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Susie had moved out of her minuscule apartment at Gramercy Tower and into another cubbyhole on the Washington Street cable-car line with a splendid view over the bay. She chose the building because Peter was living there with his wife, Mary, and her two daughters. He was still pursuing his musical career and had started renting out studio time to pay the bills, while writing music for anyone who would pay him—student films, the production company Video West. 1

In the past few years, Susie had lost both of her parents. Doc Thompson had died in July 1981; Dorothy Thompson followed only thirteen months later. Susie was so close to her parents that their deaths left a wrenching hole in her life. Afterward, her hyperkinetic tendencies did not abate; if anything, they increased. Warren had stopped taking her for granted, and his desire to please the woman he now idolized more than ever found expression partly through the money he gave her. In her younger days, Susie’s idea of a shopping spree had been buying a basketful of greeting cards.2 That had gradually expanded to an annual attack on Bergdorf’s shoe department. Warren’s tightfistedness began to let up in light of the unspoken but inexorable reality that he now controlled the money by Susie’s grace and favor. At any time she could take it back and use the money herself. Torn between two fur coats, she wanted to know, “Why do I have to choose?” The answer was, she didn’t.

But mostly the looser purse strings fueled Susie’s penchant for generosity to a ragtag collection of colorful friends that grew and grew. Nobody ever left the beguiling Buffetts. Even Peter’s college girlfriend had gone to work for Susie as a secretary several years earlier, despite Susie having been the one to break off the relationship before it became an engagement after Peter started having second thoughts. The rising tide of old friends, family dependents, and her new San Franciscan entourage would have overwhelmed almost anyone, but Susie Buffett was not just anyone. Unleashed from the confines of Omaha, with buckets of money at her disposal, she sprang to life as if powered by magic, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s broom. How much do you need for Christmas? Warren said. Oh, seventy-five thousand would do it, Susie replied.3 He wrote the check.

Her special cause was artists, creative types, anyone who had potential or whose talents she felt were not being recognized. She became the sponsor of artist Edward Mordak, who painted the kind of brightly colored contemporary canvases she preferred and wove brilliant feathery wall hangings. But of all the people she aided, her nephew Billy Rogers was her greatest challenge. A brilliant jazz guitarist, Rogers had played with different groups, backing up B. B. King and achieving his greatest success performing as one of the Crusaders. He was married, with a son, and living in Los Angeles. But he had bounced around the West Coast for several years, never staying clean for long before relapsing. Susie remained an optimist and refused to give up on him. No matter how squalid his life when he acted out his addiction, she always treated him like another son.

By 1984, when AIDS had claimed over two thousand American victims and infected two thousand more, Susie had found her next great cause among the gay men of San Francisco. With the disease’s transmission poorly understood and badly communicated, gay-bashing turned to hysteria,4 AIDS was referred to as the “gay cancer” people said that God must be punishing gays for their sexual deviancy.5 Already a mother figure to many men whose families had rejected them, Susie now once again dared to cross a social line, as a rich married woman who acted as a refuge for gay men during the early years of the AIDS crisis.6

Susie’s own life in San Francisco was something of a high-wire act, requiring a sure sense of balance. She had remained Mrs. Warren Buffett publicly for six years now while privately teetering on the fence of divorce and remarriage. Some who were aware of her situation thought