Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 6

In her will, Alice left Grant's Farm to Gussie and forgave the $600,000 loan she'd given him for his divorce settlement with Elizabeth. The bequest didn't sit well with his sister Alice, who had expected to inherit an interest in the historic family home. His brother Adolphus's heirs were already upset that he had somehow managed to acquire their father's half interest in Belleau from August A.'s estate. And his cousin, longtime pal and most recent best man Adalbert von Gontard, was none too happy that Gussie had fired him as head of advertising. "Adie" had been with A-B for more than thirty years; he was an officer of the company, a member of the board of directors, and a large shareholder. The Busch and von Gontard families were close; the children were friends. Nonetheless, Gussie banished Adie from the kingdom. The perception was that he blamed his cousin for the company's drop to second place behind Schlitz. His only stated reason to the family was that Adie had purloined spent grain from the brewery to feed to his pet peac.o.c.ks, which they thought was laughable; the grain was worthless and would have been thrown out otherwise. They knew Gussie would have given the grain to Adie if he'd asked for it. That was the point, Gussie said. Adie had not asked his permission, but had done it "behind my back."

If Gussie felt bad about all the family discord he'd sown, he didn't show it. As the 1960s dawned, he was a man in full. With four breweries running flat out and a fifth planned for Houston, the company was setting record after record for barrels produced, revenue earned, profits returned, and dividends paid. A close friend of both former President Truman and future president Lyndon Johnson, Gussie was now a kingmaker in national politics, having played an important fundraising role in the election of John F. Kennedy. As Kennedy's campaign coordinator, Ma.s.sachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill, recalled later, "All you had to do was tell Gussie that money was getting tight and more was needed. In a few days, a package would drop from heaven. Gussie raised it faster and easier than anybody in that era."

Gussie and Trudy traveled to JFK's inaugural in the Adolphus, along with their guests Harry and Bess Truman and Gussie's longtime pal Tony Buford and his wife. But when they got there, Gussie wasn't satisfied with their seats at one of the inaugural events. He yelled at Buford, "You're supposed to have a lot of pull in Washington, Buford, so get us a better box." Pointing to where the president and First Lady were sitting, he said, "I want to be up there." When Buford told him that was impossible, Gussie responded, "Either you get me up there with the Kennedys, Buford, or I'm sending you back to Jefferson City where I found you." Buford reportedly quit on the spot, and he later went to work for Falstaff, for which Gussie never forgave him.

Every spring, Gussie and Trudy took the kids to Florida on the train and spent time at the three-house compound Gussie had purchased on the beach in Pa.s.s-a-Grille, outside St. Petersburg. That's where the Anheuser-Busch "fleet" was moored for his use-an 84-foot yacht named Miss Budweiser, a 41-foot Rybovich deep-sea fishing boat named Miss Bavarian, and a 120-foot million-dollar yacht called the A & Eagle. Trudy and the children typically returned to St. Louis after a few weeks, and when they were gone, a group of Gussie's buddies-usually including St. Louis Cardinals announcer Harry Caray-would descend on St. Petersburg and take up residence in the compound for another few weeks of fishing, drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Gussie's definition of male marital fidelity could be summed up as: No mistresses, no emotional affairs, but casual, no-strings-attached coupling was okay so long as it was by mutual consent, in which case it was perfectly natural, like rutting, the male prerogative. Female fidelity, of course, was a different story.

All in all, Gussie was living a life that Louis XIV would have loved. Everything he touched had turned to gold, with the exception of his baseball team.

In ten years under A-B ownership, the Cardinals had not won a pennant. Gussie had burned through five managers and was planning to fire his sixth, Johnny Keane, who had guided the team to a second-place finish in 1963. The '63 team had ended the season winning nineteen of its last twenty games, yes, but everyone knew how Gussie felt about being second. The city was marking its bicentennial in 1964, and Gussie had been named by the mayor to head a committee of civic leaders tasked with planning the year-long celebration. A new 50,000-seat stadium was under construction near the downtown riverfront, rising in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, which was also nearing completion. Gussie had been a prime mover in both projects. In the case of the new Busch stadium, he had pledged $5 million toward the original $20 million financing package. His board pushed back, first suggesting a contribution of $1 million, then $2 million, until he beat them into submission by banging his fist on the conference table and bellowing, "No, G.o.ddammit, no! I said five million!"

