Chapter 12
When Marriott announced that it was going to build America’s largest airport hotel in Los Angeles, it barely made a stir on the West Coast, where the Marriott name still was not familiar. The company had been operating restaurants in Southern California for several years, but those were under the Big Boy name. The first time the Los Angeles Times wrote a story on the hotel development, they misspelled the company’s name in the headline and throughout the article as “Marriot,” with only one “t.”1 It was not uncommon for Californians then to pronounce the name Ma-ra-ti, “like we were an Italian food company,” one executive recalled. “The name Marriott is not quickly recognizable here,” the Torrance, California, Daily Breeze reported in spring 1973. “It will be, however, when the new Marriott Hotel opens in September.”2
Construction of Marriott’s $24-million Los Angeles hotel was finished ahead of schedule. Boasting 1,020 rooms, the eighteen-story hotel was the largest Bill had ever built. Few buildings in Southern California could equal its facilities, which included 150 meeting and banquet rooms to seat from ten to two thousand people. That was 44,000 square feet of meeting space, which Marriott executives sometimes referred to as “the convention hall with the hotel on top.”
A glance at the 150-page checklist that General Manager Jerry Best carried with him in the preopening days shows how mind-boggling a task it was to open such a hotel. On the supply side, for example, Best needed 11,716 pieces of clothing for staff, 1,000 bags of sand for ashtrays, 60,000 Marriott cocktail stir sticks, 400 panels of teakwood for the dance floor, 1,075 copies each of the Gideon Bible and the Book of Mormon (which Bill always included in every Marriott guest room), 20,000 shoeshine mitts, 93 dozen fly swatters, and 25 ice-carving chisels.3
Debbie and Bill greet Glenn Ford at the grand opening of the Los Angeles Marriott.
The afternoon of the grand opening, Bill had an unforgettable daddy-daughter time with sixteen-year-old Debbie, who was his “plus-one” in Los Angeles. Bill took her to the junior ballroom, where he and Debbie were two of the few allowed to watch one of the most famous men in the world go to work. The hotel had set up a boxing ring for Muhammad Ali prior to his rematch with Ken Norton four days later at Inglewood Forum, two miles from the hotel. The man Bill and Debbie saw in the specially designed Los Angeles Marriott hotel ring was prepared to win, which he subsequently did. “I will never forget being with my dad and watching Muhammad Ali spar in that hotel ballroom as he prepared for one of his big fights,” said Debbie. “It was just so amazing!”4
The star-studded “President’s Dinner-Dance” for the grand opening included emcee Bob Hope, Glenn Ford, Pat Boone, Roy Rogers, Nancy Reagan, Zsa Zsa Gabor, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and, memorably, John Wayne. Bill recalled: “He was a very large man and a man of few words, but he let me know exactly what he wanted—a drink—when he said, ‘I understand liquor flows like glue at Mormon parties.’”
Debbie was there cohosting with her father because Donna was home, eight months pregnant. No one was more surprised than Bill and Donna when she became pregnant twelve years after John’s birth. David Sheets Marriott arrived on October 1, 1973. His birth capped a frenetic year for Marriott, including one day in May when Bill broke ground for three hotels in three states. The trio of events was ceremoniously called “The Great Groundbreaking in the Sky” because it was done from the air. The day began in Kansas City, Missouri, where a chartered jet picked up civic officials and the media for a flyby of the hotel site. Aboard the plane Bill pushed a button, and smoke bombs went off below on the hotel site, signifying the ground had been broken. The drill was repeated for hotels in Denver and Newport Beach, California.
Four hotels—Los Angeles, Kansas City, Denver, and Newport Beach—had all been planned and financed before the recession began. Once Bill recognized the impending economic challenges, he shifted corporate strategy. He alerted the board’s executive committee that the new Marriott strategy was to own only 25 percent of the hotels with the Marriott name on them. The other 75 percent would be built and owned by someone else, but branded and managed by Marriott. It was a sea change that could mean less profit on the hotel side, but more capital freed up.
To J.W.’s dismay, another part of Bill’s corporate belt tightening was selling off nonperforming Hot Shoppes. By 1973, the number of restaurants had dropped from its peak of forty to twenty-five. J.W. had opposed every sale. “To him, it was like selling his children,” Bill said. So it was a very, very sad day in 1974 for J.W. when the board voted with Bill to sell his “favorite child,” the Connecticut Avenue Hot Shoppe.
