The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [87]
“I went to Dale Carnegie because I was painfully aware of being socially maladjusted. And I went and gave them a check, but then I stopped payment on it because I lost my nerve.”
Nor did Warren’s social deficiencies augur well for his prospects with Susan Thompson, to whom he had been writing all fall. She was not encouraging, but neither did she tell him outright to stop bothering her. Warren quickly hit on the strategy of befriending Susie’s parents as a gateway to their daughter. Over Thanksgiving, he went to Evanston with them for a Northwestern football game. Afterward, the three of them had dinner with Susie, but she ditched them early to go out on a date.8
Warren returned to New York after the holiday, discouraged but no less intrigued. He continued to see Vanita. “She had one of the most imaginative minds I’ve ever run into,” he says.
In fact, dating her began to take on an edge of unpredictability and risk. At various times she threatened to go down to Washington when Howard was speaking on the floor of Congress and throw herself at his feet, shrieking, “Your son is the father of my unborn child!” Warren thought she might actually do it. Another time, she created such a scene as they left a movie theater that, unable to listen to it any longer, he hoisted her up and stuffed her, jackknifed, into a wire-mesh trash basket on the street corner. She hung there, suspended and screaming, as he stalked away.9
Vanita was beautiful, she was smart, and she was entertaining. She was also dangerous, and Warren knew it was risky to get more involved with her. But there must have been some sort of thrill to it. Dating Vanita was like walking a leopard on a leash to see if it would make a good pet. Yet, “Vanita could handle herself fine. She had no problem carrying it off. The only question was whether she was going to want to carry it off. You didn’t have to worry about her embarrassing you unless she wanted to.”
Once Warren invited her to a dinner at the New York Athletic Club for Frank Matthews, a distinguished lawyer and Secretary of the Navy. Having the beautiful Miss Nebraska on his arm would be a plus. Matthews was Nebraskan, the crowd was full of people worth knowing, and Warren wanted to be known. During the cocktail hour, Vanita made sure he would indeed be talked about. After he introduced her as his date, she corrected him and insisted she was his wife. “I don’t know why he does this,” she said. “Is he ashamed of me? Would you be ashamed of me? Every time we go out, he pretends that I’m just his date, and we’ve been married.”
Finally, Warren realized that even though Vanita could handle herself just fine when she wanted to, “the truth was that she would always want to embarrass me. She preferred acting that way with me,” he says, and she did so regularly. Vanita had a fascination about her, however, and had he not had an alternative, there is no telling what would have happened next.10
Every time Warren went home to Nebraska, he saw Susan Thompson as much as she allowed, even though it wasn’t much. To him she seemed immensely sophisticated, even authoritative, and generous with her emotions. “Susie was way, way, way more mature than I was,” he says. He started falling hard for her and disentangling himself from Vanita, even though “it was obvious I wasn’t Number One”11 with Susie. “My intentions were clear,” he says; “they just weren’t having any effect on her.”
Susan Thompson’s family was well known to the Buffetts—in fact it was her father, “Doc Thompson,” who