The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [261]
Buffett remodeled the office in order to install Grossman next door to himself. Gladys ran interference while Buffett spent hour after hour with him, explaining float, reviewing financial models of insurance companies, outlining regulatory filings, telling Grossman his stories, and leafing through the old Moody’s Manuals. He played hours of tennis and handball with Grossman and added him to the Graham Group, where Grossman became friendly with many people.71 Warren had found yet another object of obsession.
41
And Then What?
Omaha • 1977
Susie’s friends would say that she created a separate life for herself within her marriage as a way to accommodate Warren’s obsessions. As one put it, Warren’s “real marriage was to Berkshire Hathaway.” There was no getting around that fact. However uneasily, however, their routine had worked for them. At least, that is, it worked for them until another of Buffett’s obsessions—with Katharine Graham—reached the point that it began to push Susie offstage. That was when she finally took action.
Warren now spent much of his time elephant-bumping at black-tie events in New York and Washington with Graham, or staying at her house for her Kay Parties. Despite his residual awkwardness and cackling laugh, he was meeting a circle of powerful, celebrated friends and acquaintances of Kay’s that opened his eyes to a new world. “I met Truman Capote,” he says about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, who had thrown the legendary Black and White Ball in Graham’s honor at the Plaza Hotel in New York; the event became known as the “party of the century.” Capote had been a confidant of many rich international society women.
“He would come down to her place and sit there, this little guy all kind of hunched down on the sofa, talking in this voice you couldn’t believe. But he knew all the secrets of all of them. He really did know them, because they all talked to him. He was terribly canny. The one person he really liked was Kay. Unlike the rest, he just didn’t feel she was a phony, I think.”
Buffett had even been summoned by former British ambassador Walter Annenberg, who owned Triangle Publications, which held, among other lucrative properties, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Buffett’s childhood favorite, the Daily Racing Form.
“Walter read about me in the Wall Street Journal in 1977. I got this letter that read, ‘Dear Mr. Buffett,’ and he invited me to Sunnylands,” his California estate. Having heard stories about the famously thin-skinned ambassador from Tom Murphy as well as from Kay Graham, who had reason to know about how easily offended he was, Buffett was intrigued. Annenberg’s father featured in many of the stories. Besides the publishing interests that he had bequeathed to his son, Moe Annenberg had also left him a legacy of scandal and shame, having gone to prison for tax evasion in connection with a racing wire he ran that telegraphed horse-race results to bookies all over the country. Of dubious legality, it was linked to organized crime, and added to his reputation for having mobster connections. Reportedly to save his son from prosecution along with him, Moe Annenberg copped a plea and was led into jail wearing a homburg hat and chains. Walter was later to say that his gaunt, pain-racked father, dying of a brain tumor in St. Mary’s Hospital, whispered as his last few words, “My suffering is all for the purpose of making a man out of you.”1 Whether this scene was real or imagined, Walter would later act as though he believed it.
Consumed by a drive to redeem his family’s honor, Walter was now responsible for the support