Chapter 14
For the grand opening of the Portland Marriott in April 1980, Bill had crafted a nostalgic return to the Northwest for his father, who had spent his college summers as a salesman in the logging camps. “Fifty-three years ago, I came to the Northwest to sell woolen goods to the loggers in Bend,” J.W. told the crowd. “They bought my woolen underwear at $22 a suit, which was a lot of money then, but it lasted five years. There were no chainsaws back then; everything was done by hand.”
With that said, Bill picked up a two-man crosscut saw to begin sawing a log, which would also cut the ribbon. On the other end of the saw was Portland’s mayor. It was a simple stunt that seemed impossible to flub. The small log had even been precut to within a couple of inches of its diameter. The problem was that Madame Mayor had had a couple of drinks and couldn’t pull her end. “I started laughing, she started laughing, and everybody got to laughing,” Bill said. Another guest jumped in to replace the mayor, and the opening was completed.
The Portland Marriott had been problematic from its groundbreaking. The location, a block fronting the Willamette River, was superb. The builder financed the construction, and Marriott agreed to buy it when it was completed. A series of misfortunes beset the project, including a severe winter, a concrete shortage, and two lawsuits—one from an environmental group and one from a competing hotel chain—seeking to halt the construction. The project took two and a half years, “twice as long as we had anticipated,” Bill noted. But they succeeded in the end.
Next on Bill’s agenda was the grand opening of the Marriott Hotel at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in January 1981, built in partnership with Alaska Airlines. This time, Governor John Spellman had been asked to join Bill in an authentic Native American dugout canoe in the hotel pool, where they would paddle a short distance and cut the ribbon. But the day before, during a practice run, the unsteady canoe dumped the hotel’s marketing manager into the water. So, a “scheduling conflict” arose, and the governor sent his attorney general instead.
Bill arrived at the last minute from the grand opening of the Des Moines Marriott the day before. When the time came for the canoe event, Bill and the attorney general donned elaborate Native American headdresses and were solemnly marched to the pool by drumming Tillicum Village Indians. The two men stepped carefully into the carved cedar dugout. A local reporter recounted, “Three lifeguards waded chest-deep and like pallbearers guided the tipsy canoe across the treacherous waters. [The two men], in Indian headdresses and three-piece business suits, quickly did their duty and then even more quickly clambered out of the canoe.” As with prior grand-opening stunts, the event paid off. The news photos of two distinguished men in a canoe in a pool were picked up by newspapers across the country. Some called it Bill Marriott’s “Northwest Passage.”1
The opening duties for the Des Moines and Sea-Tac hotels prevented Bill from being present during a historic event for the new president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. His election victory had been a personal victory for the Republican Marriotts. J.W. funded the transportation and lodging for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir so they could appear in the inaugural parade. The Marriotts had invitations to all the inaugural events. Bill and Donna attended the inaugural gala and had grandstand seats for the parade.
But three days later, Bill was surprised to receive a call from the State Department. A ranking official transmitted the president’s request to book the entire Crystal City Marriott in Virginia the following Tuesday. At the precise moment Reagan had taken the oath of office, fifty-two American hostages who had been held by radical militants in Tehran for 444 days were turned over to U.S. officials. Reagan wanted to meet them and their families at the White House, but they needed a private place to stay. The only conflict for Bill was that he had to attend back-to-back hotel openings. He called his parents, who agreed to greet the guests when they arrived on January 27.
The hotel was entirely emptied of other guests. J.W. and Allie drove to Crystal City at three p.m. and waited in a suite, watching the White House ceremonies on TV until the former hostages departed for the hotel. At five-thirty p.m., Allie and J.W. joined about 500 people in front of the hotel, including the staff. The Marriotts shook hands with each of the ex-hostages and their families and hosted them all for four days at no charge.
When Bill considered the political upheaval that had precipitated the Iranian hostage crisis, he could not help but be grateful that the Tehran Marriott had never been built. Having courted the Iranian government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for four years, Bill finally nailed down a deal during a trip to Tehran in July 1974. The Shah’s Pahlavi Foundation offered all the financing. Marriott would be responsible for the design and management of the hotel in return for a significant percentage of gross sales. Construction had not yet begun four years later when fanatical Muslim clerics unseated the Shah, prompting him to flee and live in exile. If the hotel had been built, extremist Muslims would have taken it over in 1979.
