The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [466]
When all I want is you…”
At the NetJets event, Bono had initiated his connection to the Buffetts when he told Warren that he just wanted fifteen minutes of his time.
“I knew nothing of Bono to speak of. So he asked me a few questions, and for some reason we hit it off. When I gave him an idea and he liked it, he’d say, ‘That’s a melody!’ And at the end he said, ‘I can’t believe it. Four melodies in fifteen minutes.’…I love music. But actually U2’s music doesn’t blow me away. What interests me is that Bono splits the revenue of U2 among four people absolutely equally.”
Buffett could at times be brutally rational about the way vast sums of money made a person more attractive, funny, and intelligent. Still, his wonderment had never quite ceased that celebrities of any rank sought him out. No matter how cool he tried to play it, he was flattered that no less a personage than Bono had deemed him smart. When Bono came out to Omaha during his Heartland of America tour, he contacted Buffett and through him met Susie Jr. Still a rock-and-roll girl at heart, Susie Jr. in turn was flattered and captivated by the singer’s interest in her. The soulful leader of what some considered the biggest rock band on earth, he had a romantic hipster nobility that appealed to both her and her mother. U2’s music spoke of a spiritual longing for love and peace. Their message—“the more you take, the less you feel, you gotta give it away”—was exactly the kind of thing both Susies would respond to. He invited Susie Jr. to join the board of his charitable operation DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa). And he had made a huge impression on Susie’s children too.
“He was just terrific with my grandkids—Susie’s kids, Emily and Michael. He talked to Emily and had an enormous effect on her.”
Bono had invited Emily to work as an intern at DATA the following summer. Big Susie, however, had never met her granddaughter’s rock-star boss. She seemed to feel that she had finished her own personal mission on earth. “Why can’t I just lie in bed the rest of my life,” she said, “and the grandchildren can come out, and it will be fine.” Is she kidding? thought Susie Jr. This is not going to happen. “You have to get up!” she told her mother. “You can’t just lie in bed the rest of your life! You’ll do the radiation and you’ll get better, and you’ll be able to travel again.” Big Susie looked surprised. “Do you really think so?” she asked.1
Finally Susie was persuaded to go through with the radiation. She went in to be measured for the mask that the radiologist had to construct to cover her face so that the radiation could be safely applied. Buffett was now involving himself more and more in the details of his wife’s treatment.
“I’m just nuts about her radiologist, who designs the mask and the angle of attack. She shows me on her computer exactly what gets hit from every angle, where the tongue and the vocal cords are.”
Some of Susie’s friends questioned whether she was once again doing something to please everybody else instead of making her own choices. Nevertheless, she had agreed to thirty-three treatments, five treatments a week, with weekends off, beginning in mid-December. Since the doctors had stressed the importance of continuous radiation, the rational Buffett ruminated over the fact that the off days happened to coincide with weekends. He thought it awfully convenient for the doctors, and wondered whether his wife’s health was being compromised.
A week after the first treatments began, he flew to Buffalo to announce a new $40 million GEICO service center the company was going to open near Buffalo to manage its rapid expansion, holding a news conference with New York Governor George Pataki. The new center would bring two thousand or more jobs to the state, replacing some of the 17,700 jobs the Buffalo–Niagara region had lost in the past three years.2 Buffett Carnegized Buffalo, a city chosen for its “smart, friendly people.”
From there, he headed out to San Francisco for Christmas, which occurred during the first two weeks of Susie’s radiation.