Number Five had been a cash cow for the company since it opened in 1930. In the basement had been the company’s first commissary, and it had become a city landmark where celebrities and political heavyweights hung out. Even more sentimental, it was the premier Swing Era place where thousands of young men courted the girls who became their wives. But by 1974, the location had become crime-ridden, causing profits to plummet. The land was more valuable than the restaurant’s decreasing annual profits, so Bill sold it to National Bank of Washington for their new headquarters.5
As the papers were about to be signed, the bank’s lawyers said it appeared a sewage easement had not been paid thirty-five years before, and the deal could not proceed. When the Marriott representative called Allie, she affirmed that it had been paid because she had written the check. In less than an hour, she located the canceled check in an attic box, and the sale closed. “I looked for the check for Connecticut Avenue everywhere,” Allie wrote that day. Along the way she “tripped over the pad under (J.W.’s) desk and sprained my ankle,” but she found the necessary proof, leaving her both exultant and sad. “We have had it since 1930. Goodbye, #5 . . .”6
Marriott was also selling or converting other unprofitable ventures. The company tried to sell its interest in the cruise ships after the Cyprus war, but there were no takers. The popularity of the fast-food Jr. Hot Shoppes had waned, so the company sold several of the locations and converted others into Roy Rogers restaurants. The most innovative measure was the conversion of Camelback Inn casas to timeshare condominiums, with sale prices ranging from $42,000 to $300,000 a unit. Then Marriott did the same at Essex House in New York City.
Under the new hotel-management strategy, Bill made a concerted effort to find prime locations abroad. The Middle East offered the most immediate opportunities. In Cairo, Bill cut a deal with the government of Egypt to manage a Marriott-designed, Egyptian-financed hotel adjacent to a former palace. In Tehran, he signed a contract to design and manage a hotel to be built by the Shah of Iran’s Pahlavi Foundation. In Jordan, Bill found tourism officials excited about the prospect of a Marriott hotel in Amman, partly because U.S.-Jordanian relations had warmed during the Ford administration. King Hussein was honored at the first State Dinner that President Ford scheduled, with J.W. and Allie among the invited guests at the dinner, held just a week after Ford assumed the presidency.
One country in which Bill decided he was not going to manage a hotel for the foreseeable future was the Soviet Union, which he was able to scout firsthand as a delegate for a 1974 trade group tour to the USSR. During Bill and Donna’s first night in Moscow, they shivered in the 55-degree temperature of their Intourist Hotel room until Bill decided to take advantage of the probability that the KGB was bugging their room. “We figured they were listening to us, so we complained loudly, ‘Why don’t they turn up the heat? What’s the matter with these Russians! Don’t they know we can’t get any sleep in a bedroom that’s only 55 degrees?’ Within a few minutes the heat was turned on. You could hear it come on as we complained.”
At every lunch and formal dinner for ten days, the Soviets started with vodka, and they were at first offended that Bill did not imbibe. “I told them I was a Mormon, and they didn’t understand what a Mormon was. I had to tell them, it’s like being a Muslim. As soon as I said Muslim, they associated it with a religious belief and they respected it. It was no problem from then on. So, I was a Mormon Muslim in Moscow.”
The more Bill expanded Marriott holdings, the more J.W. fretted, and the worse his health became. After a cardiologist diagnosed a weakened heart, J.W. always carried nitroglycerin pills to counteract chest pains often brought on by stress. Whether or not either of them realized it, Bill’s hotel expansion plans were held hostage by J.W.’s health.
Theme parks seemed to be a natural extension of the company’s product line, and they had the side benefit of distracting J.W. from his fears about hotel proliferation. A survey of the amusement park business in the early 1970s proved it was a rapidly growing industry. Bill had demonstrated his go-big-or-go-home philosophy with other Marriott lines of business. So once he set his mind on theme parks, the only question was whether Marriott would buy existing parks or build new ones. Buying was easier at the outset, but it proved to be an elusive quest.
Bill signs the contract licensing the use of Warner Brothers characters at Great America theme
Disney dominated the industry, followed by the Six Flags operation based in Texas. Bill had begun negotiations with Six Flags for a merger or buyout, but their parks were simply too profitable for them to want to sell. Theme park consultants Economics Research Associates, which also advised Disney, suggested that Bill look at locations in Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. With the bicentennial celebration of America’s founding on the horizon, Bill opted for a patriotic concept and chose the name Great America.
On January 26, 1972, Bill booked the National Press Club for the announcement of his most ambitious endeavor yet. The $65 million-plus Great America theme park was the “largest and most significant” venture undertaken in the company’s forty-five-year history, Bill told the press. Plans called for four different entertainment areas. The largest would be a 100-acre park themed as an adventure through America with plenty of thrill rides. He was also planning a marine life park, a ride-through animal preserve, and a New Orleans replica. Each of the four centers would have continuous live entertainment. It would be the most diverse family entertainment complex in the country.