“The Mideast is where the action and the money is,” Bill had declared in the mid-1970s, ramping up a major expansion in that area when he still had only one hotel in Europe.2 He hedged his bets carefully by making sure that all of the Mideast properties would be management contracts only. Bill’s first completed hotel in the region was built adjacent to Riyadh Airport in Saudi Arabia; it opened in 1978. The Dhahran Marriott opened not long afterward in Saudi’s Eastern Province. A second hotel opened in Riyadh in 1980, and another in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1984.
Amman, Jordan, was a special case. J.W. personally had raised the idea of an Amman Marriott with King Hussein at a 1974 state dinner hosted by Vice President Gerald Ford. Hussein’s American wife, Queen Noor (Lisa Halaby), created the Jordan Society to improve Jordan’s image in the United States. From his airline catering connections, Bill knew the queen’s father, Najeeb Halaby, who was CEO of Pan American Airways. Halaby asked Bill to sit on the board of the queen’s Jordan Society. The last thing Bill needed was to serve on another board, but he agreed for the sake of his company’s Middle East projects.
The Amman Marriott opened in January 1982. By that time, the Amman hotel market was already overbuilt, and Bill was concerned. “Jordan should not have any more five-star hotels until they fill the ones they have,” he explained during a press conference. “We are well aware that we are entering a highly competitive situation, just as we did in Saudi Arabia, where our hotels are now among the country’s most successful. Marriott’s great strength lies in guest service, superlative facilities and powerful marketing.”3
The jewel in Marriott’s Mideast crown, however, was always going to be Cairo. Marriott began negotiating in 1972 with the safest partner in town, the Egyptian Government Organization for Tourism and Hotels (EGOTH).
The following year, EGOTH made a verbal agreement with Marriott for an extraordinary site on Gezira Island in the middle of the Nile River. At the center of the hotel complex would be the royal palace that Emperor Napoleon III of France had built in 1869 for his consort, Empress Eugenie. The government had tried to run the palace as a hotel, but it had deteriorated over time, so EGOTH turned to Marriott to be managing partner.
Laying the cornerstone for the Cairo Marriott.
A few months later, Marriott’s hotel president, Jim Durbin, was shocked to see a photograph of the Egyptian minister of tourism shaking hands with two Sheraton executives after signing a deal for the same site. To add insult to injury, one of the Sheraton executives was Durbin’s younger brother, Robert, which prompted a headline: “Two Indiana Brothers Have Their Own Mideast War.” Marriott fought back and forced EGOTH to honor their original deal.4
No other Marriott hotel took as long to build as Cairo—seven years. Many of the best Egyptian construction workers were away in Saudi Arabia, where they could earn twenty times or more what they were paid in Egypt. Marriott’s Architecture and Construction (A&C) chief, Jack Graves, oversaw the construction, which was an exercise in frustration. “We are used to backhoes to excavate a basement, but Cairo didn’t have them. Instead, we had women with cloth sacks on their heads hauling debris out of a basement,” Graves said. The workers worked at their own pace, which is to say slow. “We had to pat them on the back and thank them for just about everything they did in order to keep it going. To motivate the concrete crews, we got a goat every morning and staked it in the middle of the project. Whoever poured the most concrete by the end of the day got the goat. Before that job was through, we had bought every goat in Cairo and some chickens, too.”
When it was finished, the Cairo Marriott was the largest hotel in the Middle East, with 1,260 rooms. Marriott’s restoration of the palace, in consultation with Egyptian antiquities experts, was nothing short of spectacular. For the grand opening in 1983, Marriott pulled out all the stops. Never before had the company spent so much on a launch. “We had over 100 important customers there. . . . We had airline presidents, bank presidents, insurance company officials, travel agents, and travel media writers,” Bill reported at a company marketing meeting a few days after the event. “We marched them around in the desert for four days and when they couldn’t stand that any longer we put them on our fresh clean Sun Line cruise ships and let them look at the beautiful blue waters of the Aegean Sea.”5
At the next board meeting, J.W. complained about the expense of it all, reportedly about $500,000. Bill defended the cost, noting that “the resulting public relations benefits exceed anything we have done before.”6 Bill knew that J.W.’s irritability about the Cairo event also stemmed from disapproval of the hotel’s government-operated casino—a first for Marriott.
