Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (12 page)

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 passion.

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 passion, 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 passengers 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 classic “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 assigned 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 passage into manhood with a stunningly thoughtful gift—a two-hundred-acre farm that abutted 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 principal 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 Institute 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 classes 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 class poor” and couldn't even afford the incidental costs. For such young men, Anheuser-Busch proved a godsend, 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 class 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 assistant,” 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 God'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 hell 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, competitive. 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 entitled 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. Nobody 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.