Dethroning the King by Julie MacIntosh

swollen I couldn’t move my fingers.” He spent up to two hours on each of those nights soaking his hand in Epsom salts. All the pain was worth it—sales of Budweiser in St. Louis skyrocketed 400 percent after the event.
    Gussie also branched into family entertainment in 1959 by opening the Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, Florida, on the belief that well-run parks could broaden Anheuser-Busch’s appeal. He, like previous generations of Busches, had always had a passion for animals. Grant’s Farm, the compound where he and other Busch family members lived at various points in time, housed a menagerie of 1,000 animals on its 281 acres. He was an avid horseman, but Gussie also had some Dr. Doolittle-esque proclivities—the type that only extreme wealth can satisfy. He owned a camel and an elephant named Tessie, and took particular pride in his trio of chimpanzees, which he often dressed in cowboy attire. Adalbert “Adie” von Gontard, his cousin, dressed his own chimps in dinner jackets and had them sit at the table during cocktail parties, drinking Budweiser.
    Gussie’s most high-profile diversification effort, however, was convincing Anheuser-Busch to buy the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team when the team’s owner was sentenced to jail for tax evasion in 1953. He won plaudits as a hometown hero for keeping the Cardinals in St. Louis, but the purchase was hardly altruistic—owning the Cardinals yielded a wealth of opportunities to promote Anheuser-Busch and its beer. He quickly rechristened their ball field Busch Stadium, and for decades afterward hauled a red beer wagon around the field with a team of Clydesdales to celebrate home games. “What was amazing was the reaction in the bleachers, where these guys making six or seven dollars an hour would rush to buy beer to toast ‘Gussie’ the billionaire,” said Tom Schlafly, a rival St. Louis beer maker, in an interview with the local paper. “If Diana was the People’s Princess, he was the People’s King.”
    While Gussie Busch was ahead of his time in understanding mass marketing and promotion, the true architect of Anheuser-Busch’s utter domination in America was his son August III, a mercurial, intimidating, detail-obsessed man whose ice-blue eyes turned even the smoothest Wall Street bankers into Jell—O. The Third, like the male Busch heirs before him, had been fed five drops of Budweiser beer just hours after his birth. Putting bloodlines aside, however, he wasn’t your typical glad-handing Busch beer baron. He avoided crowds and public appearances whenever possible and preferred to spend his few moments of free time either secluded on his 250-acre farm near St. Louis or hovering above the masses in his Bell helicopter. People liked to joke that he kept the helicopter’s rotor blades spinning outside while he ducked quickly into social functions. The Third appeared uncomfortable when he was forced to appear as a figurehead at ceremonial events and Cardinals games. And even in smaller, work-related settings, he often sequestered himself behind a phalanx of security guards or underlings to avoid being drawn into small talk.
    â€œHe was just cut from a different cloth, and was very private,” said one person who worked for the company for decades. “In public, he was very, very impressive, but always all business. You never got behind the façade. He did have a lot of responsibility, a lot of which he took on himself. But he kind of thrived on that. He was just all business, all the time.”
    That hadn’t always been the case. The Third’s youthful antics suggested he might not develop into CEO material. He spent his teens and early 20s jetting around on adventuresome whims to ski and deep-sea fish, and seemed to spend more time on such diversions than on formal education, which was never assigned a high priority within the Busch family. He attended the