Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 5

With encouragement from Al Fleishman, St. Louis civic leaders jumped to Gussie's defense. Mayor Raymond Tucker sent a telegram to Senator Johnson praising Gussie as "an outstanding leader in St. Louis affairs" and stating that "the people of St. Louis do not believe the Cardinals are being run for business purposes." The president of the Chamber of Commerce sent a similar telegram "to inform you that this 100-year-old company and its president have brought great credit to this community through their business practices, civic spirit and community services."

Undeterred, Johnson prevailed upon North Dakota Republican senator William Langer, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, to hold a subcommittee hearing on his proposed bill. Testifying as the leadoff witness, Johnson described Gussie's purchase of the Cardinals as "a lavish and vulgar display of beer wealth and beer opulence," and warned that it threatened the very existence of baseball because it would force other brewery owners to buy major league teams in order to remain compet.i.tive. "When that happens, sport goes out the window," he said. "It just becomes a contest between big businesses. Not only will there be a monopoly in beer, but there will also be a monopoly in baseball."

National League president Warren Giles countered that the Cardinals sale had, in fact, "stabilized the national league and helped stabilize baseball."

Johnson's motives were called into question in that day's newspapers, which reported that he was also the president of the Cla.s.s A Western Baseball League and, as such, was worried that Anheuser-Busch's plan to broadcast Cardinal games in cities with minor league teams would cut into attendance. The press also revealed that Johnson's son-in-law was the majority owner of the Denver Bears Cla.s.s A Team, on whose board sat none other than Adolph Coors III, the chairman of the Colorado brewing empire.

Johnson admitted that his bill was aimed solely at the "St. Louis combination," which he described as "an unholy alliance" that was having "an unhealthy influence on the youngsters of America." To press criticism that he was "picking on" Anheuser-Busch while conveniently forgetting that the New York Yankees had been owned for years by brewer Jacob Ruppert with no apparent harm to the team or the sport, he retorted, "The business of brewing and baseball always were kept separate by Colonel Ruppert. Not one cent of Ruppert's beer money went into baseball."

Not surprisingly, Gussie was the only brewer called to testify at the Senate hearings. For the most part he held his temper in check and hewed to the line that the Cardinals purchase was purely an act of community service, not of commerce. "Anheuser-Busch was a leader in its field before any baseball broadcast, and even before organized baseball itself made an appearance on the American scene," he said. "If anyone wants to buy the Cardinals, they're open. All I ask is that they be kept in St. Louis." When Johnson asked what his price would be, Gussie responded sharply, "Exactly what we paid for them and put into them." Addressing the other subcommittee members, he said, "Gentleman, this was and is the only means known to me that would have kept the Cardinals in St. Louis." After a pause, he added, "St. Louis without the Cardinals wouldn't be the same."

From a public relations standpoint, he hit it out of the park. Illinois senator Everett Dirksen and Missouri senator Stuart Symington, both subcommittee members, came out strongly against Johnson's proposed legislation and praised Gussie and his "ill.u.s.trious family."

At day's end, Senator Johnson called it quits, telling reporters, "I'm through; I closed up shop." Then, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, he claimed victory: "The hearing accomplished its purpose of awakening baseball to the dangers it faces from corporate ownership of individual clubs."

Al Fleishman could not have hoped for a better outcome: the city had retained a beloved and badly needed sports franchise; the brewery had acquired a potent marketing tool; and St. Louis's most famous family had been cast in a favorable new light. As St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Jack Rice put it, "For 100 years, the Busches had been baronial and remote, now they were right down here with the people, playing baseball."

For Gussie, the episode resulted in an extreme makeover: his image as a bad-tempered, foxhunting, skirt-chasing millionaire was wiped from the public consciousness and replaced with that of benevolent city father and man of the people. And the city was busting its b.u.t.tons with civic pride. America may have had Mom and apple pie, but St. Louis had Budweiser and baseball, Gussie Busch and the Redbirds. Happy days were here yet again.

