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Courtesy of Ronald Busch Reisinger
Baron Ronald Busch Reisinger with Teabag, a Highland bull.
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Courtesy of Ronald Busch Reisinger
King Ronald I in Biffeche
It all started as a chastening about our tortured attempt at a Busch family tree. Yes, Adolphus Busch Orthwein married Nancy Morrison, but he also married Nancy Thornley, the caller noted. “And my father, Walter Chalmers Reisinger, was called ‘Bud,’ not ‘Buddy.’ It’s my brother, Walter Chalmers Reisinger Junior, who is ‘Buddy.’”
As for our caller himself, Ronald Busch Reisinger, we’d left him off the chart altogether. “You killed me!” he exclaimed, informing us that before Walter Chalmers Reisinger was married to Vivian Uyeda and to Marion Bullard, he was married to Ronald’s mother, Osa Pearson.
“I am also a baron,” he threw in. And then the real story started.
On the Chalmers side, Reisinger’s family has held property in Scotland since 990. He is, indeed, the Baron of Inneryne. He is also the ceremonial King of Biffeche, but he doesn’t share that often, because, “it doesn’t sound plausible.”
We’ll get to that part.
First, a bit more genealogical interest: Ronnie’s grandfather, his father, and three of his brothers were all named Walter. “And my mother was married seven times,” he adds. “She liked marrying.”
She wasn’t so much for mothering, though: “She abandoned me when I was a year old, during World War II. She left me in a basket on my grandmother’s doorstep with a note pinned to me saying, ‘Please take care of little Ronnie.’ I didn’t see her again for 20 years. And then she was upset I didn’t love her.”
He has a hard time watching Angelina Jolie movies, he said, because his mother had the same big eyes and high cheekbones. “And she was brilliant—171 IQ. Her ex-husbands always spoke highly of her. When she left, she would pack two suitcases, and if it didn’t fit, she didn’t take it. No alimony, nothing. Her last husband, she was about three weeks away from leaving him when she died. He never knew. He worshipped her.”
On the Reisinger side, Ronald was intrigued by his great-uncle. Curt Reisinger married a woman who was the great-great-granddaughter of President William Henry Harrison and the granddaughter of President Benjamin Harrison. “Uncle Curt was a fabulously interesting guy—a world champion bridge player. The most prestigious bridge trophy in the U.S. is the Reisinger Cup, named after him.” He joined the musicians’ union in New York so he could conduct, then rented the Taft Hotel ballroom on New Year’s Eve and hired himself an orchestra.
Photo by National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
A 1907 portrait of Hugo Reisinger, the art collector who married Edmée Busch. Painted by Anders Zorn, it’s now part of the National Gallery of Art’s collection. When he found out how much it would cost to buy, Ronald Reisinger hired a copyist to paint a reproduction—and neglected to confess its provenance to the relatives who were infuriated that he had Hugo hanging in his home.
Then there was Ronald’s great-grandfather, Hugo Reisinger, the German-American art collector who wed Edmée Busch. And Ronald’s grandfather, Walter Busch Reisinger, a sportsman known to play tennis, polo, and golf all in the same day. Frustrated when a court wasn’t free at Forest Hills (the private club in New York where the U.S. Open used to be held), Walter paid to have two more grass courts built.
The next Walter was Ronald’s father, Walter Chalmers Reisinger. Previous Reisingers had served on Anheuser-Busch’s board of directors, but he was the first to work at the brewery, moving to St. Louis to go to brewmeister school when Ronnie was about 5.
After attending Country Day School for one semester (“which gave me my answer to the St. Louis question”), Ronald went off to boarding school. Then got kicked out. Then went to another boarding school. Then got kicked out. “I was a handful,” he admits cheerfully. “But for the most part in minor ways.” When the ninth school expelled him—in February of his senior year—he asked his father where next, and Walter said, “No more. Get a job.”
Just 17, Ronald walked into the Time Life magazine offices and told them he’d graduated from Yale with a degree in business administration. In February? “Last June,” he amended hurriedly. “I took some time off to travel.”
“Three days later, I was dictating a letter to my secretary, and they came in and fired me,” he says with a chuckle. “They’d checked with Yale.”
I thought he’d pulled something similar when I found a blogpost online, written by someone who was tickled to meet the baron on a cruise and described him as having both a law degree and a Ph.D. “I do have a Ph.D.,” he informs me. “In metaphysics. I found a little weird school in California which no longer exists. I thought it would be fun to have a Ph.D. I’m also an ordained minister. And in Scotland, I’m a judge.”
He went to Washington University School of Law for a year, he says. Then he signed up for the Army—this was the Vietnam era—and lasted one day. (He still remembers lunch: “First time I had ever had chicken-fried meatloaf. It wasn’t bad.”) He had to take four tests: math, English, tools, and boxes.
“I got 100 percent on math, 100 percent on English, 0 on tools, and 0 on boxes. The corporal who was grading the tests said, ‘You are the dumbest sumbitch I ever met.’” Adding insult, the guy who gave him his medical exam pronounced him a faker because he couldn’t touch his toes (he’d broken his back as a kid). The next doctor said the bad back disqualified him.
