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By Root 3185 0

was definitely ninety-five percent my fault—no question about that. It may even have been ninety-nine percent. I just wasn’t attuned enough to her, and she’d always been perfectly attuned to me. It had always been all in my direction, almost. You know, my job was getting more interesting and more interesting and more interesting as I went along. When Susie left, she felt less needed than I should have made her feel. Your spouse starts coming second. She kept me together for a lot of years, and she contributed ninety percent to raising the kids. Although, strangely enough, I think I had about as much influence. It just wasn’t proportional to the time spent. And then she lost her job, in effect, when the kids were raised.

“In a sense, it was time for her to do what she liked to do. She did a lot of volunteer things along the way, but in the end, that never really works that well. She didn’t want to be Mrs. Big the way a lot of wives of prominent guys in town do. She didn’t like being a prominent woman because she’s the wife of a prominent guy. She loves connecting with people, and everybody connects with her.

“She loved me, and she still loves me, and we have an incredible relationship. But still…it shouldn’t have happened. And it’s totally my fault.”

No matter how huge the wound or its reasons, as each day passed Warren discovered that he was still alive. And so eventually he fell back on the one role that suited him best: the teacher, the preacher. As long as he had his brains and his reputation, people would listen to him.

In the winter of 1978, Buffett turned with renewed intensity to writing his annual letter. The previous letter had been a brief, informative report on how the businesses were doing. Now he started drafting a lesson on how managements’ performance should be measured, an explanation of why short-term earnings are a poor criterion for investment decisions, a long dissertation on insurance, and a paean to his friend Tom Murphy’s skills in running Cap Cities. His neediness at the time was of an almost unfathomable depth. He reached out to Carol Loomis for companionship, partly on the pretext of making her the letter’s official editor. She filled the hours on trips to New York as together they put a great deal of thought into how he wanted to convey these lessons to the people who had stayed with him throughout, those who had placed their faith in him: the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.49

42

Blue Ribbon

Omaha and Buffalo • 1977–1983

By early 1978, with encouragement from Susie, Astrid Menks was coming to Farnam Street from time to time, cooking and caretaking. Susie was calling Astrid to cheer her on, saying, “Thank you so much for taking care of him.” Gradually, however, the relationship with Menks became something more as Warren began to accept that Susie wasn’t coming back to him.

At first, he and Astrid spent time at her tiny place down in the old warehouse district. In May she moved in with him, giving up the apartment where she had played after-hours hostess to la bohème Omaha. By the time Peter came home from Stanford that summer, she was growing tomatoes in the yard on Farnam Street and searching for Pepsi at thirty cents off a gallon. After so many months, “I never gave it a thought,” Astrid says. “It just happened naturally.”1

Astrid “just disappeared” from the downtown scene, says an acquaintance.2 Meeting her, Buffett’s friends were taken aback at the match. She was sixteen years younger, a blue-collar girl. Nonetheless, she knew everything that Buffett didn’t about haute cuisine and fine wines, shellfish forks and chef’s knives. In contrast to Susie’s spending habits and preference for all things modern, Astrid haunted junk shops looking for bargain antiques. She prided herself on paying the least amount possible for her thrift-shop wardrobe; so parsimonious was Astrid that she made Buffett look like a wastrel. Far more of a homebody than Susie, her interests—cooking, gardening, bargain hunting—were narrow compared to Susie’s constantly expanding and evolving tastes. Although