Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (11 page)

“That was the turning point for the company's sales,” he said later. Lest anyone think his job was easy, he boasted that in one tour of local taverns on that trip he was required to consume forty-eight beers in eight hours. “I had to take a few shots of whiskey to warm up my stomach,” he said. “That beer sure gets cold.”

By 1957, Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser were back in first place on the heels of what turned out to be an historic ad campaign. Using photography instead of illustrations for the first time, and depicting real people in everyday situations rather than formal ones, the ads marked the debut of Budweiser's nickname: “Where there's life, there's Bud.”

After Newark and Los Angeles, Gussie set his sights on Florida for further expansion of A-B's production capacity. Construction began on a new plant in Tampa in 1957, but this time he envisioned something more than a brewery. The company had been offering guided tours of the St. Louis brewery since the repeal of Prohibition. Other breweries had tours, but A-B's were considered the gold standard. The historic Brew House—with its two-story turn-of-the-century chandeliers, dark stained wood, and baroque Germanic art—combined with the ornate Clydesdale stables to make the Pestalozzi Street plant a field-day destination for every junior and senior high school in the area, and one of the top tourist attractions in the state. The entire place was so brightly painted and sparkling clean that it resembled a Disney-designed diorama more than a fully operational manufacturing facility, giving the impression that you could lick the factory floor without fear, and it would probably taste like sugar. For those over the age of twenty-one, the tour offered a bonus of free beer at the end.

What Gussie had in mind for Tampa was a combination of the St. Louis brewery tour and Grant's Farm, with birds. He had an abiding passion for beautiful birds. In addition to Cocky the cockatoo, he had a full-blown aviary in a screened room off his office at Grant's Farm and several cages of finches and songbirds around the big house. Without seeking the approval of his board of directors, he ordered that a fifteen-acre park be built adjacent to the new plant. Called Busch Gardens after his grandfather Adolphus's Pasadena estate, it would offer visitors a chance to sit and enjoy free beer in a lush tropical setting filled with parrots, macaws, toucans, cockatoos, flamingos, and various birds of paradise. Gussie was so intensely involved in the development of the park that he and Trudy went to Miami on a buying spree and brought cages full of brightly colored birds back to Tampa on the train.

Opened in March 1959, Busch Gardens was, more than any other aspect of the company, a pure expression of Gussie Busch's passion. He would eventually expand it to seventy acres, adding a free-roaming wildlife enclosure that simulated Africa's Serengeti Plain and an incongruously themed restaurant called the Old Swiss House, a replica of the Buholzer family's restaurant in Lucerne, where he first met Trudy. He spent $13 million on the restaurant and presented it to her as a Valentine's Day present. Gussie's pet project became the cornerstone of the second largest theme-park operation in the United States (after Disney)—ten parks with 25,000 employees and 25 million visitors a year. “The parks were part of the old man's magic, like the Clydesdales,” said Denny Long, who ran the division in the early years. “Gussie's magic was very expensive. His idea was to build goodwill. There was no concern for cost controls, but it sure helped sell the beer.”

In May 1958 Gussie's mother Alice passed away peacefully while taking an afternoon nap. She was ninety-two and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for some time. Still, Gussie took it hard. Even though her house was just a few hundred yards away from the big house, he held off telling the children that “Gannie” had died. “I can't talk to them about it,” he said to Trudy. “It would be too upsetting for them.” In truth, it was too upsetting for him. The flip side of his vaunted joie de vivre was that he “always had a problem dealing with sadness and death,” Trudy recalled later. He relented after a few weeks when five-year-old Adolphus kept asking why they didn't have dinner with Gannie anymore.

