house mirror. I really wanted her to feel better about what she was doing. Basically, I enjoyed trying to build her up. And I had some success, although I started late in life with her.”

Yet, wrote Munger to Graham about Buffett, “I can see damn well whose ways, predominantly, are actually being mended.”20 Buffett began to be seen out with Graham more and more. She made it her job to try to give him some polish.

“Kay tried to upgrade me a little. It was just very gradual and not so I would notice. It was very funny. She worked so hard to sort of remold me, but it didn’t work. She was a hell of a lot more sophisticated than I was, that’s for sure.” Buffett learned that Graham thought it was uncouth and disgusting to eat out in restaurants. “Around Washington your cook was a big point of pride. The highest compliment you could pay somebody at a party was, ‘I’m going to try and hire away your cook,’ or ‘You must have brought your cook over from France.’ Kay cared about that, like everybody in Washington. So her dinners tended to be quite fancy, except that she would make exceptions for me.”

Graham’s chef found the restrictions imposed by cooking for Warren a challenge. “Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate. Cauliflower almost makes me sick. I eat carrots reluctantly. I don’t like sweet potatoes. I don’t even want to be close to a rhubarb, it makes me retch. My idea of a vegetable is green beans, corn, and peas. I like spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwiches. I’ll eat meat loaf but wouldn’t order it in a restaurant.”

His idea of a feast was a half gallon of chocolate chip ice cream. He ate his foods in sequence, one at a time, and did not like the individual foods to touch. If a stalk of broccoli brushed his steak, he recoiled in horror. “I like eating the same thing over and over and over again. I could eat a ham sandwich every day for fifty days in a row for breakfast. At dinner at her farm retreat, Glen Welby, Kay served lobster. I was attacking the shellfish through the wrong side, attacking the shell, and not having much luck. She told me to turn it over.” Confronted with a nine-course dinner—each course accompanied by the appropriate wines and destined for a dinner table filled with dignitaries and celebrities and journalism’s star reporters—“it threw him,” says Gladys Kaiser. He never grew accustomed to life on this grand scale.

Yet Buffett became a regular guest at Graham’s famous dinners, which he called her “Kay Parties.” He enjoyed his status as the hayseed who was flummoxed by a lobster. His childlike tastes conveyed an air of authenticity and innocence. But his social naiveté was also genuine—mostly because he went around with blinders on. When “sightseeing” with Graham, he was focused like a laser on who