All of which explained why he considered it do-or-die time for the Redbirds: If they didn't do it this year, then someone was going to die. His general manager, Bing Devine, took the first bullet. The team was in seventh place, trailing the league-leading Philadelphia Phillies by eleven games on June 15, when Devine and manager Keane made a controversial trade, sending star pitcher Ernie Broglio (18 and 9 in 1963) to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for the Cubs' .251-hitting outfielder Lou Brock. In his first fifteen games with the Cardinals, Brock batted .398 and stole nine bases. But the team still trailed the Phillies by nine and a half games on August 16, when Gussie pulled the trigger on Devine, who'd been the architect of the team that included future Hall-of-Famers Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, and now Brock himself. Then word leaked to the press that Gussie was negotiating with former New York Giants manager Leo Durocher to take over as manager of the Cardinals, which embarra.s.sed Keane and angered many of the players. With the Cardinals eleven games behind the Phillies again a week after Devine's firing, Gussie was so frustrated that he kicked a hole in the wall of the Red Bird Roost, his private viewing suite atop the stadium.

Then, suddenly, the Cardinals took flight. In what is regarded as the wildest pennant race in the history of major league ball, the Cardinals won twenty-one of their last twenty-nine games, including a three-game sweep of the Phillies, who lost ten games in a row. The Cardinals won the pennant in St. Louis on the last day of the season. The city went crazy. There hadn't been such an orgy of beer guzzling since the morning of April 7, 1933, and this time the beer didn't run out.

The Cardinals went on to beat the Yankees in seven games in the World Series. The very next day, Johnny Keane, still smarting from Gussie's Bing DevineLeo Durocher debacle, announced that he was resigning as manager of the Cardinals to become manager of the Yankees. Devine and Keane were popular with the sportswriters, players, and fans, so Gussie found himself vilified in the newspapers and on radio and TV, accused of "destroying" the team he once was lionized for saving. As if that weren't enough, for the second year in a row, the respected St. Louis-based Sporting News magazine named Bing Devine baseball's "Executive of the Year."

It was easier running a brewery. During the first week of December, Gussie was informed that new computers used to measure production indicated that a record-setting ten millionth barrel would pour out of the pipes at the Pestalozzi Street plant the following week. Elated, Gussie pressed to find out exactly when the milestone would be hit. At 10:34 am on Tuesday, December 15, he was told.

At 10:15 on the designated day, Gussie and a group of company officers walked out of the administration building at 721 Pestalozzi Street and marched up the block to the bottling plant, where eight Clydesdales were hitched to a bright red wagon fully loaded with cases of beer. Employees lined the street, and a bra.s.s band began to play as Gussie led a parade into the plant and along the corridors to the racking room, where filled barrels were sealed with rubber plugs in a process called "bunging." At exactly 10:34, he was handed a silver mallet and a plug, and in two attempts he managed to bung the ten millionth barrel. The band then led the way out of the building, and he climbed aboard the beer wagon with the historic barrel on the seat next to him. "Here we go; give me room," he said as he flicked the reins and the giant horses responded as one. He drove the team up the street and stopped in front of the administration building, where the mayor and other civic leaders now waited. The sun was shining, the plant whistles screeched, and the employees cheered. A few people were even crying as he stood up in the wagon to address them. "This is a great day in the history of Anheuser-Busch," he said. "Our employees as well as our many consumers have played a very important part in this event. We use the best ingredients and machinery available, but without the loyal support of our employees we could not have accomplished this. They should all be proud."

He had reason to be proud as well. In the thirty-one years since that April night when he first spoke to the country on behalf of beer and Anheuser-Busch, he had accomplished everything his father and grandfather ever dreamed of, and more. Now, at age sixty-five, he was, indisputably, the king of beer.

Asked by a reporter what he hoped for in the future, he replied, "Another world championship baseball team and another world beer production record, I hope, I hope."

He would get what he hoped for, and then some. But he would pay a terrible price for it all in the years to come. In some ways, on this day, standing on a beer wagon in the sun congratulating his employees for a job well done, he had reached his peak.

6

THE PRUSSIAN LIEUTENANT

As Gussie Busch's firstborn son and the anointed heir to the Anheuser-Busch kingdom, August III might well have expected to occupy a special place in the Busch family. Instead, he became an outlier.

From the beginning, there was little love lost between August and Trudy. Out of loyalty to his mother, August resented his father's new wife. And it didn't help that his stepmother was just ten years his senior, the same age as his sister Lotsie. But what bothered him most about Trudy was that she monopolized his father's free time. Whenever Gussie wasn't at work, he wanted to be with her. And that was not what August had in mind when he moved into the Bauernhof with Gussie and Lotsie in 1947; he was hoping to spend more time with his father and get to know him better.

