Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (32 page)

By all accounts, there was now genuine affection between father and son, and no trace of the anger and resentment that had characterized their relationship for more than three decades. On Gussie's part, the rapprochement was due as much to forgetfulness as forgiveness. He just didn't remember the unpleasant details anymore, and instead basked in the glow of August's constant praise: “All of this happened because of you, Dad; none of it would have been possible without you.”

August seemed to go out of his way to pay tribute to Gussie at every opportunity. “The person who put us—the recent management team that is here today—in a position to be able to do the things that we've done, is my father,” he told a
Post-Dispatch
reporter when a local nonprofit organization named him their “Man of the Year” in 1987. “He is the one who set the base for this corporation and set the standards for this corporation. We simply picked up the fundamentals and stretched them to more distant horizons.” He added, “He's the one I try to model myself after.”

According to family and friends, August's newfound appreciation for the father who once delighted in undermining and countermanding him sprang in part from guilt. Although time and events had proved him right in deciding to depose his dad, and even his half brothers now agreed he'd had no choice, he continued to feel badly about it. “As hard-nosed as he liked to present himself,” said Adolphus IV, “he still had that [guilt] going on inside and it would slip out in comments from time to time.”

Of course, August was still the steely-eyed executive who planned and calculated his every move, and some saw self-interest in his public displays of affection for the old man. The
Post-Dispatch
“Man of the Year” article that quoted him praising Gussie, for example, also quoted Gussie as saying of the firstborn son who'd engineered his overthrow, “He's a great kid. But more than that, he is doing a great job of keeping up the tradition of the family and the company. If my grandfather Adolphus were here, he would be proud as hell. I know I am.” Anyone familiar with the way the A-B public relations machine worked knew the statement most likely was written and dictated to the reporter by a Fleishman-Hillard rep and approved by August, quite possibly without the old man even knowing about it.

The Busch family began gathering at Grant's Farm during the last week of September 1989. Gussie was suffering from pneumonia and congestive heart failure, confined to bed, and breathing oxygen through a tube in his nose; they knew it wouldn't be long. On September 28, according to Billy, Gussie spoke on the phone to Trudy and asked her to forgive him. The next day, September 29, with nine of his surviving children at his bedside (Adolphus IV was driving back to St. Louis from Houston), he died in the same room where his father had shot himself to death fifty-five years before. According to an account written by a
Post-Dispatch
reporter, moments before Gussie passed away, a bright red cardinal alighted on the bird feeder outside his bedroom window overlooking the deer park.

In its obituary the next morning, the
New York Times
described him definitively as “the master showman and irrepressible salesman who turned a small family operation into the world's largest brewing company.” The
Post-Dispatch
dubbed him “Mr. St. Louis.”

In addition to his ten children, Gussie was survived by twenty-seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. So the family filled the big house for the private funeral service, which began with a Catholic Mass in the great hall (living room). Afterward, a team of Clydesdales pulling a bright red Budweiser wagon with two drivers and a Dalmatian accompanied the funeral cortege down the long lane from the house to the iron front gates of the estate, and from there a procession of limousines carried the family a mile up the road to Sunset Cemetery, where Gussie's father was buried. As Gussie was lowered into the ground between his daughter Christina and his fourth wife, Margaret, a scarlet-coated groomsman blew Taps on a silver trumpet while one of Gussie's favorite coach-and-pony teams slowly circled the funeral party, and his favorite jumping horse, Stocking Stuffer, stood nearby. His grave was one of eleven that formed a semicircle facing a heavily symbolic artifact his father had acquired from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair—a statue of a young boy feeding a fawn.

