The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [468]
Over the holidays, Susie grew despondent again about her radiation. She threatened to discontinue it. Buffett went through another stretch of spending hours and hours convincing her that she had gone this far and it didn’t make sense to stop. No matter what Susie decided, however, the radiation schedule would have two interruptions—at Christmas and New Year’s. Warren steamed. “It bothers me that they take off for the holidays as well as weekends. She’s had eight radiation treatments. It just doesn’t seem right. And the radiologist acknowledged to me that dropping the schedule to four days a week is somewhat marginal.”
Susie was still not well enough to receive any new visitors. Neither of her sons had even seen their mother since the surgery. But Howie, his wife, Devon, and their son, Howie B., finally joined Warren in San Francisco for a couple of days. Howie, still a one-man chorus line of Rockettes when it came to energy, saw Susie “just a touch.” But the family was still not allowing other people to visit.
“She’d just as soon conserve her strength as see anybody. Frankly, there’s a number of people that are just dying to get at her. Some of them she’s a huge crutch for, and all they’ll do is drain her if they get close, because she can’t stop being their resident psychiatrist or professor or whatever. She feels a little safer when I’m there, but she knows that if she starts seeing other people, they’ll basically try to draw energy from her. With me or with Little Sooz she doesn’t feel that way. But even with my sister or her best friend, Bella, she can’t help but go back into the mode where she’s giving and they’re receiving.”
Susie Jr. had instructed everyone around her mother to keep things upbeat. There were things that her mother was unaware of, that had to be kept from her, and which Susie Jr. monitored the fax machine to make sure her mother didn’t see. Susie didn’t know that Larry Tisch had died of cancer or that Bill Ruane had called Warren to say that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Ruane was doing chemo at Sloan-Kettering, where Susie had gotten her second opinion. Warren got tears in his eyes every time Ruane’s name was mentioned. The combination of this and Susie was too much. He had some time ago abandoned the thousand-calorie-a-day diet.
“Susie’s weight has been quite stable for the past two weeks. We keep a chart of it. I eat a chocolate sundae, she eats a little bit of the chocolate sundae. And since my diet is naturally fattening, it helps her. I’m gaining weight, and she’s stayed stable. She’s in no danger of becoming anorexic.”
On New Year’s Eve, Nancy Munger was throwing Charlie a big eightieth-birthday party. Buffett flew down to Los Angeles for the celebration. He desperately needed the distraction, though it obviously bothered him that he would be attending the party alone, just as it had bothered him to show up at the Buffett Group meeting alone.
He had ordered an oversize cardboard cutout of Benjamin Franklin for a stand-up routine satirizing Munger’s fascination with Franklin. Buffett had to ship the cardboard cutout to California in advance. Although he obsessed about whether it would arrive on time, it did, and he put on a classic performance, which included his singing “What a Friend I Have in Charlie.”
Munger closed the festivities with a speech. He began by giving advice to the audience, in the latest iteration of various commencement and other speeches he had given elsewhere. Charlie’s friends and relatives and members of the Buffett Group all had copies of these speeches, now collected into a book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack.7 Munger’s favorite construct was to invoke Carl Jacobi: “Invert,