Dethroning the King Read Free

Anheuser’s legendary marketing guru Michael Roarty tugged hardest at my heartstrings. Roarty had suffered a stroke a couple of years earlier, and I spoke with him in his living room, perched at the edge of his couch so I could hear him whispering from a reclining chair a few feet away. He labored to get the words out, but it was clear his recollections and sense of humor were as sharp as ever. After we finished, Roarty’s graceful wife, Lee, patiently guided me through the lower two floors of their home so I could pore over hundreds of priceless photographs on display showing the two of them standing with glitterati like Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Lucille Ball, Joe DiMaggio, and former presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. It was an impressive display of the power big-spending Anheuser-Busch wielded in the United States. I drove away from the Roarty house grateful that I had decided to write this book, and remembering all the reasons I had decided to become a journalist in the first place.
    Dozens of people close to both Anheuser-Busch and InBev spent as much as 10 hours apiece with me as I worked to form the structure of this story and to flesh out its intimate details. Some were happy to speak on the record, while others weren’t comfortable seeing their names in print. I’m grateful to them all for the generous donation of their time and for their enthusiasm about the subject matter. On the way to my hotel from the St. Louis airport, my cab driver even offered to escort me to a section of the perimeter of Grant’s Farm, the Busch family’s ancestral country estate, where she had heard the security was weak. The popular local attraction had just closed for the season when I hit town, but she said I could probably sneak in if I wanted to. I thanked her for her creativity and her eager complicity but politely declined.
    My timing was slightly off in another respect as well, since I began researching this book while three months pregnant with my first child. Pregnancy and beer don’t exactly mesh—not in American culture, at least—and I wondered how many glasses of cranberry juice I’d end up swigging as brewing executives and bankers invited me to meet them at bars once they finished up at the office. I was playing against type to begin with, as a young(ish) pregnant woman writing a book about the hostile takeover of a male-dominated brewer. I’d covered other macho topics in my career as a journalist, though, including automotive companies and the futures markets in Chicago. If you can hack it as a woman on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, I rationalized, you can certainly stay afloat at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis. I quickly found that my pregnancy helped humanize me to some of my more cautious sources. It made me seem more relatable. And since the saying goes that writing a book is the next-closest thing to having a baby, I suppose I’ve nearly had two. This book was a labor of love that burgeoned on both U.S. coasts. I first put pen to paper in a rented office in Manhattan’s Financial District, right across Broad Street from the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. I penned the book’s last few sentences three blocks from the ocean in Santa Monica, California, after moving across the country with my husband when I was eight months along, cartons of clippings and notes in tow.
    It’s easy to deal in superlatives when it comes to Anheuser-Busch, and the company gladly reinforced that image. It brewed the country’s favorite beer; its former chief, August III, was the most powerful brewer in the world; and its top staffers enjoyed only the best—sumptuous hotels, private jets laden with free Budweiser, and ritualistic gatherings studded with movie stars. Anheuser-Busch dubbed its flagship brand the “King of Beers” and spent more than half a billion dollars on marketing each year to make sure it became,