Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (36 page)

One relatively long-term relationship ended on an ugly note when the Fourth's rottweiler horribly bit the young woman on the face. The attack occurred late at night in his home on Lindell Boulevard, across from Forest Park. As the Fourth was rushing the woman to the emergency room, he called one of his guys, frantic, and told him to go to the house and “clean up the mess.”

“What do you mean?” the other man asked.

“You'll see; just go,” the Fourth replied.

The man later told another executive that he found cocaine at the house and evidence of kinky sex, suggesting that the dog might have attacked the girl because he perceived that she was hurting his master. The Fourth told people that she had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, and the dog must have mistaken her for an intruder. The girl vanished from his life, supposedly with a hefty financial settlement. The dog stayed.

The media has long characterized August IV's sexual escapades as a “playboy” lifestyle, often employing that old-school adjective as a kind of editorial wink, telegraphing an unmistakable admiration for his accomplishment, as if to say we should all be so lucky. Several of his colleagues even coined a secret nickname for him that was intended as a humorous reference to his seemingly constant priapic state. “How's Woody doing?” they'd say. Or, “Has Woody weighed in on this yet?” But to some who knew him over a number of years, the Fourth's incessant coupling seemed more a sad compulsion born of a deep psychological wound. A female friend suggested that his need to win over beautiful women constantly stemmed from a severe case of acne that had marred his looks and played havoc with his self-confidence when he was a teenager. A male friend opined that it was because “he could never get a hug from his dad.”

Whatever the cause, one result was that between the ever-changing women and the ubiquitous entourage, August IV was rarely if ever by himself, almost as if he were terrified of being alone.

Fortunately for him, he could afford not to be. In the late 1990s, he began hosting weekend parties at the company's luxury compound on the Lake of the Ozarks, a 55,000-acre man-made lake in the Ozark Mountains about a forty-five-minute helicopter flight from St. Louis. Started by August III in 1982, the woodsy compound featured four separate residential units, a tennis court, a helicopter landing pad, an elaborate boat dock with a full-service kitchen, and a fleet of half a dozen watercraft, including a large cabin cruiser, a high speed powerboat, and two houseboats. With a staff of twenty-one in the summer months, the complex could accommodate up to a hundred guests.

The lake property was not a place that A-B's rank-and-file workers or middle managers ever visited. August III used it primarily as a conference center for his highest-ranking executives, members of the strategy committee, who would be flown to the lake on corporate aircraft, sometimes with their wives, for several days of meetings and relaxation. He also hosted Busch family gatherings, birthdays, and holiday celebrations at the compound, all sumptuously provisioned but low-key affairs. There were no wild parties when August III was in residence at No. 4, the largest residential unit on the property. Key executives, important distributors, close Busch friends, and even some Cardinals players also were allowed to reserve units for getaways with their families.

The atmosphere at the compound started to change, however, after the Fourth became vice president of marketing and began showing up at the lake with “his guys” nearly every weekend. According to a former supervisor of the household staff, “the work hours got a lot longer because he would stay up late partying, and the staff had to stay on the job until he was done and dismissed them.”

Unlike his father, who preferred barbecuing his own steaks to going out to eat, the Fourth hit all the hot spots in the area, from the Blue Heron restaurant, where you could find a $1,200 cabernet on the wine list, to the Horny Toad, a raucous roadhouse hookup joint where cocaine and oxycodone (known as “hillbilly heroin”) could be purchased in the crowd almost as easily as a Bud could be bought at the bar. According to local legend, the Fourth once paid a cocktail waitress at the Horny Toad $1,000 to deliver a round of drinks topless.

When the clubs closed, the Fourth and the entourage usually brought some patrons back to the compound, where they liked to fire guns across the water from the boat dock and set off fireworks. “They set the place on fire once,” said the former staffer. During the day on weekends, they hopped into one or more of the company boats and headed for “Party Cove,” which the
New York Times
called “the oldest established permanent floating bacchanal in the country.” The party took place in Anderson Hollow Cove, where more than a thousand boats would be anchored so closely together that you could step from one to another amid much mooning, “titty flashing,” and public fornication to the cheers of spectators.