He returned home and worked as a broker for “a socially acceptable little brokerage,” Newhard Cook & Co. He also resumed a little radio work. Years earlier—after Yale found him out—he’d worked his way through his father’s address book to find a job. And when he reached “H,” Bob Hyland, general manager of KMOX Radio, told him to show up Monday.
Ronald has a deep, resonant voice, but claims he was “the worst announcer they ever had,” doing news, sports, and weather as “Jack Star Green.” He went back and got his high school diploma, then did head toward Yale, but wound up graduating from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
“The single biggest mistake of my life,” he says. “I graduated with the highest academic average in the history of Fairleigh Dickinson at the time, but I’d much rather have a gentleman’s C from Yale.”
Still, he took advantage of the family name in his dating years, bringing girls from Wellesley or Radcliffe to the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University. “I can imagine the phone calls,” he says dryly: “Mummy, I think he’s the one! His family has a museum at Harvard!” Was it a problem, sifting through women’s motives? “Sure. Even with my second wife, friends said, ‘Don’t you worry that she’s marrying you for your money?’ I said, ‘Well, of course she is. A man who’s older with a couple of children and really doesn’t work and goes around doing odd things in Africa?’ If I’d been a cab driver with all those strikes against me…! But it’s a package—the money is part of who I am. Heck, I’d have married me.”
His first marriage ended in 1982, after his wife startled him by demanding a divorce. “I was gobsmacked. And then she just kept suing me.” He waited eight years to remarry, and that marriage is the one that’s lasted.
On the Scottish (Chalmers) side of his family, Ronald is the baron of Inneryne, and he spends part of every year overseeing land around Ascog Castle. “I actually own the barony,” he says. “We raise sheep and salmon. It’s just at the edge of the Highlands, about 40 miles west of Glasgow.”
By the time Scotland ended feudalism in 2004, he held more than 40 titles. (“When you come from a very old family, people die off all the time.”) When he’d first learned that the law was changing, he’d petitioned the Queen to allow some of those titles to be divided among his five children. Three weeks before the new law went into effect, she agreed.
Now his daughter Abigail outranks him—she’s a countess of Crawfurd-Lindsay—and teasingly reminds him with a flick of her fingers to walk behind her when they’re in a procession or at a state function. Ronnie’s youngest son, Timothy, 17 and in boarding school in Rhode Island, also outranks him—Timmy’s a lord. The other boys are barons, and daughter Hope is a baroness who holds the 16th-century Greenan Castle. “It’s in tatters,” Ronald says sadly.
His children can go to Scotland and receive a bit of special treatment, which their father reminds them is respect for the title’s history, more than anything. But back home, it’s never been mentioned. “You don’t want to be the only baron in your fifth-grade class,” he points out.
Nor do you want to be the only future king. And when Ronald steps down, his eldest, Christopher, will become the ceremonial king of Biffeche.
“The first white king of Biffeche was Ed Shafer, a prominent St. Louis Catholic,” Ronald says, explaining that in the late 1950s, Christians in the Sérér-Mont-Roland tribe were shooed into this tiny area on the border of Senegal. When they sought help from their diocese, Saint-Louis, the request was forwarded to the diocese of Saint-Louis’ sister city.
“Cardinal Glennon asked some local Catholics to put together a committee to help the people in Biffeche, and Ed was the head of the committee,” Ronald says. “Then a Belgian priest said, ‘You people need to have a king who speaks English.’ So they sent Shafer a letter and said, ‘Would you be our king?’ Most people would have thought they were crazy and said no, but he was a relative of royal families in Austria and Germany, and he said, ‘Oh. Perhaps I will.’ He went to Washington and asked if he could be king, and the State Department said sure.”
Shafer asked Ronald for some advice about monarchical law. “Instead of paying me in cash, he gave me some land. And shortly before he died, he abdicated and made me king. That was in 1995.
“I don’t, by the way, get anything from Biffeche,” he adds. “I give them stuff.” Food, fertilizer, medicine. “We brought in electricity, so they can have refrigeration and keep vaccines and antibiotics. Infant mortality has declined 75 percent. But that’s in a country that doesn’t have enough food already, so it’s a Malthusian struggle.”
Being king is “expensive and incredibly dangerous,” King Ronald says, especially since Ebola flared, “but it’s fascinating.” He now winters in Florida and summers in Michigan, but he spends part of every year in Biffeche and takes regular trips to Scotland.
The last time we speak, he’s about to drive from Michigan to Florida before he and his wife leave for China, and he’s developed pinkeye. “And I only have one eye,” he groans. “Want to know what happened to the other one?”
Obviously.
“Where we live in Africa, we don’t get very many crocodiles,” he says, “but sometimes if there’s a storm, they will wash down and wind up on our land, and they don’t know where to hunt so they will eat the children. So we shoot them. They’re good to eat—if you pound a filet, you can cook it like veal piccata.”
One day, a crocodile ran in front of his vehicle, and he didn’t have gun. “But if they’re not too big, you can put a knife between your teeth and then you grab the croc by the tail and the mouth, flip it over, and stab it in the heart.” He waits a beat. “I missed the heart.”
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