"She thought Warren walked on water-and he did," says board member Arjay Miller. "Warren was open, and she had confidence in him." For the right person, Buffett could instill an ability to see all sides nonjudgmentally, an ability that Susie had instilled in him, and this marvelous gift of self-confidence and security could be internalized, so that it was not dependent on his presence. But Kay was so insecure, "I don't think he ever really got her to do that," says Miller, "although if anybody could have, it would have been him." She needed his actual presence.

For the next six months, the Post would continue to publish while navigating fruitless negotiations, threats, violence, a logistical war of nerves, and a constant struggle to keep the torn Newspaper Guild from striking in sympathy. People were tackling all sorts of incongruous jobs to get the paper out; Don Graham worked as a paper handler, pushing huge, heavy rolls of newsprint to the presses.

"She had people telling her, including some of the people she respected most, 'You've got to give in or you're going to lose.' They were afraid, they hated not publishing and seeing the Star gain on the Post.

"So I was the countervailing force. I said to her, 'I will tell you before the tipping point is reached.' The tipping point is the point at which the other guy becomes dominant, and after you go back, he is still dominant. There are fifty variables involved: the attitude of your employees when you come back, the impression that you've left on the community, the degree to which advertising has gotten better results from having shifted over. You're gauging the likelihood of people changing their habits. They couldn't get our columnists, or our comics, so the question is, at what point does it become more of a habit for them to buy the other paper?

"That's probably what did the most for her. She believed me, and she was right to believe me. All I had were her interests at heart, and she believed that I knew enough about the business."

But while "Warren encouraged her, it was her backbone, not his," stresses George Gillespie.15 Her backbone had to be strong enough to support the whole company. Although nearly all of the Post's employees other than the pressmen stayed on the job, the constant threat of violence hung over those who crossed the picket lines. Their tires were being slashed, and their families were getting threatening phone calls at home. A striker carried a placard that said "Phil Shot the Wrong Graham." To keep morale up, Graham and Buffett and Meg Greenfield rolled papers in the mailroom. Buffett loved it, working circulation once again.

Two months into the strike, the Post had made a final offer to the pressmen, who rejected it.16 The strike dragged on, unresolved. Graham began to hire replacement workers, breaking the strike. The pressmen carried on picketing as if there was a chance of negotiation. But over the next few months, the paper gradually won back the remaining unions, readers, and advertisers, even though the picketing and bad publicity continued through the spring.

Just as Graham was slowly rescuing her company,17 Buffett and Munger had finally reached their settlement with the SEC. Now Buffett invited Munger for a steak dinner down at Johnny's Cafe near the stockyards to finalize their "simplification" plan. He had decided to stop managing money for FMC on the side. Next, Blue Chip would sell its interest in Source Capital,18 and Berkshire and Diversified would refile their merger plan, formerly quashed at the beginning of 1975 by the SEC investigation. At Betty Peters's request, Wesco, owned only eighty percent by Blue Chip, would remain a public company, and Munger would be chairman of that. Munger and Buffett deferred merging Blue Chip into Berkshire Hathaway until they could more easily agree on the relative values of the companies.

With both Berkshire and the Post emerging from the tumultuous times that had consumed his attention for so long, Buffett's business routine began to normalize. The Post board meetings lost their edge of emergency, and Graham began thinking of expanding her empire.

Newspapers at the time were being snapped up left and right. "Kay really wanted to buy newspapers. But above all, she didn't want other people to buy them instead of her," Buffett says. "Tell me what to do," she would beg. Buffett had gotten her to stop pleading for help from the rest of the board, but she still pleaded for help from him. "I would just make her make the damn decision," he says. He helped her understand that it was always a mistake to pay too much for something you wanted. Impatience was the enemy. For a long time, the Post did very little and grew slowly. Buffett taught the Grahams the immense value of buying their company's own stock when it was cheap to reduce the shares outstanding. That increased the size of each slice of the pie. Meanwhile, the Post avoided making expensive mistakes and became much more profitable as a result.19 Buffett, used to doing the taking, for the first time found himself in the giving role and discovered that, with Graham, he liked it. "She would talk to me about some business policy and then she'd talk to some other guy back home, and they'd know how to scare the hell out of her. She knew they were doing it, and she didn't like it, but she couldn't get over it.

"Eventually I told her my job was to get her to see herself in a regular mirror rather than a fun-house mirror. I really wanted her to feel better about what she was doing. Basically, I enjoyed trying to build her up. And I had some success, although I started late in life with her."

Yet, wrote Munger to Graham about Buffett, "I can see damn well whose ways, predominantly, are actually being mended."20 Buffett began to be seen out with Graham more and more. She made it her job to try to give him some polish.

"Kay tried to upgrade me a little. It was just very gradual and not so I would notice. It was very funny. She worked so hard to sort of remold me, but it didn't work. She was a hell of a lot more sophisticated than I was, that's for sure." Buffett learned that Graham thought it was uncouth and disgusting to eat out in restaurants. "Around Washington your cook was a big point of pride. The highest compliment you could pay somebody at a party was, 'I'm going to try and hire away your cook,' or 'You must have brought your cook over from France.' Kay cared about that, like everybody in Washington. So her dinners tended to be quite fancy, except that she would make exceptions for me."

Graham's chef found the restrictions imposed by cooking for Warren a challenge. "Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate. Cauliflower almost makes me sick. I eat carrots reluctantly. I don't like sweet potatoes. I don't even want to be close to a rhubarb, it makes me retch. My idea of a vegetable is green beans, corn, and peas. I like spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwiches. I'll eat meat loaf but wouldn't order it in a restaurant."

His idea of a feast was a half gallon of chocolate chip ice cream. He ate his foods in sequence, one at a time, and did not like the individual foods to touch. If a stalk of broccoli brushed his steak, he recoiled in horror. "I like eating the same thing over and over and over again. I could eat a ham sandwich every day for fifty days in a row for breakfast. At dinner at her farm retreat, Glen Welby, Kay served lobster. I was attacking the shellfish through the wrong side, attacking the shell, and not having much luck. She told me to turn it over." Confronted with a nine-course dinner-each course accompanied by the appropriate wines and destined for a dinner table filled with dignitaries and celebrities and journalism's star reporters-"it threw him," says Gladys Kaiser. He never grew accustomed to life on this grand scale.

