Dethroning the King (9 page)

The Third's legion of subordinates busted their tails every day to earn his respect, putting in exhausting workweeks and traveling for long stretches away from their families. These were salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners—people who tended to marry their high school sweethearts—and The Third demanded sacrifice. But he was compelling enough to get it.

“Mr. Busch is just a great leader; he was a guy you'd do anything for,” one top executive said. “And if he patted you on the back, you felt like you could go for six more months because that's how much we all loved him and admired him. But he's not a man who gives love back. That was the tough part.”

Helpful Anheuser ladder-climbers passed on certain pieces of advice to their less-experienced colleagues. Of utmost importance was that they knew their area of expertise inside and out, since it was a capital offense for a staffer to come up blank in front of August III on a subject he should understand. If that did happen, it was far better to tell him you'd return quickly with an answer rather than bluffing through a response. The Third's bullshit detector was finely tuned, and “if he finds out, it's not pretty,” said one former executive.

It was important to have an abbreviated version of each pitch just in case he was running behind, because when The Third told someone he had two minutes, he meant it. He was known to take off his watch and set it on the table in front of him to draw attention to the time constraint.

And always, always look him in the eye, the company's senior staffers advised.

“I never got that instruction,” mused one former executive. “But it never occurred to me to do anything other than that.”

The Third's cross-examinations were particularly stressful during trips on the Anheuser-Busch planes. Executives traveling with August—and in some cases, even their wives—knew to mentally prepare for several unobstructed hours of his attention. He would often fly the plane himself on the way home, or at the very least, crack open a beer and take a break. “On your way down, though, it's your worst nightmare,” said one former staffer. “You're in this thing for hours, and he's going to just torture you, peppering question after question. You weren't going anywhere. What are you going to do?”

August III also loved to show up unannounced. He staged frequent surprise white-glove inspections at Anheuser-Busch's breweries, theme parks, and wholesalers, and even at restaurants that poured the company's beer. The routine was simple: If the beer being served by a restaurant or shipped by a wholesaler was old, he would walk back to the beverage cooler and dump it all out. If a theme park's walkways were dirty, he'd have its general manager on a walkie-talkie within seconds, putting every staffer in the park on clean-up duty. To kick off his visits, The Third often headed straight for the bathroom—a tactic his father had also employed in his day. “When I visit one of our plants or any installation, I make a bee-line for the toilets,” Gussie said. “Not because I need to make use of them . . . If the restrooms are unclean, if there is no soap or towels or tissue, you can just bet there will be something lacking also in many other phases of that operation.”

The Third's desire for control and perfection drove him to be heavily involved in nearly all aspects of Anheuser-Busch's business. He once demanded that a television commercial be reshot because the horses in it were too skinny. His love for beer itself—the smell and taste of it, the way light filtered through a perfectly poured glass, and the way it was painstakingly made, from harvest to tap—made him a constant presence on brewery floors well past the end of his official tenure as CEO.

“He had an incredible passion for the product and the breweries and everything that had to do with the making of the beer,” said one former executive committee member. “That was sort of his thing.”

August III would ritualistically dig his hands into the breweries' hop bins, crack open the husks and inhale deeply through his nose, smelling them to gauge their quality. At brewery meetings, he liked to toss hops into hot water to make “hop teas,” an acquired taste that even many beer aficionados find disgusting.

Dining with The Third at a restaurant meant sitting down in front of a lineup of the establishment's beers and spending the supper hour sipping and gargling to make sure they were fresh. After work, he liked to hit the tasting room on the brewing department's top floor. Even his office served as a beer-swilling laboratory. As a certified brewmaster, he was a member of the company's taste surveillance team, which tested beers from various Anheuser-Busch breweries every day to see if tiny adjustments to the process needed to be made. Anyone who ducked into his earth-toned office might encounter up to 50 numbered bottles lined up on his desk. He performed the same ritual many nights at home before his head hit the pillow at 8:30.

As one executive who used to scope out the company's breweries with August III joked, “The floors were always wet when you went on a tour with August. When he visited a brewery, you'd better wear shoes with rubber soles because before he got there, they were washing down everything.”

There were complaints that the company's brewing operation was given carte blanche when it came to spending, even when it didn't seem necessary. “It was almost hilarious to go to a capital screening committee meeting,” said one top executive. “Whatever brewing wanted, they would get. We had 300 engineers on staff at one time, creating projects just to do stuff.” Still, it was worth every penny to August III.

At one time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a group of ad agency staffers and marketing executives was running a series of focus groups out at a mall near St. Louis.

“I want to see one of those,” August III said, and the marketers, of course, agreed. So The Third showed up at the mall that night as a group of consumers took their seats around a table, preparing to discuss Anheuser-Busch and its advertising. The Third and his cadre of marketers settled in a room off to the side, behind a plate of one-way glass.

The focus group caromed back and forth between various beer-related topics before settling on the concept of beechwood aging. A middle-aged man piped in with his two cents. “Oh yeah, I've been down at the brewery there where they've got those big wooden beechwood barrels. Yeah, the giant barrels, I seen 'em myself.”