Not everyone was applauding, however. P. K. Wrigley, the owner of the chewing gum giant and the Chicago Cubs, cited his own company's experience when he harrumphed, "August Busch and his beer company right now believe the Cardinals are going to be a great advertising agent for them. But they are in for a rude awakening if things start going wrong for the ball club."

Wrigley couldn't have been more wrong. The Cardinals had a so-so season in 1953, coming in third in the National League, while Anheuser-Busch blasted back into first place by turning out 6.7 million barrels, 1.5 million more than second-place Schlitz. The Cardinals dropped to a dismal sixth-place finish in 1954, but A-B still bested Schlitz by 400,000 barrels that year. And so it went for the next forty years as the Anheuser-BuschCardinals combo proved to be one of the best marketing team-ups in the annals of American business.

One unforeseen effect of the Cardinals purchase was that it turned Gussie Busch into a national celebrity almost overnight. "Not many people wrote to me when I was just a brewery president," he said. "But as owner of the Cardinals I began to receive thousands of letters."

Sportswriters flocked to him and fed greedily on his salty observations about baseball and horses and women. It didn't matter if half the things he said couldn't be printed; he rarely disappointed and frequently astonished. As the Post-Dispatch's Jack Rice observed, "He so obviously says what he means, wants what he says he wants and expects to get it, that the simplicity of his drive and candor can be upsetting to people more accustomed to the subtleties of business. Or society." A perfect example occurred the day he was talking to a reporter about a longtime brewery employee who was retiring. After praising the man profusely, he blurted, "Of course, this has nothing to do with his wife, who is the biggest b.i.t.c.h that ever happened."

In the summer of 1955, he hit a national magazine trifecta. Ladies' Home Journal profiled him as one of "The 10 Richest Men in America." Life magazine published a nine-page pictorial by famed photographer Margaret Bourke-White, "The Baronial Busches," depicting him as the patriarch of a large and colorful clan whose "way of life adds a memorably exuberant and expansive segment to the American scene." And finally, Time magazine put him on its cover, dubbing him "The Baron of Beer" and lionizing him as an American business icon-"Trim (5 ft. 10 in., 164 lbs.), graying, hard as an oaken keg at 56, Gussie Busch operates on a simple formula: 'Work hard-love your work.'"

Both Life and Time mentioned Trudy in a single sentence, describing her in the exact same words-"his handsome third wife." No doubt it was the chauvinism of the age that led them to dismiss her so blithely, but she was much more than met the eye. When world leaders and Hollywood celebrities began coming to Gussie's castle door in the 1950s, it was Trudy who welcomed them in and saw to it that they were made comfortable, catered to, entertained, and cared for. It was a role she seemed born to play: Guinevere to Gussie's King Arthur. Without her in the years that followed, there would have been no Camelot.

5

THE MAGICAL BEER KINGDOM

During the first two years of their marriage, Gussie and Trudy lived in the Bauernhof at Grant's Farm, a quarter of a mile from the main mansion. The Bauernhof (which means "farmstead") was modeled on the traditional "fortress" farms of medieval Germany, which combined living s.p.a.ce for the family with shelter for animals and storage for farm equipment, all behind a protective wall.

This, of course, was an American millionaire's farmstead, with five apartments for servants and farm staff and a private two-story, six-bedroom "clubhouse" residence for the family. Gussie's father, August A., had his architects design a system for the stables and dairy barn that watered the animals automatically on the half hour, with the water temperature controlled by the stable master. Styled to resemble the buildings in Bavaria's medieval walled city of Rothenberg, the dramatic U-shaped structure was built around a huge wood-block courtyard enclosed by a white stone and timber wall, with an arched entry on the southeast side and sculptures of nesting storks along the roofline, an ancient symbol of good luck.

