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By Root 3205 0

Susie chose to stay in this limbo as a way to please everyone else and avoid having to figure out what she herself wanted. Susie, they thought, was a woman who could never speak her own truth. Yet her life history suggests otherwise: that she preferred never to give all of herself to anyone, that she would rather divide her attention among more than one relationship. Susie—who had reason to be confident in her ability to manage people—on occasion could be overconfident. As the circle of those who knew Susie’s secrets grew, it became harder for her to control what the two main men in her life knew themselves about the state of their relationships with her.

Susie and her former tennis coach spent part of 1983 and early 1984 traveling in Europe, where she made new friends, but also ran into people she knew from Omaha. Suddenly, her two lives had collided on the Continent. In March 1984, she came to Omaha for Leila’s eightieth birthday party; during her visit she admitted to Warren for the first time that part of the reason she had moved to San Francisco involved another man. Somehow, however, Warren wound up with the impression that this relationship was in the past, and that it involved someone she had met after she left Omaha.7

Even while confessing, therefore, Susie kept her secrets. Yet she had finally committed herself to one course. By telling Warren, she had chosen his side of the fence. She would never leave him. They would stay married.

And Warren did not kill himself when he found out—as if that had ever been likely. But he did lose what appeared to be ten pounds almost overnight. Among the several shocks he had to absorb, he now knew that Susie had been spending some of the money he had dispensed to her with such a liberal hand in ways he would never have approved—had he known. His fondness for the Laguna house, never strong to begin with, also diminished noticeably.

At Leila’s birthday party, he looked thin, but behaved as he always did with the family gathered around. At home, there was no change in his relationship with Astrid, who knew nothing of what had transpired. At Berkshire headquarters, he sealed himself inside his office, protected by Gladys, and immersed himself in work. He never told anyone what he felt about the end of the beautiful illusion that had been his marriage. Instead, the bathtub memory went to work.

The dream of sustaining some remnant of Berkshire Hathaway was also dying, even though the ancient spinning frames still puffed and wheezed. Looms that looked like they were made from salvaged scrap metal, antique sewing machines, and old locomotive wheels creaked wearily in the weaving room. Only four hundred workers remained. Most were of Portuguese descent, with specialized skills, many in their fifties or older, some speaking limited English, some deaf from the roar of the machines. Buffett could not squeeze another ounce of rayon out of the equipment without buying new spinning frames and looms. That was the end; in 1985 he pulled the plug on Berkshire’s life support.8 The equipment would have cost as much as $50 million to replace. Put to the auction block, it sold for $163,122.9

The workers asked for severance above their contract guarantee and got a couple of months’ extra pay. They wanted to see Buffett to discuss it with him. He said no. They thought he was heartless. Probably, he couldn’t face them.

“Through no fault of their own, they were in a position of being a horse when the tractor arrived. The free market did them in. If you’re fifty-five and you speak Portuguese, and you’ve been working on a loom for thirty years and your hearing is shot, you’ve had it. And there wasn’t any answer. When you talk about retraining people—it’s not like they’ll all go become computer technicians by taking junior-college courses or something like that.

“But you’ve also got to deal with the people that are displaced. The free market does all kinds of good things in this country, but we need a safety net. Society is getting the benefits, and it should pick up the tab.” Warren, of course,