They'd made a good start of it, with Gussie taking him to work at the brewery and proudly introducing him around, letting him sit in on executive meetings and hang out with the workers in the Brew House to see how beer was made. At night over dinner, Gussie schooled him in the traditions and principles of the family and company. Gussie also taught him how to handle firearms, and the two regularly went out into the deer park to thin the herds. August particularly enjoyed the time they spent together at Belleau Farm, which the family called the Shooting Grounds because that's primarily what went on there. Located thirty miles west of St. Louis near the confluence of three major rivers-the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Illinois-the farm's 1,500 acres of floodplain and marshland sat smack in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway, the flight path favored by about two-thirds of the migrating birds in America, which made the Shooting Grounds a duck hunter's heaven. August took to it like nothing he'd experienced before; duck hunting became a lifelong pa.s.sion.

August did not share his father's love of horses. His sister Lotsie recalls a day at Grant's Farm when a teenage August watched her guide a horse through a series of jumps. She teased him about his lack of equestrian skill, and he responded with a shrug, "Anybody can ride a horse."

"Then get on one and jump those fences," she challenged. To her astonishment, he did. Afterward, he deadpanned, "I just don't think there is any fun in that."

The bonding between August and Gussie was cut short by Trudy's arrival on the scene. August soon moved back to the Lindell mansion with his mother, and he never again lived under the same roof with his father. For her part, Trudy was keenly aware of August's resentment toward her. Wary of him, she invited him to all family gatherings nonetheless. He never became part of the new family, however. As her children grew, they came to view their much older half brother as an uncle figure, a relative who showed up for big family events a few times a year but always remained in the background, pleasant but reserved. None of them formed a bond with him. Billy Busch remembers a single one-on-one encounter with August when he was a little boy: "I played catch with him one day and he threw the ball back at me really hard."

As a teenager, attending Ladue High School in one of St. Louis's most exclusive suburbs, August acquired the hated nickname "Augie," made only a few friends, and was, once again, frequently absent. He was a good athlete who didn't play team sports. He had a very bright mind but posted poor grades. His biggest accomplishment during his high school years was earning a pilot's license. "He wanted to fly so badly that my sister and I paid a guy out of our own pockets to teach him," said Lotsie. "He was fifteen or sixteen, and we did it without Daddy knowing, because Daddy didn't like to fly; he said it was for the birds." Flying became August's second abiding pa.s.sion, and by all accounts he was a careful, crack pilot. The same could not be said of his performance behind the wheel of a car.

On November 21, 1954, seventeen-year-old August was driving several guests home from a party at Grant's Farm when he lost control of the car and "sheared off" a telephone pole, injuring two pa.s.sengers in the process, including Trudy's brother, William Buholzer, who suffered a broken ankle. A year later, August was ticketed for driving eighty miles an hour on a rural highway near Belleau Farm. He pleaded guilty to careless driving and was fined $35. As with the Halloween-night fracas a few years earlier, both driving incidents were fully reported in the newspapers, deepening his dislike for the media.

In his senior yearbook, August was quoted as saying his ambition was to become a "baby brewer," and his pet peeve was "Falstaff." Thus, when his fellow seniors named him "Most Likely to Succeed," it may have been more an ironic comment on his inherited privilege than a testament to his intelligence, industriousness, or talent, none of which had yet to manifest themselves.

In 1956 he enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a well-known party school. He'd grown into a good-looking young man-lean and muscled, with piercing blue eyes and dark brown hair that he wore sharply parted and slicked down in the cla.s.sic "wet look." He was five ten but added a good two inches to his stature by wearing dress boots with lifts. Armed with mounds of spending money, a series of fast, expensive cars, and a surname that worked magic at every bar, restaurant, and nightclub in town, he had no trouble attracting attractive women. For two years, he practically majored in them.

The summer after his freshman year, August began working part time at the brewery. He joined Brewers and Maltsters Local Union No. 6 and, in accordance with family tradition, was a.s.signed the bottom-rung job of shoveling used beech wood chips and spent grain out of the vats, a physically demanding, sweaty, and smelly task. Luckily, he didn't have to do it for long, just enough that he could say to Fortune magazine years later, "When you finished a shift there, you knew you were a man."

