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Buffett gave his speech about managing earnings; Keough started to help Isdell, as he helped every new CEO. Isdell accepted the help, but as it turned out, he wouldn’t need all that much.

61

The Seventh Fire

New York City, Sun Valley, Cody • March–July 2004

Buffett had spent twenty-six weekends in San Francisco. He and Susie had watched almost a hundred episodes of Frasier together. The family remained protective. She still saw almost no one else.

She was starting to eat fresh food. Her friend Tom Newman, a caterer and chef, tried to interest her in something healthier than ice cream and chocolate malteds, and made her pureed carrots, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, egg salad, and “anything where I could get her some proper nutrition.”1

In March, she went for her first MRI scan since the surgery. Buffett knew the stakes associated with this event. Susie had said she would have no more surgery.

“She won’t go back into the hospital. She won’t. I think the odds are reasonably good, but…”

The MRI came back clean. Buffett was overjoyed; he said that Susie’s doctors told her that this meant she had the same odds of a recurrence as if she had never had cancer. Susie may have put it this way to Warren because she thought that this was what he needed to believe, but what Dr. Schmidt had actually told her was that she could probably count on one good year. After that, the future was uncertain.2

Months of being trapped inside by illness, just as in her childhood, affected Susie predictably. As weak as she was, her pent-up urge to live her life again exploded. “I’m going to see my family,” she said. “I want to see everybody. I’m going to do everything I want to do until Dr. Schmidt tells me not to.”3

The first thing she wanted to do was go to the Laguna house and have the grandchildren come visit. For Warren’s sake, she wanted to attend the Berkshire shareholder meeting. She wanted to be strong enough to attend the premiere of Peter’s multimedia show, Spirit—The Seventh Fire, which was to take place in Omaha in July. She had a long list of other goals as well.

Susie’s hair, which had been light-colored for the last few years, was close-cropped now; her youthful face looked a little slimmer but otherwise no different than before. She spoke with a slight lisp, but it was easy to forget what had happened and not notice how little energy she had.

Buffett’s preoccupation was whether she would be able to attend the shareholder meeting in May. The meeting had taken on such symbolism to him that a measure of how much people cared about him was their willingness to travel to Omaha for this event. Susie’s presence reassured him; she was not a spectator but part of the show. If she could not attend, it was as though his leading lady would be missing from the stage.

The Buffetts had triangulated the shareholder weekend so that Astrid (who considered the whole thing a bore and was pleased to be excused) accompanied Warren only to the backstage social events, just as she did in real life, while Susie attended the “official” public social events in the role of “wife.” She sat in the directors’ section at the meeting and sang onstage with Al Oehrle’s band in the mall at Borsheim’s on Sunday afternoon. Buffett’s supporting cast of loyal Daisy Maes had grown larger over time, and he cared very much that they attend as well. From time to time throughout the weekend, a clanking sound heralded the approach of Carol Loomis wearing her bracelet hung with a collection of twenty-seven matchbook-size gold and enamel charms, facsimiles of the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports—one for each year she had edited Buffett’s words. Sharon Osberg became part of the show by taking on any shareholder who wanted to play bridge with a champion on Sunday afternoon in the big white tent outside Borsheim’s. Buffett had not yet figured out a way to put his latest Daisy Mae, Devon Spurgeon, to work. Spurgeon, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who had covered Berkshire for a while, was starting law school in the fall. Buffett had made