Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (8 page)

It was her first visit to the brewery, however, that sealed the deal. “That's when I fell in love with him completely, because of the way he handled himself, his assurance and knowledge in telling everyone what to do. It was very sexy to me.” More than sixty years later, seated in the dining room at Belleau Farm, eighty-three-year-old Trudy smiled at the memory and confided, “I was in love and lust. He was the first man I made love with. I had never had sex before.”

Trudy returned home and broke the news to her family—she was in love with the rich American brewer who wanted her to come to the United States to be with him. While she was in Switzerland, Gussie besieged her with love letters, which, she found out some years later, were actually written by his longtime secretary, Dora Schoefield. “She had a beautiful way of writing, and she knew him so well; they were wonderful letters.”

Gussie brought Trudy to St. Louis again in the spring of 1950. This time she stayed at Grant's Farm, where he put on a show for the ages, hosting a reception for President Harry Truman, who was in town to attend a reunion of his World War I army unit. Gussie and the president had been friends since Truman was an up-and-coming state politician in Kansas City. As Truman rose to prominence—as FDR's vice president in 1944 and then as his successor following FDR's death in office in 1945—Gussie liked to tell the story of how he once took Truman to Union Station to catch a train back to Kansas City and had to lend him a quarter to make the fare. He contributed a great deal more than that to Truman's come-from-behind campaign for reelection in 1948.

At Grant's Farm, Gussie greeted his old friend at the front gates while Trudy served as one of the hostesses at a dinner party for a thousand guests who were seated at canopied tables in the courtyard of the Bauernhof, surrounded by the Busch collection of antique carriages, coaches, landaus, tally-hoes, phaetons, buggies, Russian sleighs, and German hunting wagons.

After dinner, like two young boys bent on mischief, Gussie and Harry climbed aboard one of Gussie's favorite carriages, the Vigilant, and clattered off into the deer park behind four shiny black horses, leaving the president's Secret Service detachment in their wake. They were gone for more than half an hour, and it's not difficult to imagine that they used the time to enjoy a nip or two from one of Gussie's silver flasks.

Over the next year and a half, Trudy became more and more visible as Gussie's companion, appearing with him at A-B events around the country and traveling with him on vacations to Florida and Europe. All the while, he was trying to extricate himself from his marriage. In 1948 he published a notice in the local newspapers disavowing Elizabeth's debts. “You are hereby notified that, having furnished my wife, Mrs. August A. Busch Jr., with adequate funds to maintain her household, I will no longer be liable to you, or any other person whosoever, for any accounts contracted by Mrs. Busch for any purpose whatsoever, or for any accounts contracted by her on behalf of our two children.”

He finally filed for divorce on August 7, 1951, six years after separating from Elizabeth. Citing “general indignities,” he claimed that she had exhibited “the most violent wrath and hatred” toward him and had told him on several occasions that she didn't love him. For the next six months,
Busch vs. Busch
played out in the court and in the newspapers, with each side visiting indignity upon the other, making it appear to the public that the main issues between them were her drinking and his philandering. His lawyers questioned “how much she paid the yard man in 1940” and “how much was spent for whiskey, wine and gin.” Her lawyers demanded to inspect his books and records, because “how else could we find out how much Mr. Busch has been spending on other women.” The judge, however, denied her request to examine her husband's financial records, saying they were “immaterial,” and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld his ruling. A few weeks later, Elizabeth accepted what the newspapers trumpeted as the state's first-ever million-dollar divorce settlement. It consisted of a lump sum of $450,000 for alimony, a property settlement of $480,000, to be paid over a number of years, and the house on Lindell, which was valued at $100,000. She also was awarded custody of the couple's two children, Elizabeth and August III.