In his posh fifty-foot cruiser or conspicuously branded Budweiser powerboat, the Fourth was always the biggest fish in the cove, and he reveled in his celebrity. The bikinied females who flocked aboard his boat were not the same as the girls he picked up in Central West End bars or brought to company parties. “They were a different class of women altogether,” said a friend. “These were more the ‘rode hard and put up wet' gals, coarser and more worn. And they reacted to him as if he were a god.”

In an interview with a local magazine, the Fourth described a typical lake weekend from an entirely different perspective. “Here we can work in a non-traditional, natural setting,” he said. “The great thing about the Lake is that we can walk into any bar or restaurant and just talk to people, engaging consumers while they're enjoying our beverages. It's a tremendous opportunity to get people's honest feedback about a particular product.”

The lake became the Fourth's refuge, a place where he was always surrounded by people who catered to him and protected him, including local sheriff's deputies, whom he paid to moonlight as his personal bodyguards and weekend security detail at the compound. “His father had no security,” said a former compound employee. “The Fourth was kind of obsessed with it, especially after 9-11.” That sort of patronage bought a lot of indulgence from law enforcement in the small rural community of Lake Ozark, Mo. “The Fourth liked the lake because he felt he could control the environment there, and no one in authority was watching or judging him,” said a friend.

Over the period of a few years, the Fourth literally took over the lake facility. His father used the compound less frequently, and other A-B executives were uncomfortable with the increasingly rowdy atmosphere. Eventually, management of the property came under the purview of A-B's vice president of hospitality, Jim Sprick. From then on, the Fourth “operated it like a little party palace,” said a former company employee.

The Fourth changed the atmosphere at the St. Louis office, too, as he moved to solidify his position in the hierarchy of the company. Buoyed by his accolades for A-B's ad campaigns, he morphed into a “hard-charging, aggressive, assumptive guy, entitled and arrogant,” according to one executive who worked with him at the time. “He'd have dinner with his father on Sunday night and then come in on Monday and say, ‘My dad and I talked and this is what we are doing.' His father inadvertently empowered him. People knew he was probably going to be chairman one day, so they got out of his way; they deferred to him even though his actual position didn't dictate that deference.”

Inevitably, resentments sprang up between the older members of the management team and the younger men the Fourth was bringing in to the mix.

“You had the big brothers and the little brothers,” said one observer of the dynamic. The big brothers were, for the most part, loyal to August III, and felt that helping the Fourth succeed was part of their duty to the Chief. The little brothers felt they owed allegiance solely to the Fourth, and they saw his father as a tyrant intent on holding on to power for as long as he could. It was a repeat of the pattern established thirty years earlier, when a young August III and his corporate planners butted heads with Gussie and his buddies up on the third floor of the old administration building.

The big brothers thought the Fourth was too caught up in the glamour aspects of the business—the cool TV commercials, sports sponsorships, and lavish Super Bowl parties—and didn't pay enough attention to the sales functions of the brewery and its distributors, the gritty work that moved the product out of the plants and into the beer coolers of America. They looked askance at the Fourth's growing relationship with Ron Burkle, a onetime California supermarket magnate turned billionaire investor whose reputation for womanizing matched or exceeded his own and whose parties at his Beverly Hills mansion, “Green Acres,” featured the sort of guests the Fourth would never have bumped into at the Horny Toad, including former president and Mrs. Clinton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his sons Yusef and Jonathan. The Fourth hosted Burkle on at least one occasion at the lake compound, where the staff had no idea who he was but took to calling him “the rich guy.”

The big brothers grumbled that while the Fourth was hobnobbing with Burkle, he avoided mixing with people far more important to the company. “He did not respect our distributors,” said one. “He viewed them as hired help rather than the wealthy independent businessmen that they were.”