August III, stationed behind the glass, cocked his head to the side. “That guy is full of shit,” he told the rest of the observers. “That's not what we have, that's not it at all.” The man had clearly never seen any of the aging tanks at Anheuser-Busch's brewery, which were giant vats made of steel, not wood, whose bases were lined with beechwood shavings.

“I know, August, but that's what he thinks, so that's reality to him,” said Steve Kopcha, who was running the focus group. As the group listened politely, the man continued spouting off phony bits of knowledge about the beechwood aging process until August III couldn't take it anymore. He got up, strode into the focus group's room with his hand outstretched in greeting, and said “Hi, I'm August Busch. Let me tell you how we do it.”

“These guys are just sitting there with their mouths open,” Kopcha recalled later. “For about an hour, he told them about beer and how you make it right. And I tell you what, there were ten new Budweiser drinkers for life. He sold a lot of beer that night. That's the kind of guy he was. If it wasn't right, he wanted it fixed.”

For all of The Third's dedication to quality, however, and his efforts to pull everyday drinkers onto the “fanatic” side of the fence, Budweiser and Michelob haven't been viewed by the American public as premium beers since the 1950s. To many American drinkers and even more to drinkers in Europe, Bud and Bud Light are keg beers meant to be enjoyed five or six at a time in front of the television.

“People don't really care how you make the stuff,” said Kopcha, echoing in blunt terms what Anheuser insiders try to skirt around more delicately. “They assume it's sanitary, and that's all they really care about.”

“I wish I had a dollar for every time we tried to talk ingredients in a focus group, and somebody would say, ‘Look, I don't care if it's made out of panther piss. If I like it, I like it and if I don't, I don't.' We could never convince August, although intellectually, he knew people were saying that.”

August III's meticulousness filtered through the entire Anheuser-Busch organization, from its executive suites all the way down to the people who hosed off the Clydesdales or hauled cases of beer. Budweiser deliverymen during his era would routinely turn each can in their store displays so that the labels faced outward, and salesmen would stop by their local grocery on the way home from work to refill the beer cooler from the stockroom out back. It was that grassroots-level intensity that helped Anheuser triumph over Miller during The Third's first 15 years at the helm.

“We can second-guess, but you look at so many things that were so on and so right,” said Buddy Reisinger. “There was no one who would outwork him, and no one who cared more about the place.”

If there was one thing The Third loved nearly as much as brewing beer, it was flying. Anheuser-Busch was one of jet maker Dassault's top clients, and The Third, who started flying at the age of 15, relished the opportunity to rack up extra flight hours by taking the company's planes for a spin. Anheuser actually leased its fleet of jet aircraft and Bell helicopters from a company August III had formed, Ginnaire Rental, for several hundred thousand dollars per year and disclosed the cost in its annual statement to shareholders. Anheuser's fleet of pilots never minded the intrusion when The Third would assume the controls on the way home. “August was one hell of a pilot,” said one former staffer. “And the pilots absolutely loved and respected him. He knew everything.”

Rather than brave the St. Louis highway traffic and endure forced handshakes and small talk on the short walk from the company parking lot to his office, he also preferred to fly his helicopter to work each morning from his secluded farm in St. Peters, 40 miles to the east. He had a phobia of elevators, and flying to the office allowed him to descend just one flight of stairs from the roof each morning rather than having to hitch a lift up from the bottom of the building. The Third showed up each day by a quarter to seven, and his subordinates marked the promptness of their own more pedestrian arrivals by whether his helicopter was already perched ominously on the roof when they steered their cars into the parking lot. Anheuser-Busch operated on “Busch” time—events were dictated by The Third's arrival, not by the positioning of two hands on the face of a clock. Anyone scheduled to accompany him for a trip on one of the company's corporate jets knew to arrive at least half an hour early because “as soon as August gets there, you leave.”

“Mr. Busch's omnipresence at the office—the helicopter ceremoniously on top of the building—always got you,” said one top former executive. “Every day I'd drive to that office the years he was there, you'd see that helicopter and you knew your ass could be in that office at any minute answering questions—and not usually in a very friendly way. So it made you get there on time.” Company staffers who were already in the building tried to ignore the thwack of the rotors each morning as the chopper settled on the roof right above their heads, but disregarding The Third's arrival was never easy.

“The helicopter used to come in over my head when I worked up on the ninth floor, and I found it very distracting,” said another top former executive. “After a while, I took the bottles off my bookcase because I was sick of having them fall off.”

Many companies would think hard before letting their CEOs helicopter to and from work each day, especially publicly traded companies with executives as influential as August III was. But August III was never bound to the laws of common men. Thanks to a mix of extreme wealth and a sheltered and provincial upbringing, he tended to circumvent life's harsher realities—or was never presented with the opportunity to face them in the first place. During one visit to New York for a business meeting, his security detail stopped traffic on busy Sixth Avenue as he exited an office building to allow him to get into his car. “This is a man who is not troubled by self-doubt,” said the chief of a rival beer company.