But his plan to build the first park in Howard County, Maryland, north of Washington, was stymied by neighborhood opposition. After nearly a year of battling the locals and the county government, the project was denied the necessary zoning. He had better luck at the other two sites. For San Francisco, the company found a willing partner in one Marriott stockholder, actor Fess Parker, aka Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Parker owned land near the southern tip of San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara, where he had hoped to build a Davy Crockett–themed amusement park. Marriott bought the land, and the Santa Clara City Council obligingly rezoned it for a Great America park. At the same time, a half continent away, the company found land between Chicago and Milwaukee on I-94 in the small village of Gurnee, Illinois, and bought it for a second Great America park. Marriott continued to search around Washington but decided to leave the field after being shut out in Virginia as he had been in Maryland.
• • •
As he contemplated providing memorable experiences for children at his theme parks, Bill was actively involved in rearing his own children. Being one of the wealthier families in America created the risk of those children being spoiled, so Bill and Donna wanted to do all they could to prevent that. “My parents had the philosophy that we only spend money on education and travel,” Debbie said. “We didn’t grow up with fancy cars or a big house.” The only exception was that each of the children got a car when he or she turned sixteen. Bill explained, “That was about the only thing we indulged in, but it was probably because we didn’t have to drive the kids around then.”
If the Marriott children wanted money, they could work for it. Debbie’s first summer job for the company was at the front desk of the Key Bridge hotel. “I really tried hard to distance myself from this perception people had that ‘you’re a Marriott so you must be rich,’” she said. But one day she simply had to use the Marriott name, which led to an all-time favorite Marriott family “gotcha” story.
A woman and her elderly mother arrived to check in at the hotel. When Debbie asked for her credit card, the woman refused to provide one. Debbie explained that hotel policy required either a credit card or cash payment.
“I’m best friends with Bill Marriott!” the woman huffed. “He trusts me, so it’s not a problem. My mother needs to go to the bathroom, so you need to check me in right now!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” Debbie calmly responded. “It’s against our policy.”
The woman was furious. Looking at Debbie’s name tag, which had only a first name, the lady sputtered: “I can’t believe anybody would hire you, Miss Debbie. I’m going to call Mr. Marriott right now and tell him what terrible people he has working on his front desk.”
With a smile, Debbie replied, “Well, if you would like to talk to Mr. Marriott, I will dial the phone number. But I can tell you right now that my dad is not in his office. He’s out of town.”
The lady turned white as a sheet. Then, Debbie recalled, “She took her wallet out and started throwing credit cards across the desk—hard!” It was a rare moment when the Marriott children would own up to their famous name. Once when Donna was away with Bill on a business trip, J.W. sent his chauffeured limousine to take the grandchildren to school. Debbie and her brothers refused to get in.
Humility was one of the greatest lessons Bill and Donna felt they could convey to their children. By their behavior over the decades, no one could accuse them of showboating at public functions or acting as if they deserved the spotlight. Bill felt strongly that the family wealth threatened to make his children prideful if he and Donna did not pass on their own natural self-effacement. “We used to say, ‘There are no big shots in this family.’ And that’s the way we’ve operated,” Bill said.
The lesson worked, even during the teenage years, when adolescence tends to induce a sense of entitlement. In 1970, Washington Post magazine writer John Carmody joined Bill and his family for several weeks of close observation. He concluded in his comprehensive profile: “Bill Marriott has a family that looks as if it had just marched out of a life insurance commercial. . . . Their church is an integral part of their lives: they truly do pray together and play together. When they are out in public the boys shake hands solemnly with the grownups and they all, mom and dad and the kids, fall into a laughing, easy comradeship that makes the people at the next table, or wherever, look and smile back without quite knowing why. It is, in sum, one of those families a great many people in the United States still hope to have.”7
Like every father, Bill was less than happy with the boys who were dating his daughter, especially if they kept her out past curfew. “Dad would wait up. Then, when my date and I arrived, he would come charging out the door to yell at me to get inside. He had a sparkle in his eyes because he got a real kick out of thinking all my boyfriends were scared of him,” Debbie said.
One night, Bill himself had a fright when he got home and was confronted by a knife-wielding man. Longtime employee Martin Buxbaum lived nearby, and his daughter was babysitting the Marriott children that night. She called her father frantically to report, “There’s someone trying to get in the back door.”
