• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3340 0

’s doorstep with a huge box of See’s Candies, excited as a child at the portrait he had drawn of her. She put him on the guest list to her opening at the French Café and sent him an invitation.31 He and other guests remember her as looking young and radiant that night, wearing a brunette shag wig and a sequined dress that hugged her newly svelte figure. Raven-feather eyelashes fluttered around her beaming eyes. The look on her face suggested that she was discovering that the care and feeding of Susan Buffett was not so bad. By now she had developed some polish as a performer, and smiled seductively while the crowd hooted and hollered in between songs.32 Her guests saw the glow of a woman emerging from behind her role as a wife and mother onto the stage of her own life. The audience found her tender delivery and smooth liquid styling of pop standards and sentimental favorites engaging and sweet. Her repertoire of medleys—“Daddy” songs like “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” cabaret classics like “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and her personal favorite, Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns”33—moistened eyes. When she sang, Susie’s torchy side came to life and she opened up emotionally. Standing in the back with his arms crossed, watching his wife vamping and flirting and romancing her audience, Buffett, in good humor, remarked, “This is pretty good of me to let her do this.”

Yet by the summer of 1977, Susie still had not followed up on her New York opportunities. Warren thought it was because his spontaneous wife resisted the structured time commitments required of a professional singer. Some of the Buffetts’ friends questioned whether Susie’s pretty warble and her appealing stage presence could compete with established singers of greater artistry. While Susie loved to perform, it was Warren’s dream that his wife might become a singing star with a recording career. Her ambitions had always been harnessed on behalf of others, not herself. Meanwhile, the care and feeding of Susan Buffett was something separate, a more private matter.

There was the rub. Being a rich man’s wife opened doors that would have helped her pursue a serious singing career. But it also opened doors that invited others to peer into her personal life, doors that she would prefer remained shut. Warren could stay at Kay Graham’s house and be seen as her date in public in perfect freedom, while the gossip columns did no more than wink. Yet as a married woman, Susie had no such liberty. The women’s movement had changed many things, but not that. With her privacy eroding, the question of how to deal with her increasingly divided feelings was beginning to tear her apart.

Stan Lipsey, their Sun publisher friend, was also having some issues with his marriage, and he and Susie sat on park benches in the mornings, sharing confidences. Both of them were interested in Eastern thought and the human-potential movement, which had sprung from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.34 They somehow convinced Warren, as well as Stan’s wife, Jeannie, and Susie’s sister, Dottie, to join them at a weekend workshop in a Lincoln hotel. The idea was to get in touch with yourself. The workshop started with an exercise to get people to open up to one another nonjudgmentally, a skill of Susie’s. Warren’s reaction to such an outpouring was nothing like his wife’s.

“There were five hundred people who had come from as much as a thousand miles away. And they started doing all these crazy things. First we had to get a partner. And one of them was to start talking, and the other person, no matter what, just keeps saying, ‘And then what?’

“So I paired up with this nice woman from Oklahoma, and she starts talking. Then she pauses and I say, ‘And then what?’ In ten minutes, she’s sobbing uncontrollably. I’ve destroyed her, just by saying, ‘And then what?’ It was like I was boring into her. I felt like I was running a torture chamber or something.”

After having misinterpreted this exercise in every possible way, Buffett left his tear-drenched companion, eager to move on. The leader