The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [308]
The year 1985 would be a humdinger. During the same week that Buffett’s investing yielded Berkshire $332 million from a single stock—General Foods, when it was taken over by Philip Morris—Forbes caught on to how rich he was and added him to its list of America’s 400 richest people. At the time, it took $150 million to make that list. But Buffett, at age fifty-five, was now a billionaire, one of only fourteen ranked by Forbes. His favorite childhood book could be retitled One Thousand Ways to Make a Million Dollars. The cascading, compounding slew of pennies from weighing machines and other ventures had never, in his boyhood dreams, looked like this.
Berkshire Hathaway, its first few shares originally bought for $7.50, was now trading at more than $2,000 a share. But Buffett refused to “split”*29 the stock into smaller pieces, citing the way brokerage fees would multiply needlessly along with the number of shares. While this was certainly true, there was also no denying that this policy made Berkshire more like a partnership—or even a club, and the high stock price drew attention to Berkshire like nothing else.
His fame ascended with Berkshire’s stock price. Now when he entered a room of investors, an energy filled the air as all attention gravitated toward him. The purchase of ABC by Cap Cities did indeed begin to change his life, adding a Hollywood sheen to the elephant-bumping of Kay Graham. Meeting soap opera impresario Agnes Nixon at a dinner with Murphy, he got invited to do a gig on the show Loving. A lot of CEOs would have feigned a mortal illness before doing something so undignified, but Buffett loved doing his cameo on Loving so much that he showed off the paycheck from his show-business debut. It was all of a piece with the Buffett who loved to play dress-up and would soon be appearing costumed as Elvis at his friends’ parties. This same Buffett reveled in putting on black tie to take Susie Jr. to a state dinner at the Reagan White House, where Sylvester Stallone and fashion designer Donna Karan were seated at the same table. Jetting off to the Academy Awards with Astrid—who made a rare public appearance, proudly wearing a thrift-shop gown—he dined with Dolly Parton. But Buffett, who found Parton likable as well as hugely attractive, failed to make the lasting impression on her that he managed with most other women.
At the Kay Parties, where Graham always seated him between the two most important or interesting women, he did better. Still, he had never grown to love small talk, and found it challenging—or just plain tiresome.
“The truth is, you’re sitting next to two people that you’ve never seen before and you’re never going to see again. It’s kind of strained, no matter what. Whether it was Babe Paley, or Marella Agnelli, or Princess Di, Kay always saw in these women what she aspired to be. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to talk about. Princess Di was not as easy to talk to as Dolly Parton. What do you say to Princess Di—‘How’s Chuck? Anything new at the castle?’”
Still, by 1987 a billionaire commanded a certain cool respect; Buffett had become something of an elephant himself, no longer so dependent on Graham for invitations to bump. And Graham no longer needed him so much as a regular escort, for their mutual obsession had cooled. Now her attraction to powerful men had heated up her longtime friendship with the recently widowed, paper-dry, encyclopedically brilliant, alpha-squared Robert McNamara, who had been defense secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. McNamara was the onetime architect of the military’s “war of attrition” strategy; many people considered Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” It was also he who had ordered the study of U.S. government involvement in Southeast Asia known as the Pentagon Papers—the very same Pentagon Papers