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things about her husband, and explained that she provided Warren with “unconditional love.” She also discussed her move to San Francisco, saying she left, as she told Warren, because “I would like to have a place where I can have a room of my own. It would be nice.” On Astrid, “She took care of your man for you?” asked Rose. “She did, and she takes great care of him, and he appreciates it and I appreciate it…she’s done me a great favor,” Susie said. Perhaps because of the set-up question, this exchange made clear that Susie viewed Astrid as the tool through which she managed Warren—something that Susie may not have intended to reveal quite so bluntly. Afterward, she said to Susie Jr., “Let’s go to Bergdorf’s.”11 There, she sat on a chair and looked at some things but soon said she was tired and went back to the hotel.

A couple of days later, on Mother’s Day, her energy rebounded in time to accept an invitation to meet her daughter’s friend Bono at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bono had been faxing her letters during her recovery, which Susie Jr. would read to her. The letters, according to Susie Jr., “were sort of this giant thing to her.” By May, after going to sleep every night listening to Bono sing, she had grown passionately interested in meeting the messianic singer. The two had a brief encounter, and “I just can’t even explain to you how excited she was,” says Susie Jr.

Susie went to bed and rested for two days. Then Bono, his wife, Ali, their daughters, and Bobby Shriver (the brother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver), who had cofounded the African-aid charity DATA with Bono, came over to the Plaza Hotel to meet Susie for lunch in the dining room. For three hours, Susie and Bono sat talking. Then he presented her with a portrait that he had painted from a photograph of her, overwritten with some of the lyrics to the U2 song “One.” Susie was overcome. Bono invited her to visit him in France with Susie Jr., who was coming for a meeting of his foundation board.

When Susie returned to San Francisco, she immediately gave a place of honor to the picture, making room for it among all the other art and masks and decorative items on her walls. Then she made up her mind to go to France. The Africa vacation had been canceled once again, for she was far too weak to make that trip. But she thought she could go to France. She and Susie Jr. started by spending four days at the Ritz in Paris, where Susie recovered from the trip across six time zones by following the get-up-at-one-p.m.-pills-in-ice-cream routine while going out once a day to do something simple. Then they took the TGV bullet train to Nice, to Bono’s salmon-colored stucco mansion in Eze Bord de Mer.

This house, where Gandhi was said to have once prayed, sat on a point overlooking the Mediterranean. Susie’s high-ceilinged bedroom was warmed by a fireplace and lit by expansive windows framed in gauzy white curtains that opened onto the sea. She spent most of her days sleeping, but one afternoon Susie Jr. called her upstairs to a terrace overlooking the water while Bono played music from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2’s unreleased album. He was singing a song he had written for his father’s funeral: “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” That evening they spent four hours talking over dinner, and Bono stood up and toasted her, saying, “I’ve met my soul mate!”

Her reverence for the charismatic rock star had grown so during the course of getting to know him in person that the next day, on the plane home, Susie stayed awake and played U2 music on her iPod the entire way. “I can’t explain the rest I got there,” she would later say about Bono’s house.12

Roughly a week after the two Susies returned from France, most of the family went to Sun Valley, while Peter and Jennifer stayed in Omaha, setting up for the premiere of his show, Spirit—The Seventh Fire. After the long year of pain and isolation, Susie was making up for lost time by trying to see everyone and go everywhere. At Sun Valley she spent time with various people, including Barry Diller and