Yet Buffett became a regular guest at Graham's famous dinners, which he called her "Kay Parties." He enjoyed his status as the hayseed who was flummoxed by a lobster. His childlike tastes conveyed an air of authenticity and innocence. But his social naivete was also genuine-mostly because he went around with blinders on. When "sightseeing" with Graham, he was focused like a laser on who was there, not on which fork to use. He had no desire to broaden this aspect of his horizons. Graham upgraded his elephant-bumping skills gradually but was amazed that Buffett continued to eat nothing but hamburgers and ice cream.21 "She always talked to the cook in French, always, totally in French. So I would hear 'hamburger' among the French words and tease her and say, 'No, no, it's hambur-zhay.' Then I would just say, 'Order me a hambur-zhay,' and it would come out of the kitchen very fancy. The chef at Kay's wanted so much to be able to make hamburgers and french fries-and I ate them, but they were not even close to as good as you could get at McDonald's or Wendy's. The french fries were always mushy. And he wanted so hard to please.

"But at her big parties, she didn't make exceptions for me as much."

At the Kay Parties, Buffett's role was not to eat but, of course, to talk. As a star investor, he was like a bald eagle in a town where birds of any kind were scarce. Even the most hidebound of Georgetown "cave dwellers"-blue bloods who rarely emerged to socialize with anyone except others of their kind, many of whom were Graham's friends, such as the columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop, cousins of Eleanor Roosevelt-enjoyed having the charming Buffett around. Dinner guests pelted him with questions about investments, and he fell into his most comfortable role: the teacher.

By now he was spending so much time in Washington that he began keeping a spare set of clothes in Graham's guest room, just as he once had with the more maternal Anne Gottschaldt in Long Island. Usually he wore a fraying blue suede jacket and gray flannel slacks that looked like a rumpled bedspread.22 Graham tried to improve his sartorial sense. "She was appalled by Warren's clothes," according to her son Don, "although my mother just hated the way that I dressed. And at one point she said, referring to her employees, 'Why am I of all people surrounded by the worst-dressed executive staff of anyone in America?' Her scorn for people's clothes was widespread, and not confined to Warren."23 She took him to meet Halston, the tony designer whom she preferred and who had made over her own sense of style. Buffett's take on Halston: "He was from Des Moines, you know."

By June 1976, Buffett had occasion to invite Graham to an event of his own: Susie Jr.'s wedding. In every way this event would be the antithesis of a Kay Party-held in Newport Beach, California, a mix of the formal and the casual, with a Buffettish zoo of a guest list, to celebrate a marriage that everybody knew was a mistake from the start.

The spring semester of her senior year of college, Susie Jr. had dropped out of UC Irvine when her roommate learned that Century 21, a real estate company, was offering high-paying secretarial jobs that didn't require typing skills.24 Though they were wise enough not to interfere, both her parents knew that Susie Jr.'s marriage to Dennis Westergard, the good-looking blond surfer, wasn't going to work out. On some level, Susie Jr. herself knew this, but she was caught up in the fantasy.25 Parental reservation notwithstanding, her wedding was an important affair. Warren had asked that Kay be invited; Big Susie had reserved a special place for her at St. John's Lutheran Church, right behind the family. For a few minutes she sat with Dick and Mary Holland, who had escorted her to the service. Then, not surprisingly, Kay said to them, "I feel uncomfortable. I don't know why, but it'd be better if I sat in back." She removed herself to the rear of the church, where she sat for the rest of the wedding.26 Buffett had traveled far from the day of his own wedding, when he had to take off his glasses because he was so nervous that he didn't want to see. Waiting in the rear of the church to go down the aisle, he said to his anxious daughter, "Don't look now, but my fly is open." The photographer was standing in front of the altar, waiting to snap a picture. Susie Jr. was so busy trying to stifle her laughter and to keep from looking at her father's fly so that the photographer would not capture her staring at his crotch that she forgot to be scared.27 The rest of the traditional ceremony proceeded without incident. Then the reception at the Newport Beach Marriott turned wild. The Buffetts had let their music-groupie daughter hire any band she liked. Susie Jr. chose her favorite, Quicksilver Messenger Service, a psychedelic rock band that had been among the groups launched at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in the 1960s. Its members looked like any normal rock band. As the group of twenty-something men with white-boy afros and nipple-length uncombed hair mounted the stage and tuned up their instruments, Buffett looked on with inner horror. When Quicksilver Messenger Service hit it with the drums and electric guitars, Susie Jr. danced in ecstasy at her rock-and-roll wedding while her father managed to keep his composure, even though he was squirming inside. "I was not wild about their music," he says in an understatement. "They played awfully loud." He longed for something like his wife's sweet Doris Day style of singing, or Florence Henderson or Sammy Davis Jr. After ninety minutes, the musicians flabbergasted him again when they stopped playing and put away their instruments. Then their manager compounded his astonishment by asking Buffett to fork over the staggering sum of $4,000-in cash.28 Big Susie had told her daughter, "You know, Susan, you can't go home with the band on your wedding night." "Darn!" said Susie Jr. But "some of my friends did," she says.

Now Susie Jr. had settled permanently in Los Angeles, working for Century21. Howie had already dropped out of Augustana College after having trouble adjusting and connecting with his roommate. He tried a couple of other schools, but had lost his support system and never graduated. "I was so close to my mom," he says, "and everything in my life revolved around our family and our home. In college I just could not get any traction."29 Neither had their father's ambition, but both had money for the first time. The trust left by Howard to his grandchildren had distributed a little over six hundred shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock to them. Warren gave them no advice on what to do with it. He had never sold a share himself; why would they sell theirs? Susie Jr. sold most of hers to buy a Porsche and a condo. Howie sold some of his to start Buffett Excavating. In a grown-up version of his childhood love of Tonka Toys, he was now digging basements for a living.

Peter, just finishing his senior year in high school, had been accepted at Stanford and would be headed to California in the fall. More and more during the summer of 1976, the house in Omaha was simply empty. Most days after school Peter went to Arby's by himself to get something for dinner, then headed to the darkroom to work on his photography. Even the dog was decamping. Peter's friends had started calling to report "Hamilton's over here."30 Big Susie, who was rarely home these days, admitted to feeling depressed about the state of her marriage. She seemed to feel that Kay was an interloper who was pursuing her husband;31 Kay had such a territorial way with men that it would have been surprising if Susie had felt otherwise. Yet despite-or perhaps because of-her sadness, Susie herself was "running around like a teenager," as one person put it, in the hot rush of a midlife romance. She was angry at Warren and got careless, letting herself be seen around Omaha with John McCabe, her tennis coach. She still called Milt from time to time as well, and when he agreed to see her they, too, were spotted out in public. She seemed to be living in different worlds, with no plan to proceed in any direction. She could not conceive of abandoning Warren. She described him as an "extraordinary man."32 She clearly looked up to him; however much she joked and nagged about his rigidity and his preoccupation with money, he gave her things she very much wanted: security, stability, strength. "It mattered to her that he was honest and had a good value system," says Doris. "If I ever let down someone who needed me," Susie said, that would be the biggest failure she could imagine.33 Susie was not a thinker. She had a natural confidence in her ability to manage complex relationships with multiple people, using her emotions as her guide. But somebody would have to be let down eventually.