Buxbaum grabbed his hunting knife and sprinted to the Marriott house. His daughter let him in the front door, and he rushed through to the back door to confront the intruder, who was still tinkering with the lock. The “intruder” turned out to be Bill, who was more than a little surprised to be met by one of his employees brandishing a knife. Buxbaum blurted out defensively: “Why don’t you come in the front door like a normal person?”
“Because it’s my house!” Bill said.8
Bill built a house at Lake Winnipesaukee for his own family, near J.W.’s home there. The nearest Latter-day Saint chapel was in Laconia, forty miles away. The family would drive the distance in Grandpa J.W.’s red convertible with the top down. At the lake, the pace picked up when Bill bought his swift 1970 Donzi Express Cruiser. The children loved speeding along the placid lake at more than 50 miles per hour with their dad at the helm, where he seemed happiest. A catamaran sailboat also joined the family “fleet.”
None of the children was expected to go into the family business. “Dad never really brought business discussions home. Business was not thought of as a dinner-table discussion topic,” Stephen said. “He didn’t pressure us to go into the business, but I know he hoped we’d go into it. He always had summer internships available for us, so we could learn at early ages if that’s what we really wanted to do.” Stephen’s first summer job was flipping hamburgers at a Roy Rogers restaurant.
In spite of his career demands, Bill put his Christian faith first, which included serving in a succession of ecclesiastical positions in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the local level, the Church has an unpaid lay ministry. The members are “called” to assignments, and they can decline, but few do. In terms of the organization, a ward is a single congregation, and a stake is a leadership umbrella over several wards. Stakes are governed by a three-member presidency and twelve men on a “high council.” Bill became a high councilor in the Washington D.C. Stake in 1974.
The most rewarding high council assignment for Bill was his role in the opening of the Washington D.C. Temple in 1974, a building for which his father had lobbied over the years. The massive, six-spired edifice covered with white Alabama marble was showcased for the public during an open house in September and October. A total of 758,322 visitors toured the temple. Bill was tasked with hosting a day for business VIPs. They began their tour with breakfast at the Key Bridge Marriott, where Bill had salted the crowd with Latter-day Saint executives from the company among the tables to answer questions about the Church. In conjunction with the open house, Allie, a Kennedy Center board member, arranged for a September concert by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at the Center, which was attended by newly inaugurated President Gerald Ford and the First Lady.
More often than not, Church work for Latter-day Saints, even famous ones, is anonymous or behind the scenes. Few in the Church in high or low positions escape the thankless task of setting up or taking down chairs for church meetings or cleaning the buildings. Bill was not above that duty. On the Saturday before the D.C. temple dedication services, Allie reported that Bill was exhausted from carrying chairs up six flights of stairs in the temple for two hours. “It made him sick, since he was still weak from the stomach flu he just got over.”9
Life-altering personal events in the summer of 1975 competed for Bill’s attention. Debbie graduated from high school and went off to Brigham Young University, and the family became fully aware of Stephen’s multiple health issues. When Stephen was about twelve years old, he began to lose his hearing, but it was a couple of years before either he or his family realized it. His parents had gotten used to Stephen’s “What’d you say?” during conversations. A few days after Debbie’s graduation, Donna felt prompted to ask Stephen, “Are you not hearing me or just not listening?” Stephen thought about it for a moment, and then he said that maybe he couldn’t hear as well as other people. He was soon diagnosed with a severe and potentially degenerative hearing loss. “My dad put his arms around me, and he sometimes cried with me. He also spent all day waiting with me at hospitals.”
In the same month as Debbie graduated and Stephen was diagnosed, Bill received a significant change in his Church assignment, to become bishop of his ward—the equivalent of a pastor. He reluctantly agreed to what essentially amounted to a full-time volunteer job. The day before the news was announced to the Chevy Chase Ward, J.W. did something almost unheard of in the Church. He called the President of the Church to ask that Bill’s assignment be rescinded. He knew President Spencer W. Kimball would give him a respectful hearing because they were friends. Kimball took J.W.’s phone call and listened as J.W. said Bill was simply too busy at Marriott to be a bishop on the side. “This calling was approved by our First Presidency, and we’re not going to reverse it,” Kimball replied.
