The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [67]
Helped by his prodigious memory, Warren was free to do as he pleased for much of the day. At lunchtime, he dropped by the Alpha Sig house, an old three-story mansion with a spiral staircase, where Kelsen, the black houseman, cooked, cleaned, and, in his white jacket, gave the place a degree of dignity. A bridge game went on twenty-four hours a day in a corner alcove, and Warren would sit down and play a few hands.27 His taste for practical jokes continued unabated. He occasionally enlisted one of his fraternity brothers, Lenny Farina, to pose for attention-getting photographs out on the street while he pretended to pick Lenny’s pocket or shine his shoes.28
Meanwhile, in a scam reminiscent of sending poor old Kerlin into a water trap naked wearing a gas mask, he and Clyde had told their third roommate, George, that he looked “run-down and puny and would never attract girls unless he developed muscles.” They finally maneuvered George into buying himself some barbells. “And then we used to bang these barbells up and down while Harry Beja was studying down below. We had great fun taunting him by banging these barbells on the floor.”29
By college, however, the evidence had become convincing. Warren had begun to give up on the idea of becoming a strongman. “After a while, I decided my bones were wrong. My clavicles were not long enough. It’s your clavicles that determine how broad-shouldered you’ll be, and you can’t do much about your clavicles. That’s why I got disgusted and eventually quit. I decided that if I was going to have girl-like muscles anyway, then to hell with it.”
Girl-like muscles did not attract girls, and Warren had still not gone out on any dates since he arrived at Penn. Saturdays were big fraternity party days, with prefootball luncheons and postgame cocktail parties, dinners, and evening dances. Warren wrote a letter to Bobbie Worley, asking her to come up for a weekend and saying, in effect, that he had fallen in love. Bobbie liked him and was touched by his letter, but did not return his feelings. She would have enjoyed the weekend but said no because she felt it was wrong to lead him on.30
Warren had one date, with Ann Beck, a Bryn Mawr girl. He had worked at her father’s bakery shortly after moving to Washington, when he was in eighth grade and she was “just a little girl with long blond hair.” Ann had been voted the most bashful girl at her high school, and the day she and Warren spent together was like a shyness contest: They walked around Philadelphia in awkward silence.31 “We were probably the two shyest people in the whole United States.” Warren had no idea how to make small talk; when stressed, he emitted small grunts instead.32
Sometimes Warren and Clyde took the borrowed Ford coupe and drove off to the suburbs in search of movies about mummies, Frankenstein, vampires, or anything macabre.33 Since hardly anybody had a car at that time, his fraternity brothers were impressed.34 That was the irony: Warren was the only one with a car to make out in, but nobody to make out with. He passed on the Ivy Ball and the Inter-Fraternity Ball. He always skipped the Alpha Sig Sunday tea dances and never had a date at the fraternity house.35 His face would flush and he would stare at his shoes if anyone talked about sex.36 He was out of his element at such a hard-partying school, where the college fight song was “Drink a Highball.”
“I tried drinking because I was in a fraternity where about half my dues were going to buy alcohol for these parties. I felt I was getting screwed. But I just didn’t like the taste. I don’t like beer. And I can behave silly enough without it. I mean, I was right there with the rest—the drinkers didn’t have anything on me when it came to being silly.”
But even without a date on his arm or a glass in his hand, Warren sometimes showed up at his fraternity’s Saturday night parties. He was able to draw a little crowd by sitting in a corner and lecturing on the stock market. He had a wit