On May 4, 1958, August's mother, Elizabeth Overton Busch, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at her home. She was sixty-three and had been diagnosed with hypertension. August was away at school and rushed home when he got the news. "He insisted on seeing her [body at the funeral home] even though I begged him not to," said Lotsie. "It broke his heart." Her death barely got a mention in the two local newspapers. Gussie and Lotsie attended the private memorial service at the Lindell mansion and the burial. Years later, Lotsie recalled her stepmother once telling her, "Always walk the straight line and never fall off, because if you do, it is very hard to get back on."

August did not return to college for his junior year. Instead, he joined the U.S. Army Reserves, thereby avoiding the draft. After six months of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Waynesville, Missouri, about 120 miles from St. Louis, he embarked on a life that seemed dedicated to the pursuit of princely pleasures, whether on European ski slopes, Caribbean beaches, or Wyoming dude ranches. This, too, was in keeping with a family tradition-young Busch males traditionally took some well-funded time off to sow their wild oats before settling down to career and family.

August would complain bitterly in later years that he "never had a daddy" when he was a boy, but it was Gussie who marked his pa.s.sage into manhood with a stunningly thoughtful gift-a two-hundred-acre farm that ab.u.t.ted the Shooting Grounds, complete with a comfortable, rustic residence. August named it Waldmeister, after a fragrant European forest herb also called sweet woodruff, and he turned it into his private preserve, where he could party out of the eye of the despised media, enjoy some of the best duck hunting in North America, and hangar his twin-engine plane at a rural landing strip called the Spirit of St. Louis Airport a few miles down the road in the tiny town of Gumbo, Mo. He eventually expanded Waldmeister to more than a thousand acres and made it his princ.i.p.al residence for the next fifty years. During that time, the Spirit of St. Louis Airport grew into a lavish base for Anheuser-Busch's fleet of globe-hopping aircraft.

August returned to school in 1960, enrolling at the Siebel Inst.i.tute of Technology in Chicago, the country's oldest college of brewing. Various biographical accounts have suggested that he went away to the school and returned to St. Louis a year later having "graduated" with a diploma as a "certified brew master." In truth, he completed a twelve-week course of study without really leaving home, flying his plane to Chicago each Tuesday morning to attend cla.s.ses and usually returning on Thursday.

Whatever the depth of his brewing education, August's experience at Siebel seemed to change something in him. Rewarded by Gussie with a job as sales manager of the company's low-priced brand, Busch Bavarian, he threw himself into the task with monomaniacal zeal, putting in seventy-hour weeks, driving himself mercilessly, as if on a mission to make sure that no one, not even his father, knew more than he did about beer and the business of it.

Denny Long, the company's twenty-five-year-old head of pricing when August moved up from the Brew House into management, remembers his first impression of his future boss. "He didn't trust anyone, he needed to be in control, he had zero sense of humor, and he didn't want you to be his friend."

Long, the son of a construction laborer, started working for Anheuser-Busch in 1953 at the age of seventeen, immediately after he graduated from high school. He'd been offered an academic scholarship to Quincy College, but his family was "working cla.s.s poor" and couldn't even afford the incidental costs. For such young men, Anheuser-Busch proved a G.o.dsend, offering a potential lifetime of employment at a fair wage, with good benefits and plenty of opportunity for advancement because the company had a long tradition of promoting from within. A-B even maintained the old German brewing tradition of der Sternewirth, which granted all employees a thirty-minute free beer break every day. Among the working cla.s.s in St. Louis, it was believed that if you had a job at "the Brewery," you were blessed.

Denny Long felt doubly so. He had risen rapidly from office boy to middle management on the strength of "an incredibly simple pricing process" he'd perfected, which the company adopted nationwide. That caught the attention of the new Busch Bavarian brand manager. "August asked me to be his a.s.sistant," Long recalled fifty years later. "He said, 'I don't want any yes men around me; I want you to tell me what you think.' He told me that he was going places, and I was going with him."

Long soon learned August meant that literally, as he was dragooned into traveling with him constantly, hopscotching the country in August's plane to meet with distributors, usually accompanied by a pair of A-B's top marketing executives, George Couch and Charlie Aulbert, former Army Rangers and World War II vets who liked to let off steam after work.

"I was a poor kid from South Broadway and suddenly I am with a Busch and a very fast-moving crowd of hard drinkers. They'd work all day, then walk into a bar, and it was 'Bring on the wild horses and the wild, wild women.'"

Even though August never exhibited any effects from the alcohol, the whole scene was a bit too much for Long, a devout Catholic and devoted husband. He quickly figured out that he could join in the revelry for a short time and then slip away back to the hotel without them noticing, or at least saying anything. He eventually came up with a way to serve the boss without having to leave St. Louis, gradually taking over all the administrative aspects of the brand manager job-the home-office minutiae that bored August to death. "Everything that came across his desk, I read and summarized for him."

