The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [253]
“She always talked to the cook in French, always, totally in French. So I would hear ‘hamburger’ among the French words and tease her and say, ‘No, no, it’s hambur-zhay.’ Then I would just say, ‘Order me a hambur-zhay,’ and it would come out of the kitchen very fancy. The chef at Kay’s wanted so much to be able to make hamburgers and french fries—and I ate them, but they were not even close to as good as you could get at McDonald’s or Wendy’s. The french fries were always mushy. And he wanted so hard to please.
“But at her big parties, she didn’t make exceptions for me as much.”
At the Kay Parties, Buffett’s role was not to eat but, of course, to talk. As a star investor, he was like a bald eagle in a town where birds of any kind were scarce. Even the most hidebound of Georgetown “cave dwellers”—blue bloods who rarely emerged to socialize with anyone except others of their kind, many of whom were Graham’s friends, such as the columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop, cousins of Eleanor Roosevelt—enjoyed having the charming Buffett around. Dinner guests pelted him with questions about investments, and he fell into his most comfortable role: the teacher.
By now he was spending so much time in Washington that he began keeping a spare set of clothes in Graham’s guest room, just as he once had with the more maternal Anne Gottschaldt in Long Island. Usually he wore a fraying blue suede jacket and gray flannel slacks that looked like a rumpled bedspread.22 Graham tried to improve his sartorial sense. “She was appalled by Warren’s clothes,” according to her son Don, “although my mother just hated the way that I dressed. And at one point she said, referring to her employees, ‘Why am I of all people surrounded by the worst-dressed executive staff of anyone in America?’ Her scorn for people’s clothes was widespread, and not confined to Warren.”23 She took him to meet Halston, the tony designer whom she preferred and who had made over her own sense of style. Buffett’s take on Halston: “He was from Des Moines, you know.”
By June 1976, Buffett had occasion to invite Graham to an event of his own: Susie Jr.’s wedding. In every way this event would be the antithesis of a Kay Party—held in Newport Beach, California, a mix of the formal and the casual, with a Buffettish zoo of a guest list, to celebrate a marriage that everybody knew was a mistake from the start.
The spring semester of her senior year of college, Susie Jr. had dropped out of UC Irvine when her roommate learned that Century 21, a real estate company, was offering high-paying secretarial jobs that didn’t require typing skills.24 Though they were wise enough not to interfere, both her parents knew that Susie Jr.’s marriage to Dennis Westergard, the good-looking blond surfer, wasn’t going to work out. On some level, Susie Jr. herself knew this, but she was caught up in the fantasy.25 Parental reservation notwithstanding, her wedding was an important affair. Warren had asked that Kay be invited; Big Susie had reserved a special place for her at St. John’s Lutheran Church, right behind the family. For a few minutes she sat with Dick and Mary Holland, who had escorted her to the service. Then, not surprisingly, Kay said to them, “I feel uncomfortable. I don’t know why, but it’d be better if I sat in back.” She removed herself to the rear of the church, where she sat for the rest of the wedding.26
Buffett had traveled far from the day of his own wedding, when he had to take off his glasses because he was so nervous that he didn’t want to see. Waiting in the rear of the church to go down the aisle, he said to his anxious daughter, “Don’t look now, but my fly is open.” The photographer was standing in front of the altar, waiting to snap a picture. Susie Jr. was so busy trying to stifle her laughter and to keep from looking at her father’s fly so that the