Giving it all Away: The Doris Buffett Story

—CONFUCIUS

HERE’S THE DEAL

This couldn’t be right.

I was looking for a place to rent. A friend had given me an address on Sophia Street in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and said to talk to the lady there. When I pulled up to Mary Washington Square, one of the most exclusive addresses in town, I was sure my friend must’ve been having some fun with me.

I was a newspaper reporter, and he knew that meant I wasn’t looking for a place in the high-rent district. And I was single. I needed only a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe, I thought, one of the floors was being rented out. That seemed highly unlikely. I knocked on the door. It swung open to reveal a striking gray-haired woman in her sixties with piercing blue eyes and high cheekbones.

I had no idea who she was. And I was a stranger to her.

She gave me a five-minute tour of the place. Three bedrooms. Three-and-a-half baths. Lavishly furnished with antiques. The third-floor balcony overlooked the Rappahannock River with a view of Chatham, a mansion where George Washington had spent time visiting friends, and that had been used by the Union Army during the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Are you interested? she said.

I don’t think I can afford this, I said.

How much do you want to pay a month? she asked.

I hesitated. Even then, nearly twenty years ago now, the place could probably easily bring $2,500 a month. But I figured I might as well give her an answer. Five hundred dollars, I said, expecting her to laugh.

Here’s the deal, she said. My husband and I will be living in North Carolina, and we’d like to come up and visit for a weekend about every six weeks. We’d like to use one of the bedrooms. Would that be OK?

I figured I could live with that.

She didn’t ask for a reference. We had known each other for minutes, hadn’t talked much, but she recognized something in me.

It was 1992, and I had become one of the first of thousands of people Doris Buffett would personally size up and decide to help, one by one, most times after painstaking study, but sometimes, as in my case, on pure gut instinct.

She jokes now that we lived together for two years. I came to know her as a quick-witted woman with a wicked sense of humor and an infectious laugh. And as one who was mildly frustrated with her brother for his reticence at that time to let go of Berkshire Hathaway stock to help the needy. Why sell it now, Warren Buffett reasoned in the 1990s, when it would be worth so much more later and could do so much more good then?

But Doris felt a sense of urgency. Poor children needed help now, not later, she reasoned, or a whole generation could be lost to prisons and homeless shelters.

Much later, in August 2007, Sally Beatty of The Wall Street Journal lauded Doris for devoting her life and fortune to helping others. She has done so through her own Sunshine Lady Foundation—begun four years after we had met—and then, starting in 2007, on behalf of her brother, Warren Buffett, then the world’s richest man. He asked her to handle thousands of letters he had begun receiving from those in need around the world, after announcing he would donate about $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation upon his death.

We are really polar opposites in our approach to this, Warren said about his sister’s approach to philanthropy. I admire the way she does it more than the way I do it. She really goes at this and gets involved. I mean she really likes the retail aspect and I’m total wholesale. I can get touched by stories, but I know if I got into it, I’d get a million letters a week. It’d totally swamp everything I do. So having Doris as a partner is the perfect solution.

The Wall Street Journal said: While it’s not unheard of for people in need to write to wealthy people seeking help, philanthropy experts say it’s highly unusual for a wealthy person to give so much money directly to so many individuals. Ms. Buffett’s direct approach, her personal involvement and her reliance on friends and other non-professionals set her apart from other foundations, especially large, historic institutions such as the Ford Foundation, which boast staffs of trained professionals and a network of offices.

The Journal story noted that Doris has not always been wealthy. She had to count pennies as a young housewife in Colorado. She nearly lost her home in Virginia after the stock market crash of 1987. She didn’t know real wealth until she inherited money from her mother in 1996. And yet, even during recent frightening economic times, rather than clinging to her money out of fear of ending up in trouble herself once more, she has continued to make giving it away to those in need her mission in life.

All of it.

My goal, Doris likes to say with a chuckle, is for the last check I write to bounce.

Doris and Sunshine Lady Foundation’s Diane Grimsley at Beaufort-Morehead City, N.C. Airport. MICHAEL ZITZ.

MOMMY DEAREST

When Doris was twelve, she locked herself in a closet. I won’t remember this when I’m forty, she kept whispering to herself, crying. Outside the door, her mother, Leila Buffett, continued one of a lifelong series of tirades which would sometimes go on for two hours. She was never happy ’til I was sobbing, Doris said.

One of Leila’s favorite themes was Doris’ supposed stupidity. Over and over, she would mock her by punctuating insults with Duh!

Leila would also make her son, Warren, cry. As a young boy, he said he often felt the urge to protect his older sister. But I never did, because I was afraid of becoming the target myself. Once he ran away from home to escape her rants.

Her fury would come ‘in spurts,’ he said, minute by minute. She would really lay into Doris or me. We had a mutual aid society. He chuckles about it now, downplaying it. But Warren told his first wife Susie that he was surprised Doris didn’t end up in a mental institution because of the abuse.

When Warren and Doris were in their late twenties, they went to visit their father, Howard Buffett, to ask for his help in ending decades of emotional abuse by their mother. She has to let up on us or we’re moving away, they told him. Howard must’ve said something, because Leila toned it down for a while.

WHEN DORIS was born, on February 12, 1928, her grandparents went nuts, she said. They wanted to declare it a national holiday. But it was a difficult delivery for Leila, who developed an infection and almost died.

Some later believed that she developed postpartum depression. It was a long postpartum, Doris joked. It ended with her death. Decades later, Doris came to the conclusion that her mother may have suffered from bipolar disorder, because she would tear into her oldest daughter at the kitchen table for an hour, then smile and say pleasantly, I’m glad we had this discussion.