The process provided a terrific education for Long and freed August to continue crisscrossing the county to observe and absorb the field operations of the beer behemoth he would one day be called upon to run. By his own estimate, August spent 75 percent of his time on the road in the early years, and it was during this period that he began building a reputation as a fearsome drill sergeant whose white-glove inspections and impromptu interrogations could cause otherwise brave men to lose control of their bowels. Wherever his plane touched down, local sales reps and wholesalers went scurrying to make sure everything was in order. This wasn't just another brand manager, after all; this was the future king, baptized in Budweiser, for G.o.d's sake. He'd better not find a single bottle of out-of-date beer in any bar, restaurant, or package store he walked into, or there would be h.e.l.l to pay. August seemed to relish the fear he engendered in the troops. He thought it was good for them. Kept them on their toes, compet.i.tive. Long likened him to "a Prussian lieutenant." They were an odd couple-the self-consciously poor kid from the rough-and-tumble Patch and the ent.i.tled brewing scion from the pampered country club suburbs-but they formed a partnership that would last twenty-seven years.

August's "playboy" period officially came to an end in the summer of 1963 when, at the age of twenty-six, he was promoted to vice president of marketing, one of the key jobs in the company, and elected to the board of directors, filling a vacancy created by the death of Eberhard Anheuser, the grandson of the brewery's cofounder. A few weeks later he married Susan Hornibrook, a beautiful, athletic blonde from a prominent Brentwood, California, family whom he'd met in his travels for the company. The wedding took place at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. August's best friend, John Krey, served as best man and Gussie picked up the tab for a dinner party the night before at Chasen's restaurant in Beverly Hills, a favorite hangout of the Hollywood crowd. The Busches of St. Louis did their boisterous best to make sure the Beverly Hills bunch would never forget them. During her toast to her little brother and his bride, Lotsie told Susie she "was going to have to learn to shoot" as she loosed a pair of flapping, quacking ducks among the startled guests. n.o.body rode a horse through the banquet room, but the Busch party included a miniature Sicilian donkey that trotted around the restaurant and caused such a sensation that Jackie Gleason, who was hosting a party upstairs, insisted it be brought into his gathering.

After a European honeymoon, the newlyweds settled into domestic life at Waldmeister. On June 15, 1964, Susan gave birth to August Anheuser Busch IV, and dutifully fed him a thimbleful of Budweiser when he was a day old. Another child-Susan-followed two years later. A family man now, August slowed the pace of his traveling, cutting it back to about 50 percent of the time, while continuing his rapid rise in the company with a promotion to vice president and general manager of the brewery in 1965. His father had approved the promotion and thought he had earned it with his performance as marketing VP. But Gussie didn't want anyone to get the impression that his son's ascension to the top spot was guaranteed or imminent. "If I've told him once, I've told him a thousand times that the board of directors does the electing," he told Business Week magazine. "In my book, you rise or fall on your own."

Of course, no one believed that. When August sat down for an interview with a reporter from the Post-Dispatch in April 1967, the resultant headline read, "August Busch III Prepares for Job of Keeping Anheuser-Busch on Top." Al Fleishman had arranged the interview, with Gussie's approval. It couldn't have happened otherwise, because Fleishman tightly controlled all publicity for A-B, which didn't have its own PR department, just Fleishman's firm, Fleishman & Hillard, which devoted about 75 percent of its billing hours to telling the A-B story the way Gussie wanted it told. Apparently, he had decided it was time to introduce his heir apparent to the public.

August's official media debut was what's known in the publishing trade as a "puff piece." The article presented the picture of a handsome twenty-nine-year-old prince in waiting, "an intense young man ... who has become a well-grounded specialist in the beer and is an articulate student of the brewing industry."

Crediting August with "a philosophy that shows both an understanding of corporate teamwork and a feeling for the pitfalls of nepotism," the article quoted him as saying, "Family members in the corporate executive structure of a company like Anheuser-Busch can either be a great a.s.set or a great liability.... There are some very definite advantages to having people around who have grown up in a business, who have lived with the company around the dinner table in the evening, who have learned the personalities involved."

The article closed with a quote that now seems eerily prescient. "If you get a bad apple anywhere in the lower executive levels, you've got trouble," August said. "But get a bad apple at the top, and you've got super trouble."