As luck would have it, Trudy gave birth to two children while they lived in the Bauernhof-Adolphus IV in July 1953 and, less than a year later, Beatrice in July 1954. Shortly after Beatrice was born, at the urging of Gussie's mother, Alice, they moved into the mansion, which the Busch family always referred to as "the big house." Alice, nearing ninety, remained in the sixteen-room "cottage" nearby. The move was not an easy decision for Gussie, who worried about the expense of operating such an immense household. He was reportedly the highest paid executive in St. Louis, with an annual income of more than $200,000. But he'd borrowed $600,000 from his mother to pay his ex-wife's divorce settlement, and he constantly complained that he was cash poor; all his wealth was tied up in company stock. He even sought the advice of his daughter Lotsie, who shared the Bauernhof quarters with him and managed the household accounts until she got married in 1948. "How much do you think I should give Trudy to run the big house?" he asked. "Would $1,000 a month cover it?" Her response was, "You must be kidding."

The big house had gone to seed somewhat since Gussie's mother and father had lived there. The ground floor was in need of new curtains, carpets, and furniture. When the huge Aubusson rugs in the living room and dining room were replaced twenty years before, it had cost several hundred thousand dollars. The children's bedrooms upstairs were now empty. The kitchen was obsolete.

"Okay, you can start to order things," Gussie told Trudy, "but make it as cheap as possible, because I can't afford it."

She ignored him completely and went at the task like the future Jackie Kennedy redecorating the White House. "I just bought and bought and bought," she recalled later. "The man from Lammert's Furniture came out to the house and we got the very best carpets from New York. It was amazing what [Gussie] had to spend."

Having grown up in the big house, Gussie knew its every secret hiding place and historic secret. The most stunning feature was the main staircase leading to the second floor, where a curved seven-panel window of Tiffany gla.s.s depicted a majestic stag standing in the forest. The ornate molded ceiling above the stairway was perforated so that the sound of an orchestra playing in the third-floor ballroom could permeate the house. Gussie's favorite places were the gun room-a parlor off the living room with a score of his father's animal-head trophies mounted on the wall and a marble fireplace big enough to burn five-foot logs-and his father's bedroom, with its large window providing the perfect vista onto the deer park right where a small creek cut across a rolling meadow and the herds gathered to graze and drink. Once, in an attempt to cheer up his bedridden father, Gussie led a newly acquired horse up the main staircase and into his father's bedroom.

Gussie was not a religious man, but the deer park pa.s.sed for his house of worship. Whenever weather and work permitted, he and Trudy loved to ride or "coach" through the park together, especially in the evening after dinner. On one such excursion, they had driven into the park in Gussie's convertible and were taking a walk around the lake when suddenly a huge stag confronted them. Trudy recognized the animal as Ike, an English red deer she had bottle-fed and cared for two years earlier after it was abandoned by its mother. Ike had followed her around for months, until he was old enough to be released back into the park. Now he was fully grown, it was the middle of rutting season, and by all indications he wanted to mate with her. He charged them with his antlers down, snorting, challenging Gussie. They ran back and jumped into the car, but Ike stood in front of it, locked his antlers onto the front b.u.mper, and began lifting the car on its suspension. Gussie told her to put the top up while he got out, ran around to the trunk, and took out a rifle. When Ike came at him again, he fired. Ike buckled, but then recovered and staggered off into the darkness. The next morning, Gussie went out and found him dying. He finished him off and had his magnificent head mounted on the wall in the gunroom.

With Gussie and Trudy in residence, the big house once again became the focal point of activity for the extended Busch clan and the company. No one loved a party more than Gussie, so he ordered them and Trudy organized and executed them with the help of her twelve-person household staff. Thanksgiving, St. Nicholas Day, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, family birthdays, team parties, employee dinners-they seemed to never end. One of them almost didn't. In the summer of 1954, after a drop in Budweiser sales in St. Louis, Gussie decided to invite every distributor, retailer, and bar owner in the area-anyone who had a hand in selling his beer-to a dinner party in the courtyard of the Bauernhof. In order to accommodate the 11,000 invitees, he and Trudy played host to 1,000 people a night for eleven straight nights. "When midnight came, my hand would be so swollen I couldn't move my fingers," he told Time magazine, which reported that Budweiser sales in St. Louis went up 400 percent after the marathon.

