The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [265]
Nevertheless, Buffett continued to work as the go-between for Annenberg and Graham, who had been taking Buffett to etiquette school and preparing him for these elevated doings. She called him constantly about the smallest details of her life. He visited her rambling shingle mansion on Martha’s Vineyard overlooking Lambert’s Cove, and they traveled together often to business meetings and went, on a lark, to Niagara Falls. He took her to see one of his totems, the Berkshire textile mills. As the flirtatious, fifty-nine-year-old Kay was spotted tossing the forty-six-year-old Warren her house key at charity benefits and the two were seen together ever more often in public, by early 1977 the gossip columns had taken note, and, as Graham put it, “eyebrows shot up.”16
Friends observed, as one put it, that the pair had “zero chemistry.” Yet Graham discussed an affair candidly with her friends.17 She was obviously sexually insecure but tried to project the opposite, as illustrated in her memoir.18 Her mother, notably, was famous for pursuing (and flaunting) obsessive, flirtatious, but platonic relationships with powerful, brilliant men. Buffett himself would go on to develop a history of romanticized friendships with women. Whatever genuinely romantic elements the relationship with Kay may have had initially, however, at the heart theirs was a friendship.
But publicity upset the delicate equilibrium between Susie and Warren. Whatever else was going on in her life, she still cared very much about her husband. Moreover, Susie needed the people in her life to need her, even to be dependent on her. Now she felt discounted and trivialized. Yet she would never allow herself to look like the spurned Daisy Mae in public. She continued to stay at Kay’s house when she traveled to Washington and smiled benevolently no matter how often her husband was seen with Kay. Some of Susie’s friends believed that she was, in fact, indifferent. Others felt that she needed to be in control or that Warren’s relationship with Kay gave her cover to live her own separate life in peace. Nevertheless, she made it plain to several friends that she was furious and humiliated. Her way of dealing with the situation was to send Graham a letter granting her leave to pursue a relationship with Warren—as if Kay had been waiting for any such permission.19 Kay showed the letter to people as though it let her off the hook.20
Susie was now working hard on a serious singing career. In 1976, she had approached the owners of Omaha’s French Café, a formal restaurant located in a renovated warehouse in the quaint, cobblestoned Old Market district downtown, and suggested that she sing in their lounge, the Underground. They were astonished but gladly agreed. Susie had once hosted a benefit there for African relief—barefoot, in gingham, wearing a bandanna.21 Ads went up verifying the rumors that Susan Buffett would become a chanteuse. “This is very scary, but I’ve always wanted to live to the hilt,”22 she had told a reporter before her first performance.
She “lacked self-confidence,” said a reviewer, but her “Ann-Margret youthfulness,” “stylized jazz,” and desire to please won over the crowd in the French Café’s stone-lined basement cabaret. The audience was described as being made up of “uncritical friends” and people who attended out of curiosity to see a rich man’s wife.23 Within weeks, Bill Ruane had said to her, “This is Broadway Bill. I’ve lined you up with auditions in New York.” She did a three-week gig as an opening act at Yellow Brick Road, See Saw, Tramps, and The Ballroom. Afterward she said, “I’ve been asked back, but I’m going to be loose about the timing. Maybe after the first of the year. First I plan to find a musical director and put a package together. Now I know how hard it is, but I’m hooked on it, and when I go back, I want to do six months without stopping.”24 She signed up with the William Morris talent agency.
That summer