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By Root 3616 0

hand, she wanted her privacy and freedom. On the other hand, she wanted to please Warren, enjoyed running the foundation, and also gravitated toward the elephant-bumping aspects of public life. Yet her role as president of the Buffett Foundation and now as a member of the Berkshire board made her a public figure. Susie was trapped. To fend off attention, she downplayed her role and explained that she was not important, just an accessory to Warren’s fame. Thus, nobody should be interested in her, nobody needed to write about her or her life. To maintain her privacy, she had to juggle deftly, keeping a low profile in San Francisco and declining opportunities that went with her husband’s rising stature. Susie expressed resentment of Warren from time to time to various people, as if it were his fault that her life was now so fraught.

Her routine with Warren now included the celebrity Sun Valley scene every July, the biannual Buffett Group meetings, which were held in different places every other year, family Christmas and New Year’s in Laguna Beach, and two weeks every May in New York with the whole family. In between these trips, Susie counseled a long list of “clients,” traveled to see her grandchildren and hosted them in Emerald Bay, and accompanied son-in-law Allen Greenberg on Buffett Foundation business, which took them to places as far away as Vietnam. She also entertained, went to parties, concerts, museums, spas, got pedicures, shopped, continued the never-ending renovation of the Laguna house, maintained her other relationship, wrote hundreds of cards and sent hundreds of gifts, and traveled frequently with friends. And she willingly dropped everything to be at the bedside of anyone who was dying or ill.

But her pace had been slowed by painful bouts of adhesions in 1987 and more adhesions and a hysterectomy in 1993. Kathleen Cole found herself shuttling her friend and boss to the emergency room distressingly often. She tried to coax Susie into exercising and to wean her off her steady diet of Tootsie Rolls, cookies, and milk by stocking the kitchen with low-fat SnackWells. But the Pilates equipment gathered dust downstairs, in a second apartment that Susie had convinced Warren to buy for her, and some friends noted that Susie routinely overextended herself with commitments to care for others.21 The family seemed strangely unperturbed each time Cole called Nebraska to say that Susie had been hospitalized, as if they had adopted her serene attitude.22 “Thank God I have my health,” she often remarked, and continued to view herself as the well person who ministered to the ill, rather than the other way around.

By now she was running a hospice in her apartment. Her first patient was an artist friend who was dying of AIDS, whom she invited to move in and spend his final weeks there. Cole found herself administering IV drips to a terminal patient while Susie’s other employees strolled in and out of the room, questioning her about foundation matters or the renovations and redecoration of the Laguna Beach house, still metamorphosing after a decade.23 After that, whenever one of Susie’s gay friends who was dying of AIDS neared the end, she invited him to come live with her. She and Cole took some of her dying friends on dream trips, one to Japan, another to Dharamsala, where she had arranged for him to have a personal audience with the Dalai Lama—what must have been an almost unimaginable spiritual experience for a man who was weeks from death. At one friend’s request, she threw a La Cage aux Folles–like masquerade party instead of a memorial service after he died. She kept her friends’ ashes on her mantel to make sure that someone would remember them. Peter took to calling his mother the Dalai Mama.

Howie, who had always absorbed so much of his mother’s energy, now stepped out from under her wing at the same time that his father’s growing fame began to have an impact on his life. During 1989, he had become chairman of the Nebraska Ethanol Authority & Development Board. Through this role, he became friendly with Marty Andreas,