Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (31 page)

Amid widespread speculation about who would be named to succeed Long, August issued a statement saying, “I have assumed Mr. Long's responsibilities as president of Anheuser-Busch Inc. and will remain in that position for at least two years.”

To Long, that finally explained everything—the nepotism investigation, the table-slamming interrogation, the assignment of blame, and the insistence on their version of his resignation for the questionable conduct of a couple VPs. August's diversification initiative had proved an utter failure, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars. The way Long saw it, August wanted to be back on the beer side of the company, and now the internal investigation into the kickback scheme provided him with the perfect pretext for riding in on a white horse to save the day. All he had to do was sacrifice his closest associate, who was, in the end, just an employee, not blood. He was his father's son, after all.

In the months that followed, Martino and Orloff were indicted on twelve counts of mail fraud and one count of filing a false tax return. Martino was also indicted for fraud in the alleged rock band scam, but the government eventually dismissed that indictment. Drugs never came up.

At the trial, Martino mounted a spirited defense that portrayed him and Orloff as having been singled out for doing what was common practice at the company. He admitted that an executive of the outside advertising firm had provided him with clothes, club memberships, airline tickets, and gifts for his parents, but he insisted they were gestures of friendship, not bribes. He testified that every year at Christmas so many gifts for executives arrived at A-B headquarters that they spilled out of the offices into the hallways. One Christmas, he said, Fleishman-Hillard sent A-B executives, himself included, beer-pouring robots that were valued at more than $600. Martino's lawyer called Denny Long as a defense witness. Long testified that he “frequently” gave gifts to motivate and reward wholesalers, employees, and “virtually anyone involved with Anheuser-Busch.” Gifts were “part of the Anheuser-Busch style,” Long said.

In the end, Martino and Orloff were convicted on only one of the original twelve counts of mail fraud, one count of conspiring to defraud the IRS, and one count of filing a false tax return (for failing to report the gifts they'd received). They were sentenced to three years in prison, a punishment that shot fear through the hearts of dozens of A-B executives whose homes and offices contained thousands of dollars' worth of similarly undeclared gifts.

Throughout the remainder of 1987, August and Fleishman-Hillard worked hard to spin the story of August's triumphant return to the brewery. Naturally, they turned to the always Busch-friendly
Fortune
magazine, inviting one of its reporters out to Waldmeister Farm for a rare and intimate sit-down with America's once-again-reigning king of beer. The result was a long and unabashedly celebratory article that contained only two sentences about the recent unpleasantness while describing August as “fanatical about the reputation of his company” and reporting that he was “personally” taking over the beer business for at least two years “lest anything impede its fearsome progress.”

At the same time,
Fortune
and the rest of the financial media took little or no notice as August's various diversification ventures—bread, wine, water, and cruise line—toppled like dominos over the next eighteen months.

Denny Long signed his consultancy agreement and settled into his new office in Sunset Hills, not far from Grant's Farm. It took him a few months to realize that the company wasn't going to give him anything to do. He was being paid to be, as he put it, “a silent consultant.” August finally called about a year later and invited him to the farm for breakfast on a Saturday. Long resented being asked to drive the thirty miles to Waldmeister on a weekend after he'd been let go, but he went because he thought maybe August was going to offer him something.

The two men sat in August's kitchen while Ginny prepared breakfast. They talked casually about brewery business for a while before August got down to the reason for the meeting. “I have been wanting to thank you for your loyalty in not talking publicly about everything that happened,” he said. “I know that wasn't easy for you.”

“It sure wasn't,” Long replied, “especially when all the reporters were at my gate, and—”

Flashing an irritated look, August cut him off. “I'm telling you that you did a good job, okay?” he said, as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject forever. Ginny said breakfast was ready, so they ate, engaged in more brewery small talk, shook hands, and never spoke to one another again.

Long would hold his tongue for twenty-three years.

In October 1987, Gussie Busch got to see his Redbirds play in one more World Series.

Facing the Minnesota Twins, the Cardinals performed horribly in the opener at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, losing 10–1, and then suffered an 8–4 drubbing in game two.

Back home in the open air of Busch Memorial Stadium for game three, a crowd of 55,347 stood as Gussie threw out the ceremonial first ball. The eighty-eight-year-old “Big Eagle” had never appeared more frail or, judging by the thunderous applause, more beloved.

In a city with a population a fraction the size of New York and Los Angeles, the Cardinals had sold 3.07 million tickets in 1987, more than any other team. In the last twenty-three years under Gussie's “ownership,” they had won six National League pennants and three World Championships. Great players had come and gone—Musial, Flood, Maris, Carlton, Gibson, Brock—but Gussie remained, wearing his goofy red Cowboy-Budweiser-Cardinal getup and waving happily to the crowd: the man who saved the Cardinals for St. Louis and gave the Clydesdales to the world. The fans in the stands cheered as if they suspected this might be their last chance to thank him.

The Cardinals won three straight games at home to take the lead in the series, but then lost the final two games in Minneapolis. They wouldn't appear in the World Series again for seventeen years.

Gussie's game-three appearance turned out to be one of his last. In the months that followed, his health deteriorated to the point that he was confined to a wheelchair and rarely left Grant's Farm except to travel to his beachfront winter home in St. Petersburg. No longer the king of beer, he remained the emperor of his St. Louis estate, however, with a household staff of seven and a round-the-clock team of nurses attending to his needs. His day usually began with a breakfast of two poached eggs and three pieces of low-sodium bacon and ended with two dry Beefeater gin martinis with three onions and three olives. He invariably pushed for a third martini, and the nurses often gave in, but no one acceded to his constant requests for a gun so he could shoot the sparrows that invaded his fifteen-foot-high faux castle pigeon roost. The prospect of a gin-fueled ninety-year-old blasting away at “those goddamn chippies” with a rifle was just too frightening.