Two days later, the city got its chance to say good-bye at a public memorial in the St. Louis Cathedral on Lindell Boulevard, just a few blocks from where Gussie had delivered his famous address to the nation the night beer went back on sale in April 1933. Among the 1,700 who filled the Basilica for the Catholic High Mass were Missouri governor John Ashcroft,
Tonight Show
sidekick Ed McMahon, New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio, five busloads of workers from the brewery (which shut down for the day at 2:00 p.m.), and twenty-four Catholic clerics, including Archbishop John May and Gussie's old friend Father Paul Reinert, the chancellor of St. Louis University. In his homily, Reinert said he'd seen Gussie grow spiritually over the years, from a “self-centered” individual into a socially conscious community leader who “gradually discovered the joy and thrill of giving.”

“He had a very beautiful death,” Reinert said. “He was resigned and well prepared.”

Gussie died a very wealthy man, far richer than his grandfather Adolphus. As the company's largest stockholder, he controlled 35,452,142 shares, or about 12.5 percent of A-B common stock, worth about $1.3 billion. Upon his death, virtually all of it passed to Busch family members and relatives, including Orthweins, von Gontards, Hermanns, Flannigans, and Reisingers.

In accordance with a will Gussie had signed in 1987, each of his ten children—including August III, whom he claimed to have disinherited—received 400,000 shares from a trust that was set up in 1932. With the stock then valued at approximately $37 a share, each child's portion was worth nearly $15 million.

In addition, each of Gussie's six surviving children by Trudy received 337,464 shares from another trust set up in 1936. There were restrictions on the proceeds of the 1936 trust, however. Half of the amount—1,012,392 shares, or 168,723 shares per child—had to be placed in trust for the next generation, though the heirs could continue to draw income from the shares. So the Grant's Farm children each inherited more than $21 million worth of stock, plus an income of more than $100,000 a year, with another $6 million worth of stock held in trust for their children.

Most of Gussie's personal property was divided among the Grant's Farm children as well. Adolphus IV and Billy inherited Belleau Farm, while Peter and Andy were given ownership of 140 acres of land that abutted Grant's Farm. The two girls, Beatrice and Trudy, each got $250,000 in cash. And in his most bedeviling bequest, Gussie left Grant's Farm itself to the six of them jointly, with the restriction that it could not be broken up or sold to anyone outside the immediate family. His expectation was that the four brothers would eventually buy out their sisters and then reach an agreement about ownership among themselves. (It has not worked out that way.)

Gussie's four older children by his first two wives didn't fare nearly as well their younger half siblings. From the large art collection at Grant's Farm, each of the sisters—Lilly, Lotsie, and Elizabeth—received a Western-themed watercolor by St. Louis–born artist Oscar E. Berninghaus. And August III got the golden telegram that brewery employees had presented to his great-grandfather Adolphus for his fiftieth wedding anniversary.

When all was divided, the only real losers were August's children—Susan, Virginia, Steven, and August IV—who received nothing from their grandfather's vast estate. It appeared that Gussie had disinherited them for the sins of their father.

In the spring of 1990, Anheuser-Busch simultaneously introduced two new products, each the result of careful planning and promotion.

One was Bud Dry, a brand whose name derived from a brewing process that was all the rage in Japan. “Dry” beer was produced by fermenting the malt, grain, water, and yeast mixture, called wort, longer and more thoroughly, allowing the yeast to consume more of the residual sugar. The result was a light-bodied beer with slightly fewer calories than regular beer, but with higher alcohol content (5 percent), a drier, less malty taste, and little to no aftertaste. As the estimable London beer expert Peter (“the Beer Hunter”) Jackson put it, dry beer was “notable for having scarcely any taste, and no finish.”

Dry beer itself was nothing new. The process was a modification of one used to make a German lager called Diät Pils, originally brewed specifically with diabetics in mind because of its lower sugar content. Several regional American brewers had produced dry beers over the years, but the style had not caught on with U.S. beer drinkers. In 1987, however, Japan's Asahi Brewery introduced a dry beer in that country, hoping to sell 1 million barrels the first year. Instead, Asahi Dry Draft sold 13.5 million barrels. Asahi's three competitors—Kirin, Suntory, and Sapporo—quickly introduced their own dry beers, and within a year, 39 percent of the beer sold in Japan was dry-brewed, and all four brewers began exporting their new dry brands to the United States.

