Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (10 page)

“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 glass 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 passed 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 bumper, 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-passenger, 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 class 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 cockatoo, Cocky, 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 passion for horses, she became one of the top competitive female equestrians in the United States. The “Swiss girl” who had seated customers at her father's Lucerne restaurant quickly blossomed into the world-class 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 Municipal 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 mass 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 mass 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 hello 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 chores. 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 grass 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.