Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (19 page)

Even as Gussie plotted revenge against August, he maintained the facade that all was well. When Fleishman managed to have him named to head a citizens' committee to raise funds for the completion of the St. Louis Convention Center and the mayor proclaimed him “the No. 1 Ambassador of the City St. Louis,” Gussie posed for pictures with Trudy and the kids on the steps of City Hall, all of them dressed up as if they were going to church on Easter morning. “As long as I am alive, the citizens can count on me to do everything in my power to make St. Louis, our state and our nation the best place to live, raise a family and do business,” he said.

Gussie took Adolphus along when he flew to Washington, D.C., with Lou Susman to confer with former defense secretary Clark Clifford. An adviser to Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and a former St. Louisan, Clifford was considered the wisest and wiliest honest broker in the nation's capital, and Susman wanted Gussie to get his advice on the various options available to him in the wake of the coup.

Clifford agreed with Susman that Gussie should avoid a big public battle with August, but said that through quiet negotiations, “we might be able to get back some of what you have lost.” At the same time, Clifford said he thought Gussie stood a good chance of toppling August if he sold his shares to a potential buyer that Susman had lined up—RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolds was enticed by the prospect of buying into the brewing business with a competitive advantage over its longtime rival, Philip Morris, which now owned Miller. So eager was Reynolds, in fact, that the company's CEO, Paul Sticht, flew to St. Louis to meet with Gussie at Belleau Farm, offering him $34 a share at a time when A-B stock was still trading in the low twenties. With Gussie's 30 percent stake in hand, and a willingness to pay a substantial premium over the trading price, Reynolds would have little trouble securing a controlling interest in A-B and placing its own people on the board. That wouldn't put Gussie back in charge, but it would mean good-bye to August, who would either leave on his own or be voted out by the new board.

While Gussie was mulling over the Reynolds offer, Susman managed to negotiate some face-saving concessions from A-B, including the continued use of his third-floor office and his full-time personal secretary, along with his company car and driver. Susman told him that he might even be able to arrange a deal to buy the Cardinals from the company. Gussie liked that idea so much that he called a press conference to talk about it, announcing with Adolphus at his side that the somewhat bewildered-looking twenty-two-year-old would be part of the Cardinals operation if a deal could be reached. Adolphus was praying that no one would ask him a question; for the life of him, he couldn't figure out why his father would want to buy the team. He'd been listening to Gussie complain for years about how the players association was ruining the game and making it impossible to turn a profit. The Cardinals had earned profits of less than $4 million over the entire twenty-two years A-B had owned the team. Who would want to own a business like that? You'd do better putting your money in a savings account.

Neither of the big deals came to fruition. After A-B placed an $11 to $13 million valuation on the baseball team, Gussie lost interest in being the real owner and chose to continue as its president. He would have August looking over his shoulder, but at least it wouldn't cost him any money, and he could continue to use the rail car and motorbus during spring training and the playing season. And after weeks of soul-searching, he decided that selling his shares to RJ Reynolds would be a betrayal of his father and grandfather. “I don't think they would ever go along with something like that,” he told Trudy. August had dodged a bullet without even knowing it. The RJ Reynolds negotiations would remain a secret for more than a decade.

Though he said nothing publicly, in private Gussie continued to rage against August and the board, breaking off relations with everyone he thought had not supported him, including his daughters Lotsie and Elizabeth. “I tried to tell him to let it go,” said Trudy. “I said, ‘It's time. You have everything you could want. You have to deal with it. You have to move on and live.' But he was losing his empire and he couldn't accept it. He took out all his frustration on the people around him, yelling and screaming at everyone. He was like a wounded buck dying.”

The saddest chapter in Gussie Busch's life ended with a vindication of sorts. Beginning in September 1975, reports began surfacing that Schlitz had secretly removed more than 500,000 cases of its beer from bars and stores in seventeen states based on customer complaints that it “tasted funny.” CEO Robert Uihlein sought to blunt the impact of the stories, saying that only 3,685 cases had been pulled after a distributor reported an “off-taste” that may have been caused by “a very limited number of defective can-end lids supplied to Schlitz by a can company.” But the company's problems were far more serious than that, and it all stemmed from Uihlein's corner cutting.