While Susie was off on her various unknown pursuits, and his three children were headed in their respective directions-Peter taking off for Palo Alto in his little yellow Triumph convertible; Howie driving a backhoe, gorilla costume in tow; and Susie Jr. embarking on married life with her good-looking surfer-Warren was on a journey of his own. The man of simple tastes who thought of his life as something out of Leave It to Beaver was now spending his time at parties on Embassy Row. Katharine Graham was dragging him into elephant territory as fast as she could.

"She didn't change my behavior as much as changing what I knew and saw. Everywhere she went, she was treated just like royalty. I saw a whole lot of interesting things that I wouldn't have seen in the world. I had a lot of things explained to me. I picked up a lot around her. Kay knew so damned much about everybody that she would give me insights on people in the political arena.

"It bothered her that she thought I was teaching her all these things and she wasn't doing anything for me. She was constantly laboring in terms of trying to think of something she could do to help me out, whether it was inviting me to fancy dinners or something else. You could call all these events glamorous or exotic. I found them quite interesting. I'm not knocking these things. There were probably people who were way more dying to do them, particularly in her presence, than I would be. But I had a good time doing it, you know."

There undoubtedly were people who were "way more dying" to go. Nevertheless, Buffett did go, over and over again, no matter how ridiculous or awkward for him the events turned out to be.

One night Graham took him to a black-tie state dinner at the Iranian Embassy. She wore a golden gown to match the embassy's decor. Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was an important U.S. strategic ally and a charming host. His embassy sat at the apex of the Embassy Row Washington social scene, and its doings glittered with a fin de siecle magnificence.

After the cocktail hour, Buffett sat down at his assigned table and found himself between one of Empress Farah Pahlavi's ladies-in-waiting and Illinois Senator Charles Percy's wife. He turned toward Loraine Percy and found her locked in a tte--tte with her other dinner partner, Paul Newman. Seeing that it might be a while before she turned toward him, Buffett revolved toward his right and said something to the empress's lady-in-waiting. She smiled politely. He said something else. She smiled again, then went blank. Ted Kennedy, seated on her other side, leaned over and uttered some bon mot in French. Her face brightened and they began conversing animatedly in French. Buffett sat stranded in the middle. He turned back to Loraine Percy and found that she was still engrossed in Paul Newman. He realized with a dull feeling that with Paul Newman sitting on her left, it might become a very long evening.

Kay had been seated next to the Shah, at another table. Among these circles, she was the most important and Warren the least important guest there. Kay was the queen and he was some hayseed investor from Nebraska whom Kay had towed along. Forget Supermoney; this was old money. After a while, Ted Kennedy noticed his plight and asked, "Don't you speak any French?" Buffett felt like a poseur. He had landed in Bora-Bora with only a snowsuit to wear. The meal went on until one o'clock in the morning, and then the band began to play. To begin the dancing, one of the gentlemen waltzed the empress around the floor. Buffett grabbed Graham's hand and escaped.

And yet, if she had asked him again, he would have gone. Because he was for sure not knocking it. The sightseeing was too good.

As he knew all too well by now, despite the fame from Supermoney and the articles in Forbes, many prominent people had never heard of him. In May 1976, Buffett was visiting Kay Graham in Washington when she said, I have someone I want you to meet. Jack Byrne, the person in question, was reluctant, however. When Graham called to arrange a meeting, he said, "Who's Buffett?"

"Well, he's a friend of mine," Graham said. "He's just bought a piece of the Washington Post." Neither knowing nor caring, Byrne turned down the meeting. Then Buffett's old friend Lorimer "Davy" Davidson, who had retired from GEICO in 1970, called Byrne. "God, what kind of ninny are you to pass up a meeting with Warren Buffett?" he asked.34 Byrne had been hired in 1976 to try to pull GEICO-on the brink of bankruptcy-out of the ditch. Once an insurer only of government employees, GEICO had taken on John Q. Public. "Millions more qualified" was the tagline. "Growth, growth, growth, the emphasis was all growth," says a longtime executive.35 Fueled by growth, growth, growth, GEICO stock had traded as high as $61-far too rich for Buffett, but he had kept an eye on it anyway. In fact, he had never stopped following it for the past twenty years.

In 1975, "I looked again at GEICO and was startled by what I saw after a few rule-of-thumb calculations about loss reserves." As an auto-insurance company grows, grows, grows, so does the number of accidents its customers have. If a company underestimates the payments for those claims, it has overstated profits by the same amount. "It was clear in a sixty-second examination that the company was far underreserved and the situation was getting worse. I went in to see [the CEO] Norm Gidden on one of my Washington Post trips. I had known and liked Norm for twenty years on a casual basis. He was friendly, but he had no interest at all in listening to my comments. They were in deep denial. He really sort of hustled me out of the office and would not respond on the subject."36 That Buffett, who did not own the stock, was trying to help GEICO's management says something about how attached he still was to the company from which Lorimer Davidson had recently retired, the stock that had been his first really big idea, the investment that had made so much money for his friends and family.

In early 1976, GEICO announced its worst year in history, a $190 million loss from underwriting operations during 1975.37 The company stopped paying dividends, a move that conveys to shareholders that the till is empty. Gidden cast about frantically to bolster the mere $25 million in capital that GEICO had in its coffers.38 That April, at Washington's Statler Hilton, four hundred angry stockholders stormed the shareholder meeting, armed with questions and accusations. Shortly afterward, the insurance commissioners arrived in a squadron at GEICO's offices. The board realized, a bit belatedly, that it had to fire the management.39 The board itself was in disarray, several of its members having lost their personal fortunes in the debacle. Without a capable CEO to steer the company, Sam Butler, a steady-handed lawyer from Cravath, Swaine & Moore, took charge as the lead board member-in effect, a temporary CEO.

