The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [387]
Sharon, like Astrid, was not a shrieker. She was quietly invited to Susie Jr.’s Thanksgiving dinners and included in bridge games with Bill Gates. A year after Bill and Melinda’s wedding, the Gateses were celebrating their first anniversary on January 1, 1995, at their house in San Diego. Buffett invited Bill, Charlie Munger, and Sharon to come over for a New Year’s Day bridge game. While Susie, long accustomed to Warren’s choosing his own pursuits even in the midst of a family gathering, spent the day with family and friends, Gates, Osberg, and Buffett sat down at the bridge table to wait for Munger. Buffett, who always ran precisely on schedule, noted that it was time to begin but otherwise ignored Munger’s tardiness since nobody else seemed bothered by it.
Gates was in a pleasant mood, but as they chatted, Buffett began growing irritated that they were being kept waiting. When Munger did not appear after a few minutes, Osberg suggested a game of three-handed bridge to keep the others entertained, partnering with both Buffett and Gates while keeping up her end of the conversation.
After forty-five minutes of three-handed bridge, Buffett, who was playing the polite host, cracking jokes and making conversation, trying to make everything okay, had become noticeably jumpy and restless. Suddenly, he flew out of his chair. “I know where he is,” he said. He snatched up the phone and called the Los Angeles Country Club.
Whoever answered the phone went off to search. Within a few minutes he had located Munger in the golf grill, sitting with his cronies, as he habitually did every day when not at the office. He was about to take a bite of a sandwich.
“What are you doing, Charlie?” Buffett asked. “You’re supposed to be playing bridge with us.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Munger replied.
Without a word of apology, he hung up the phone, put down his sandwich, and headed out to the car.
Half an hour or so later, Munger strolled into the Buffetts’ house at Emerald Bay, sat down at the table exactly as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t noticed that he’d kept Bill Gates waiting for an hour and a half on his first anniversary, and said:
“Happy New Year. Let’s play.”
Stupefied, the other three sat in silence for a moment.
Then Gates said, “Okay. Let’s play.”
They played.
Another group of Buffett’s loyal friends joined him for their biennial ritual when the Buffett Group held their meeting at the Kildare Club in Dublin in September 1995. Because Bill Gates was present (for Gates straddled all of Buffett’s worlds, since Buffett would have liked to become his Siamese twin), the government of Ireland treated them like emperors. They were met at the airport by official government limousines and watched over by security agents in helicopters. They dined with the chairman of Guinness, the Taoiseach*30 and his wife, and the U.S. ambassador, walked the cobblestones of Trinity College to the Book of Kells, and clapped their hands in awe at the sleek hunt stallions of the Irish National Stud in County Kildare. Never—even under Kay Graham’s auspices in Williamsburg—had they experienced such luxury. Filled with incredible artwork and antiques, the K Club raised all of its own food on site and prepared it with a European staff and chefs.
The gloss and glamour of the surroundings belied the fact that the Buffett Group members, many of them fabulously wealthy by now, were largely unchanged. Warren saw some of these people only once a year or so; yet he remained utterly devoted to them. Bill Ruane was still gregarious and told long, funny stories. Walter Schloss still lived in a tiny apartment and picked stocks the same way he’d always done. The Stanbacks, among the richer members of the group,