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but instead found a 1928 Springfield Rolls-Royce Phantom I Brewster coupe for $350 in a junkyard in Baltimore. It was gray, weighed more than a Lincoln Continental, and was adorned with little bud vases. The car had two sets of instruments, so the lady in back—the employer—could see how fast the chauffeur was driving. The starter was broken, so Don and Warren took turns cranking it until it finally started up, then they drove it the fifty miles or so back to Washington. It belched smoke, leaked oil, and lacked taillights and license plates, but when they were stopped by a cop, Warren kept “talking and talking and talking” until he wiggled their way out of a ticket.22

They put the Rolls in the garage underneath the Buffett house and started the motor up. The house immediately filled with acrid smoke, so they pulled it back out and up the steep driveway onto the street. They worked on it Saturday after Saturday. “Danly did all the work,” according to Doris, tinkering with the pipes and doing the welding, “and Warren watched admiringly and encouraged it along.”

When they decided to paint the car, Don and his girlfriend, Norma Thurston, bought something called a Pad-o-Paint, which smeared on the color with a sponge. They painted the car dark blue; it looked really good to them. 23 Naturally, word had gotten around, so they rented it out, thirty-five bucks a pop.

Then Warren had an idea for a stunt. He wanted to be seen in the car. Danly dressed up like a chauffeur, Warren put on the raccoon coat, and the two cranked and cranked to start the car, then drove downtown with platinum-blond Norma. As Danly lunged about under the hood, pretending to fix the motor, Warren directed him with a cane and Norma draped herself over the hood like a movie star. “It was Warren’s idea,” says Norma. “He was the more theatrical one. We were going to see how many people would look at us.”

Norma knew that Warren had never really dated in high school and needed help with girls, so she set him up with her cousin, Bobbie Worley. They dated chastely that summer, going to movies and playing bridge, Warren barraging her with an endless series of brainteasers and riddles.24

When fall came, he left Bobbie behind and returned to Penn as an eighteen-year-old sophomore. He now had two roommates, his fraternity brother Clyde Reighard and a freshman who was assigned to them, George Oesmann. The year before, he had Tom Sawyered Clyde into acting as the front man for a business venture that went nowhere, but during their short-lived partnership, the two had become friends.

Warren had not changed much since his freshman year, but he had much more in common with Clyde than he had with Chuck Peterson. Clyde was amused by Warren’s tennis shoes and T-shirts and dirty khaki pants, and he took it in stride when Warren needled and taunted him about his grades. While “he didn’t make me any smarter,” says Reighard, “he did make me use what I had more efficiently.” Indeed, Warren was a master at using what he had efficiently, his own time especially. He rose early in the morning, ate chicken salad at the dorm for breakfast, then headed off to classes.25 After sleepwalking through his freshman year, he had finally found one class he liked: Professor Hockenberry’s Industry 101, which discussed different industries and the nuts and bolts of running a business. “It was textiles, it was steel, it was petroleum. I can still remember that book. I got a lot of stuff from it. I can remember talking about the laws of capture in petroleum, and the Bessemer processes in steel. I devoured that book. That was really interesting to me.” But his suitemate Harry Beja, a grind who sweated through Hockenberry’s class alongside Warren, resented the way he tobogganed ahead effortlessly.26

It was the same in business law, taught by Professor Cataldo, who “had very close to a photographic mind. He would quote cases at length. I can still remember Hadley versus Baxendale and Kemble versus Farren. So I would do the same thing back to him on the exams, which entertained him to no end. I would