Butler knew that Byrne had quit Travelers on impulse, bitter at having just been passed over for the job of CEO. A former actuary who became a millionaire at age twenty-nine through a start-up insurance company, Byrne had been instrumental in turning around the Travelers' flailing home-and auto-insurance lines two years earlier. Butler called him in Hartford and played on his ego, explaining that if he took the job at GEICO it would prevent a national emergency that would throw the whole United States economy into jeopardy. The unemployed Byrne was easily recruited to audition for CEO.40 He came down to Washington in early May and pogo-sticked back and forth before the board, tearing through white flip-chart pages, covering them with marker pen while talking nonstop. "I came in and gave a sort of off-the-cuff five-hour blah, blah, blah, here's five points, here's what we have to do, boom boom boom speech,"41 he says. The desperate board had no trouble deciding that this ruddy, round-faced cannonball was the right guy.

Byrne's first task when he took over as CEO was to run straight to the dusty Chinatown offices of the District of Columbia's Insurance Superintendent Max Wallach. An old-school German who spoke with a thick accent, Wallach was "stubborn as hell, and he had this enormous interest in serving the public," Byrne recalls. He was disgusted with GEICO's former management and had refused to deal with them. Byrne perceived that Wallach was not wild about him either. Nevertheless, the two men began talking daily, sometimes hourly.42 Wallach insisted that the company put a deal in place by late June to raise money while simultaneously getting other insurance companies to take over some of its policies-that is, to "reinsure" GEICO.43 The idea was to increase the resources GEICO had available to pay claims and to cut the risk it was carrying so that they were more in balance. Thus, Byrne had to sell other insurers on the idea of putting up money to save a competitor.

Byrne's prior experience was that he could sell anything. At first he was confident.

"My pitch was that insurance companies take care of themselves," says Byrne. "We don't want the regulators involved." If GEICO failed, the regulators would just send the bill for GEICO's unpaid claims to its competitors. So they would end up bailing it out anyway. But "Ed Rust, Senior, who ran State Farm," says Byrne, "he was a cooney old bastard. He concluded-and he was probably pretty smart-'I'll pay a hundred million to cover any of their unpaid claims if it puts GEICO out of business. They have a better mousetrap, and killing GEICO will save us money in the long run.'" So State Farm backed out of the reinsurance deal.

"In the end," says Byrne, "a couple of really good friends reneged. The Travelers just said, 'We're not going to help.' They didn't have any principled idea behind this. Travelers was just wussy about it."

Three weeks after he joined GEICO, "I was racing around, thinking I had made the biggest mistake of my life. My wife, Dorothy, was up in Hartford, crying and crying and crying. We had just moved for the nineteenth time." The market was suggesting GEICO might not survive; its stock, so recently trading for $61 a share, had crashed to $2 a share. Somebody who owned, say, twenty-five thousand shares, had just seen their fortune dwindle by almost ninety-seven percent-from more than $1.5 million to $50,000-from enough to live on for the rest of your life to enough to buy a very good sports car.

The reaction of the company's investors and shareholders to the calamity would, in not a few cases, literally determine their fate.

Many longtime shareholders had panicked and talked themselves into selling, which is how the stock got to $2 in the first place. Whoever was buying from them took a gamble on GEICO's fate.

Ben Graham, now age eighty-two, did nothing and kept his stock. Graham's cousin Rhoda and her husband, Bernie Sarnat, talked to the dean of the University of Chicago business school. He told them to sell it, since stocks that cheap rarely recover. They decided-au contraire-that a stock that had sunk so low was too cheap to sell. What would they gain by selling? They had little to lose by keeping it. So they did nothing.44 Likewise, Lorimer Davidson never sold a share.45 Leo Goodwin Jr., the son of GEICO's founder, sold and destituted himself. Shortly thereafter, his son, Leo Goodwin III, died of a drug overdose, a presumed suicide.46 Buffett did not own the stock, but with GEICO trading at $2 a share, he had sniffed out another situation like American Express. Here, however, the company didn't have a franchise strong enough to pull it out of the ditch. GEICO needed a tow truck. Buffett felt that only a brilliant, energetic manager had any chance of turning the situation around. He wanted to meet Byrne and size him up before committing any money to the stock. He had Katharine Graham call Byrne; after overcoming Byrne's initial resistance, she set up the meeting.

Buffett waited at Graham's Georgetown house after a Post board dinner for Byrne to arrive. "This is risky," he told Don Graham. "It could go completely out of business. But in insurance it's very hard to get an edge, and they have an edge. If they got the right person in to run it, I think he could turn it around."47 In came Byrne, red-faced, effervescent, forty-three years old, like a firecracker exploding. The two men sat down by the fireplace in Graham's high-ceilinged library. Buffett questioned Byrne for a couple of hours. Of all the Irish-Americans who would ever swing through Buffett's orbit, Byrne had the greatest gift of blarney, and "by a wide margin," Buffett says. "I was excited and babbling on and on and on," says Byrne. "Warren asked a lot of questions about how I thought we were going to stay out of insolvency and what my plans would be after that."

For Buffett, "the question was whether Byrne really was cool, unflappable, and professional, or whether he just didn't know what was going on."48 He decided that Byrne "understood insurance very well and had the analytical abilities. And he was a leader and a promoter. GEICO needed an analytical leader to figure out how to solve its problem and it needed a promoter to make that sale to all the constituencies that were involved."49 The next morning, Buffett met up with George Gillespie, the lawyer who had sold him the Post stock, because the two men were on the board of Pinkerton's, the detective company, and there was a board meeting that day.50 "George," he said, "it's pretty uncharacteristic of me, but today I bought some stock that really might be worthless tomorrow." He had just called Bill Scott back in the office and placed an order for half a million shares of GEICO for Berkshire, leaving another order to buy millions more as stock became available. Scott put together a huge block trade, buying $4 million worth of GEICO for him.51 Buffett had waited years for the chance to buy GEICO at the right price. The tow truck had arrived, but GEICO still did not have reinsurance, it needed capital, and both depended on the goodwill of Max Wallach, the regulator.52 But now a new phenomenon took hold. Buffett's margin of safety was his mere presence as an investor. Having Buffett as a backer-a now-legendary investor whose company already owned a successful insurer-gave Byrne a powerful card to play with the regulators.53 In addition, "General McDermott, the head of USAA, wrote a letter" to other insurers, says Byrne. The United States Automobile Association sold insurance only to military officers and behaved accordingly. Within the insurance industry, it was fabled, General Robert McDermott almost revered. He supposedly wrote that "in the military we never leave people behind; we have a fallen eagle here."54 Buffett went to see Wallach to do what he could to convince the crusty old public servant to ease up on the June deadline. But assembling the reinsurance deal was like convincing two dozen shivering children to hold hands and jump into a lake.55 To pull it off, the story Byrne was selling was that the worthless former management, befoulers of GEICO, had been tossed out; that what was left of the termite-riddled house was now clean; that the seasoned Jack Byrne, rescuer of Travelers, had helicoptered in to restore the damage; and so confident was the infallible Warren Buffett in Jack Byrne that he had plunked down a whopping $4 million on the stock.

