Free Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder

Busch played out in the court and in the newspapers, with each side visiting indignity upon the other, making it appear to the public that the main issues between them were her drinking and his philandering. His lawyers questioned “how much she paid the yard man in 1940” and “how much was spent for whiskey, wine and gin.” Her lawyers demanded to inspect his books and records, because “how else could we find out how much Mr. Busch has been spending on other women.” The judge, however, denied her request to examine her husband’s financial records, saying they were “immaterial,” and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld his ruling. A few weeks later, Elizabeth accepted what the newspapers trumpeted as the state’s first-ever million-dollar divorce settlement. It consisted of a lump sum of $450,000 for alimony, a property settlement of $480,000, to be paid over a number of years, and the house on Lindell, which was valued at $100,000. She also was awarded custody of the couple’s two children, Elizabeth and August III.
    August was only five when his father went off to Washington. Raised mostly by his troubled, often impaired mother, he had developed into a moody, withdrawn adolescent with a spotty school attendance record and only a few friends. As the ugly dissolution of his parents’ marriage dragged on in public, he began acting out. One particularly antisocial episode occurred on Halloween night in 1949, when two neighbor girls accused him of shooting them with a pellet gun when they came to his house trick-or-treating. The girls told the police that when they rang the doorbell at the Busch residence on Lindell, they were greeted with a barrage of eggs, tomatoes, and water from a second-story window, so they ran home and got some eggs to respond in kind. But when they returned, August stood at the second-floor window with a rifle and shot them. The girls were treated for minor contusions, and two police officers went to the Busch house. The story they got from August was that a “swarm of girls” had engaged in an unprovoked attack on the house that started when the butler answered the front door and an egg “came flying through and splattered in the living room.” August admitted that he had stood at the window with a gun and warned the girls to go away, but he claimed the gun was partly dismantled and could not have been fired even if he had attempted to do so.
    August’s version of events did not pass the smell test, but his mother and the butler backed him up about the gun and took the police upstairs to see it lying on the bed, partly dismantled, just as August claimed. Even though no charges were filed, the preteen contretemps earned a headline in the next day’s paper: “August A. Busch III Questioned by Police in Halloween Fracas.” It’s unlikely that it would have been reported if his name had been anything other than Busch.
    Gussie’s physical and emotional absence from August’s life during this period would eventually have serious consequences for the family and the company. Years later, in describing to a colleague what it was like to grow up as Gussie Busch’s firstborn son, August ruefully related an incident that occurred at Grant’s Farm when he was a boy: He’d put on an old pair of his late uncle Adolphus’s old chaps and had taken one of the farm’s tractors on a joyride around the lake when he lost control of the machine and wound up in the water, standing on the seat as the tractor slowly sank. Suddenly he heard his father calling and saw him standing on the bank. He thought he was about to be rescued. Instead, Gussie shouted at him, “August, what the hell are you doing wearing your uncle Adolphus’s chaps?”

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“THE MAN WHO SAVED THE CARDINALS”
    On March 22, 1952, the day after Gussie’s divorce from Elizabeth became final, he and Trudy were married. The