Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (35 page)

Still, August handled the split with grace. He didn't just sell out to the highest bidder; he personally solicited prospective buyers, making sure the team would remain in St. Louis. (He expected that Gussie would roll over in his grave, but he didn't want to risk the old man clawing his way out of the coffin.) He chose a group of local businessmen and set the price for the team and the stadium and parking at $150 million. The sale was
the
topic of public discourse for weeks, but there was no backlash against the company because the citizens were assured that almost everything would remain the same for them—from Busch Stadium with its Clydesdale-drawn beer wagon and giant A & Eagle scoreboard to the brewery's sponsorship of the Cardinals' TV and radio broadcasts to the familiar voices of announcers Jack Buck and former Cardinal right fielder Mike Shannon talking about Bud and Bud Light in between the play-by-play. The fans were told, in effect, that Mom and Dad still loved one another, they just wouldn't be sleeping in the same bed anymore.

Extensive media coverage of the Cardinals sale helped to obscure the news that August simultaneously unloaded two other struggling subsidiaries. After fourteen years of losses, he spun off A-B's Campbell Taggart baking operation into a separate publicly traded company in a stock-swap deal with shareholders. Unable to find a buyer for Eagle Snacks, he shut down the operation and let go all of its 150 employees. (Frito-Lay eventually purchased four of the five Eagle Snacks plants, and Procter & Gamble acquired the trademark and brand name.)

August's grand plan for turning A-B into a fully diversified package-goods company in the style of Procter & Gamble—a strategy inspired by his grandfather's successful diversification of the company during Prohibition—had proved a dismal failure. But he was not one to dwell on failure, especially his own, and he often preached that mistakes were the greatest teacher. He pivoted to a plan that might well have been inspired by the letter his great-grandfather Adolphus wrote to his son (August's grandfather) ninety years before, reminding him that the family's welfare depended “solely on the success of our brewery.” August updated the sentiment to a punchier slogan, “Beer is why we are here,” and announced to shareholders in the spring of 1996 that his goal was to capture 60 percent of the domestic beer market by the year 2005. He then took to the task with the energy and determination of a man half his age.

He carried a Dictaphone wherever he went, recording an endless stream of questions, critiques, and complaints that his secretaries transcribed and forwarded to the targeted executives in the form of e-mails and interoffice memos marked “from AAB3 executape” and usually accompanied by a demand for an immediate response. He called his executives at all hours, even on Sundays and holidays. “My beeper once went off on Christmas morning when I was opening presents with my kids,” sighed a longtime executive. “I knew he'd probably sent out the query to six other people, too, and you didn't want to be the last to respond.”

There was no corner of the business that escaped his attention. He traveled to Idaho's remote Teton Valley every summer to personally inspect the hops and barley crops that were destined for his beer, hopping from farm to farm in his helicopter. He conducted similar examinations of his suppliers' rice fields in Arkansas and Mississippi. And when the annual shipments of European hops arrived by train at Pestalozzi Street, he dug right in, rolling the buds in his hands and holding them up to his nose to inhale the bouquet. “He understood the relationship between the ingredients and the processing,” said a former employee. “His father didn't even have that sort of technical command of the business.”

Mike Brooks recalled accompanying August on an inspection tour of the company's marketing presence at the Indianapolis 500 one year. After checking out the ad signage and meeting the Budweiser racing team owner and driver, August was headed back to his helicopter when he spotted a large trashcan overflowing with empty beer bottles. Brooks watched in astonishment as the boss whipped out his Dictaphone and began fishing out Bud and Bud Light empties, reading the date codes aloud so someone could check to see if the beer being sold at Indy was fresh. “That's how focused he was on quality,” Brooks said.

“So there he was, the chairman of the company in his sunglasses, $500 slacks, and $1,000 boots, digging through the trash,” said Brooks, still marveling at the image years later, “when this drunk, tattooed biker walks up, stares at him like he's from the moon, and says, ‘Hey, buddy, if you need a beer that bad, I'll buy you one.' August almost fell down laughing.”

When it came to the company's award-winning ad campaigns, the Fourth may have been claiming the credit, but no commercial went on the air without August III's approval. “He watched everything, and he could be very intimidating, aggressive and uncompromising,” said a veteran of many commercial viewing sessions with him. “But he invited opinion. He genuinely wanted to know what
you
thought. I remember one marketing meeting when he said, ‘I don't get it, but I'm not a contemporary adult. All the people in here under thirty, stand up and you tell me what you thought about that commercial.' He synthesized opinions; he energized you. He was engaged.”

The executive recalled one time when August sought his opinion about a commercial at a particularly inopportune moment. “We had just finished a meeting and I was in the executive washroom, in a stall, when he walked in and said, ‘Who's in there? Hey, what did you think? Was that the damnedest thing you ever saw?' He didn't stand on ceremony. His head was working on something, and he didn't care that I was taking a dump,” the former executive said, adding with a laugh, “And I was never comfortable using that restroom after that.“

August continued to press his personal war on drugs. Few companies had stricter or more comprehensive drug policies than A-B. All union employees were required to undergo a drug test once a year, and nonunion and management employees were subject to random testing without notice. Other companies required employees to provide blood and urine samples for testing, but A-B required them to surrender a hair sample as well, which could be used to detect drug use up to three months prior. The official company policy stated that workers who tested positive for drugs would be given unpaid leave and could be reinstated after completing an employee assistance program and testing clean. In practice, few were reinstated. “The company would pay for rehab, but the minute you completed it, they let you go, so it was really one strike and you're out.”

Despite a family history rife with substance abuse (his great-grandfather, uncle, mother, and, arguably, his father), August didn't buy the idea that alcoholism and drug addiction were a disease with a hereditary component. “He believed they were the result of personal weakness, not illness,” said a colleague. “I heard him say it many times. He thought it was all a matter of willpower.”