August was only five when his father went off to Washington. Raised mostly by his troubled, often impaired mother, he had developed into a moody, withdrawn adolescent with a spotty school attendance record and only a few friends. As the ugly dissolution of his parents' marriage dragged on in public, he began acting out. One particularly antisocial episode occurred on Halloween night in 1949, when two neighbor girls accused him of shooting them with a pellet gun when they came to his house trick-or-treating. The girls told the police that when they rang the doorbell at the Busch residence on Lindell, they were greeted with a barrage of eggs, tomatoes, and water from a second-story window, so they ran home and got some eggs to respond in kind. But when they returned, August stood at the second-floor window with a rifle and shot them. The girls were treated for minor contusions, and two police officers went to the Busch house. The story they got from August was that a “swarm of girls” had engaged in an unprovoked attack on the house that started when the butler answered the front door and an egg “came flying through and splattered in the living room.” August admitted that he had stood at the window with a gun and warned the girls to go away, but he claimed the gun was partly dismantled and could not have been fired even if he had attempted to do so.

August's version of events did not pass the smell test, but his mother and the butler backed him up about the gun and took the police upstairs to see it lying on the bed, partly dismantled, just as August claimed. Even though no charges were filed, the preteen contretemps earned a headline in the next day's paper: “August A. Busch III Questioned by Police in Halloween Fracas.” It's unlikely that it would have been reported if his name had been anything other than Busch.

Gussie's physical and emotional absence from August's life during this period would eventually have serious consequences for the family and the company. Years later, in describing to a colleague what it was like to grow up as Gussie Busch's firstborn son, August ruefully related an incident that occurred at Grant's Farm when he was a boy: He'd put on an old pair of his late uncle Adolphus's old chaps and had taken one of the farm's tractors on a joyride around the lake when he lost control of the machine and wound up in the water, standing on the seat as the tractor slowly sank. Suddenly he heard his father calling and saw him standing on the bank. He thought he was about to be rescued. Instead, Gussie shouted at him, “August, what the hell are you doing wearing your uncle Adolphus's chaps?”

On March 22, 1952, the day after Gussie's divorce from Elizabeth became final, he and Trudy were married. The ceremony took place in Gussie's cottage on the grounds of the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was performed by a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. It was a brewery family affair: Eberhard Anheuser gave away the bride; Gussie's cousin Adalbert (“Addy”) von Gontard, an A-B vice president, served as best man; and Gussie's two daughters by his first marriage, Lilly and Lotsie, were Trudy's bridesmaids.

Press coverage of the event was carefully managed. Gussie's public relations man, Al Fleishman, had alerted the local newspapers to the impending nuptials just the day before, telling reporters that August III “was expected to attend.” He did not, however, and neither did his sister Elizabeth. Following a breakfast buffet reception that featured unexpected entertainment by comedian Joe E. Lewis, who “just happened to be in town,” the newlyweds boarded Gussie's motorbus and left for a two-week Florida vacation.

As Busch weddings went, it was a low-key, seemingly inauspicious event, an impression the newspapers furthered by devoting nearly as many words to Gussie's two previous unions as they did to the one at hand. Trudy's name wasn't even mentioned in the society-page headlines, one of which said, “August A. Busch Jr. Will Marry Swiss Girl Today” (she was twenty-five).

A lot of people underestimated Trudy Buholzer in the beginning, but marrying her turned out to be one of the best moves Gussie Busch ever made, ranking up there with his decision less than a year later to purchase the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Together these two “acquisitions” defined the rest of his life.

The Cardinals weren't even his idea. He was approached in February 1953 by a contingent of local businessmen that included several A-B board members and Fleishman, who was fast becoming one of his most trusted confidants. The men told Gussie that the owner of the Cardinals, Fred Saigh, was in talks to move the team to Milwaukee, where an investor group had offered him more than $4 million for the franchise. Saigh had financial problems and was about to begin serving a fifteen-month prison sentence for tax evasion. He needed to sell the team, they said, but he preferred that the Cardinals remain in St. Louis; he just hadn't been able to find a local buyer. If Gussie was interested, then Saigh might sell the team to A-B for less than the Milwaukee people had put on the table.