Nonetheless, when Byrne started hitting the banks on Wall Street, "people were walking out in the middle of lunch," he says. "I got kicked out of everywhere." Then Sam Butler took him down to Salomon Inc. An old, respected specialist bond house, Salomon had never done an equity deal but craved to enter the lucrative business of underwriting stocks. John Gutfreund, an influential Salomon executive, sent a junior research analyst, Michael Frinquelli, and his sidekick, Joe Barone, to Washington to check GEICO out. "I kept them waiting for an hour and a half, so they were furious," says Byrne. "But I talked till the sun came up. And they were very blank-faced, but on the way to the airport, the company driver heard them talking, and he told me they were very, very enthused on the way back."56 "The insurance industry can't afford to let these guys go down," Frinquelli told Gutfreund. "It would be a terrible black eye on the industry, and these assholes will not tolerate that."57 But when Byrne and Butler arrived at Salomon's offices for his last-ditch attempt to raise the money, Gutfreund opened with a bruising remark: "I don't know who'd ever buy that fucking reinsurance treaty you're trying to sell."

"You don't know any fucking thing you're talking about," said Byrne right back.58 Displays of testosterone out of the way, Byrne made a passionate speech, citing "God and the national interest" among reasons why Salomon should raise the money, and referring to Buffett's investment. As Byrne waxed about GEICO's prospects and approached liftoff, Gutfreund fiddled with a long, expensive cigar. Finally, wrung out and crestfallen, Byrne ground to a halt. Then Butler said his piece. Byrne thought, from Gutfreund's demeanor, that they had failed. Then Gutfreund pointed at Byrne and said to Butler, "I will do this underwriting. I feel you've got the right guy, but you've got to keep him quiet."59 Salomon agreed to underwrite a $76 million convertible stock offering by itself. No other investment bank would participate and share the risk. GEICO had to consent to an SEC decree in which it neither admitted nor denied the SEC's conclusion that it had failed to disclose its losses to the shareholders-the mere description of which in a public offering prospectus would tend to poison the deal.60 To get the financing done, Salomon had to convince investors that GEICO would survive, yet the financing was what would enable GEICO to survive. The deal reeked of desperation, and investors could smell it. GEICO was getting such bad press, Byrne said, that if he had walked across the Potomac River, the headlines would have screamed, "Byrne Can't Swim."61 Buffett, the ace in the hole, was unperturbed by these events. When the offering looked as if it was not going to go off, he simply went to New York and met with Gutfreund, saying he stood ready to buy the whole deal-at a price. Having a backup buyer strengthened Salomon's hand, but Gutfreund also got the impression that Buffett wouldn't mind if the deal failed and he ended up buying all the stock.62 For Buffett, this was the ultimate no-risk deal. Naturally, the backup price he insisted on was low. Salomon told Byrne unequivocally that, given Buffett's ceiling, the convertible offering would sell no higher than $9.20 per share, not $10.50 as Byrne wanted.

Buffett wanted as much of the stock as could be had. He asked Salomon to buy all that was available for him once the stock started trading. Buffett's willingness to buy after the offering bolstered Salomon's ability to market the deal. Otherwise, Salomon would have had to jam the stock down its customers' throats.

Indeed, once the self-fulfilling prophecy of the sage of Omaha took hold, there was more demand for the stock than shares to be had.63 Buffett got only a quarter of the deal. Within a few weeks, after a total of twenty-seven reinsurers came forward to provide the required reinsurance, the common stock had quadrupled and was trading around $8 a share. And GEICO's savior, John Gutfreund, became one of a tiny handful of modern Wall Street figures whom Buffett genuinely admired.

But GEICO was still not fixed. Byrne needed a thirty-five percent rate increase in New York-and speedily got it.64 In New Jersey, Byrne went to the decaying old capitol of Trenton to plead with Commissioner James Sheeran, a handsome ex-Marine who prided himself on being tough. Byrne marched into the commissioner's office with a copy of the company's license in his pocket and told Sheeran that GEICO must have a rate increase.

"He had a sour-ass, little wizened actuary at his side who had been fired by some insurance company and had a bone to pick," says Byrne. Sheeran said his numbers didn't justify a rate increase. "I did all the arm-waving and stuff that I could, and Mr. Sheeran was intractable." Byrne pulled the license out of his pocket and threw it on Sheeran's desk, saying, "I have no choice but to turn in the license," or something to that effect but containing more four-letter words.65 He then drove back to the office with tires screeching, sent out telegrams to thirty thousand policyholders canceling their insurance, and fired two thousand New Jersey employees in a single afternoon, before Sheeran could go to court and get an injunction to stop him.66 "It showed everybody, all audiences, I was serious about this," recalls Byrne. "And that I was going to fight for the life of this company no matter what, including walking out of a state, which wasn't done back then." Byrne's impalement of New Jersey had exactly that effect. Everybody knew he was serious.

"It was like he had trained all his life for that position. It was like he'd been genetically designed for that particular period of time. If you'd searched the country, you could not have found a better battlefield commander. He had to assemble a team of people, he had to chop thousands of heads, and he had to change the thinking of those heads that stayed around. It was a Herculean job. Nobody could have done it better than Jack. He was a tough, disciplined thinker about pricing and reserves and he demanded rational business principles and actions. Everybody knew exactly what GEICO was all about, and he worked extraordinary hours focused on a single objective. He was always interested in what made sense rather than what had been done in the past."

Byrne walked through GEICO's door each morning, sailed his hat fifty feet up to the upper floor of the atrium, and hollered hello to the secretaries.67 "If I don't whistle by the graveyard, who is going to?" he asked. "If I don't dance, who's going to dance?" He had a way of making people feel tah-riffic about the place where they went to work every morning, despite the career-threatening status of their employer. He chopped forty percent of the company's customers, sold half of its profitable life-insurance affiliate to raise cash, and withdrew from all but seven states plus the District of Columbia. Byrne seemed to run on rocket fuel. He called his executives into meetings at the Sheraton and Westin hotels near Dulles Airport and questioned them for fifteen hours at a stretch, sometimes for days at a time.68 He interrupted GEICO's human-resources manager at the podium during a meeting by saying, "You're out," and named his successor from the audience that very moment. His attitude was: "You're not running a public library here, you're trying to save a company."69 "Jack was unmerciful on me," says Tony Nicely, who had worked for GEICO since he was eighteen years old. "He liked picking on young, aggressive people. But he taught me a lot and I will always be indebted to him. He taught me to think of the business as a whole, not separate functions like underwriting or investing. I learned the importance of a disciplined balance sheet."