The temptation for hotel chains to add lucrative gambling operations began to increase in the late 1960s. Hilton jumped in with both feet in 1971, becoming the first company registered with the New York Stock Exchange to operate gambling facilities. By 1985, half of the company’s operating income was derived from gambling—largely from two Las Vegas hotels.7 Even Holiday Inn wanted a piece of the pie and acquired the casino and gaming giant Harrah’s. By 1983, one-third of Holiday Inn’s revenues were from gambling. Five years later, revenue from the chain’s casinos was equal to its hotel lodging revenue.8
Marriott had grappled with the issue first in 1972 when offered an opportunity to manage a casino hotel in Las Vegas. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only discouraged gambling of any kind by its members but was also outspoken about the evils of gambling. But as the CEO of a publicly held company, Bill was required to thoroughly investigate gaming as a new revenue stream for the company. He sent a team to Las Vegas for a week to do a market analysis. The team returned with a positive report. However, the project ultimately died for lack of a suitable site and financing.
Over the next two years, as Bill examined the gaming industry more closely, three primary arguments against Marriott involvement formed: Marriott had no experience managing casinos, bankers were wary to loan money for construction, and the moral and ethical implications continued to trouble Bill. Barron Hilton warned him that there were some unseemly aspects to the business. For example, large casino hotels lured high rollers with expensive perks such as free suites and even prostitutes and drugs. Bill couldn’t imagine buying into that culture.
He was equally wary about the risk to his customers. Gambling could destroy people’s lives with a single roll of the dice. “When you see old men and old women taking their Social Security checks and going to Las Vegas and spending the day and blowing it all and having no money, this is serious business. It’s not good to make your money that way,” he told one interviewer. In the early days of Atlantic City’s development as a gaming destination, Bill went to see it. He wrote in his journal: “Atlantic City is a very unhappy place. Everyone is trying to strike it rich. Most of the people were of moderate means and couldn’t afford to be there in the first place. It was sad.”9
Casinos became a significant issue for Marriott in 1976 with the possibility of acquiring the Del E. Webb Company. When Bill began negotiations with their CEO, Bob Johnson, he was hoping to acquire only lodging properties, which included Mountain Shadows, the resort hotel near Camelback Inn. He did not want Webb’s four Nevada hotel casinos.
Nevertheless, Johnson issued a public announcement on August 2 that Marriott was offering to purchase all of Webb’s properties in Arizona, California, and Nevada—which prompted a call to Bill from the President of his church, Spencer W. Kimball. He recounted to Bill his own sad experiences with friends from his hometown in Arizona who had lost all their money to the lure of Las Vegas gambling.
No Church President would ever in practice require a member of the Church to walk away from a legal business. “I can’t tell you how to run your business,” Kimball told Bill, “but I would like to strongly suggest that you do not get into gambling, that you do not go into Las Vegas. It would be a terrible thing for you to get into.”
Bill’s respect and love for his ecclesiastical leader was great, and Kimball’s words had such a sobering effect on him that he shared them with others. As a result, when the Del Webb deal fell through, a rumor spread among Marriott executives that it was because President Kimball had ordered Bill to drop it. But at the time there was no deal for the casinos, and Bill’s preferred position was still to acquire only the Del Webb lodging facilities.
When Bill updated the Marriott board, to his surprise, the two longest-serving “outside” board directors, Don Mitchell and Harry Vincent—neither of them Latter-day Saints—argued strongly that the company should stay out of Las Vegas for the sake of the company’s image. “I’m a reasonably active Protestant, and I am absolutely opposed to the gambling milieu in our country. I think it’s very, very destructive,” Vincent explained. In the end, Del Webb itself pulled out of the negotiations, deciding not to sell any assets at that time.
It is ironic, then, that Bill brought up the gaming issue again a few days after the deal evaporated. The board was firmly committed to staying out of the casino business in Las Vegas, but Lake Tahoe was a different story. Investor Brooks Parks had a partially completed hotel and casino there on the Nevada-California border. He hoped to partner with Marriott. At a board meeting, J.W. objected strongly. The issue of the Cairo Marriott came up, where a casino was required by the government partner. But the Marriotts viewed government-run “amenity casinos,” like the slot machines and blackjack games on most cruise ships, as sideline “entertainment.”