In her will, Alice left Grant's Farm to Gussie and forgave the $600,000 loan she'd given him for his divorce settlement with Elizabeth. The bequest didn't sit well with his sister Alice, who had expected to inherit an interest in the historic family home. His brother Adolphus's heirs were already upset that he had somehow managed to acquire their father's half interest in Belleau from August A.'s estate. And his cousin, longtime pal and most recent best man Adalbert von Gontard, was none too happy that Gussie had fired him as head of advertising. “Adie” had been with A-B for more than thirty years; he was an officer of the company, a member of the board of directors, and a large shareholder. The Busch and von Gontard families were close; the children were friends. Nonetheless, Gussie banished Adie from the kingdom. The perception was that he blamed his cousin for the company's drop to second place behind Schlitz. His only stated reason to the family was that Adie had purloined spent grain from the brewery to feed to his pet peacocks, which they thought was laughable; the grain was worthless and would have been thrown out otherwise. They knew Gussie would have given the grain to Adie if he'd asked for it. That was the point, Gussie said. Adie had not asked his permission, but had done it “behind my back.”

If Gussie felt bad about all the family discord he'd sown, he didn't show it. As the 1960s dawned, he was a man in full. With four breweries running flat out and a fifth planned for Houston, the company was setting record after record for barrels produced, revenue earned, profits returned, and dividends paid. A close friend of both former President Truman and future president Lyndon Johnson, Gussie was now a kingmaker in national politics, having played an important fundraising role in the election of John F. Kennedy. As Kennedy's campaign coordinator, Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill, recalled later, “All you had to do was tell Gussie that money was getting tight and more was needed. In a few days, a package would drop from heaven. Gussie raised it faster and easier than anybody in that era.”

Gussie and Trudy traveled to JFK's inaugural in the Adolphus, along with their guests Harry and Bess Truman and Gussie's longtime pal Tony Buford and his wife. But when they got there, Gussie wasn't satisfied with their seats at one of the inaugural events. He yelled at Buford, “You're supposed to have a lot of pull in Washington, Buford, so get us a better box.” Pointing to where the president and First Lady were sitting, he said, “I want to be up there.” When Buford told him that was impossible, Gussie responded, “Either you get me up there with the Kennedys, Buford, or I'm sending you back to Jefferson City where I found you.” Buford reportedly quit on the spot, and he later went to work for Falstaff, for which Gussie never forgave him.

Every spring, Gussie and Trudy took the kids to Florida on the train and spent time at the three-house compound Gussie had purchased on the beach in Pass-a-Grille, outside St. Petersburg. That's where the Anheuser-Busch “fleet” was moored for his use—an 84-foot yacht named
Miss Budweiser
, a 41-foot Rybovich deep-sea fishing boat named
Miss Bavarian
, and a 120-foot million-dollar yacht called the
A & Eagle
. Trudy and the children typically returned to St. Louis after a few weeks, and when they were gone, a group of Gussie's buddies—usually including St. Louis Cardinals announcer Harry Caray—would descend on St. Petersburg and take up residence in the compound for another few weeks of fishing, drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Gussie's definition of male marital fidelity could be summed up as: No mistresses, no emotional affairs, but casual, no-strings-attached coupling was okay so long as it was by mutual consent, in which case it was perfectly natural, like rutting, the male prerogative. Female fidelity, of course, was a different story.

All in all, Gussie was living a life that Louis XIV would have loved. Everything he touched had turned to gold, with the exception of his baseball team.

In ten years under A-B ownership, the Cardinals had not won a pennant. Gussie had burned through five managers and was planning to fire his sixth, Johnny Keane, who had guided the team to a second-place finish in 1963. The '63 team had ended the season winning nineteen of its last twenty games, yes, but everyone knew how Gussie felt about being second. The city was marking its bicentennial in 1964, and Gussie had been named by the mayor to head a committee of civic leaders tasked with planning the year-long celebration. A new 50,000-seat stadium was under construction near the downtown riverfront, rising in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, which was also nearing completion. Gussie had been a prime mover in both projects. In the case of the new Busch stadium, he had pledged $5 million toward the original $20 million financing package. His board pushed back, first suggesting a contribution of $1 million, then $2 million, until he beat them into submission by banging his fist on the conference table and bellowing, “No, goddammit, no! I said five million!”