A key reason for Bill’s unhesitating acceptance of this new call was his admiration and respect for the man who had issued it, President Kimball. In four short years, the Church had successively lost three prophets to death. The first two were ninety-six and ninety-five years old, but the third, Harold B. Lee, was a close Marriott family friend and was just seventy-four when he died. “A terrible shock,” J.W. lamented in his journal. “A great friend of ours for 40 years. The Lord wanted him or he would have stayed.”10
Unlike his three immediate predecessors, Kimball had dealt with serious health issues throughout his life; the year before he became President, he had undergone open-heart surgery at the age of seventy-seven. The Marriott family knew Kimball to have a spirit far stronger than his body. He had stayed at the Marriott home in 1957 on his way to New York for an operation for his throat cancer, and he had greatly impressed Bill and J.W. with his insistence on performing extensive duties in spite of his illness.
“If someone were to ask me who was the most powerful and influential man in the world today, it would be President Kimball,” Bill unabashedly pronounced during the Latter-day Saint prophet’s life. “He is the most dynamic leader of the Church in this century. But to me, his greatness is in compassion and humility. He has said his life is like his shoes: to be worn out in service. He has been an example of complete submissiveness to the will of the Lord, of meekness and love.”11
For President Kimball’s part, Bill’s acceptance of the call to serve as bishop increased the prophet’s fondness for his friend’s son. In letters to J.W., President Kimball often inquired after Bishop Marriott, calling him “delightful,” “excellent,” and “a credit to the Marriott name.”12 In one of the sweetest moments in Donna’s memory, after a standing-room-only regional meeting at the new Washington D.C. Stake Center, President Kimball took the time to stop and give two-year-old David a kiss on the cheek.
Another life-changing event occurred in the summer Bill was called to be a bishop. On August 26, 1975, J.W. suffered a massive heart attack while vacationing with the family in New Hampshire. That afternoon, fourteen-year-old John was on the tennis court playing with his uncle Dick when they heard Allie scream from the window, “Come quick! He’s having a heart attack!” Allie called for an ambulance, and J.W. was taken to Huggins Hospital. Ironically, the previous year J.W. had contributed funds for an intensive care unit there, but it had never been used because the hospital couldn’t afford the extra nurses that were needed to staff it. Bill flew up from Washington, and the family hovered at the hospital for an anxious week of prayer and fasting. On September 8, J.W. was transported by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where the diagnosis was grim: J.W. probably needed multiple bypasses, but he might not survive the surgery. After three weeks he was sent home to regain enough stamina to have heart surgery.
Three days after returning home, J.W. suffered another heart attack and was rushed by ambulance to Georgetown University Hospital, where he spent two more weeks. No one in the family believed that J.W. was out of the woods when he returned home from the hospital on October 15. On November 6, he went into shock from a reaction to medication and was again rushed to the Georgetown hospital.
During J.W.’s fourth hospitalization, Bill suggested his father go to the Mayo Clinic for more tests when he was well enough to travel. Doctors there determined that surgery would not help. Rest and medication were the best and safest treatment. The family huddled and decided it was best if J.W. and Allie rested at Camelback. Arizona’s weather and the resort’s spalike atmosphere were palliative to J.W. for the next five months. He beat the odds and survived another ten years.
Bill was deeply grateful for the prayers of many friends, family members, and Marriott associates, but it was Allie whose ministrations were paramount. At his father’s funeral a decade later, Bill said, “The doctors gave my father little chance for recovery, but they didn’t know my mother. Nor did they recognize the healing power of our Father in Heaven. It was Mother’s complete dedication to Dad’s every need that helped to add ten precious years to his life.”
Bill also played a role in prolonging his father’s life. He innately knew that beyond a certain point, J.W.’s stress about the hotel expansion program might prove fatal. So he curtailed his hotel development vision throughout the 1970s. Instead, he directed the company’s extra capital to other ventures. Those were less stressful for his father, but they also delayed Bill’s drive to become the world’s largest hotelier.
Donna and other family members believed that Bill’s service as a bishop was also instrumental in J.W.’s survival. Deeply imbedded in every Latter-day Saint’s core beliefs is the idea that God often blesses those who give selfless personal sacrifice. “We were doing everything we could medically to help Bill’s father,” Donna concluded. “But I knew that the fact Bill was willing to serve as bishop, no matter how hard that was, blessed his father’s health.”
Bill’s ready acceptance of the call to service might have been the greatest act of faith he had ever shown. He felt ill prepared and thought the timing couldn’t be worse. As the CEO of a $732-million company in the middle of a recession, his plate was already full. He coped by delegating and organizing and by using his business skills at church to make sure the trains ran on time.
He found himself in charge of a large contingent of Hispanic Latter-day Saints who were absorbed into the heavily Anglo Chevy Chase Ward when their own congregation was disbanded. The Hispanic members felt they had lost their footing, so Bill created a “translation booth,” from which English-to-Spanish translations of sermons were transmitted via headphones to the Spanish speakers seated in nearby pews. When one of them spoke from the pulpit, a simultaneous translation into English was piped into the chapel.