In the summer of 1995, August ordered a drug “search and seizure” raid at the Los Angeles brewery, conducted by A-B security and human resources personnel with the help of a private investigation agency, Wells Fargo security guards, and drug-sniffing dogs. The task force swept into the plant during a shift change at 4:30 p.m. and locked down the employee parking lot, preventing anyone from leaving for more than two hours while the dogs went from car to car. If the dogs reacted to a car, indicating that drugs might be present, the owner was located and brought to a room in the administration building, where he was told to sign a consent form authorizing a search of his vehicle or face being fired.

One longtime employee was fired on the spot for refusing to sign, and another was fired after he consented to a search and security guards found a marijuana roach clip in the glove compartment of his truck. In the parking lot, a handful of workers were ordered to remove their shoes and socks and sit on the ground while their vehicles were being searched.

The operation turned into a debacle as detained employees began calling their spouses to say they would be late for dinner because the company was holding them “hostage.” Family members called reporters, and reporters called Fleishman-Hillard for comment. “I think A-B expected to find a shit-load of dope,” said a former Fleishman-Hillard executive involved in the damage control. “Instead, they stepped in a load of shit.”

A group of more than twenty employees sued the company for false imprisonment, false arrest, assault and battery, invasion of privacy, and defamation, among other things. “The whole operation was reminiscent of some of the horror stories emanating from Germany during World War II,” said the workers' attorney, Andrew M. Wyatt, at a press conference announcing the lawsuit, which named August III and A-B security chief Gary Prindiville.

In legal papers, Wyatt cited a sworn statement by the head of the private investigation firm, saying he was told by an A-B executive that “the corporation's legal department had approved [the raid]” and that August III had said “the search better be conducted or (expletive) heads would roll.”

But for the embarrassing news stories, August III should have been pleased with the outcome of the raid. No cache of drugs was found, just some traces of marijuana under the seat of one car, which would suggest that there was no significant drug problem at the Los Angeles plant. You could expect to find more than that in any random employee parking lot in America.

Contrary to PR-generated press reports, August IV had not “toned down his wild ways.” He had just become more circumspect. As his star rose inside the company, he began gathering his own team of executives. They were a little younger than the team he inherited, by about five years, and he seemed to choose them more for their fealty to him than their knowledge of the business. One of them was Jim Sprick, a former member of the millionaires' boys club. “Sprick was given a VP position and moved up to the ninth floor, and no one could figure out why, other than he was close to the Fourth,” said one of the older executives, who was unaware that Sprick's testimony had helped sway the jury in the Fourth's 1986 car chase trial.

Sprick and a handful of the younger executives formed a protective, enabling circle around the Fourth. Whether he was out having dinner, watching football games on TV at home, or traveling on company business, they were ever-present. He called them “my guys.” Others in the company called them “the entourage,” and several of his friends referred to them as “the jackals.” On business trips, they drove the car, carried his money and credit cards, picked up the tabs, and made sure that young women were on the evening's menu. They usually accomplished the latter task by placing an order with the local distributor, telling him what August liked and instructing him to be certain to have several women available. Most of the distributors didn't like it, especially the older married ones. They weren't being asked to provide hookers, just beautiful young women who might want to party with a rich young beer baron, but it felt uncomfortably close to pimping. They felt they couldn't say no to the young man destined to inherit the company in a few years, or complain to his father. If they had been around long enough, they knew that August III and Gussie both had operated in a similar fashion back in the day, though not with the Fourth's singleness of purpose.

In fact, sex seemed to be the one thing that the Fourth and his father bonded over. The two would get into discussions on the subject with such discomfiting specificity that their fellow A-B executives would sometimes excuse themselves from the table, saying they had to go to the restroom, rather than hear more. “It was like listening to Satan talk,” said one former colleague. Another remembered having breakfast with them on a business trip in Europe. “August IV had been out to a bar the night before, and he said he'd met a beautiful girl who spoke English beautifully, and he gave her a $100 bill and asked her to go to the room with him, but she tore it in half and gave it back to him. I said, ‘Good for her,' and they both looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?'”

The Fourth's relentless womanizing made for great cocktail chatter at company social gatherings, where his colleagues and their wives watched to see what manner of pretty young thing he would bring. They were generally “nice girls” caught up in the thrill of dating the Busch brewery heir and naively hoping there might be a place for them in the kingdom. Most often they were wannabe models, actresses, or beauty queens. “He had a weakness for pageant girls,” a friend said. The A-B wives learned not to get attached to them because they tended to disappear without notice. One girl arrived in New Orleans with him, expecting to spend the week as his date at the company's Super Bowl festivities. Instead, she found herself packed up and put on the plane back to St. Louis in less than twenty-four hours. The next night another beautiful young woman was sitting by his side at the dinner table.

The Fourth once picked up a girl in a nightclub in Dallas and flew her back to St. Louis with him on the company jet. After a few days, he sent the jet back to Dallas to fetch the woman's two toy poodles. Just as quickly, the woman and her dogs were headed back to Texas. “August IV fell in love with whomever he was with,” said a friend of more than fifteen years.

After breaking up with his fiancée Judy Buchmiller, the Fourth dated an aspiring actress named Sage Linville, who moved from southern California to St. Louis to be with him. “There's a girl I'm very much in love with and she may be the one,” he told a reporter, adding playfully. “Sage Busch is an interesting name, isn't it? I'm not making predictions about that.” He also dated a stunning blonde named Shandi Finnessy, a Miss Missouri who went on to become Miss USA and a runner-up in Donald Trump's Miss Universe competition.