Byrne told his workers if they couldn't meet a certain sales figure, they would have to hoist his 240 pounds on their shoulders into a sedan chair like a Roman emperor and bear him into company meetings for a year.70 They made the numbers. Wearing a huge chef's hat and a giant shamrock, "I cooked Irish dinners for them," he says. "Colcannon, which is turnips and potatoes and sour milk. It tastes terrible. I'd have these big kettles, and I'd pound these turnips, saying, 'Oh, this is going to be wonderful!'"

Buffett grabbed Byrne and his wife, Dorothy, and immediately pulled them into his circle of friends. Now, between GEICO, Washington Post meetings, Pinkerton's board meetings, West Coast trips for Blue Chip and Wesco, business trips to New York, board meetings for Munsingwear, a board that he had joined in 1974, and Kay Parties, he was traveling much of the time. Buffett decided that he needed help in the office. Pushed by Big Susie, one of her tennis friends approached Warren about a job as a sort of general apprentice. Dan Grossman, a bright Yale graduate with a Stanford business degree, even offered to work for free. Buffett didn't take him up on that, but latched on to Grossman with his usual intensity. Some thought that since neither of his sons wanted to work in the business, he saw in Grossman the chance at a surrogate son, someone who could potentially succeed him.

Buffett remodeled the office in order to install Grossman next door to himself. Gladys ran interference while Buffett spent hour after hour with him, explaining float, reviewing financial models of insurance companies, outlining regulatory filings, telling Grossman his stories, and leafing through the old Moody's Manuals. He played hours of tennis and handball with Grossman and added him to the Graham Group, where Grossman became friendly with many people.71 Warren had found yet another object of obsession.

41.

And Then What?

Omaha * 1977 Susie's friends would say that she created a separate life for herself within her marriage as a way to accommodate Warren's obsessions. As one put it, Warren's "real marriage was to Berkshire Hathaway." There was no getting around that fact. However uneasily, however, their routine had worked for them. At least, that is, it worked for them until another of Buffett's obsessions-with Katharine Graham-reached the point that it began to push Susie offstage. That was when she finally took action.

Warren now spent much of his time elephant-bumping at black-tie events in New York and Washington with Graham, or staying at her house for her Kay Parties. Despite his residual awkwardness and cackling laugh, he was meeting a circle of powerful, celebrated friends and acquaintances of Kay's that opened his eyes to a new world. "I met Truman Capote," he says about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, who had thrown the legendary Black and White Ball in Graham's honor at the Plaza Hotel in New York; the event became known as the "party of the century." Capote had been a confidant of many rich international society women.

"He would come down to her place and sit there, this little guy all kind of hunched down on the sofa, talking in this voice you couldn't believe. But he knew all the secrets of all of them. He really did know them, because they all talked to him. He was terribly canny. The one person he really liked was Kay. Unlike the rest, he just didn't feel she was a phony, I think."

Buffett had even been summoned by former British ambassador Walter Annenberg, who owned Triangle Publications, which held, among other lucrative properties, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Buffett's childhood favorite, the Daily Racing Form.

"Walter read about me in the Wall Street Journal in 1977. I got this letter that read, 'Dear Mr. Buffett,' and he invited me to Sunnylands," his California estate. Having heard stories about the famously thin-skinned ambassador from Tom Murphy as well as from Kay Graham, who had reason to know about how easily offended he was, Buffett was intrigued. Annenberg's father featured in many of the stories. Besides the publishing interests that he had bequeathed to his son, Moe Annenberg had also left him a legacy of scandal and shame, having gone to prison for tax evasion in connection with a racing wire he ran that telegraphed horse-race results to bookies all over the country. Of dubious legality, it was linked to organized crime, and added to his reputation for having mobster connections. Reportedly to save his son from prosecution along with him, Moe Annenberg copped a plea and was led into jail wearing a homburg hat and chains. Walter was later to say that his gaunt, pain-racked father, dying of a brain tumor in St. Mary's Hospital, whispered as his last few words, "My suffering is all for the purpose of making a man out of you."1 Whether this scene was real or imagined, Walter would later act as though he believed it.

Consumed by a drive to redeem his family's honor, Walter was now responsible for the support of his mother and his sisters. He learned the publishing business through trial by fire and proved a gifted entrepreneur. He dreamed up Seventeen magazine, then a booklet-size magazine called TV Guide, a brilliant conception that fed the public's appetite for information about television schedules, shows, and stars. By the time he met Buffett, he had not only become a great business success story but had reached the pinnacle of social respectability after Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to England's Court of St. James's. Yet even though he restored the family name, he never overcame the personal scars of his legacy.

Buffett arrived at Sunnylands filled with curiosity to meet Annenberg. The two already had a connection; Annenberg was the brother of Aye Simon, the "spoiled, spoiled" widow of Ben Rosner's former partner Leo Simon-the same Aye Simon whom Rosner had decided to screw when he had sold Associated Retailing to Buffett too cheap, because she was no longer his partner. On the one occasion that Buffett had met her, Aye Simon had entertained him in her vast art-filled apartment in New York City. Maids tiptoed back and forth carrying silver trays of cucumber sandwiches; Aye explained to Buffett that her "Pop," Moe Annenberg, once had his goons, known as "the boys," "take a few shots at Leo" to improve his attitude toward Moe. You can still see the bullet holes on a building on a certain corner of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, she told Buffett. Aye then asked for her son to join the Buffett partnership. Warren, "envisioning bullets" if he turned in a year of bad results, had "tap-danced" his way out of the situation.

Her brother, Walter, had spent decades establishing a reputation for propriety about as different from the image of bullets on Michigan Avenue as you could get. Sunnylands was a vast, opulent oasis in the desert in Rancho Mirage, California. Amid a garden filled with the images of Mayan sun gods, Rodin's bronze sculpture of Eve stood in a reflecting pool, covering her face in shame. Hundreds of floating bromeliads gazed up at her from the water beneath her feet. At Sunnylands, Annenberg had entertained Prince Charles, hosted Frank Sinatra's fourth wedding, and given his friend Richard Nixon peace and quiet to write his last State of the Union address.

