Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (20 page)

Indeed, brewers seemed particularly vulnerable. In 1933, the Ma Barker gang kidnapped William Hamm Jr., president of the Theodore Hamm Brewing Company, as he left his office in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hamm was held for four days and released only after a $100,000 ransom was paid. A year later Adolph Coors Jr., the son and successor to the Coors brewery founder, was targeted in a $50,000 kidnapping plot that was broken up by the police. His son was not so lucky. In 1960, forty-four-year-old Adolph Coors III, then president of the company, was shot to death in a botched kidnapping attempt on the road between his Colorado home and the brewery.

Over the years, Gussie received constant reminders of his family's vulnerability as various law enforcement agencies warned him about suspected kidnapping threats to his children, including Peter when he was a teenager and Christina in the week before her death.

If all that weren't enough to stoke Peter's fear, there was also the large oil painting by noted German artist Ferdinand Charles Wimar that hung on the wall in the dining room of the big house. A dramatic rendering of an actual event in America history, it was titled
The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians
.
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Intentionally or not, the fear of kidnapping was served up nightly with dinner at Grant's Farm.

The grieving Leeker family was angry that no one from the Busch family called or came to talk with them until more than twelve hours after the shooting, and that when Peter and Adolphus IV finally did come to the Leeker home, they were accompanied by family lawyers. “Why didn't you come get me? Why didn't you call me?” David's mother asked Peter. “They wouldn't let him,” his older brother replied for him.

At one point on the morning of the shooting, David's two sisters stormed over to Grant's Farm to try to find out what had happened. They were appalled when a member of the household staff ushered them into the gun room, with all its weaponry and animal heads on garish display, to wait for Gussie to come down from his room and talk to them. When he did, all he could do was weep and repeat over and over again, “It's a terrible tragedy.”

By the time Trudy returned from Switzerland, the tragedy was being treated as a scandal by the media, which reported that police had found three other guns in Peter's room—two .45-caliber pistols and an M16 military rifle—and that Peter had a history of carelessness with firearms, once shooting himself in the leg while practicing quick draws with a revolver.

Over the next few weeks, the county prosecutor grew concerned about the discrepancies in Peter's story. The fact that the shooting had been ruled accidental did not eliminate the possibility that there had been criminal negligence on his part. So the prosecutor ordered investigators to reinterview all the witnesses, including Peter. He then presented the results of his inquiry to a grand jury, which returned an indictment charging Peter with manslaughter for handling a gun “in such a manner as to show a reckless disregard for human life.”

(While Peter's case was moving through the court system, there was another shooting at Grant's Farm. On October 8, an unknown assailant with a .22 rifle fired into a herd of Clydesdale broodmares as they stood grazing by the light of a full moon. Four mares were wounded, and one them, an eighteen-year-old named Peggy Lyndale, had bled to death by the time a stablehand came upon the carnage the next morning. Peggy, who had produced fourteen foals and was carrying her fifteenth, was one of Gussie's most prized Clydesdales. “The fact that she is gone is just breaking my heart,” he said.)

After first pleading not guilty in the Leeker case, Peter changed his plea to guilty on the eve of the trial. The prosecutor had refused to plea-bargain for no jail time, so he was taking a chance. “I am very sorry,” he told the judge. “I know now that I had to have my finger on the trigger because there was no other way of the pistol going off.... I was very careless.” He was sentenced to five years' probation, during which time he was forbidden to handle any kind of firearm.

Two weeks later, David Leeker's parents filed a $3 million wrongful death lawsuit,
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naming Peter, Gussie, Trudy, Anheuser-Busch, and Colt, the manufacturer of the pistol. By that time, Gussie and Trudy were suing one another—for divorce.

By all accounts, life with Gussie had become unbearable, and the Leeker shooting and its aftermath were the last straw for Trudy. “Dad wasn't the same; he didn't have that vibrance anymore,” said Billy. “He cried all the time, and she was mad at him for not being strong. They fought like cats and dogs.”

When he drank, which was most of the time, “Dad got mean and was verbally abusive,” said Adolphus. “All of a sudden, the twenty-seven-year difference in their age seemed like forty-seven years.”

“Age had something to do with it,” Trudy said later. “But I wanted my freedom. I couldn't stand a man crying over something that you couldn't do anything about. I wanted out.”

Once again, the children were forced to choose. The girls, Beatrice and Trudy, sided with their mother, while all four boys stood by Gussie. “I was feeling very sorry for Dad,” Billy said. “Mom became sort of bitter, and would say hard things to him, and he would break down crying. She got really cold.”

“Why would you put him through all this?” Adolphus asked his mother. “Look what he's gone through already. He's seventy-seven years old. How much more can he take?”

Trudy moved into the Cottage in September 1977, and negotiations commenced, aimed at reaching an amicable divorce agreement. But the separation of only a few hundred yards quickly turned into a kind of “War of the Roses” when Gussie learned, through private investigators hired by Lou Susman, that Trudy had had a romantic fling during her trip to Europe. She'd never had an affair before, and it came on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, and on the heels of her finding out about Gussie's infidelities aboard the yacht in Florida. But Gussie's pride was hurt, and he instructed Lou Susman to take the gloves off.

Five days after they each filed for divorce, saying their marriage of twenty-five years was “irretrievably broken,” Gussie moved to have Trudy evicted from the Cottage. In a letter addressed “Dear Trudy,” he ordered her to “vacate the premises” within twenty-four hours. “No other living quarters will be available to you at Grant's Farm. At the time you move from the premises, please take only those personal items of clothing which you feel you will need immediately. I will make arrangements to have the balance of your personal clothing and effects delivered by appropriate means to the location you designate.”