“He had the attention span of a flea,” said another. “He could
not
finish a dinner or a round of golf with important clients or wholesalers. He was always saying, ‘I gotta go.'”

At a meeting with executives of 7-Eleven at the company's offices in Dallas, for example, the Fourth “got up and walked out when the discussion went longer than he'd planned,” said an executive who was present. “Everyone was shocked because they wanted to share their strategy with us. The meeting went on for another hour without him, and when we got back to the airport he was waiting on the plane. We asked, ‘How could you walk out on one of our largest customers?' He said, ‘I'm sorry, but I just couldn't sit there anymore.'”

(In contrast, August III once waited several hours for the CEO of 7-Eleven, whom he was supposed to meet for dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. But the other man was flying in on his own plane, and there was some delay. “So after about an hour, August asked, ‘How much business do we do with 7-Eleven?'” said a former executive who was present. “I told him twenty-four million cases a year, and he said, ‘Holy shit! I'll wait all night for someone who buys that much beer from us.'”)

Sometimes the Fourth wouldn't show up for meetings at all. When his father and all the other senior executives gathered in Palm Springs for a long-scheduled golf weekend with one of A-B's biggest customers, the vice president of marketing had his assistant phone in his regrets at the last minute. “Where's August?” his father asked a subordinate at the kickoff cocktail party. “He was supposed be here.” The Fourth was forty-five minutes away by corporate jet, hanging out with his new best friend Ron Burkle in Los Angeles, where he remained for the entire weekend. To the big brothers, it was another example of his lack of work ethic.

The little brothers had an entirely different view of their boss. They saw him—and by extension themselves—as the hip breath of fresh air the company needed to blow away the smell of the Clydesdale stables that seemed to cling to everything. They pointed to the success of the Bud Light “I Love You, Man” and “Real Men of Genius” campaigns as evidence that the Fourth was himself a marketing genius, capable of leading the company to new heights of success if his father would just support him and not keep undermining him all the time. The Fourth fostered the latter sentiment by posting some personal notes his father had sent him on the wall in his home, where others could see them. “They were painful to read, stern and businesslike,” said a frequent visitor to his house.

The most loyal of the little brothers sometimes characterized the Fourth as a “visionary” or even a “great man,” but at the same time they ignored or covered up behavior that belied such descriptions. They knew, for example, that his partying was beginning to interfere with his job performance. “Did it ever make sense to you why he would never attend a meeting before noon? It was because he'd gotten wrecked the night before and he couldn't make one before that,” one of the little brothers confided to a big brother years later, after the takeover deal went down. “And how many meetings did he cancel out on?”

The older, married executives missed the signs because they didn't stay up with Fourth into the wee hours, when his demeanor changed and he got a little loopy and poignant, and stood with his face a little too close, as if something more than alcohol was at work. The big brothers attributed his unavailability to laziness. The little brothers didn't tell them what was really going on for fear they would tell Dad.

The Fourth's mother, Susie, apparently knew enough to call several of the older executives and ask them to help her arrange an intervention for her son. They thought she was being overly dramatic. Besides, they'd never seen the Fourth any more impaired than a lot of them got on occasion. It sort of went with the territory. They respectfully declined Susie's request, figuring that if they tried to rope the Fourth into an intervention and he didn't go for it, then they'd be looking for another job pretty quickly.

In 2001 the Fourth took half a dozen or so members of his executive team on a working vacation to Key West, Florida, where they found a new safe haven for misbehaving. They rented a secure floor on one wing of the Hilton and, with the 172-foot
Big Eagle
yacht and
Little Eagle
speedboat docked nearby for their use, commenced two weeks of epic partying that seared them into the memories of the locals. They quickly made themselves known at Rick's, the town's largest nightclub complex, which boasted half a dozen separately operated bars, including a topless one called the Red Garter.