The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [405]
Two days later, when the announcement of his resignation became public, the reporters camped out on his doorstep. The name Buffett attached to a scandal was like red meat to rottweilers. The wisdom of moving fast was even more apparent now that he and Devon had to manage a getaway from their own home.
But Howie soon found that despite the absence of reporters, who were excluded from the event, even Sun Valley was not safe. One of the first people he saw in the lobby of the Sun Valley Lodge was another ADM board member. This man, who would be around all weekend, poked him in the chest and said, “You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life.”2
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Howie had just saved himself from being associated with a disaster in which three top executives, including the vice chairman Michael Andreas, would go to prison in the biggest price-fixing case in American history.3 ADM paid an enormous fine to settle with the government, and its reputation took a hit that would shadow it for years.
Now, however, the contretemps had left Howie out of a job. Big Susie, who was concerned about him and also about Susie Jr., who was getting divorced from Allen, swung into action and convinced Warren to begin a tradition of giving each of the kids a million dollars once every five years on their birthdays, starting then. Buffett not only went along but bragged on himself for beginning this tradition. He had begun to loosen up significantly when it came to money. Susie’s allowance had expanded dramatically. At her behest, Buffett bought another house in Laguna next to the first, known as the “dormitory,” to house all the children and grandchildren and visitors.4 Susie’s Pacific Heights apartment, up a million stairs with no elevator but with an amazing view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, had been transformed to feature white lacquered walls and carpeting in her trademark sunny yellow. Almost every inch of space was covered with things she had purchased, collected from her travels, or been given by friends. There were paintings and masks created by artist friends, a Chinese altar cloth, a Balinese tapestry, Tiffany glass, souvenirs and tchotchkes of all kinds, some expensive, many cheap and offbeat. They filled her walls, cabinets, closets, and drawers to overflowing.
The effect struck observers, depending on their perspective, as colorful, beautiful, and a wonderful reflection of Susie’s personality, or a chaotic magpie’s nest of things. Susie was always lobbying for more space; along with the second apartment she had convinced Warren to buy her on the ground floor of her building, unknown to him, she had also begun to rent storage rooms around San Francisco to house her ever-expanding collections.
Susie’s ministry to the sick and dying seemed to compound as rapidly as her collections. She had carried on her work with AIDS sufferers through the 1990s. Then her sister Dottie began a battle with terminal cancer. All through Dottie’s earlier struggles—with alcoholism, with health and marital problems, with the death of her son Billy—Susie had been by her side. Susie stayed in Omaha to nurse her sister through her last months and days. When Dottie finally died, another person Susie had not, in the end, been able to save, it was the greatest loss she had suffered since her nephew’s terrible death by overdose. And Susie was now the last person alive from her original family.
In summer 1996, she had to help Warren deal with the death of his ninety-two-year-old mother. Even in her later years, Leila had never stopped berating the family. She could still work Doris over on the phone or during a visit, barely stopping for breath for an hour or more, sending Doris into tears and ending with “I’m glad we had this little talk.” Warren himself continued to avoid Leila, having relegated