He told her that she could continue to drive the white Lincoln, but “you may not use any other Grant's Farm vehicles.” Nor could she call upon the services of any member of the Grant's Farm staff, including the children's longtime nanny, Yolanda. “As of this date, I have terminated the employment of Yolanda Gloggner,” Gussie wrote. “I am also advised that her lease for an apartment at the Bauernhof has been terminated.” It was breathtakingly brutal. He was doing to Trudy exactly what August and the board had done to him.

Trudy obtained an injunction barring her eviction, and she remained in the Cottage while her lawyers and Gussie's slugged it out in court filings. But as lord of the manor, Gussie continued to torture her by, among other things, ordering his security guards at the front gate to search the trunk of her car whenever she drove off the estate, lest she attempt to remove any of his “personal property.” At one point, when Trudy's brother Kurt traveled from Switzerland to visit her, the guards barred him from entering. Trudy was so incensed that she uncharacteristically complained to the press. “I think it's time this was exposed,” she told a reporter from the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
. “I was always hoping we could have an amicable reconciliation, and when that became impossible, an amicable divorce. But when it comes to my brother coming all the way from Switzerland for only three days.... I was horrified to understand when I came to the gate that my brother was not allowed in.

“He is the only uncle my children have, the only close relative my children have. I need someone from my family to help me. I cannot understand. To me, refusing him entrance is just totally diabolic.”

Gussie's response to her public outburst was, “I have no comment.”

A divorce was granted on February 28, 1978. Trudy came to court wearing a black dress and knee-high black boots, but Gussie didn't make an appearance. He was home recovering from a recent hip surgery. Under the terms of the settlement, Trudy received an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, and monthly maintenance for the rest of her life or until she remarried. The agreement also provided for a new home and a trust fund for her, in accordance with a prenuptial agreement.

On her way out of court that day, Trudy smiled for reporters and said graciously, “It is not a bitter divorce. I am glad we have had such great children, and I've had marvelous years with my husband.”

Her children would not have agreed with her sunny assessment at that moment. In truth, the divorce had shattered the family. Divided by their loyalties, the six surviving siblings ceased functioning as a unit and began to scatter: Beatrice returned to college; Trudy moved into her mother's new home; Peter, Billy, and Andrew remained in the big house with Gussie; Adolphus had taken up residence at Belleau Farm.

“This became my sanctuary,” he said, sitting in the rustic kitchen thirty-three years later. “I couldn't stand being at Grant's Farm anymore. And I was torn because Dad would always call and say, ‘Please, you have to spend more time with me.' But it hurt me so badly to see him.”

It would be seven years before he spoke to his mother again. “It was sad to see all of that crumble before your eyes,” he said.

The first real test of August's leadership came on March 1, 1976. The company's contract with its Teamster-affiliated bottlers expired at midnight, and picketers from bottling locals in Jacksonville, Florida, and Columbus, Ohio, appeared at the Pestalozzi Street plant just before dawn. Within hours, the Teamsters had shut down eight Anheuser-Busch breweries, idling eight thousand workers.

The issues in the strike had to do not with money but with the grievance and arbitration process and a demand by the Teamsters that they be given a say in any plant automation changes that might affect the number of union jobs. August sensed that the strike would be his crucible. He no longer had his father looking over his shoulder, second-guessing him, criticizing, interfering, undermining or countermanding his decisions. Now it was his photo on the first page of the annual report, his signature on the letter to shareholders. Newspapers and magazines could no longer refer to him as “young Busch.” At long last, the kid had become the king, and it was up to him to rule.

When the picketers appeared, August was ready for them. A-B had built up its inventory in anticipation of the strike, and had a thirty-day supply of beer on hand. The company also had an unlikely ally.

The Brewers and Maltsters Local No. 6 was the second-largest union on the Pestalozzi Street premises, representing approximately 1,000 of the plant's 4,000 hourly employees (Bottlers Local 1187 represented 1,490 employees). Local 6 members had recently ratified a new three-year contract that gave them a wage increase of $2.25 an hour. It was “the best economic package in the history of the brewing industry,” according to their business manager, Robert Lewis. As a result, Local 6 members honored the out-of-towners' picket line grudgingly.

“My people are bitter about being involved in this,” said Lewis, who was furious at the leaders of his parent union, Teamsters International in Chicago, for calling a strike over such sidebar issues. In addition to the pay increase, Lewis had negotiated an employee stock-purchase plan that he believed “could be revolutionary” in the industry. “Now the average worker is going to be concerned with profit and loss because it will affect his investment,” he said, noting that Anheuser-Busch had since incorporated the stock-purchase plan into eighteen of its thirty-three union contracts. The Teamsters' action threatened “everything we have gained,” he said.

Lewis gave most of the credit for the stock-purchase plan to August, whom he had publicly blamed for the 1969 strike and once characterized to reporters as “biologically incapable of doing his job.” In the intervening years, however, the two had taken Gussie's advice and learned to get along, to the point where they now considered themselves friends.

For the most part, Anheuser-Busch had a history of good relations with its craft unions, dating to the days before the turn of the century when the mostly German-born plant employees were part of the city's tight-knit German-American community, which made up the bulk of the local beer drinkers. Back then, if you angered your workers, you ran the risk of losing your customer base. As a result, labor disputes tended to be settled quickly. In June 1881, for example, five hundred workers at the Pestalozzi Street plant went on strike after management rejected their demand for shorter hours and higher pay. They labored from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. seven days a week, at a salary of $55 to $75 a month, with free lunch furnished at 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., and a daily allowance of twenty free beers per man. They wanted $5 more per month, a company-furnished breakfast at 6:00 a.m., and three hours off on Sunday morning to go to church. (Apparently, they considered the beer ration sufficient.) After a short work stoppage, they got what they wanted.