All of which explained why he considered it do-or-die time for the Redbirds: If they didn't do it this year, then someone was going to die. His general manager, Bing Devine, took the first bullet. The team was in seventh place, trailing the league-leading Philadelphia Phillies by eleven games on June 15, when Devine and manager Keane made a controversial trade, sending star pitcher Ernie Broglio (18 and 9 in 1963) to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for the Cubs' .251-hitting outfielder Lou Brock. In his first fifteen games with the Cardinals, Brock batted .398 and stole nine bases. But the team still trailed the Phillies by nine and a half games on August 16, when Gussie pulled the trigger on Devine, who'd been the architect of the team that included future Hall-of-Famers Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, and now Brock himself. Then word leaked to the press that Gussie was negotiating with former New York Giants manager Leo Durocher to take over as manager of the Cardinals, which embarrassed Keane and angered many of the players. With the Cardinals eleven games behind the Phillies again a week after Devine's firing, Gussie was so frustrated that he kicked a hole in the wall of the Red Bird Roost, his private viewing suite atop the stadium.

Then, suddenly, the Cardinals took flight. In what is regarded as the wildest pennant race in the history of major league ball, the Cardinals won twenty-one of their last twenty-nine games, including a three-game sweep of the Phillies, who lost ten games in a row. The Cardinals won the pennant in St. Louis on the last day of the season. The city went crazy. There hadn't been such an orgy of beer guzzling since the morning of April 7, 1933, and this time the beer didn't run out.

The Cardinals went on to beat the Yankees in seven games in the World Series. The very next day, Johnny Keane, still smarting from Gussie's Bing Devine–Leo Durocher debacle, announced that he was resigning as manager of the Cardinals to become manager of the Yankees. Devine and Keane were popular with the sportswriters, players, and fans, so Gussie found himself vilified in the newspapers and on radio and TV, accused of “destroying” the team he once was lionized for saving. As if that weren't enough, for the second year in a row, the respected St. Louis-based
Sporting News
magazine named Bing Devine baseball's “Executive of the Year.”

It was easier running a brewery. During the first week of December, Gussie was informed that new computers used to measure production indicated that a record-setting ten millionth barrel would pour out of the pipes at the Pestalozzi Street plant the following week. Elated, Gussie pressed to find out exactly when the milestone would be hit. At 10:34 am on Tuesday, December 15, he was told.

At 10:15 on the designated day, Gussie and a group of company officers walked out of the administration building at 721 Pestalozzi Street and marched up the block to the bottling plant, where eight Clydesdales were hitched to a bright red wagon fully loaded with cases of beer. Employees lined the street, and a brass band began to play as Gussie led a parade into the plant and along the corridors to the racking room, where filled barrels were sealed with rubber plugs in a process called “bunging.” At exactly 10:34, he was handed a silver mallet and a plug, and in two attempts he managed to bung the ten millionth barrel. The band then led the way out of the building, and he climbed aboard the beer wagon with the historic barrel on the seat next to him. “Here we go; give me room,” he said as he flicked the reins and the giant horses responded as one. He drove the team up the street and stopped in front of the administration building, where the mayor and other civic leaders now waited. The sun was shining, the plant whistles screeched, and the employees cheered. A few people were even crying as he stood up in the wagon to address them. “This is a great day in the history of Anheuser-Busch,” he said. “Our employees as well as our many consumers have played a very important part in this event. We use the best ingredients and machinery available, but without the loyal support of our employees we could not have accomplished this. They should all be proud.”

He had reason to be proud as well. In the thirty-one years since that April night when he first spoke to the country on behalf of beer and Anheuser-Busch, he had accomplished everything his father and grandfather ever dreamed of, and more. Now, at age sixty-five, he was, indisputably, the king of beer.

Asked by a reporter what he hoped for in the future, he replied, “Another world championship baseball team and another world beer production record, I hope, I hope.”

He would get what he hoped for, and then some. But he would pay a terrible price for it all in the years to come. In some ways, on this day, standing on a beer wagon in the sun congratulating his employees for a job well done, he had reached his peak.