Dethroning the King (16 page)

“I can categorically tell you that ‘Whassup?' would not have run without The Fourth,” said an agency executive who worked on the aforementioned campaign, which featured a group of slacker guys who tossed the slang term “Whassup?” back and forth to each other in greeting. “His dad looked at it and said, ‘I don't get this—what does this mean?' And The Fourth said, ‘It's funny, trust me.' ”

“Well, are you going to run it on late-night?” The Third asked. The company always ran its edgier ads later in the evening for older viewers.

“No, Dad, I'm going to run it on prime time,” The Fourth responded, which put The Third even more on the defensive.

“But The Fourth took all of it,” the agency executive later recalled. “And he said, ‘Guys, my dad approved this. But we've all got to hope that it works.' ”

Legend among Anheuser-Busch marketers has it that one Friday, just two days before the first “Whassup?” commercial ran on network television, The Third and The Fourth were still debating whether the campaign would really work. The Third wanted more time to think about it before giving the go-ahead to the networks, but there was no time left if the company wanted the ad to run that Sunday. So The Fourth loaded some video equipment and a television into the back of a van, fired the engine, and drove up onto a well-known hill in St. Louis where a pack of Italian restaurants was concentrated. He pulled the truck up to the back of one of the restaurants and, with a manager's permission, showed the commercial to the restaurant's kitchen staff.

“They thought it was hysterical, and he said, ‘Dad, I'm shipping it.' And the rest was history,” said DDB's John Greening, who had been waiting for The Third's okay. “I remember thinking, ‘Are we going to get the instructions to ship? Or are we just going to run some of the same old stuff?' The Fourth called me, or maybe it was an e-mail from somebody, and said, ‘Ship it.' And it was like, ‘Yes!' ”

“We played it at the convention, and there were 6,000 wholesalers in this big hall in Houston,” Greening went on. “We played the ‘Whassup?' spot, and the whole place went crazy. I remember there was stuff falling from the ceiling, balloons, and we're all hugging one another like we had won the presidency or something.”

The Fourth seemed to spend part of every day bobbing and weaving to duck his father's blows, but he enjoyed a certain level of job protection as the boss' son. Not everyone was as lucky.

“I had been fired at least three or four times,” said Bob Lachky. “I said that in my exit interview kind of as a joke, but it was true.”

The scariest such episode for Lachky happened in late 1997, when he tried to convince The Third that a series of ads in which a jealous lizard tried to assassinate the Budweiser frogs was a better fit for the upcoming Super Bowl than an ad that starred The Third himself, talking about the company's heritage. The Third had grown increasingly enamored with his own series of ads, which were controversial, given his astringent personality. “August Busch III has always seemed a little too tightly wound to appeal to the average beer drinker,” one St. Louis reporter wrote in a newspaper column entitled “To Sell Beer Takes More Than a Glare.” The Third had gotten decent feedback on his first set of commercials, however, and was pushing hard not just to film more of them but to have greater say in directing them and writing his own copy. Lachky, on the other hand, felt the Super Bowl warranted a new set of funny commercials that keyed off the successful but stale “Frogs” campaign. The situation quickly grew sticky for the marketing and film staff, who were anxious to keep The Third happy but also convinced that Louie the Lizard was a better headlining star for the year's biggest make-or-break event.

The debate hit a melting point just before Christmas when The Third was told his own ads weren't testing as well as Louie's. He gruffly insinuated that Lachky might as well pack his bags and leave. August IV stopped by to see Lachky later that day and found him despondent, lying flat on his back on his office floor.

“Buddy, don't worry. If you go, I go,” The Fourth said in an effort to console his colleague, who was trying to sort out how to provide for his young children.

“August, don't even go there,” Lachky said with a roll of his eyes. “Give me a break. You're not going anywhere.”

“You'll be fine,” The Fourth replied. “Don't worry, it's just temporary.”

Sure enough, August IV convinced his father to review the positive feedback on Louie the Lizard over the holidays, and Lachky's job was still there when he returned. The stress and pressure had been almost unbearable, however, and Lachky found himself empathizing more with The Fourth's plight than ever before.

“August IV was going through this every day,” Lachky said. “Can you imagine what that would be like, where every single day of your existence is getting through this kind of grind? I go through this three or four times in my career. He's been ‘fired ' every day of his life. Every single day, he's going through this.”

“What people don't give him credit for is that the role he played, in terms of protecting people like myself and what we believed in, eventually wears you down.”

The Fourth's dealings with his father were never easy. August III's life and behavior were not without their share of irony, and one of the greatest examples, perhaps, is that while he focused with razor-sharp intensity on never making the same mistake twice at Anheuser-Busch —and while he ridiculed, punished, and sometimes fired those who did—he repeated some of his father's worst mistakes at home. The tension between The Third and some of his half-siblings was well-chronicled, but when he married his second wife, Ginny, and had two children with her, he not only let a rivalry develop between half-brothers Steven and August IV but appeared to relish pitting them against each other.