At a party for the Cardinals and their families, one of the players' wives gushed to Gussie that his wooded kingdom was so "magical," he should consider opening it to the public, "because children would love it." He jumped on the idea. He'd already begun replenishing his father's herds; now he started expanding his menagerie of more exotic animals to include tropical birds, monkeys, chimps, llamas, camels, longhorn steers, mountain goats, even black and grizzly bears. The cherry on top of the ice cream was his acquisition of a baby elephant, just thirty-nine inches tall and named Tessie II. Next he purchased a fifty-four-pa.s.senger, seventy-two-foot "trackless train" that could carry kids safely on guided tours past President Grant's log cabin and through the deer park, the animal enclosures, and the fifty-one-acre Clydesdale breeding farm. Naturally, he named the kiddie tram "the Budweiser Special." Finally, he set up a concession stand in the Bauernhof courtyard that offered refreshments at the end of the tour-hot dogs and sodas for the children and beer and pretzels for their parents-all of it, like the price of admission, free. He funded the operation, including the sixty-head Clydesdale farm, by having the company lease most of the property from him at a price that covered his costs.

Grant's Farm quickly became one of the most popular tourist attractions in St. Louis, with many children preferring it to the world-renowned St. Louis Zoo because most of the animals roamed free and could walk right up to the train and sniff you-or bite you, depending on their mood. Either way, it was an indelible experience. Visiting days were Monday through Thursday from May through August, and reservations were a must because the entire season was booked in a matter of days, forcing schools to reserve for their annual cla.s.s trips a year or two in advance. More trains had to be ordered.

The tours were routed away from the big house to preserve the family's privacy, but Gussie frequently walked over to the Bauernhof and waded into the crowds, shaking hands and kissing babies, running Tessie II, his chimps, and his blue-eyed c.o.c.katoo, c.o.c.ky, through their routine of tricks. He loved being the center of attention, the ringmaster of the circus. And he never lost focus on the fact that each person he touched was someone who could eventually buy his beer. He did not-perhaps could not-separate himself from the company. In his mind, they were all one-the Clydesdales, the Cardinals, Grant's Farm, and the family-joined together in the furtherance of a greater cause, the promotion of Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser. "My happiness is my business," he once told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, maybe a bit too candidly. "I eat it, sleep it, and dream about it. My family, of course, comes a close second to my love of my business."

Trudy, or "Troodles," as he called her, understood that better than anyone. She knew from the outset what he needed her to do and what the benefits would be. In addition to managing the household staff and the grueling entertainment schedule at both Grant's Farm and Belleau Farm, she accompanied him on business trips when he deemed it necessary, either because he didn't want to go alone or felt her feminine charm would be an added value. On his annual hops-buying trips to Europe, for example, her fluency in German and French proved enormously helpful in his dealings with the growers. Trudy not only shared Gussie's pa.s.sion for horses, she became one of the top compet.i.tive female equestrians in the United States. The "Swiss girl" who had seated customers at her father's Lucerne restaurant quickly blossomed into the world-cla.s.s hostess of one of America's most glittering residences. She beguiled Frank Sinatra on the ballroom dance floor, ministered to Ed McMahon after he fell down drunk in the living room and pulled the curtains along with him, covered for Andy Williams when he drank too much to sing for the guests as promised, and saw to it that Yul Brynner had a late dinner and good conversation waiting for him every night when he stayed at the cottage during his two-week run of The King and I at the St. Louis Munic.i.p.al Opera. Gussie was powerfully proud of her; she made him look good.

He was proud of himself, too, when she gave birth to five more children after Adolphus IV and Beatrice-Peter, Gertrude, Billy, Andrew, and Christina-all seven of them in the span of eleven years. He beamed when his older daughters Lilly Marie and Lotsie teased him about his remarkable motility, calling him "miracle man."

For the first time in his life, now in his mid-fifties, Gussie seemed settled. When he wasn't traveling on brewery business, he was home in time for dinner with Trudy and kids at 7:00 p.m. sharp. He and Trudy always sat side by side at the head of the enormous dining room table, speaking to one another in German when they didn't want the children to know what they were saying. In the fall and winter, when it was dark outside, the children were expected to show up at the table bathed, in their robes and pajamas, and ready for bed. The three-course menu was planned by Trudy but prepared and served by a kitchen staff that could be summoned to the table by a bell. Gussie brought his work home with him, of course, but in an inclusive way, enveloping them all in the latest tale of triumph or challenge at the brewery. He took pains to refer to it always as "our" company rather than "the" company, and he corrected them whenever they made the mistake, just as he did when they carelessly called their product beer. "Not beer," he would chide gently, "Budweiser." As a result, by the time the children reached the age of reason, they understood they were part of something bigger than themselves and even bigger than the family.

