The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [428]
Image 80
Bitten by a cheetah, chased by a polar bear…photographer and conservationist Howie Buffett donates to wildlife preservation.
Image 81
Image 82
At Buffett’s 75 birthday party at Sharon Osberg and David Smith’s house, he and Gates attempt to learn landscape painting. Afterward, Buffett stands by his finished work of art.
Image 83
After his colon-polyp surgery in 2000, Warren grew a beard for the first time in his life.
Image 84
Warren, Doris, and Bertie reenact their childhood photograph (see Photo Insert 1) with expressions appropriate to their feelings at the time.
Image 85
Buffett and Arnold Schwarzenegger at a NetJets conference for business leaders in England, September 2002.
Image 86
Buffett interviews San Francisco 49ers cheerleaders for flight attendant jobs at another NetJets event.
Image 87
Buffett concedes defeat to Ariel Hsing, the nine-year-old ping-pong player who trounced him on his birthday, August 30, 2005.
Image 88
In May 2004 in New York, Bono presents Susie with a picture he painted of her featuring U2 lyrics. Afterward he declared they were “soulmates.”
Image 89
Buffett’s friend Walter Schloss boogies the night away at his ninetieth birthday party in 2006.
Image 90
On his birthday on August 30, 2006, two years after Susie’s death, Warren marries a tearful Astrid in a private ceremony at Susie Jr.’s house.
Image 91
A scene from Peter Buffett’s Spirit: The Seventh Fire, a show about recovered identity. The Philadelphia Inquirer compared it to a Philip Glass opera, with “guitar rolls that would put U2’s The Edge to shame.”
Image 92
Bill and Melinda Gates share a joyful day with Buffett on June 26, 2006, when he announces that he will give most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Susie Jr. drove off to meet Don and Herbert Allen at the hospital. She knew very well that no one could expect her father to deal with any kind of medical crisis. Big Susie had had a cardiac catheterization in 1997, and Warren got on a plane to go to San Francisco to be with her. When Kathleen Cole called to say that Susie was going to be okay, he turned the plane around in midair and went back to Omaha. Since then, Susie had been in the emergency room repeatedly with excruciating abdominal adhesions and intestinal blockages. In 1999 she had her gall bladder removed. Throughout all of her medical problems over the years, Warren had never once been able to endure the emotional distress of going to the hospital to be with his wife.24
Shortly after he and Don arrived at St. Luke’s and the radiologist took the CAT scan, Dr. Harsh saw it and said, “Kay needs to get to a trauma center.” The hospital helicoptered her to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise; Herbert Allen arranged a private plane—somewhat bigger than a riding lawn mower and flown by a couple of cowboys in jeans and T-shirts—to take Don and Susie to Boise.
While all of this was transpiring, Warren retreated to his condo. Big Susie had left earlier that day for a wedding in Greece and knew nothing of what was going on. Peter and Jennifer, Howie and Devon were still at Sun Valley; Peter and Howie came by briefly, but even at such a time it was unnatural for Warren to tune the unfamiliar instrument of his emotions to make an openhearted connection with his sons. Sharon Osberg was not at Sun Valley; nor, of course, was Astrid. With both his wife and his daughter also unavailable to him, it was Bill and Melinda Gates, Ron and Jane Olson, and Susie Jr.’s boyfriend who sat with him waiting for news of Kay. Their job was to help distract him from what was going on by talking of anything but her. Susie Jr. had called from Boise to say that she was going into surgery, but that was all.25
Kay was taken into the operating room, then brought out. Around midnight, Dr. Harsh came by to tell Don and Susie that things looked worse and Kay needed another CAT scan. They wheeled the gurney back into surgery and handed her watch to Susie Jr., who felt her stomach drop.26
Around two o’clock in the morning,