"He had a courtly way about him and was very formal. We went outside in back by the pool, and Walter sat down. He was beautifully dressed and looked as though everything he was wearing had been bought that morning. He was about seventy at the time, and I was about forty-seven. And he said, in a nice, kind manner, as if he were talking to a young man he was trying to help, 'Mr. Buffett, the first thing you should understand is, nobody likes to be criticized.' That was setting the ground rules for getting along."

Nothing could be easier for Buffett. "I said, 'Yes, Mr. Ambassador. I've got it. Don't worry about that one.'

"And then he started in on 'Essentiality.'

"'There are three properties in the world,' he said, 'that have the quality of 'Essentiality.' They are the Daily Racing Form, the TV Guide, and the Wall Street Journal. And I own two out of three.'

"What he meant by 'Essentiality' was that, even during the Depression, he saw the Racing Form being sold for two and a half bucks down in Cuba."

The Racing Form had that quality because there was no source of better or more complete information about handicapping horses.

"It sold a hundred fifty thousand copies a day, and it had for about fifty years. It cost more than two bucks, and it was essential. If you were headed to the racetrack and were a serious racing handicapper, you wanted the Racing Form. He could charge whatever he wanted, and people were going to pay it. It's like selling needles to addicts, basically.

"So every year, Walter would go in and say, 'Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how much should I raise the price of the Racing Form this fall?'

"And the mirror would always say, 'Walter, charge another quarter!'"

This was when you could buy the entire New York Times or Washington Post for a quarter. And yet, thought Buffett, the New York Times and the Washington Post were great businesses! That meant the Daily Racing Form was an incredible business.

Annenberg enjoyed owning two of the Essentialities, but he wanted to own all three. The visit to Sunnylands was the beginning of a reel that he and Buffett would dance from time to time: talking about whether and how they could buy the Wall Street Journal together.

But "the real reason that he had me out there was to send a message to Kay."

The Annenbergs and the Grahams had once been friends.2 Then, in 1969, during the confirmation hearing for Annenberg's appointment as ambassador to Great Britain, the Post's muckraking columnist, Drew Pearson, penned a column saying that Annenberg's fortune "was built up by gang warfare" and repeated an unsubstantiated rumor that his father had paid $1 million a year in protection money to mob boss Al Capone.3 Annenberg, enraged, accused Graham of using her paper as a political weapon against President Nixon, the man who had restored the Annenberg family to respectability by taking the risk of nominating him for the ambassadorship. "President Nixon may have had his flaws," Annenberg said later, "but he paid me the highest honor that anyone ever paid the family."4 The morning of his confirmation hearing, Annenberg read another Pearson column that described at length his editorial vindictiveness at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He clutched his chest and his face turned purple. His wife thought he was having a heart attack.5 Annenberg called Graham to ask for a retraction. She tried to soothe his feelings, but said she never interfered with the editorial page.

That evening, after a stressful day of hearings in which Walter had had to defend himself one by one against the points made in the Pearson columns, the Annenbergs reluctantly went to Graham's Georgetown mansion to attend a dinner party for fifty guests to which they had been invited many weeks before. Upon entering the gilded splendor of Graham's drawing room, Annenberg-who cared deeply about protocol and who was well primed to take offense that night-did indeed take offense when Graham seated someone else next to herself and seated him between two of her friends, Evangeline Bruce, wife of the outgoing British ambassador David Bruce, and Lorraine Cooper, the wife of a prominent senator.

Annenberg's prickliness about anything he took as a slight resembled in many ways his friend Nixon's lack of perspective. He and Nixon also shared an unfortunate inability to charm and disarm.6 Thus, a feud that had been brewing between Mrs. Annenberg and Vangie Bruce over the decoration of the ambassadorial residence soon escalated and overshadowed the meal.7 Compounding this, Mrs. Cooper offended Annenberg by supposedly implying that he wasn't rich enough to be ambassador.8 Feeling that he had been set up, Annenberg stalked out of the party early and stopped speaking to Kay Graham.

"Kay was distraught about it. She wanted enormously to get along with Walter. Kay was not looking to have fights with anybody. That was not her style. She liked being in charge, but she did not like to show off. She liked big shots, and she liked big-shot guys, particularly. So it was not comfortable for her to be in a fight with him. But she also wanted Walter to understand that she wasn't going to tell Ben Bradlee what to write about in the paper.

"So by the time I went out to see him, he was thinking about having a book commissioned about Phil Graham, and how Phil's teeth were in a funny way."

Phil Graham's teeth.

"Walter had a theory that if you were gap-toothed, that was a sign of mental instability. And if Walter had a theory, you didn't argue with it. Walter liked me, but one reason that he liked me was that I never disagreed. If Walter said to me, black was white, I just wouldn't say anything.

"So I became the go-between with Kay." Annenberg expected Buffett to deliver the message that if he published the book about Phil Graham's teeth, well, that's show business.

"Meanwhile, he couldn't have been nicer to me. He put me in this super-fancy guest room. And he took me into his office, where he had a little display in a glass case of a Prussian coin, a pocketknife, and one other thing. It was all that his grandfather had in his pocket when he landed in this country from Prussia. And he said, 'Everything you see here is a product of that.' In a period of not that many years, Walter had rehabilitated his family. He did his father proud. And that was his number one goal in life, to do his father proud."

Buffett understood Annenberg psychologically yet never seemed to notice certain resemblances between the ambassador and himself. Probably this was because they were so different in other ways. Annenberg's humorlessness, his fondness for opulence and formality, and his enmity toward the Grahams set him strikingly apart from Buffett, and they were at opposite poles politically. Nonetheless, beneath their similarly paper-thin skins, these two shrewd businessmen shared a deep drive to prove themselves-both in business and in the social world-and a reverence for fathers whom they felt the world had treated unjustly.

They struck up a correspondence. Annenberg would come to think of himself, in an avuncular sort of way, as training Buffett in philanthropy. He thought rich people should give it all away before they died lest their appointed stewards dishonor their obligations.9 He wanted to warn Buffett of the potential pitfalls. Mistrustful by nature and always testing people-again, like Buffett in both respects-Annenberg had made a close study of failed foundations and the perfidy of foundation trustees. He sent Buffett examples of foundations gone wrong after their benefactors had died, along with chitchat about stocks and courtly correspondence. Buffett-a budding philanthropist and a publisher whose paper had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the failed stewardship of a major charity-read this material with interest. Annenberg conveyed to him his dread of an imperial administrator for his money, one who would conduct what he referred to as "foundation rapings" after he was gone.