"Our father led us to believe that the business and the family were one and the same," Billy Busch recalled fifty years later. "We knew we were in the limelight, not because we were better than anyone else but because we were also a company that sold a wonderful product that people loved."

Gussie didn't involve himself in the minutiae of child-raising-what they were going to eat, wear, do, or which schools they would attend. He left all that to Trudy, along with the discipline. While he did not believe in hitting, she believed in it wholeheartedly. "She would beat you with whatever she could get her hands on," said her oldest, Adolphus IV, chuckling. Her favorite weapons were the "switches" fashioned from saplings that she seemed able to pull out of thin air. At the same time, she made the rounds to their bedrooms at night to read and say prayers with them before tucking them in. A devout Catholic, she herded them all to ma.s.s every Sunday, either at Our Lady of Providence Church nearby or in the small chapel she had built on the grounds, named St. Hubert's after the patron saint of hunters and designed to resemble her family's chalet in Switzerland. The Irish priests at Our Lady of Providence, Fathers Duggan and O'Reilly, were all too happy to celebrate ma.s.s at the private chapel of the impossibly rich parishioner that Providence had put in their path. They became, in effect, the house priests at Grant's Farm. A lifelong agnostic, Gussie did not attend services on Sunday morning, but he was there on Sunday night when the family gathered together in front of the TV to watch Bonanza.

Gussie insisted that the kids always kiss him h.e.l.lo and good-bye, but he rarely engaged in intimate conversations with them. Mostly, he dealt with them as a group, offering his counsel and dispensing advice at the dinner table. "Hold on to your gun until they convince you that their way is better," he'd say. Or, "You can always correct someone when they are wrong and back them in the corner, but always remember to leave a door open for them to get out." However, he made a point of telling them individually exactly where he stood as their father: "Right or wrong, I'm always behind you," he'd say. "But I expect you to do the right thing."

He also expected them to work. Growing up at Grant's Farm may have been comfortable and privileged, but it was not easy. With nearly three hundred acres to maintain, more than a hundred animals to care for, and thousands of tourists traipsing through, the estate provided endless potential for ch.o.r.es. The Busch brood was required to labor alongside the paid staff after school and on the weekends-pulling weeds, repairing fences, feeding animals, working the concession stand. April was always the cruelest month, as they prepared for the annual start of the tram tours. "It was almost like getting ready for a festival," recalled Billy, who was No. 5 among the children born at Grant's Farm. "Everything had to be made beautiful for the arriving tourists."

Gussie was a particularly difficult taskmaster because he'd inherited one of his grandfather's quirks, a fastidiousness that bordered on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Legend had it that Adolphus once decided not to buy a competing brewery because he thought the alley behind the plant was too messy. Gussie's children joked that he could "spot a broken branch from two miles away." As a result, a casual walk or a coach ride with him could turn suddenly into heavy lifting.

"You never saw Dad sitting around reading a book," Billy said. "When he was home he would be out on the grounds, and with his eye for detail there was always something he thought needed to be done-the gra.s.s here was too long, this needed painting or that wasn't clean. Sometimes it kind of got you down: 'Gee, Dad, this was supposed to be fun!'"

Gussie's quest for visual perfection extended to the pigeons that roosted in the eaves of the big house. He loved the all-white ones that he had cultivated, but could not abide the gray, black, and mottled ones that constantly flew in from the city. So there was a standing order to exterminate the interlopers, which prompted Gussie's loyal black valet, Frank Jackson, to tease him: "I notice you only shoot the colored ones."