In the normal brewing process, a protein is produced that can cause a haze to form when the beer is chilled. Anheuser-Busch allowed the protein to settle out naturally during its longer aging process. Due to its shortened brewing process, however, Schlitz needed to add an artificial silica gel to counter the hazing effect. But Schlitz brewery managers feared the FDA would soon require brewers to list their ingredients on the label, exposing the company to attacks from Anheuser-Busch for using “unnatural” ingredients. So they began substituting another artificial antihaze additive called Chill-Garde, which could be filtered out prior to bottling and therefore didn't need to be listed on the label.

Schlitz's brewing technicians didn't realize that Chill-Garde would react in the bottles and cans with a commonly used (but not by A-B) foam stabilizer called Kelcoloid, forming tiny white flakes in the beer. The flakes got worse the longer the beer was on the shelf, eventually clumping together to form clots that resembled mucus or, according to one observer, “snot.” In a rushed attempt to fix the problem, Schlitz executives in Milwaukee ordered their technicians to keep the Chill-Garde and lose the Kelcoloid, and the result was a headless beer that was “flat as apple cider,” according to one distributor.

The shocking breakdown of quality controls culminated in the secret recall of more than 10 million bottles and cans of unacceptable beer that the company bulldozed into the ground at its Tampa and Memphis plants, a process that went on for months. But the damage was done. Schlitz sales fell more than 40 percent, its stock price plummeted to $5 a share, and its reputation as a quality brewer was irrevocably destroyed. Within a few years, the “beer that made Milwaukee famous” all but vanished from the marketplace (the brewery was purchased by Detroit-based Stroh Brewing Company in 1982).

Robert Uihlein died on November 12, 1976, just a few weeks after he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Gussie refused to attend his funeral in Milwaukee, so Trudy and Adolphus IV went without him to pay their respects. They flew commercial.

The trade magazine
Advertising Age
summed up the whole sorry episode in an article that seemed aimed at the financial press that had so recently mocked Gussie for his “old fashioned” devotion to quality:

“A classic tale of human failing, the Schlitz saga now serves as a reminder for those who might lose sight of the fact that a company—no matter how modern its plants, how endowed its balance sheet or how lionized by Wall Street analysts—is really no stronger than the human beings who manage it.”

Considering how the Anheuser-Busch saga ultimately played out, that passage now seems prophetic.

In the middle of the night, the big house at Grant's Farm can be a spooky place, cavernous and shadowy, with no neighboring homes for half a mile in any direction, and no sounds of civilization to compete with the rustling of the wind in the trees and the cries of myriad wild animals.

At 1:00 a.m. on February 8, 1976, the loud crack of a gunshot reverberated through the darkened house. Gunfire was not an unusual sound at Grant's Farm, where animals were hunted and harvested all the time. The property practically bristled with weaponry. Gussie had a collection of nearly one hundred rifles and pistols, many of which were on display in the aptly named gun room.

But this shot had been fired inside the house. The sound woke Adolphus IV, who was lying in his bed trying to figure out what he had just heard when his brother Peter burst into his room. “Please help me,” Peter said. “Something terrible has happened.”

Adolphus followed Peter through the bathroom that separated their bedrooms. He could smell the burned gunpowder as he entered the room, where he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Peter's best friend, David Leeker, lying on his back on the floor, with a small bullet hole between his lip and nose and blood pooling on the carpet around his head. Adolphus's mind careened back nine years, to when he watched his best friend, Geoffery Meiers, die right in front of him after falling from a horse down by the lake at Grant's Farm, the blood pooling on the pavement around his head.

Adolphus wheeled and bolted out the door into the second-floor hallway, nearly colliding with Gussie, who had heard the shot, too, and was coming to see “what the hell's going on.”