The work of a Latter-day Saint bishop is partly administrative but also heavily weighted with one-on-one care for congregants and pitching in alongside everyone else. True to the family motto, Bill’s “no-big-shots” behavior impressed everyone. He was often one of the last to leave after a ward social event, and, with his family, he could be found in the church kitchen doing dishes and mopping the floors.
An important work for a bishop is bringing disaffected Latter-day Saints back to the fold. The Church keeps members’ names on the ward records, even if the person drops out of Church activity. One woman in Bill’s ward hadn’t attended any Church meetings in forty-nine years. Every time Bishop Marriott called her, she hung up on him. He stopped at her home several Saturdays in a row, and she never answered the door. “I finally said, ‘This is one person—maybe I better spend my time on the ones whom I can help.’”
It took more than a year to locate one inactive woman, but finally Bishop Marriott learned that she was working in a local hospital. When he visited her there, she was aloof until she revealed an interest in music. Bill asked her to join the choir, and she began coming to church, gradually providing fellowship and service to others.
One man hadn’t been to church in sixteen years when Bill finally located him. He was a heavy smoker and an addicted coffee drinker, and he also enjoyed wine—all violations of the Church’s health code. He felt out of place attending ward meetings. “Despite the many demands on Bishop Marriott, he found the time to meet with me five different times in a three-month period, always encouraging me to give up these habits. He was very personable and easy to talk to. But then, on the fifth time, he said, ‘If you have a cup of coffee or a cigarette, come to church anyway. We want you back.’ It was a refreshing approach,” the man recalled. “It took a lot of pressure off me, and it worked.”
Bill said, “Some of the happiest moments I ever had as a bishop were when a member came to me and said, ‘I want to come back. I’ve been outside the Church for many years and I have not found happiness. I know that the other way is not good. I want to return to the gospel.’ What a great thrill and blessing it was to bring back just one member to that joy.”
As a bishop, Bill presided over Sunday worship services, performed marriages, conducted funerals, attended ward socials, and went on ward campouts. It was, perhaps, the latter that was the greatest challenge. He hated camping and would outfit a full bed in the back of his station wagon to avoid sleeping in a tent. David Fell, who was the ward executive secretary for Bishop Marriott, recalled that Bill would also don a sleeping mask that made him look like the Lone Ranger. “That’s how he survived the campouts. But he came, and that spoke volumes.”
As a bishop, Bill could perform marriages in Maryland. At least one of those ceremonies was unforgettable. The couple arrived forty minutes late. Bishop Marriott looked over their marriage license and panicked; it was a Virginia license, not good in Maryland. “So Bill bundled this couple in his car, dashed over to Virginia, and got them married in a civil ceremony,” Fell related. “When he brought them back, the bishop did not tell anyone what had happened. He did everything except pronounce that he was doing it by the authority of Maryland, and no one was the wiser. He had a very slick way of doing it so that it sounded like it was a done deal, rather than having been done in between.”
Regarding funerals that took place while he was bishop, Bill was able to handle the sad occasions with compassion and equanimity. The tragic death of Burr Johnson aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer was the cause of a particularly notable funeral. Johnson, his wife, and their children were Latter-day Saints, but he came from an Episcopalian family. (His mother was secretary to Bill’s former St. Albans headmaster, Canon Charles Martin.)
Before the funeral, Canon Martin wrote J.W. about how impressed he was with Bill’s sensitivity: “Immediately after Bill got the news, he went over to see the family. Yesterday, he was over again arranging all of the details of the service, from the music to the pallbearers. . . . It did me good to see a man with Bill’s responsibilities giving the time, the interest, and the concern he was giving.” The Episcopalian minister was also amazed at the support other members of the Church gave to the family. “I am going to call together our clergy at School [St. Albans] and say, ‘Look, my friends, this is an example of the way we must support one another and this is an example of what lay people in the church can do.’”13
Bill had reason to be pleased with the way his ward pulled together at such trying times, but he was not happy when someone fell short of doing his or her part. His second counselor, Steve West, who also happened to work at Marriott, provided a unique perspective about Bill’s growth as a leader in a nonbusiness situation.