By the mid-1950s, the Newark and Los Angeles breweries were producing at capacity. Gussie's plan to help pay for the latter plant with a 15-cent-per-case increase in the wholesale price of Budweiser had been a disaster, causing a steep drop in sales that let Schlitz regain the No.1 position in 1954. But he'd redeemed himself by acknowledging his error at the annual stockholders' meeting-"We made probably the worst mistake in our company's history and, as your president, I take sole responsibility"-and by spending most of the next year traveling the country in his rail car, repairing relations with distributors and enlisting them in the battle against Schlitz.

"That was the turning point for the company's sales," he said later. Lest anyone think his job was easy, he boasted that in one tour of local taverns on that trip he was required to consume forty-eight beers in eight hours. "I had to take a few shots of whiskey to warm up my stomach," he said. "That beer sure gets cold."

By 1957, Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser were back in first place on the heels of what turned out to be an historic ad campaign. Using photography instead of ill.u.s.trations for the first time, and depicting real people in everyday situations rather than formal ones, the ads marked the debut of Budweiser's nickname: "Where there's life, there's Bud."

After Newark and Los Angeles, Gussie set his sights on Florida for further expansion of A-B's production capacity. Construction began on a new plant in Tampa in 1957, but this time he envisioned something more than a brewery. The company had been offering guided tours of the St. Louis brewery since the repeal of Prohibition. Other breweries had tours, but A-B's were considered the gold standard. The historic Brew House-with its two-story turn-of-the-century chandeliers, dark stained wood, and baroque Germanic art-combined with the ornate Clydesdale stables to make the Pestalozzi Street plant a field-day destination for every junior and senior high school in the area, and one of the top tourist attractions in the state. The entire place was so brightly painted and sparkling clean that it resembled a Disney-designed diorama more than a fully operational manufacturing facility, giving the impression that you could lick the factory floor without fear, and it would probably taste like sugar. For those over the age of twenty-one, the tour offered a bonus of free beer at the end.

What Gussie had in mind for Tampa was a combination of the St. Louis brewery tour and Grant's Farm, with birds. He had an abiding pa.s.sion for beautiful birds. In addition to c.o.c.ky the c.o.c.katoo, he had a full-blown aviary in a screened room off his office at Grant's Farm and several cages of finches and songbirds around the big house. Without seeking the approval of his board of directors, he ordered that a fifteen-acre park be built adjacent to the new plant. Called Busch Gardens after his grandfather Adolphus's Pasadena estate, it would offer visitors a chance to sit and enjoy free beer in a lush tropical setting filled with parrots, macaws, toucans, c.o.c.katoos, flamingos, and various birds of paradise. Gussie was so intensely involved in the development of the park that he and Trudy went to Miami on a buying spree and brought cages full of brightly colored birds back to Tampa on the train.

Opened in March 1959, Busch Gardens was, more than any other aspect of the company, a pure expression of Gussie Busch's pa.s.sion. He would eventually expand it to seventy acres, adding a free-roaming wildlife enclosure that simulated Africa's Serengeti Plain and an incongruously themed restaurant called the Old Swiss House, a replica of the Buholzer family's restaurant in Lucerne, where he first met Trudy. He spent $13 million on the restaurant and presented it to her as a Valentine's Day present. Gussie's pet project became the cornerstone of the second largest theme-park operation in the United States (after Disney)-ten parks with 25,000 employees and 25 million visitors a year. "The parks were part of the old man's magic, like the Clydesdales," said Denny Long, who ran the division in the early years. "Gussie's magic was very expensive. His idea was to build goodwill. There was no concern for cost controls, but it sure helped sell the beer."

In May 1958 Gussie's mother Alice pa.s.sed away peacefully while taking an afternoon nap. She was ninety-two and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for some time. Still, Gussie took it hard. Even though her house was just a few hundred yards away from the big house, he held off telling the children that "Gannie" had died. "I can't talk to them about it," he said to Trudy. "It would be too upsetting for them." In truth, it was too upsetting for him. The flip side of his vaunted joie de vivre was that he "always had a problem dealing with sadness and death," Trudy recalled later. He relented after a few weeks when five-year-old Adolphus kept asking why they didn't have dinner with Gannie anymore.