Gussie spent most of his time in the gun room, where the weapons were kept under lock, and in the large pantry next to the kitchen, where he sat at the head of a big table and monitored the comings and goings through the informal entrance to the house. He installed a 25-cent slot machine in the pantry and played it contentedly for hours while the staff bustled around him. Whenever a visitor or delivery person passed through, he'd call out, “Hey, pal, you got a quarter?” and motion him over to join him. Visitors could put money in, but not take any away. If they hit a jackpot, they had to turn over their winnings to Gussie before they left. Money was at the root of another amusing ritual. Each morning as his valet was getting him dressed, Gussie would ask, “Did you get my money off the dresser?”

“Yes, Mr. Busch,” the valet always replied.

“Did you count it?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Is it all there?”

“Yes, sir. Fifteen dollars, the same as yesterday.”

When he felt up to it, Gussie was taken on carriage rides around the property. Prior to setting out, he would flip a switch in his bedroom that set off a siren mounted on the house outside his bedroom window, announcing to all creatures on the estate that he was about to emerge. He had to be hoisted into the driver's seat, and no longer had the strength to control the team, but he insisted on holding the reins once they got going. As his carriage passed them, workers would stop what they were doing and wave, salute, or bow their heads in tribute. They knew the old man loved the attention.

Gussie's two youngest sons, Billy and Andy, still lived in the big house with him, as did Billy's six-year-old daughter Scarlett. The little girl was at the center of a lurid, highly publicized custody battle between Billy and an ex-girlfriend named Angela Whitson, a troubled young woman with a taste for drugs and a rap sheet that included arrests for lewd and lascivious behavior and endangering the welfare of her seven-year-old son. After Scarlett's birth in 1983, Billy supported Whitson—providing an $80,000 condo, a car, and $3,500 a month—and made his daughter part of the life at Grant's Farm, where she was given her own room, her own horse, and riding lessons beginning at age two. But in September 1987, Whitson, by then a full-blown crystal methamphetamine addict, abruptly moved with her children to southern California, where she lived in five different places, including a motel, over the next eight months, and took up with a reputed drug dealer named Gino.

In July 1988, after receiving a call from Whitson's great-aunt saying the children were being neglected and physically abused, Billy flew to California, scooped them both up, and brought them back to Grant's Farm. A juvenile court awarded him temporary custody, but Whitson challenged the ruling in a case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court and produced some of the most salacious testimony that judicial body had ever heard. Billy's attorneys brought out the fact that Whitson had been “pregnant six times by three men to whom she was not married at the time of conception,” including Gino, whose baby she brought to the April 1989 closed-door hearing. Whitson also admitted to once having a sexual affair with an escapee from an Indiana prison.

Whitson's attorney in turn grilled Billy in uncomfortable detail about his numerous sex partners, including a woman named Ginger:

“Do you recall her last name?” he was asked.

“No.”

“Was Ginger one time, or more than one time?”

“More than once.”

“About how many times?”

“Fifteen.”

The court found that Whitson was “absolutely unfit to be the custodian of this child” (the reference was to Scarlett only because, in an odd twist, the county prosecuting attorney had ordered Billy to return Whitson's son to her, and he had complied), but the court's chief justice didn't disguise his distaste for Billy and his lifestyle. “I cannot say very much in Busch's favor,” he said in his ruling. “He is the archetypal playboy.... He lives and ‘works' at Grant's Farm helping to train elephants and dogs for the public shows and attending crops and gardens.... He is the beneficiary of a family trust to which he resorts when he needs money.... I doubt that he will allow his daughter to stand in the way of his transient pleasures.”

Although Billy would prove him wrong on that last point,
^*
the judge was accurately reflecting the public's perception of Billy at the time, based largely on an incident that occurred in 1981, when he was twenty-two.

Following an arm-wrestling contest in the bar where he later met Angela Whitson, Billy was challenged to a fight by the man he'd bested, and in the course of the subsequent rolling-around-on-the-ground melee—and supposedly at the urging of the chanting crowd—he bit off the top half of his opponent's ear. No charges were filed because Billy had not started the fight, and he paid the man $25,000 for his injury. But news reports of the bloody brawl became so embedded in the public consciousness that even today, after more than two decades as a model citizen and devoted father, Billy still is commonly differentiated from his brothers by the descriptor, “the one who bit off the guy's ear.”

Not surprisingly, press coverage of the custody battle played up the sensational revelations and the Busch wealth rather than the story of a young single father trying to protect and provide for an out-of-wedlock child.

It wasn't clear how much Gussie grasped about the latest “scandal” swirling around his family because his health took a turn for the worse around the time of the custody hearing in April 1989, and thereafter he was bedridden most of the time. It's unlikely he would have judged Billy in any case. Of his five sons, Billy was the one who most resembled him physically and behaviorally, down to his love of Grant's Farm and devotion to the animals, particularly the elephants. (Billy would in fact be the last Busch to move from the estate.)

Gussie's relationship with August III warmed as his time grew short. Nothing brightened his mood more than the sound of August's helicopter setting down on the front lawn of the big house. Toward the end, August came at least once a week and sat with Gussie for an hour or so, always taking the time to inspect the antique wood-and-marble “beer box” in the pantry where the house supply of Budweiser was kept. “And if he found a bottle past its freshness date, then you were in trouble,” said a former household staff member.