Gussie didn't give a good goddamn about baseball or the Cardinals. He was a “sportsman”; he enjoyed hunting, fishing, horseback riding, and coaching—all gentlemanly pursuits. He had never followed professional team sports; that was for the masses. He knew that St. Louisans loved their “Red Birds,” of course, and that outfielder Stan Musial was considered one of the greatest players in the game. The men who worked at the brewery idolized “Stan the Man” or “Stash” (pronounced
stosh
), as some of them liked to call him, a childhood nickname bestowed by his Polish-born father.

The Cardinals were in fact one of the most successful teams in the major leagues, having won nine National League pennants and six World Series titles in the previous twenty-seven years. That paled in comparison to the New York Yankees' record of nineteen pennants and fifteen World Series wins, but the Cardinals boasted a broader fan base than the Yankees. As the farthest west and farthest south major league franchise, they were the home team of more Americans than any other ball club. If you lived in Kentucky, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Tennessee, or a dozen other southern and western states in 1952, you likely rooted for the Red Birds. They were, arguably, “America's team.” Which made the radio and TV broadcasting rights to their games all the more valuable. Those rights were then held by the St. Louis–based Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, whose Falstaff brand was the No. 1 seller in the city, a fact that galled Gussie no end. He knew the electronic media's potential for selling beer. In 1950, Anheuser-Busch became the first brewery to sponsor a network TV program,
The Ken Murray Budweiser Show
. The one-hour Saturday-night variety program ran on fifty-one CBS stations and often showed the host and his guests sipping the sponsor's product live on the air. Budweiser registered sales increases in those fifty-one markets that were double those in other cities.

Gussie liked everything he heard. With one move, he could deny the city of Milwaukee, home of Pabst and Schlitz, a professional baseball team, wrest the Cardinals' broadcasting rights away from Griesedieck Brothers, and turn Sportsman's Park, where the Cardinals played, into a giant outdoor tavern—thirty thousand Budweiser drinkers held captive for two or three hours at a time in the sweltering St. Louis heat. Better yet, as Al Fleishman explained, the acquisition could be sold to the public as an act of good citizenship on the part of Anheuser-Busch, and Gussie would be celebrated as “the man who saved the Cardinals for St. Louis.”

Done deal. Gussie agreed to pay Saigh $2.5 million and assume $1.25 million of Saigh's debt. He bludgeoned the A-B board into going along with the plan, which included naming himself president of the team. The board also acquiesced when, after an inspection tour of Sportsman's Park, Gussie decided to buy the stadium for $800,000 and spend another $400,000 on badly needed repairs and refurbishing.

The local newspapers played the story just the way Al Fleishman said they would. “Busch Saves the Cards for St. Louis” blared the banner headline on the front page of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
.

On March 10, 1953, a stockholders meeting at A-B headquarters drew a record one hundred people (only twenty-one had attended the previous meeting) who voted 99 percent of the outstanding shares in favor of the acquisition. In a room with blowups of recent press coverage displayed on the walls, Gussie spoke about the tremendous public relations potential of the team. “Development of the Cardinals will have untold value for the development of our company,” he said. “This is one of the finest moves in the history of Anheuser-Busch.” At a subsequent press conference, however, he played up the benefits to the city and delivered a line that Fleishman obviously scripted to preempt any impertinent questions from reporters about the new owner's love of the game.

“I've been a baseball fan all my life,” Gussie said. “But I've been too busy to get out to the park in recent years, unfortunately.”

In all the excitement surrounding the announcement, Gussie stumbled when he told reporters off-the-cuff that he intended to rename the ballpark Budweiser Stadium. Howls of protest went up immediately, decrying the crass commercialization of the great American pastime. Baseball commissioner Ford Frick called Gussie directly to tell him the organization could not condone naming a ballpark after an alcoholic beverage. Al Fleishman drew the unpleasant task of trying to talk Gussie out of something he wanted to do. Suggesting that there might be a more appropriate name for the ballpark, Fleishman deftly pointed out that when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the Chicago Cubs in the 1920s, he named the ballpark Wrigley Field, not Juicy Fruit Field. Gussie got the point, admitted he made a mistake, and Sportsman's Park became Busch Stadium, supposedly in honor of his grandfather, father, and brother.