“That's part of the whole father/son dynamic,” said fellow Busch clan member Reisinger. “When Prince Charles was born, from the minute he was born every single person in England who supported royalty said, ‘Okay, this is the future king. Prepare him. From the second the guy was born, they're preparing him and saying, ‘You're the one, and we're going to make you ready and be there for you.' ”

With August IV, Reisinger said, “It was always sort of like ‘We'll see, we'll see.' No support, tear you down, tear you down . . . it's the extreme opposite approach. If you were told forever that you just may never be ready or you're not good enough, what are you going to think about yourself ? That level of mental battering and torture is not good. Why that happened, who knows—but it's a whole different approach. It's unfortunate.”

Steven was 13 years younger than August IV. The Third started to pull him into meetings and assign him roles within the company once Steven matured into a young teenager. Some Anheuser-Busch staffers thought the perceived rivalry between August IV and Steven would morph into the next Busch generation's battle royal. “There was a time where people would say to The Fourth: ‘Hey, it's his mom going to bed with him every night, not your mom,” said one former Anheuser-Busch employee. Speculation was already running rampant in 1991, when Steven was only 12, that he might challenge The Fourth to the throne. “We just hope it doesn't come to that,” The Fourth's mother said. In 2002, when Steven was 25, people close to the company said that August IV believed that his stepmother, Ginny, wanted Steven to take over the company. “For the past 12 years, The Fourth has said openly that his stepmother wants him to fail and her son Steve to run the joint,” said one insider. “I don't know that it's true, but it's true that The Fourth feels that way.”

Others, however, never saw Steven as much more than a distraction. He spent five years working as his father's executive assistant, rather than swapping into new roles at the company to broaden his expertise. When most up-and-comers were pulled into Anheuser-Busch's antiquated executive assistant program, in which they tailed a particular executive for years, half in mentorship and half in servitude, they'd stick around for one to three years before moving elsewhere to be molded for leadership. Steven's stasis in the job made his candidacy for a higher position less and less viable as time wore on.

“I never bought the Steven thing,” said one strategy committee member. “He was never a factor. He was never a threat. He was just his father's sidekick. He would have been destroyed Day One.”

Steven eventually started backing away from the business, and in October of 2006, less than a month after the board voted to install The Fourth as CEO, 29-year-old Steven left Anheuser-Busch altogether and purchased Krey Distributing, one of the company's most lucrative independent distributors, which was based near St. Louis and had been run by The Third's best friend from his school days. “I couldn't be happier with the career choice I've made,” Steven told one local publication. “My brother is going to do a great job for us running the brewery. He's the guy that was groomed for it and is in the job, and it's a great fit. That wasn't something I was looking for.” August IV's sister, Susie Busch Transou, who had rejoined Anheuser-Busch after completing an MBA, also left the company to run Tri-Eagle Sales, an Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband.

It was hard to blame The Fourth's siblings for backing away from the spotlight. Running the company was an incredibly heavy cross to bear, and just like other Busches who had avoided corporate work over the decades, they stood to be fabulously wealthy for the rest of their lives even if they never spent another day at Anheuser-Busch headquarters. Why take on the added burden?

Their departures eliminated an effective point of leverage for The Third, however. “When Steven left and his sister Susie left, I was very surprised. I think August III really loved hanging Steven, in particular, over The Fourth's head,” said one former Anheuser-Busch employee.

In November 1996, a 32-year-old August IV was named vice president of marketing, which made him responsible for the entire brewery's marketing and sales activities and put him in a position to report directly to Patrick Stokes, the brewery's president. August III seemed supremely confident that his son would keep Anheuser-Busch ahead of the pack. Its advertising was winning back young beer drinkers who had been abandoning Budweiser throughout the earlier 1990s. Profits were rising again at a double-digit pace. And the company's stock was up.

“Budweiser isn't your father's beer anymore,” The Third told a reporter just a few months after installing The Fourth as CEO. “I'll be retired by sixty-five. At that point, this is a younger person's game.” Yet when the reporter said that insiders believed there was a 99 percent chance August IV was next in line to take over as CEO, The Third demurred. “I don't think anyone can say there's a 99 percent chance of anything in life.”

Susie laughed at her father's cryptic remarks. “If my brother continues to perform as he has, it's 100 percent certain he'll have the job.”

Two years later, a health scare put life and mortality into clearer perspective for August III. After feeling uncomfortable while exercising on a treadmill at his home on a Sunday in September 1999, Busch checked in with a doctor the following day and was told he needed a quadruple heart bypass operation. Trim and until then, seemingly fit, 62-year-old August III wanted to undergo the procedure as soon as possible. He was wheeled into surgery later that day at St. John's Mercy Medical Center and came out of the operation in good condition.

The incident immediately sparked questions over his succession plans. Anheuser-Busch told investors that no one else at the brewery had needed to assume The Third's responsibilities because there had been no emergency and the operation had gone well. Every senior Anheuser-Busch officer was required to let the board of directors know who could take over his or her position in case of an emergency, but a spokesman for Anheuser wouldn't divulge who would stand in for August III in such a situation. The Third recovered from the surgery's physical strain in his typically aggressive and efficient fashion. “I remember, maybe four weeks after his heart attack, he choppered into the soccer park and he looked great,” said one former ad agency executive. “He always took care of himself. He was a fit person, and he ate right.”