“Dad, don't go in there,” Adolphus said, instinctively trying to shield the old man from another tragedy. Gussie pushed past him and knelt down next to the boy to feel for a pulse. He couldn't find one. “It was an accident,” Peter said. “I didn't mean to shoot him. The gun just went off.” The gun, a Colt .357-magnum revolver, lay on the floor. Gussie recognized it as the one his friend Robert Baskowitz Jr. had given Peter as a high school graduation present.

There was a time when Gussie would have taken charge and dealt decisively with the situation. But at age seventy-seven, he was no longer that man. With both his sons in a state of shock and Trudy visiting her family in Switzerland, he instructed the brothers to call the police and then went back into his bedroom and collapsed on the bed in tears. Peter phoned the police while Adolphus called Gussie's secretary, Margaret Snyder, who quickly contacted Lou Susman in Florida. Within minutes the police and paramedics arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Snyder, two lawyers from Susman's firm, and seventy-one-year-old Al Fleishman, who'd been rousted out of bed by Susman even though he had retired from his company.

David Leeker was rushed to the hospital, but Peter and Adolphus knew the caliber of the gun and the location of the wound pretty much guaranteed he was dead. While the police examined the scene in Peter's room, the Busch advisers gathered in Gussie's bedroom and listened to Peter sob out his description of the shooting.

After an evening of hanging out, watching TV and playing cards, David had decided to spend the night, and they were preparing a sleeping bag for him on the floor. Peter went out into the long hallway and, with the gun in his hand, got a pillow from the linen closet. He walked back into the bedroom, dropped the pillow on the sleeping bag, and started to toss the pistol onto his bed. That's when the weapon “somehow discharged,” he said.

The police questioned Peter and Adolphus in the Blue Room, a parlor at the end of the second-floor hallway, and the brothers later went to the police station, where Peter gave detectives an official statement and took a lie detector test. At 3:15 a.m., detectives knocked on the door of the Leeker home less than a mile from Grant's Farm and gave his parents the awful news. At the same time, Al Fleishman faced a group of reporters gathered at the front gate of Grant's Farm and repeated Peter's version of events. When a reporter asked why the young man was carrying a loaded gun around his house, Fleishman explained awkwardly that all the Busch children were taught to handle firearms and used them for hunting and target practice. When he was finished, one of the reporters said to him, “I guess you know nobody is going to believe this.”

There were problems with Peter's story. He told his lawyers and the police that David was standing across the room from him when the gun went off. But the powder burns on Leeker's face indicated that he'd been shot at point-blank range, with the muzzle of the gun inches away. Peter also said that the gun was not cocked before it discharged. But the county firearms examiner could find no reason why the gun would have fired so easily, and tests in the police laboratory showed that without the hammer cocked, it took eleven pounds of pressure to pull the trigger. All of which argued against an inadvertent discharge.

Nonetheless, the detective in charge of the case told reporters that Peter “has cooperated with us fully and we believe he is telling the truth.” And by the end of the day, the chief investigator for the county medical examiner's office had ruled the shooting an accident, saying he “could find no evidence of reckless action that might prompt the lodging of a manslaughter charge” against Peter.

According to investigators, Peter told them he was carrying the gun around the house that night out of fear of kidnappers. “Apparently it was normal occurrence for this young man to walk around carrying a gun on the property and in his home,” the chief detective told reporters. “Even though the family has security guards and other people around all the time, they always seem afraid something might happen.”

It may have sounded like paranoia on Peter's part, or a convenient excuse for dangerous behavior, but a reasoned fear of kidnapping was in fact embedded in the Busch family psyche. It dated back to the Depression, when America experienced an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom, including that of August A. Busch's eleven-year-old grandson, Adolphus Orthwein, who was abducted at gunpoint on New Year's Eve in 1930 as he was being driven to Grant's Farm to have dinner with his grandparents. Young Dolph was rescued unharmed the next morning, but a shaken August A. from then on traveled with an arsenal in his Cadillac limousine—a pistol in the front seat for the driver, a pistol behind the backseat, another one in his suit pocket, and a double-barreled derringer in his hat. He went so far as to buy sixty .32-caliber pearl-handled Police Special revolvers, which he gave to friends and business associates as protection from kidnappers.