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The rest of the traditional ceremony proceeded without incident. Then the reception at the Newport Beach Marriott turned wild. The Buffetts had let their music-groupie daughter hire any band she liked. Susie Jr. chose her favorite, Quicksilver Messenger Service, a psychedelic rock band that had been among the groups launched at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium in the 1960s. Its members looked like any normal rock band. As the group of twenty-something men with white-boy afros and nipple-length uncombed hair mounted the stage and tuned up their instruments, Buffett looked on with inner horror. When Quicksilver Messenger Service hit it with the drums and electric guitars, Susie Jr. danced in ecstasy at her rock-and-roll wedding while her father managed to keep his composure, even though he was squirming inside. “I was not wild about their music,” he says in an understatement. “They played awfully loud.” He longed for something like his wife’s sweet Doris Day style of singing, or Florence Henderson or Sammy Davis Jr. After ninety minutes, the musicians flabbergasted him again when they stopped playing and put away their instruments. Then their manager compounded his astonishment by asking Buffett to fork over the staggering sum of $4,000—in cash.28 Big Susie had told her daughter, “You know, Susan, you can’t go home with the band on your wedding night.” “Darn!” said Susie Jr. But “some of my friends did,” she says.

Now Susie Jr. had settled permanently in Los Angeles, working for Century21. Howie had already dropped out of Augustana College after having trouble adjusting and connecting with his roommate. He tried a couple of other schools, but had lost his support system and never graduated. “I was so close to my mom,” he says, “and everything in my life revolved around our family and our home. In college I just could not get any traction.”29 Neither had their father’s ambition, but both had money for the first time. The trust left by Howard to his grandchildren had distributed a little over six hundred shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock to them. Warren gave them no advice on what to do with it. He had never sold a share himself; why would they sell theirs? Susie Jr. sold most of hers to buy a Porsche and a condo. Howie sold some of his to start Buffett Excavating. In a grown-up version of his childhood love of Tonka Toys, he was now digging basements for a living.

Peter, just finishing his senior year in high school, had been accepted at Stanford and would be headed to California in the fall. More and more during the summer of 1976, the house in Omaha was simply empty. Most days after school Peter went to Arby’s by himself to get something for dinner, then headed to the darkroom to work on his photography. Even the dog was decamping. Peter’s friends had started calling to report “Hamilton’s over here.”30

Big Susie, who was rarely home these days, admitted to feeling depressed about the state of her marriage. She seemed to feel that Kay was an interloper who was pursuing her husband;31 Kay had such a territorial way with men that it would have been surprising if Susie had felt otherwise. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—her sadness, Susie herself was “running around like a teenager,” as one person put it, in the hot rush of a midlife romance. She was angry at Warren and got careless, letting herself be seen around Omaha with John McCabe, her tennis coach. She still called Milt from time to time as well, and when he agreed to see her they, too, were spotted out in public. She seemed to be living in different worlds, with no plan to proceed in any direction. She could not conceive of abandoning Warren. She described him as an “extraordinary man.”32 She clearly looked up to him; however much she joked and nagged about his rigidity and his preoccupation with money, he gave her things she very much wanted: security, stability, strength. “It mattered to her that he was honest and had a good value system,” says Doris. “If I ever let down