The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [268]
“She was wearing a muumuu and weighed about four hundred pounds. My job was to get down on the floor. And then the leader said this woman was to give me the ‘gift of her weight.’ Which meant she flopped right down on top of me. There was this whale coming right at me. I was just—ack! It turned out to be the gift that never stopped giving.
“Meanwhile, in the other room, they were having people bark like dogs. I could hear Dottie—who was so uptight she could hardly say hello to somebody—trying desperately to bark.”
Following a session of being blindfolded and led through the streets of Lincoln to experience sensory deprivation, Susie and Stan gave up and they all ran away to a movie theater to watch Annie Hall—“a nervous romance”—and “spent the rest of the weekend gorging ourselves on fried food and ice-cream sundaes,” says Lipsey.
The summer of 1977, while Buffett again played bridge marathons at Kay Graham’s apartment in New York, Susie stayed away from home at all hours of the day and night.
Howie got married that August to Marcia Sue Duncan, despite her father’s warnings that she would not be happy with a guy who dug basements for a living and drove a pickup truck everywhere with a couple of big shaggy dogs in its cargo bed. After sending the newlyweds a gift, Kay Graham called Buffett to say how disgusted she was that Howie had spelled three words in the thank-you note wrong.
Over Labor Day weekend, Susie gave her final performance in Omaha, appearing at the Orpheum Theater as the opening act for singer/songwriter Paul Williams. In a pink chiffon gown, she smiled and beguiled as her smooth contralto oozed romantic jazzy ballads like warm honey, “languorous and sensual.” She come-hithered the audience with “Let’s feel like we’re in love, okay?”35 But in a small, gossipy city like Omaha, that announcement probably could have been left unmade.
That fall, Susie apparently began to realize what a mess her life had become. She went out until four o’clock in the morning, driving all the way to Wahoo—where she had spent her wedding night—playing music at top volume on the radio of her Porsche before returning at dawn to her lonely home.36
At her best Susie gave people part of her soul. Now panicked, she reached out to people and made her problems their own. Friends listened to her agonize in parks, on walks, on long drives. She stockpiled little sums of money and gave them to friends to hold, as if planning an escape. She appeared at Berkshire Hathaway’s office in her tennis pal Dan Grossman’s doorway, sobbing and asking for advice, while her husband sat in his office next door.
Susie seemed to realize on some level that she was compromising numerous people by letting them know more than her husband did about his troubled marriage and the secret yearnings of his disillusioned wife. You can’t tell Warren, she said to one person. If you love him, you won’t hurt him that way. If he ever found out, he would kill himself.37
So powerful was Susie, so beloved, so apparent was Warren’s devotion to his wife, and so thoroughly had Susie trained everyone to think that he was helpless without her, that people accepted this burden. Some did it automatically, some did it out of loyalty, some did it uneasily, half aware of the flaws in her logic. But they all now felt responsible for keeping her secrets on the pretext of Warren’s vulnerability.
Yet nothing appeared amiss at Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch in Arizona, where the Graham Group was meeting that fall. Most of the group—now usually referred to as the Buffett Group—had long ago accepted the idea of “Warren-o” and “Susan-o” as an affectionate couple who lived separate lives. This year proceeded like any other, with Susie in attendance along with