The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [269]
At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.41 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich.
All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He knew Susie thought he was obsessed with money, but she always had, yet they had managed to lead their lives in such a way so as to honor their differences while staying a united team for twenty-five years. Or so it seemed to him.
Later that fall, after the Buffett Group meeting, Susie went to visit a high school friend who lived in San Francisco. She stayed for four or five weeks. One relationship after another seemed to bind her to California. Her nephew Billy Rogers had moved to the West Coast to join the music scene. Susie had told him she would give him any help he needed to kick his heroin addiction, but she worried about him on his own in California. Bertie Buffett, who was now married to Hilton Bialek, lived in San Francisco and Carmel. Jeannie and Stan Lipsey were thinking of moving to San Francisco. Susie’s widowed friend Rackie Newman now lived there. Susie Jr. and her husband were living in Los Angeles. Peter, on whom she had grown to rely, was now a sophomore at Stanford in Palo Alto. And she and Warren already had their own foothold in California—their vacation home in Emerald Bay, just south of Los Angeles. Fewer and fewer ties pulled her back to Nebraska. The house in Omaha was spooky empty: As soon as Peter left for college, Hamilton the dog ran away and went to live with one of Peter’s friends.42
Spending this extended time in San Francisco, Susie found it a beautiful, creative, spirited city. At every angle from its rising hills, the bay and ocean and bridges and sunsets and rickrack rows of Victorian houses beckoned, Come look at me. A delirious mosaic of people, neighborhoods, architecture, culture, art, and music said, You’ll never be bored in San Francisco. The thermometer never registered 110 degrees in San Francisco. The city’s air raced through your lungs, clean and liberating. In the spontaneous, hot, do-anything-with-anyone mood of the 1970s, San Francisco was the capital of mind-expanding, hedonistic spirituality, a magnet of tolerance where people didn’t judge one another.
Susie looked at some apartments. She came back to Omaha and went to the French Café, where she had been singing, and talked to Astrid Menks, who was the maître d’there on Monday nights as well as a sommelier and sometime chef. She and Menks were friendly; Astrid served her tea between sets at the French Café, and had catered a dinner at the Buffetts’ earlier that year when Peter Jay, the new British ambassador to the United States, had visited Omaha. Knowing the Buffetts’ tastes, Menks had either delighted or sludged Jay with the carbohydrate count of Warren’s favorite meal: