Doris Buffett Interview: From HBO's "Becoming Warren Buffett"

well i was the oldest as you know and then my brother and then my sister and um i can remember specific things i can't remember day to day today but uh i can tell you this he was very good natured and he was very content and i remember one time when we went with our mother to a church circle they called them that and i can remember that i was busy investigating the entire house and actually got locked in a closet as a result of my wanderings but he was sitting by my mother the entire time with a toothbrush and he enjoyed that and he never you know whimpered or did anything he was very that was who he was which i it was so different for me it was that's why i remember i suppose he was good-natured uh he was quiet uh he didn't do anything destructive uh he didn't take it out on any of us or anything like he's just a very sweet kid i do remember one time my father would go to new york periodically on tr to check on businesses and stocks and things like that when you come back he always had a a costume for each of us if you believe that mine was once a cen senorita's costume with the hook skirt and the whole thing off i didn't think i was enough well one time he got a policeman's outfit complete with billy clinton and so i tormented him in some way and so he's coming after me this little thing waddling along and uh i i got myself into the bathroom and locked the door and he pounded on the door with his billy club and i sat in there laughing you know fiendish older sister and so when we when my mother came home she wasn't there at that moment when she came home and saw her dented door my brother got up spanking and i danced in the living room i remember that so fortunately that isn't the way it all went through the years but uh i remember that because he'd never done anything he didn't do things like that he was very patient quiet and agreeable and colorless you know but um and there's very very early it was hard to tell he was a genius at that point but i mean who was looking well i knew he was smart but then we were all supposed to be smart and um i heard things about him when he was at um college at um what's that one in pennsylvania and morton yeah and uh he had a roommate who was a friend of mine had been at my age and the roommate said it'd just drive him crazy because he he studied all the time when warren would come in like 15 minutes before the exam and just aced his way through it so we were really beginning to catch on at that point because he had so many interests you know he owned a rolls-royce in 1927 or something like that and and uh once he had a hearse and my mother made him take it away because it was in front of our house and we had a neighbor whose husband had just died and she didn't think the hearse was too attractive but um he but he was always busy or else he was he probably told you how he you know he went in and got used golf balls that had gotten in the pond and nearly asphyxiated themselves and uh he um ran away from home once when he was in junior high i think up to somewhere in pennsylvania uh and they got him back i don't remember conversations or anything about it but it was very daring and um with the son of another congressman that we'd known in fredericksburg shed me terrified and i i know one time when he was interviewed someone asked about that and he said i couldn't do anything to help her and he actually wept so i got the brunt i was i was a whipping boy because i couldn't have been anything else i was just you know marriage sunshine and um so it was dreadful me and it was he said i couldn't do anything to help her and he really felt terrible about that and he also thought it was a miracle i didn't end up in a mental institution because it was really tough really tough i hate the sounds because i think it sounds whiny but it was dramatic and it went on all the time uh my fa no one let's see oh i know when i'd wake up in the morning i'd listen to hear her voice i could tell by a voice it was going to be a terrible day or not you know and then daddy the next sound i heard was my father going through the front door to go to work so he was exempt from all this and really didn't know it i don't know the three of us my shrinks at one point said i can't believe that all three of you kids conspired not to tell your father well i think we were terrified of her i don't know what it was i've tried to figure that out but she made it really clear and it was particularly clear warren and my sister saved my life i like to say at one point because i was a dramatic teenager and i'd gotten a letter from some boy and i was just gonna throw it in the fireplace there was unfortunate little fire going on in the fireplace and the flames came up like this over the metal piece and my mother and father were both gone so we sat down and figured out what we're going to do to save my life and so bertie i think took the wrap on that so i always have to be grateful for that i mean once i remember as a kid i was going to you know pack up and take off and i had a place i saw on the on the streetcar line which said they'd rent rooms and i thought i'll move in there and then i will what do you do panhandle that's what i was going to do i must have been eight or something like that and um so i said i was gonna do that she said i'll help you pack and and um but it was cutting and you know if i had to choose between your children and daddy it'd be your father you know she came from a home that was always almost dickensian and her mother was really bad off and um my grandfather had the he was a superman of schools and i remember because he always had a um bare skin or something like that as he rode around in the winter and no carriages yet but no cars yet and uh so and that lunch they would come home and he bought the newspaper he left the school thing and bought a newspaper because he could be there all the time to watch over his wife he adored her and um i remember they said that she would if she went away to california she was okay there but the minute she came back to west point west point was a really competitive town if you ask somebody for a recipe they'd give it to you but they'd alter it so you never had the cookies or the whatever it was never turned out as well as your neighbor so she was english now this sounds really this is just old-timey stuff because it's we're talking about 1910 or something like that and the movement west when they came to as far as west by county that was all english the next town was german and a lot of these she was born in bancroft which was the english town and when she moved to west point she was thrust in with all these tough heavy ladies that didn't you know wouldn't put up with anything so grandpa ran the paper and at lunch they would do mental math that sounds like fun doesn't it yeah when we lived in washington then she had migraines there steadily and it was hard on her she didn't want to live in washington oh but she'd always do with daddy and he of course asked her before she signed up i bet he did but anyhow he really wanted to go to congress and and for his own wonderful lofty reasons and so uh she always covered for him always made him two feet taller and you know that well we recorded his song i think it was battle him the republic probably because that was his and my one of our bonds we both loved that music and i remember doing it and warren's been just sick ever since because somebody got rid of it you know it just doesn't exist uh once we went to a church dinner and there was an artist there and she was going to pick out somebody from the audience draw that person and give them what she'd done and for so i couldn't believe it she picked me so i sat up to her and got the paper when it came home it later disappeared she threw it away and that went on for you know a numbers of times but that's the one i remember the best because i was tickled to think somebody done this pastel portrait amazed as a matter of fact we were on the circuit there were five counties and uh we were a nice wholesome looking family and behaved ourselves and we're part of the team his uh his priorities were first his faith second his marriage and children i think and the third one was and then making money you know enough to live on and all that so i mean he he started a business down in south omaha which was for the south omaha feed company or something that's where the stockyards used to be i remember when we were teenagers we would go down there to talk to somebody on saturday morning that worked there and we were just rolling around because it smells so bad in the stockyards you know my father says that's the smell of money you know oh that's terrible and so um if actually he said that the fact that he had that income made it possible for him to run for congress and i don't know if warren told you about the time when they had an election which he won and um uh then they voted the congress at that time when they came back they voted themselves a raise i think maybe fifteen thousand dollars was a sum total at that time and he said no the voters of nebraska did not uh put me in office at this higher rate but and so i'm going to turn the money back to the to the treasurer every month and then if they decide to elect me next time at 15 000 or 17 five or whatever it was then i'll take it now i don't there was anybody else that did that now it's a hundred and some thousand dollars and nobody and it's automatic you know so they can escape it he corrected me three times in my life that i could remember i deserved each one but i was learning and he was just he would look at me in the rear vision mirror of the car and that was a really big treat for me ah so but on the other hand i don't believe they came to my graduation in high school they may have but there was just nothing made of anything like that so oh brilliant at math yes she could you know i guess they still had these things where you cranked them and things added up and she could add it in her head faster than the machine could do it she was absolutely amazing in that oh yes i don't have any hesitation saying that of course he was they all were and most of them unless they were the therios you know that they're all stumbling around and woodrow wilson high and we went he and he and i met at a certain corner during classes at some point he never spoke kept his head down like this i don't know what that was all about but my girlfriends would come with me and they thought that was really funny so he's always had that dexterity both in his mind and the ping pong and all that stuff that he did we all talked at the dinner table and uh that was sort of a jovial time um but other than that he was hidden behind a newspaper my father was our books he read and read and um and he listened to um marches on the on on the right not the radio but the phonograph player and um uh he and i had a special thing about the battle hymn of the republic so that was our meeting point and you i don't i guess i'd have to say that it was before the the time of family councils you know we had one neighbor that did that and we just yearned to have a family council everybody got to speak but it never they made fun of it so um that stopped a lot of things by making fun i i learned a lot of stuff i heard a lot of stuff that i wish i'd never heard because it was it was a um it's derogatory it was uh questioning people's motives um and that you're just little ears listening all this stuff going on and i didn't realize that until maybe a few years back that i had been filled up with a lot of propaganda or prejudice and um and then you have it in your head you know and then the rest of your life you spend stomping on it or something because it isn't right but that's the way it was we're all democrats now i'll tell you uh yeah i think that's very interesting too but it was um i was after after we came back from congress i'd have to think a little bit about what opened it up without going into the whole detail about susie which comes later well my sister knew her better because they had a triplex or something at northwestern and i had never met her and i don't even think i'd met our parents but they were sort of the same general generation and besides that activities i don't know what they were but i just know this that anybody asked me about susie i said she's the best thing that ever happened to our family she really was best friend i ever had now she and i had one of our one of the tenants or the basic things to our friendship besides just liking each other and laughing a lot was that we love music and she wrote a letter to her mother and i've got it somewhere and she said i have no idea that dodo you know love music but we were in new york and we went to all these crazy places to hear the music and she when we were in omaha then later on bb king came to town and i had never heard bb king but she had and i think we're the only white people in an auditorium that seated 6 000 on one literally so um we went to town on that that was a that was a big thing and then we all we also had a sort of running not contest but you know uh of greeting cards we loved greeting cards and um they had to be perfect now when i was in hospital later on in maine with cancer she sent me this the queen of all cars well there's one that's better than that but this is a second this comes to say this guy's in his hospital bed and he has a you know thing that holds cold water ice on his head and and it says i hear you're sick and then you turn the page and it says if you die can have your stuff now you can't send that to just anybody and that's the the card was sort of worn looking she had it so long because she there was nobody she knew that would laugh and of course i did laugh and so uh we had this thing it just went on for uh it's just as strong as it could be it at any time and we'd shop and we'd go down warren said that the merchants would bring the stuff out on the sidewalks for us so we wouldn't miss anything she did go to california and i went out to visit her almost immediately we really had us we had a sister relationship we trusted each other i was learning every day from her every time she opened her mouth i got a new point of view on things i um she gave me the book man searched for meaning which became my bible i must have given away almost 100 of them now i'm going to give them to a whole new batch of people because i think it tells you that you have choices you can make even if you don't think you can and so um so we had that in common we love that i love that book and then uh mainly we just enjoyed being in each other's company we really did as i said that letter she wrote to her mother and said i didn't know dota was interested in these things and it makes us we'd i saw a lot of them they they would come to new york and they'd invite me up and i'd sleep with the living room of the corner suite of the plaza and then um warren would do whatever he was doing and we were out looking at the town checking everything out we never did not have something to say to each other love acceptance um kindness um very smart um hope no she's very cool she was i don't mean cool but i just mean centered whatever people were using the word today um she uh she i think very early she knew he i know her father said this some form of this that that she ought to marry him and she was in love with somebody at northwestern at the time and but warren noticed that her doc played the ukulele so he got a ukulele and they played together and he just camped there until uh between the two of them she was very young but 19 18 something like that and never went back after the first year uh at northwestern and um i i can't tell you what her emotions were at that time but there was some element of of realizing that he was a special person i don't want to misrepresent her because i have nothing but an admiration for a total period that's it um but she was on the other side of this thing she was cared about people that's what it wasn't and she took very good care of people whether it was a black taxi driver woman she went to the when that woman was ill and in the hospital and susie wanted to visit and read and all that kind of stuff she did she had time for that when my aunt alice had cancer susie came over every single morning and fixed her breakfast because she thought she'd get off to a good start that way and that's when she had little kids she had help too but i mean still that was her own idea and it was a wonderful thing millions of examples like that she just uh he was just totally enamored of her and why not she of him in a different way but at the same the same degree and she her ideas on various subjects changed over the years and so did his and just kept up but she had a whole different concept of herself as having a life than everybody else of our generation he just didn't even think about it but she wanted to sing and she said i remember i think what she said was i've spent 25 years with you and i've loved every minute of it where's that effect and now i've got to have something the children are gone they'd all gone off to college and so and he was just heartbroken but that's what happened and she became very active in san francisco with gay the gay community and um she just had a big heart for she was just not judgmental that's you know and i was raised from the most judgmental place in the usa we all all three of us were and it was it was softening him now it didn't show all the time but and he missed the boat on a couple things as far as i was concerned but that was the old that's what had been drummed into it he was religious about not making negative statements i was trying to think once we were the dining room table and he said he stopped himself he was going to make one and he caught himself in shop so um and she also not all she didn't just encourage him on on being a daddy she forced him to be a daddy and she said anybody be a father but take special work so we're going to get on this overnight train and we're going to go down the floor you know some texas or someplace so he could be a daddy and but he had a lot on his mind at the time you know he was remarkable in in his temperament because i think he had the ideal temperament as well as the ideal brain power and strength of whatever it took because he came to the top of the stairs and he had this sort of sick expression on his face and he says well he says this is early he says we just lost a million dollars i think it was a million but it wasn't 30 billion or something and it seems that some lawyer had made a mistake and um but he he fixed it he flew out to san francisco and fixed it and came home but and that guy he thought was going to be on the supreme court but he never heard about him again so um i don't think he was ever bitter but he's able to cut people off and they never it's over you know members of the family even and with her he could have gone over the edge but when she came into the field she was the balancing force when was she not sick i mean she had these problems with her her migraine headaches i remember once she went to some kind of party and susie got one because there was a wonderful chocolate dessert we both adored chocolate that was another very strong bond that kept us together through thick and thin and so she so she thought she was she had to go home she was sick so she ate chocolate all the way because she feared she'd already done the damage you know so um um there was a lot of whimsy and and we both found a a drug my dad dennis gave me this drug in a big court jar like this that was made ambar i think was the name of it i made you have more pep and we only each had three kids you know and so on sorry but we needed more pip and one time um she took the wrong one and i took the wrong one so i was up and at them you know and she was dozing off all day long just the opposite of what we needed but we were really just like fun fun serious zany enjoy enjoying each other's company she didn't have the best health i that was we were used to you know stout german whatever and she didn't have that it was just overwhelming warren said she's not going to make it and but she did through that period that i'm talking about and then that when they're in wyoming that's when she died i think she had a stroke bonnell kissed me that's what happened at that he doesn't seem to remember but anyhow uh yeah i did it was heartbreaking it was killer and various people spoken had their say and it was just sad yeah i was up in maine and i had the tv on and come here come the three of them and um somebody interviewing them and they're talking about what they're going to do and um i thought well that makes sense because that's um to a degree anyhow because susie would want to see it you know spread out and do some good and they certainly didn't need any of it to live on so and then in about a week i it doesn't affect me it's what i basically i'm saying that too i never thought it would but anyhow uh i get this letter and it's from a woman in florida who's writing to him and she had seen this some more of this stuff on tv about the gates and what he was doing and so uh she uh so he he sent me the letter and wrote on the top of it um would you be interested in helping with this so i called the three members of my various student board and i called diane and i said diane i've got this letter tell us about this and that and and um do you think we ought to do this and she said i could see her pursing her lips and she said i don't think that's a very good idea because be too hard on you and uh so i said well thank you very much and the next morning we called and said yeah i'll take them well the first letter we got was something like two to four hundred letters and it was like laying them out on your dining room your living room floor and then your den if you had one and we didn't i didn't know what in the world i was gonna do to do but i knew that was the chance of a lifetime for me because that's what i love to do and so um so i called him back said yeah we'll take him and um then he said i'll how uh they were coming in at such a rapid rate and the problems were so terrible and we've never done it nobody's ever done it the way we did it you know and it's the most brilliant plan that ever came down the pike it really works and i'm so happy about that um that was the beginning of sunshine lady so um well we've done a few things before but this was big magnitude stuff and so um let me think what was the next thing so he sent us these boxes and then he said i'm going to give you 5 million but then he raised it to 10 million and he said you know take him over so um i'm not just bragging when i say it's the best it is the best and it's remarkable but it's the right combination of people and then we had a wonderful culture you know they have a culture to us at berkshire hathaway but we were doing the same thing parallel and so um i had to find people to help me and they wrote they put a notice in the episcopal church over in the next town you know looking for people to read letters because by that time we probably had five thousand or something i mean it was just overwhelming and then we developed a form that we used to find out if they were telling the truth and we signed up for a place you wrote and the boys in the basement could check anybody out so that was what a bonus that was and so um uh we started in and we um we have a book we have a book that's yet to be written there because we saved all the letters and uh it was sad in the beginning in this past summer we started reading them to see if with the idea of culling out some things for a book and um and i in reading as fast as we could developing the letter just as fast as we could shoring up this you know these points and then um uh oh darn it i can't remember what's doing this i guess i'm trying to convince you that we it was not a what do i say a charity minded lady deal nor was it paying any money to any of us and it took about three months ago i finally figured out i was working full-time for war and getting paid nothing [Laughter] oh but anyhow we uh we have answered and dealt with over 22 000 letters this is not a joke this is not a little game for all little society people because we aren't society people at all we had high standards and nobody nobody was getting rich and these women were all we got them a phone and put it in their house and that was their phone for the sunshine lady and then we had a questionnaire as time went on we promptly did this but anyhow determine how much their income really was what are they spending it on and if they smoke well sorry i can't do that we said it's i said this is a um um it's a collaborative effort and if you're not willing to do your part good then you know that's that we're not either we're not doing it because we got more than we can we don't need any more clients or anything like that and it was remarkable how it worked it was just dandy and uh very sensible and straight to it and mainly we had to convince them that there was a collaboration it wasn't a throwaway well i think his legacy first of all is going to be integrity because he just doesn't screw around or do crazy things there and he never talks bad about anybody as i said to you uh what did he say oh yeah once i told him about a um an editor of a magazine and someone had who was mad at me had gotten their secretary ha ha to write a letter into national reveal and it was scathing it was terrible and my mother and father had been friends of the buckley's i had known them but i mean sort of adored each other as a matter of fact and so i um so i wrote to him and um you know i i wish he'd contacted me first before he or she had do a check on it or something that was all i was doing so i was telling warn about it and he was sitting there and his face was like the street ahead he said he'll want something someday oh and so i didn't i stopped worrying about but and then on another person one other person this was an ex-husband um he said because he'd really been bad and he said well he will um he will let's see he won't get anywhere or something he was moving on and i didn't ask why and then bertie called and said why did you say that he's i guess it sounded just like oh the mafioso or something and he and the answer was well he knew people everywhere so his days were numbered you know he won't well it was kind of funny but anyhow he lived through it there she was my father was gone they had this house belonged to her second husband my mother's second husband and um he had he was out of it he was alzheimer's and although he didn't know that name at that time and then he died and um and that she could keep the house as long as she was going to live in it but um one day she went to the hospital for a checkup or something when she came home they moved her out and she was in an old folks home and um you know out we all came and took the stuff we wanted and it was gone and then uh but they told her that warren was worried about her safety oh then it's all right so that's how she went over there she i remember visiting her shortly before that and i thought god his bathroom's dirty and the kitchen is dirty and this is not my mother at all and so i was up there polishing taking off the top of the refrigerator and she came in she just you get down from there i mean she was really mad and she said i said well what are you gonna do about the toilet you know and she said it'll take care of itself so obviously we weren't tracking too well and it was a problem so they thought they were there and so that's when she went to the the home and i went several times to see her but it was just her the thing she'd come back to would be you've got to you've got to admit that i gave you the best father in the country or in the world yeah and she had about six things she could say that made sense and repeat them every every time and once we were in the restaurant and um um she was going through no no apartment that's true she was going through the routine but the thing was that she called birdie or birdie called her brother later on and she's going through about six or seven little things that we could predict and and we sure knew about them and uh then she said you know it's very strange to think i was once a functioning adult boom something clicked it was an amazing thing so she she was a good sport of course and she would do whatever i wanted you know if that made her warn happy and he didn't worry as much uh that was the way it was so and she would always say i'm in the best room and you know it always had to be she was explaining she was being well taken care of so so she died and we went to the funeral and um can't think of much more than that but a lot of her friends had died oh i know i went out there i don't know what i was thinking and i said i said well where's your bridge group because she had about 17 of them and she was a crack player i don't know she said they just stopped happening or something like that and obviously they'd cut her off and because she couldn't play bridge anymore so well she'd always wanted to be a singer first of all that i can tell you and she talked about it from time to time and the big move in omaha was we all went out to it and uh warren sent flowers and so on to back her up he always backed her 100 if that's what she wanted to do like like she said when they were telling him about how she went out to california she said i've spent 25 years of my life you know i don't know that she said making you happy but any i don't think she'd say that but i've spent i've spent the first 25 years you know first 25 growing up this was with you and now i really have to do something for myself this is something i really really want to do so um so she did and i was there in the hotel she moved into because it had a beauty shop and a restaurant um it was sort of a residential hotel and he phoned and he said he was just coming to pieces and she said no no i may have to go home but he pulled himself together and she said this is also typical she said i'll need 75 000 for christmas presents so that's the way i went

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Id: 6C5IuD6rZjc

Length: 34min 58sec (2098 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021