“I remember a grave situation where we had somebody who was not doing what Bill wanted done. At work, you can say, ‘Do it,’ and the person does it. If they don’t, they’re fired. As bishop, Bill could say, ‘do it and do it and do it’—and in this case, it didn’t get done. Finally he said, ‘We’ll just have to remember that we’re all volunteers. They don’t get paid for doing this. They’re doing it because they want to, and at the point they decide they don’t want to, you lose all control. We have to keep them wanting to.’ This refined Bill’s capabilities as CEO because keeping people wanting to do things was good for business. You can be aggressive, you can be gruff, you can be a prima donna. But if you lead a group who follows because of desire, you are an exceptional CEO.”
Perhaps only in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could a Fortune 500 CEO counsel with a Church member about a deeply personal issue one day and then report to work the next morning and make multimillion-dollar decisions. “As bishop, I was dealing with every kind of thing imaginable—marital problems, kids on drugs, people in abject poverty who couldn’t get jobs,” Bill recalled. At first, he wore himself out in the effort. “It took about six months before he realized there was no way he could solve all those problems. He wasn’t a trained psychologist. He was just one man. He decided he could do no more than to do the best he could and pray that would suffice,” Donna said.
David Fell recalled once being tasked by Bishop Marriott to accompany a young ward member with serious psychiatric problems back to his home in Salt Lake City for treatment. “I was very nervous he would have a psychotic episode along the way, and then we reached O’Hare airport and it was bedlam. Suddenly, a man from Bill’s In-Flite services at the airport tapped me on the shoulder and whisked us along to the connecting flight, right through his friends at security and the airlines.” Bill paid for the flights himself.
One of the hardest parts of Bill’s job as bishop was when he took the time to personally counsel ward members only to have the problem get worse because the supplicant didn’t follow his advice. Once, Bill received a long-distance phone call from the mother of a young woman he had counseled about her marriage. The daughter had disregarded his advice, and things had not improved. “I thought [the mother] was going to tell me I told [the daughter] all the wrong things,” Bill said. Instead, she reported that she told her daughter, “If you go to counsel with the bishop, you should do what he tells you to do. If you don’t—and you haven’t—you shouldn’t counsel with him, or complain.”
Sometimes the calling could be very frustrating, even depressing. “He worked very hard at keeping husbands and wives together,” recalled David Fell. “Once, he mentioned to me that he had just finished eight hours of counseling with a couple, trying to keep them together. But they had already planned a divorce, and he finally realized that they had gone through all those hours to try to get him to decide who would get custody of the dog. That really irritated him, as it should have.” Fell added that instead of being a bishop who held a lot of Church inquiries over moral transgressions, “he held a lot of hands. He preferred to counsel them back to righteousness, rather than excommunicate them.”
Among the things that affected Bill most deeply as bishop was the impoverished Hispanic members who were determined to pay tithing. “They were not making much. They were going without needed clothing in order to pay their tithing. I had these little South American ladies come in and give me their tithes of $5 or $10, knowing that was maybe a full 10 percent of all they’d made in the week. It brought me to a much better understanding of, above all, their faithfulness.”
Looking back on Bill’s time as bishop, Donna considered it nothing short of miraculous that her husband could fit it all in. “When he became bishop, I didn’t know where he would find the extra time he needed to do it,” she said, “but the Lord blessed him to carry out his calling. We had a wonderful spirit in our home. He was able to do what needed to be done as bishop, still keep up with his job, and always be at home when he was needed.” Blessings aside, though, the time-consuming calling could not help but sap some of his energy. “He had very, very long Sundays,” Donna recalled. “First there were the church meetings, and then he’d stay after church to counsel with people in his church office. After that, he’d make hospital visits or go to the members’ homes to talk with them. Then he’d go to work Monday morning just wrung out. People couldn’t understand why he was so tired on Monday. They’d all been out playing golf.”
During this time, Bill struggled with the downturn of a new chain restaurant venture—Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour Restaurants. The mid-1972 acquisition for $10 million had seemed like a good idea at the time. Founder Bob Farrell had successfully married entertainment with well-priced ice cream specialties to produce a winning concept. The restaurants had a “Gay Nineties” theme—1890s, that is—with bright red-and-white decor and employees energetically serving customers in straw boaters and period dress. Every parlour had a player piano, and the tabloid-sized menu featured sandwiches as well as ice cream treats delivered with noisy fanfare. When a group ordered “The Zoo Sundae,” the huge dairy treat was carried enthusiastically by employees around the restaurant on a stretcher to the accompaniment of wailing ambulance sirens. Free sundaes for birthday customers were a big draw, and the parlours were doing high-volume business at shopping malls in the West.
