The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [332]
Having his daughter around pleased Warren in another way. Susie Jr. shared her mother’s caretaking quality, although packaged in a more businesslike style. He would now have two women in Omaha to look after him. More women to look after him was something that he had always rationalized. “Women don’t mind taking care of themselves,” he said. “Men mind taking care of themselves. I think women understand men better than men understand women. I’ll eat asparagus before I give up women.” His desire to be taken care of by women was so overwhelming that he mostly left it up to the women to settle any differences in their hell-bent desire to do what, in each of their opinions, was in his best interest. Susie Jr. and Astrid began to work out their respective roles.
The network of connections he had forged now brought Buffett a business that would certainly put him in favor with all his women—Borsheim’s, an Omaha jewelry store. Louis Friedman, the brother-in-law of Mrs. B, had founded this company, which carried high-and mid-range merchandise at discount prices. Buffett had learned how strongly women preferred jewelry to clothes, no matter how well clothing “held its value.” The person most likely to be pleased by this purchase was Big Susie, who had been assembling an impressive collection of jewelry given by her contrite husband. Susie Jr. also appreciated jewelry, as did Warren’s sisters and Kay Graham. The only one not that interested in jewelry was Astrid, who was uncomfortable with expensive things, though if he gave her jewelry, she certainly wouldn’t turn it down.
So Warren’s Christmas shopping for the women in his life was simplified in 1989. He worked out a system: earrings, pearls, watches, everybody would get a variation on some theme each year. But he himself got nothing to equal the hefty chunk of Coca-Cola that he’d bought so happily the year before. Worse still, he got a lump of coal in his stocking in the form of a new book, Liar’s Poker, written by former Salomon bond salesman Michael Lewis. Named after a bluffing game that traders played using the serial numbers on dollar bills, the book captured Salomon’s swaggering, innovative, energetic culture and how it had begun to break down in 1986 and 1987. Liar’s Poker turned into a whopping bestseller; it depicted the firm’s eccentricities so memorably that Salomon would never again live down its reputation as a sort of zoo for the most aggressive and uncouth people on Wall Street.31 The end of the 1980s takeover boom was another problem for Buffett, for while he was still arbitraging announced deals, his usual feeding territory was empty. With no great businesses to buy, Buffett once again lowered his standards as he had when buying Hochschild-Kohn.
The lure this time was other CEOs, who, fearing for their jobs or their autonomy, began to offer him more special deals to invest. For Berkshire, he bought three apparently lucrative “convertible preferred” stocks, all structured along the lines of the Salomon deal, paying him on average nine percent, which gave him a floor on his return while also giving him the right to convert in case the companies did well. Each of these companies was quite different. Champion, a poorly managed paper business, was thought to be “in play” among takeover artists.32 Gillette, a business with a huge “moat” around its brand—like See’s Candies, invulnerable to competition—was being temporarily shunned by investors. And Pittsburgh-based US Air, formerly