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18

Miss Nebraska

New York City and Omaha • 1950–1952

Warren had always been a washout with girls. He longed to have a girlfriend, but the very things that made him different hindered his quest. “Nobody was more shy than I was with girls,” he says. “But my reaction to that was probably to turn into a talking machine.” When he ran out of words about stocks or politics, he resorted to grunts. He was afraid to ask girls out. He summoned the nerve when a girl occasionally did something that made him think he wouldn’t get turned down, but in general his attitude was, “Why would they want to go out with me?” Thus he didn’t go on many dates during high school or college. And when he did, something always seemed to go wrong.

On a date to a baseball game with a girl named Jackie Gillian, the high point was hitting a cow with his car on the way home. He took another girl to hit golf balls at a driving range.1 That didn’t fly. Driving a hearse to pick up Barbara Weigand, he says, was “sort of desperate,” not a stunt. It may have worked as an icebreaker, but after that, what was there to say? On a date with a shy girl like Ann Beck, he was struck mute; he was so insecure that he had no idea what to do. Girls didn’t want to hear about Ben Graham and the margin of safety. If he couldn’t get to first base with Bobbie Worley, who had dated him all one summer, what hope did he have? Very little, he thought, and maybe the girls could sense it.

Finally, the summer of 1950 before he went to Columbia, his sister Bertie set him up on a date with her roommate from Northwestern. A round-cheeked kewpie of a brunette named Susan Thompson,2 she had quickly impressed Bertie, who was a year and a half younger, as a special girl with a knack for understanding people.3 As soon as Warren met Susie, he was fascinated, but suspected she was too good to be true: “I bet she was a fake at first. I was intrigued by her and I was pursuing her, but I was determined to find the hole in the dike. I just couldn’t believe anybody was really like her.” Susie, however, was not interested in him. She was in love with somebody else.

After Warren went off to Columbia, he read in Earl Wilson’s gossip column4 in the New York Post that Miss Nebraska 1949, Vanita Mae Brown, was living at the Webster women’s residence5 and performing with the singer and teen idol Eddie Fisher on a television show.

Vanita had attended the University of Nebraska at the same time as Warren, although she had escaped his notice and aspirations until now. Something about the situation overcame his shyness. Since the glamorous Miss Nebraska was living in New York, he telephoned her at the Webster.

Vanita took the bait. Before long, she and Mr. Omaha had a date. He learned that her upbringing had been nothing like his. She grew up in South Omaha near the stockyards, cleaning chickens at Omaha Cold Storage after school. Her pinup body and girl-next-door face had been her ticket out. She got a job in Omaha as an usherette at the Paramount Theater, then parlayed her love of putting herself on display into victory in a local beauty pageant. “I think her talent was bedazzling the judges,” Buffett says. After winning the Miss Nebraska title, she represented the state as Princess Nebraska in the Washington, D.C., Cherry Blossom Festival. From there she moved to New York City, where she was now desperately trying to make it in show business.

Although Warren was not the kind of guy to take a girl to dinner at the Stork Club or a show at the Copacabana, she must have welcomed a hometown face. Soon the two of them were exploring the streets of New York together. Looking to upgrade themselves, they went to Marble Collegiate Church to hear Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a famous self-improvement writer and speaker. Warren serenaded her with “Sweet Georgia Brown” by ukulele on the bank of the Hudson, toting along cheese sandwiches as riverside picnic fare.

Even though Vanita hated cheese sandwiches,6 she seemed willing to keep seeing him. He found