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Carpets & Parties. To sell his beer, Busch whistle-stops around the U.S. in the most luxurious private railroad car on tracks—an 86-ft. stainless-steel, wood-paneled, deep-carpeted traveling office with a sitting room, four conference rooms, kitchen, bar, an ample supply of Budweiser, and accommodations for eleven. For his trips, he used a twin-engined DC-3 airliner, at one time even drove around in a super de luxe company bus fitted out with kitchen, bedrooms and offices. On long business trips Busch himself loved to spell the driver at the wheel, go careering down the highway, eyes alight with pleasure. But now he has passed on both plane and bus to lesser Anheuser-Busch executives, the plane because he hates flying and the bus because, with his new railroad car, he no longer needs it.
On his railroad trips Busch is apt to pull into a siding unannounced at night, make a whirlwind tour at 2 a.m. through one of his breweries to make sure that everyone is on his toes. At every stop he invites his wholesalers on board for a drink of beer (or whisky) and a pep talk.
For those he misses, Busch lays on baronial parties in his St. Louis home. One of the biggest was a mammoth affair last summer, after Budweiser sales in St. Louis had dropped sharply. Busch invited every wholesaler, retailer and saloonkeeper in the area to his home—11,000 in all.
For eleven nights running, the guests arrived in batches of 1,000. Busch, with his handsome third wife Gertrude, 28, made sure to pump every hand, pass a few pleasant words with each. "When midnight came," Busch recalls, "my hand would be so swollen I couldn't move my fingers." Every night he soaked his hand in Epsom salts until the swelling went down; on the eleventh night the soaking took two hours. But when St. Louis' Budweiser sales shot up 400%, Brewer Busch was satisfied.
Bison & Tessie. The house and farm where Busch entertains are unique in contemporary America. The house is a 34-room red brick French Renaissance chateau set on 220 acres of rolling Missouri countryside outside St. Louis. Among the formal gardens and cool blue ponds are eight buildings; a 350-yd. portion of the mile-long fence is made entirely of Civil War rifle barrels. From his bedroom window Busch looks out on one of the world's finest animal parks; he can see bison, North African mountain sheep, great European red stags, rare rapier-horned Indian black bucks.
The air-conditioned stables house 17 sleek hackney horses, rawboned hunters and jumpers, all champions, with 600 trophies to their credit since 1950 alone. Up at sunrise, he often takes his white mare Miss Budweiser over the 5-ft. jumps. Sometimes he hitches up a coach-and-four from his $1,000,000 collection of antique carriages, and rides over his acres, occasionally stopping to toot a brass-throated hunting horn to startle the deer. For his merriment Gus Busch even has his own private zoo: a camel, a trio of performing, cowboy-suited chimpanzees and a stubborn baby elephant (3½ years old, 750 lbs.) named Tessie.