August III was not about to get caught flat-footed again on a new style of beer, no matter how bland it tasted or oxymoronic it sounded. He put dry beer on the fast track, and Michelob Dry was rushed into five test markets in September 1988. By April 1990, A-B was convinced there was a big enough market for another American-made dry beer, and the company announced the national launch of Bud Dry Draft, backed by a $70 million marketing and advertising budget—the most any brewer had ever spent to promote a new beer, the company said.

The other new product A-B introduced in April 1990 was a revamped version of August IV. Last seen publicly as a defendant on trial for assaulting police officers, the Fourth, now twenty-five, had been made over into the spitting corporate image of his father. From the short, slicked-down hair to the buttoned-down oxford-cloth white dress shirts, the resemblance was almost eerie in the publicity photos Fleishman-Hillard released, announcing that, in his first managerial role with the company, August IV was being put in charge of the Bud Dry rollout and its record budget.

The Fourth was emerging from three years of image rehab, having completed a series of assignments that read like a checklist his father might have given him titled “Things You Need to Do to Redeem Yourself and Follow in My Footsteps.” He had graduated from St. Louis University. He'd completed an apprenticeship as a member of Brewers and Maltsters Local Union No. 6, working in the brew house. He'd taken a course of study at Versuchs und Lehranstalt fur Brauerei, a brewing institute in Berlin, where he earned a master brewer certificate. He'd spent a year as assistant to A-B's vice president of brewing, Gerhardt Kraemer, and another year as assistant to marketing vice president Mike Roarty. And he appeared to have settled down in his personal life by becoming engaged to a local model named Judy Buchmiller, as chronicled by
Post-Dispatch
gossip columnist Jerry Berger in his frothy Top of the Town column:

“Bud Dry was on the house at Dominic's on The Hill Saturday night, courtesy of August Busch IV, twogether [
sic
] with his fiancée, who toasted the countdown to their middle-aisling November 17 at Our Lady of Lourdes, followed by a pouring at the St. Louis Country Club.”

Two months later, Berger reported that the Fourth and Buchmiller were “off and running to join August III in the Florida Keys to catch
Miss Budweiser
in an offshore race,” and he noted offhandedly that their wedding had been postponed. “We're still, hopefully, going to get married,” the Fourth said, as if trying to placate his father, who'd been pushing for the marriage. “We're very much in love. I want to marry the girl.” But it never happened.

Publicity surrounding the Fourth's reemergence was tightly controlled by Fleishman-Hillard, which doled out access and information to news outlets and reporters that could be counted on not to dredge up his reckless past. For the most part, the media gave him a break and focused on the present. But even Fleishman-Hillard couldn't control all the reporters all the time, and in one of the Fourth's first arranged interviews, he was asked whether the unusually large $70 million Bud Dry budget was the company's way of ensuring success for the boss's son. “No, no, no, no,” he responded. “This brand had tremendous success in test markets.” Then he all but confirmed that he'd been given special treatment with the promotion, blurting out, “I've only been on the [Bud Dry] team two or three months.”

The Fourth initially earned kudos from his coworkers merely for being nicer than his father. “He was very personable,” said a former A-B middle manager who first met him during the Bud Dry rollout. “He was walking through the brewery, shaking hands, and asking people questions and actually listening to them. I felt like he was trying to learn, and not from the way his dad did things. He didn't go around looking for old beer. It was more the way Gussie had done it.”

There was still that other side to the Fourth, however, the one that came out at night, when he was running with his friends in St. Louis's Central West End or traveling on company business away from the prying eyes of his father and the higher-ups in the home office. This was the side that a group of A-B marketing employees saw during the company's spring break promotion in Palm Springs in 1989.