Leila was a pretty, petite and vivacious woman with brown hair and green eyes. And as my father said, she could make more friends than he could lose, Doris remembered. It was always fun to watch her work her way across a room, because she was a born campaigner. When her husband Howard was elected to Congress, Leila worked tirelessly in his office on Capitol Hill, typing letters for no pay, and she enjoyed that.

Leila was so well-liked that when she was sixty-five she got sixty-five birthday cards, Doris recalled. One of Doris’ grandsons, Alexander Buffett Rozek, recalls Leila as a sweet great-grandmother. He treasures a picture of himself as a child standing next to Leila, who was a good enough sport in her nineties to don a dark cape and Darth Vader helmet and mask to amuse Alex, a Star Wars fan.

Warren doesn’t believe his mother was bipolar. There were periods she would attribute to neuralgia. I think they refer to it now as migraines. But I think my mother did have terrible headaches, and how much of these periods of extreme criticism and extended berating of us would be attributable to that would be hard to tell.

Doris with her beloved father, Howard.

Doris with her mother Leila, outside their home at 4224 Barker Avenue in Omaha.

He said a difficult childhood may also have contributed to it. My mother had this tough upbringing. Leila’s mother had been institutionalized for mental illness.

Our mother always presented this totally sunny disposition to the rest of the world, Warren said. So there was this contradiction between public and private behavior that I’m sure was hard for Doris or myself to fully understand as a kid.

But Doris said it was clear that she was the primary target of her mother’s wrath. I never heard the words, ‘I love you,’ she said. I never had a story read to me. Rarely was I tucked into bed. Nobody ever said, ‘Call us when you get there so we know you’re safe.’ There were so many times I just wished some fairy godmother would come and understand me or like me—whisk me out of there or something.

One Christmas in Washington, in a moment of adolescent drama, a sixteen-year-old Doris angrily threw a letter from a boyfriend into the fireplace. Dried greens in the fireplace then burst into flames, flared up and scorched the mantle. Eleven-year-old Bertie decided to take the blame because she and thirteen-year-old Warren knew the punishment would be so much worse for Doris.

We got enormous approval from my dad, Warren said. We never could quite get it from our mother. That wasn’t just Doris, that was me, too. It probably didn’t extend to Bertie so much, being the youngest. Every child seeks approval from both parents. Neither Doris nor I would get much from our mother. It was tougher on her, being the oldest.

And Warren was a boy. It was a Victorian thing, Doris said. Your job was to make them look good, even walk a couple of steps behind them.

Leila with baby Bertie, Doris and Warren. 1934.

Younger sister Roberta Buffett Elliott of Carmel, California, agreed with Doris that Leila was much tougher on her. "Warren was a boy, and boys, in my mother’s viewpoint, were more valuable than women.

"Men were supposed to be smarter. In a marriage, if the woman was smarter, she’d better hide it. Men had to go out in the world and earn the living. They had more power, and women were expected to smile and keep quiet.

My mother never criticized my dad, Bertie said. It’s hard to imagine a marriage where you’d never feel critical, but if she did, I never saw it expressed. So I think that even though my brother was criticized, too, that it was against a background of men succeeding and being somebody and being important. My mother helped Warren by getting up early and making his breakfast so he could do paper routes. In a sense, she had higher expectations for him, so I think that would be very empowering. For a woman it was like, ‘Oh, don’t you dare have those expectations, because you’re a woman. You can’t do those things. You have to be in a lesser role.’ So I think it would be more damaging to Doris than to Warren.

Leila never displayed her ill temper to Howard. She was head over heels in love with and slavishly devoted to her husband for life. When Howard, then a stockbroker, asked her, Mom, why do you think you’re here on Earth? she replied, To take care of you, Daddy. She really felt that way, Doris said. Leila was either J. A. Stahl’s daughter, Howard Buffett’s wife or Warren Buffett’s mother. That was her identity. And it really burned her up when I didn’t seem to buy into that.

Leila often told Doris that she wasn’t smart. She didn’t want her to go to college. She didn’t see any reason. The only reason you went to college was to get your man, your ‘Mrs. degree.’ Ick.

Sister Bertie in her early teens.

But her younger sister Bertie was sent off to Northwestern at sixteen. Doris was never allowed to leave home to go to college, and took college classes in Washington and Omaha while her friends all went away to school.

All four of Doris’ marriages were disasters. After Leila’s death, Doris saw a daybook her mother had kept for decades. An entry from Doris’ first marriage, when she and her husband were struggling financially, noted: Doris called collect today.

Doris lost everything in the 1987 stock market crash, going $2 million into debt. When that happened, Leila wrote in her daybook, Don’t give Doris a cent.

She has battled depression at times in her life and gone to a psychiatrist, trying to understand why her relationship with her mother was so ugly and how that may have affected the rest of her life. We’ll never know, because at the age of three you couldn’t be that bad, and that’s when it started, she said. Whatever the reason, it had a huge impact on her life.

Looking at a picture of herself as a cherubic blond toddler, Doris said, How could you hate that child? Their nickname for me was ‘Mary Sunshine.’

Doris, Bertie and Warren, in the front yard of the home the family occupied in Washington, during World War II, when Howard was in Congress.

"When I was twenty-eight and married, I remember thinking ‘Isn’t this strange? My brother’s a genius, my sister’s a Phi Beta Kappa, we all have the same parents, and I’m such a dummy.’ I bought