Restaurant Group President Mike Hostage was hot about the prospect, so Bill decided to pick it up and let Hostage run with it. Bill liked the idea of owning a group of ice cream shops and “not reinventing the wheel. To try and duplicate what Bob Farrell had done would have taken a lot of time and may or may not have been successful. He had the charisma, expertise and ability to run these places. They were fun and different. Great ice cream and great family entertainment. It made sense for us to acquire it.”14
When Marriott bought Farrell’s, the company had twenty-one ice cream restaurants with sales in eight states of $7.7 million the previous year. An additional thirty-seven franchised units in six states and British Columbia, Canada, brought in $13 million more. The fact that sixteen of the twenty-one company-owned units had been built in the previous three years promised an appealing growth trajectory. In fact, in two years, Hostage tripled the number of company-owned Farrell’s to sixty profitable restaurants across the United States and in Canada.
In retrospect, Bill observed: “Farrell’s was handled all wrong. With weak management, we expanded too fast over a wide geographic area. They had big-time business on birthdays, but there weren’t enough birthdays. They made money for two or three years, and then failed miserably.” Farrell’s was partly a victim of the recession, when overall business in retail malls declined, and Bill eventually sold it for roughly a break-even price.
Meanwhile, Bill was intent on opening a hotel in Europe. Over nearly a decade, Bill went on a half dozen hotel-scouting trips abroad, one of them in the company of legendary movie star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who had solid business contacts with hoteliers in Great Britain and Germany. Bill learned while on a Fairbanks-arranged 1965 trip to Munich that “Europe was controlled by a bunch of cartels that kept out all the competition. The Munich city council locked us out of the city, but took us to a place we could build way out in the country. We walked away. I told them, ‘We aren’t going to do anything in Germany until you get your act together and allow free enterprise to be free.’”
What Bill wanted most was a suitable site for someone else to build the hotel and Marriott to manage it. He finally found a site in Amsterdam and a partner, the massive Watney Mann brewery company, who agreed to finance the $15-million real-estate purchase and construction through a Dutch subsidiary. J.W. was happy with a deal that required not one cent of corporate investment, while the company stood to make money even if the hotel owners did not.
The grand opening of the Amsterdam Marriott in March 1975 was a major media event. For his part, J.W. may have been more excited about the new Marriott Tulip a Dutch grower had developed for him and Allie. After the grand opening, they took home 100 bulbs to plant in Washington and at Lake Winnipesaukee.
Two weeks after the Amsterdam grand opening, Marriott opened its first destination resort built from scratch—the Lincolnshire Resort complex north of Chicago. At its center was the 400-room hotel with an eighteen-hole championship golf course, ski runs, bicycle trails, health club, ice-skating rink, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a live theater venue.
Many things can go wrong at a ribbon cutting, and the Marriott preference for quirky grand-opening stunts added to the unknowns. This time it was a lion named Zamba who had to break through the ribbon and eat a slab of raw meat shaped like a hotel key (the usual symbol that the resort didn’t need a key because it would never close). On cue, Zamba devoured the “key,” and then a power fluctuation caused the lights to flicker. The 450-pound Zamba panicked and broke from his leash.
With the trainer in hot pursuit, the lion ran up the aisle and dashed across several rows of terrified guests. He made it out an exit door to the lobby and into a hall before the trainer wrangled him back onto the leash. Amid the pandemonium, the wife of one of Marriott’s franchisees was so frozen to her seat that the huge lion bounded right over the top of her. News reporters rushed to her with microphones. “Are you all right?” they asked. With impressive aplomb, the Jewish woman replied: “Well, with all these Christians here, I knew I was safe from the lion.”15
• • •
In May 1977, after two years in his Church calling, Bill was released as bishop to take an assignment as the first counselor in a new Washington D.C. Stake presidency. After the reception honoring Bill as the outgoing bishop, Allie recorded with exultation: “All said Billy was the best Bishop they had ever had.”16 It had been a time when Bill said “the need to rely on the Lord became very important to me.”
Longtime friend Jon Huntsman observed a few years after his friend’s release as bishop that “the happiest I’ve ever seen Bill was when he was bishop—when he was literally working around the clock with families who didn’t have anything. He seemed to thrive in that atmosphere. He radiated a sense of inner peace and contentment.”17
Two decades after his release as bishop, Bill reflected that the service “really brought me to a much better understanding of our associates in our company—what kind of problems they have in making ends meet, in trying to raise their families, trying to get their kids to do right, trying to provide healthcare and pay the light bill, the heat bill, the rent. When you’re the CEO of a company, it’s hard to really understand what’s going on in people’s lives that are working down in the trenches. The Church job gave me more empathy. I became a better listener because of it. Those two years became an anchor in troubled times. No question about it.”18