"Dear Warren," he wrote, thanking Buffett for sending an article about Mac Bundy, who ran the Ford Foundation in a way that Annenberg deemed abhorrent,10 "Henry [Ford II] once described McGeorge Bundy as 'the most arrogant son of a bitch in the country, who developed the lifestyle of an Arabian prince on Ford Foundation money.'"11 Annenberg spent immense amounts of time scheming to avoid being double-crossed after he was dead. He told Buffett about the Donner Foundation, whose executive director had changed the name of the foundation to the Independence Fund, obliterating the founding donor.12 "I respectfully suggest you make sure that no one can tamper with the name of your foundation after you're gone," he wrote. "Remember Mr. Donner."13 Buffett thought otherwise about the foundation he and Susie had set up. "It should not have been named the Buffett Foundation," he said later. "It was dumb to name it the Buffett Foundation. But it would also be dumb to change it now, because it would be too obvious."14 He and Annenberg shared a fascination for media and publishing. TV Guide was Annenberg's greatest asset. It had the same "essentiality" as the Daily Racing Form, but a much bigger audience. Once Buffett got the idea that Annenberg was going to sell TV Guide, he and Tom Murphy flew out to Los Angeles to see if the imperious ambassador would sell it to them, fifty-fifty.

But Annenberg wanted to be paid in stock, not cash. "And we wouldn't give our stock away," says Murphy. "Warren never gave his stock away; neither did I if I could possibly avoid it. You don't get rich that way." Giving stock in exchange for TV Guide was saying, in a literal sense, that they thought it would earn more in the future than whatever share of Berkshire Buffett swapped for it. Paying with stock showed a sort of contempt for your own business versus whatever it was that you were buying-that is, unless you were paying with stock that had gotten wildly overpriced.15 As a rule, the way they ran their businesses and dealt with their shareholders meant that didn't happen, so they didn't buy TV Guide.

Nevertheless, Buffett continued to work as the go-between for Annenberg and Graham, who had been taking Buffett to etiquette school and preparing him for these elevated doings. She called him constantly about the smallest details of her life. He visited her rambling shingle mansion on Martha's Vineyard overlooking Lambert's Cove, and they traveled together often to business meetings and went, on a lark, to Niagara Falls. He took her to see one of his totems, the Berkshire textile mills. As the flirtatious, fifty-nine-year-old Kay was spotted tossing the forty-six-year-old Warren her house key at charity benefits and the two were seen together ever more often in public, by early 1977 the gossip columns had taken note, and, as Graham put it, "eyebrows shot up."16 Friends observed, as one put it, that the pair had "zero chemistry." Yet Graham discussed an affair candidly with her friends.17 She was obviously sexually insecure but tried to project the opposite, as illustrated in her memoir.18 Her mother, notably, was famous for pursuing (and flaunting) obsessive, flirtatious, but platonic relationships with powerful, brilliant men. Buffett himself would go on to develop a history of romanticized friendships with women. Whatever genuinely romantic elements the relationship with Kay may have had initially, however, at the heart theirs was a friendship.

But publicity upset the delicate equilibrium between Susie and Warren. Whatever else was going on in her life, she still cared very much about her husband. Moreover, Susie needed the people in her life to need her, even to be dependent on her. Now she felt discounted and trivialized. Yet she would never allow herself to look like the spurned Daisy Mae in public. She continued to stay at Kay's house when she traveled to Washington and smiled benevolently no matter how often her husband was seen with Kay. Some of Susie's friends believed that she was, in fact, indifferent. Others felt that she needed to be in control or that Warren's relationship with Kay gave her cover to live her own separate life in peace. Nevertheless, she made it plain to several friends that she was furious and humiliated. Her way of dealing with the situation was to send Graham a letter granting her leave to pursue a relationship with Warren-as if Kay had been waiting for any such permission.19 Kay showed the letter to people as though it let her off the hook.20 Susie was now working hard on a serious singing career. In 1976, she had approached the owners of Omaha's French Cafe, a formal restaurant located in a renovated warehouse in the quaint, cobblestoned Old Market district downtown, and suggested that she sing in their lounge, the Underground. They were astonished but gladly agreed. Susie had once hosted a benefit there for African relief-barefoot, in gingham, wearing a bandanna.21 Ads went up verifying the rumors that Susan Buffett would become a chanteuse. "This is very scary, but I've always wanted to live to the hilt,"22 she had told a reporter before her first performance.

She "lacked self-confidence," said a reviewer, but her "Ann-Margret youthfulness," "stylized jazz," and desire to please won over the crowd in the French Cafe's stone-lined basement cabaret. The audience was described as being made up of "uncritical friends" and people who attended out of curiosity to see a rich man's wife.23 Within weeks, Bill Ruane had said to her, "This is Broadway Bill. I've lined you up with auditions in New York." She did a three-week gig as an opening act at Yellow Brick Road, See Saw, Tramps, and The Ballroom. Afterward she said, "I've been asked back, but I'm going to be loose about the timing. Maybe after the first of the year. First I plan to find a musical director and put a package together. Now I know how hard it is, but I'm hooked on it, and when I go back, I want to do six months without stopping."24 She signed up with the William Morris talent agency.

That summer had taken both Buffetts to New York. Warren played bridge in Kay's apartment, and on other evenings Susie sang while he gazed at her rapturously from the audience. Her musical career bound them together-he was thrilled for her success. They considered buying an apartment in a landmarked building just off Fifth Avenue in New York City, which would have given them a permanent base in New York-but decided to pass.25 Susie was indeed loose about the timing, and by the fall of 1976 had made no plans to go back to New York. She still spent more time at Laguna than Warren. Moreover, her "clientele" around Omaha was a distraction. From Leila, who besieged Susie with hours of stories about the 38 wonderful years with Howard; to Howie, who was running a backhoe outside Omaha; to Dottie, who seemed to be sleepwalking through her life, so passive that one day when she called and reported that there was a big fire at her house, Susie had no sooner hung up the phone than she wondered whether Dottie had called the fire department. Susie phoned her sister back. Dottie said no, she had thought only of calling Susie.26 And all these responsibilities came only from the family; outnumbering them by miles were Susie's "vagrants," lonelyhearts, and local relationships.

Instead of setting up commitments to sing in New York, therefore, she scheduled another round of performances for the spring of 1977 at the French Cafe in Omaha. With that, a magazine published by the Omaha World-Herald decided to do a cover piece on the millionaire's wife who set out to become a cabaret singer in midlife. The reporter, Al "Bud" Pagel, started out with a routine story, approaching Susie's friends and asking them simple questions about her life. What makes Susie sing? he wanted to know. Like many people in Omaha, of course, he had heard the rumors about Susie's extracurricular activities.27 Susie's friends were "defensive" and "protective."