The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [298]
Verne McKenzie, who had only just finished mopping up the Blue Chip mess, was assigned the thankless task of convincing the SEC to grant an exception to its rules so that Mrs. B would not suffer the pains of an audit or of having to unveil her financial secrets to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. He began to go through torture navigating the government’s unsympathetic maze while Buffett offered blithe assurances that he could easily get this done.50
Buffett, meanwhile, had the happy job of diving into a new business and a new collection of people. He grew fond of Louie and “the boys” he started driving out to 72nd Street at eight-thirty in the evening when the store closed to go out to dinner with Louie, Ron, and Irv, talking for hours about furniture and merchandising. He started taking “the boys” and their wives on an annual vacation.
That fall the Buffett Group lurched across the North Atlantic in heavy seas on the Queen Elizabeth II. Some of Buffett’s friends were shocked when told to send $125 in advance for tips and asked to bring tuxedos for several formal dinners. Joy Ruane was so intimidated by this new hauteur that she showed up with seventeen suitcases.51 The food onboard the ship was “second rate,” said one member, and the agenda a mix of the typical and the unusual: Wyndham Robertson, another Fortune reporter who was a member of the group, on investing during inflation; a session on stock options; George Gillespie and Roy Tolles on splitting up assets in a divorce—a subject on which views ran hot; Tom Murphy on the race between television networks CBS and Cap Cities; and Charlie Munger on Benjamin Franklin. Buffett spoke on using “game theory” to solve economic problems, based on pioneering economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,”52 in which people laboring to further their own interests acted collectively for the good of everyone.
All the while, Buffett delighted in telling his friends about the immigrant saga of Mrs. B and her wonderful Furniture Mart, the new money-churning prize he had just bought himself. However, he was almost upstaged by Ed Anderson, who made the prudish members of the group—the majority—fall out of their chairs when he explained his funding of human sexuality research and told with perfect earnestness the touching story of someone who had had a sex-change operation and kept his severed organ in a jar.
But the Buffett Group was falling out of its chairs, anyway. Those who were not below in their staterooms vomiting were imprisoned inside the saloon, where plates slid off the tables and ashtrays flew while the ship rocked and surged across the ocean in driving rain and gale-force winds and they heard story after story of the unsinkable Mrs. B. The Buffett Group was supposed to tour England for several leisurely days upon arriving, but five hours after they landed in Southampton, Rick Guerin was on a plane back to New York.
Nonetheless, through the howling wind, the homilies of Ben Franklin, divorce planning, and penises in a jar, one message came through, loud and clear: Buffett’s affection and admiration for Rose Blumkin.53 He had plans for her and enlisted Buffett Group member Larry Tisch in his behind-the-scenes machinations. In a virtuoso display of gratitude and showmanship, he had decided to turn the geriatric Rose into Cinderella.
With the help of Tisch, who was a trustee of New York University, he arranged it so that both Creighton University and NYU gave Rose honorary degrees.54 At Creighton, the tiny Mrs. B was so overcome that she covered her face with her hands and cried on the stage, saying, “Oy, oy, oy, I never even believe it.”55 Then she spoke of America, the country that made her dream come true. Her advice to the graduating seniors: “First, honesty,” she said. “Second, hard