The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [311]
Susie’s work as a “mobile Red Cross unit,” as one family member put it, had expanded after she had made her confession in 1984 and she and Warren reached a new understanding about their marriage. That year, she had suffered a painful abscess between the spleen and pancreas, and was hospitalized for exploratory surgery. Her doctors could find no cause, and she recovered without incident. Her self-image was as the healthy person whose role was to care for others, so she ministered to her usual collection of the ill, the needy, and the heartsick. She also threw masquerade parties in her tiny place on Washington Street, tried to learn to ride a bicycle, and gathered her impromptu family of gays and strays at large dinner parties and Thanksgiving celebrations. She wore jeans and sweatsuits and put away the wigs she had once worn, her hair now a lighter brown, released into a corona around her beaming face.
Warren—who would give his wife almost anything she asked for these days—let her expand and redecorate the Laguna house, which had never stopped looking like the rental it once was. Tom Newman, Rackie’s son, introduced Susie to Kathleen Cole, an interior designer who was also an exercise instructor and former nurse, and together they began to give it the bright-colored contemporary look that Susie favored. Cole also took over the job of buying gifts for Susie’s ever-expanding list.29 Susie and Warren continued to spar over money, but these spats had become almost scripted; Susie’s allowance expanded at an accelerating pace—although never at quite the rate she wanted. She could afford Cole’s services and those of a full-time secretary to manage her schedule, which freed her to extend herself further while also spending more time with the family. Howie remained the magnet who drew more of her support and energy than anyone else. She commuted back and forth to Nebraska to help with this and that and to lavish affection on Howie’s children, her adopted granddaughters Erin, Heather, Chelsea, and Megan, and grandson Howie B. When Susie Jr., who lived in Washington, D.C., became pregnant with her first child, Big Susie began making more trips to the East Coast.
Susie and Allen needed to remodel their little Washington house, which was all staircases, had a kitchen the size of a baby blanket, and an inaccessible back garden. She had plans drawn up for a new kitchen big enough to accommodate a table for two, with a back door opening to the garden. It would cost $30,000. She considered how to pay for it, since she and Allen didn’t have the money; she knew better than to ask her billionaire father to give it to her. Fortunately, her pregnancy had activated the one loophole in her weight deal with her father. Buffett was not getting his $47,000 back. Nevertheless—despite her father’s belief that clothing holds its value better than jewelry—she and Allen could not hock her new wardrobe to pay for the kitchen. So she asked her father for a loan.
“Why not go to the bank?” he asked, and turned her down. He explained that a football player on the Nebraska football team shouldn’t inherit the starting quarterback position from his father, a former star quarterback. Unearned position, inherited wealth drove Buffett crazy, offended his sense of justice, and disturbed his sense of the universe’s symmetry. But applying such strictly rational rules to his own children was a chilly way to look at the world. “He won’t give it to us on principle,” said Susie. “All my life, my father has been teaching