J.W. told the board he wanted to discuss the Lake Tahoe issue “within the family.” Bill read the signal from his father and said that he might need to cut off his talks with Parks if the board was considering a no-casino rule. “I do not want to be embarrassed in my negotiations with Mr. Parks, who is an honorable man, if the board might later reject a reasonable proposal on ethical grounds,” he said.10
It was a rare time that J.W.’s objections were a relief to his son, and the Tahoe plans were dropped. “Dad didn’t want us to go into gambling with a hotel casino, and I didn’t either,” Bill said. It was a new line of business that not only had no appeal for him but might well be the ruination of the company he was proud to lead. He spelled out this deeply held opinion in his 1997 book, The Spirit to Serve:
“The gambling and lodging businesses are completely different. The two might often be found in one building, but their operations—right down to the way their books are kept—have little in common. The result, I think, is that one has to give way to the other. I’ve watched many Marriott competitors go so far down the road into gambling that their original business, lodging, has become a secondary thought. Their attention has been diverted away from what was once their core business. Given our presence in and love of lodging, I couldn’t see allowing the company to be pulled in a direction that would do short shrift to what we do best.”11
Bill had no problem when it came to promoting wholesome entertainment more in line with his values, and that included the Church-owned Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Latter-day Saint missionaries first went to Hawaii in the mid-1800s and from there spread out to other Polynesian islands. With a substantial presence in the Pacific, Church leaders became concerned that vibrant Polynesian cultures and traditions were disappearing. The Church had opened the Church College of Hawaii (later remained BYU–Hawaii) on Oahu and had another concern about the ability of Latter-day Saint Polynesians to afford the tuition and travel expenses.
Thus was born the PCC adjacent to the college—a unique tourist attraction preserving the culture of Polynesia and providing jobs for students in an otherwise sleepy corner of Oahu. Running the nonprofit operation was an unpaid board headed by one of the Church’s Apostles, Marvin J. Ashton, who invited Bill to serve on the board in 1977.
When Bill joined the board, the PCC had just become the number-one paid tourist attraction in Hawaii, due to an ambitious expansion from fifteen to forty-two acres. Among the improvements was a new, 2,500-seat Pacific Theater hosting a ninety-minute evening spectacular, “Invitation to Paradise,” with more than 150 cast members, most of them students. The show was so popular that reservations had to be made months in advance.
Bill found one area in need of an improvement he was uniquely qualified to provide—food service. He shared his own expertise and loaned Marriott restaurant experts to consult with the PCC. Some PCC employees got Marriott management training in Washington, D.C., and Bill included the PCC and the adjacent college in Marriott purchasing deals for everything from kitchen equipment to cleaning supplies.
Service on the PCC board was demanding for Bill. Ten hours flying time was required each way to the meetings in Hawaii, and he would often take a red-eye flight to get back to business in D.C. Each board meeting included a Sunday devotional service. Bill remembered one beautiful Sunday driving from his hotel to the devotional. He stopped to let a foursome of golfers in their carts cross the road. “I remarked to those who were in the car with me how much I would have liked to have been in that Sunday morning foursome, but I knew I would feel better about myself if I did my duty and went to church as I was supposed to do—and I did—and I didn’t have to suffer a nagging conscience because I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”
In his first year on the PCC board, Bill multitasked by scouting Hawaiian hotel sites. He found that while Waikiki was saturated with hotels, the outer islands offered tantalizing opportunities. He partnered with Amfac Corp. to build a resort hotel along the Kaanapali Beach of western Maui. The hotel—Marriott’s one-hundredth—opened in January 1982. Typical of his travel schedule, Bill arrived ten days before the grand opening to host the PCC board for two days of meetings at the hotel. Then he flew to Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where he signed up $20 million in new airline catering business. When he returned to Hawaii, Donna and his parents were there to join him for the grand-opening festivities.
J.W. was amazed at how much ground his son covered and at all the work Bill accomplished on the trip. But, as was typical, J.W. recorded his admiration in his journal rather than in person to Bill. He wrote: “Bill phoned from his room. He is leaving 8 a.m. tomorrow for Washington. A great man. Did very well here and has promoted the hotel in a marvelous way. Very proud of him—his character, family and business success. It is he who has put the Marriott name around the world.”12
The PCC was not Bill’s only voluntary service to his Church during those years. He also served five years as a counselor to Washington D.C. Stake President Ralph Mecham. Presided over by a president and two counselors, the stake was an ecclesiastical umbrella over multiple congregations attended by about 4,000 Latter-day Saints who primarily lived in D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland. As the Latter-day Saint population in D.C. grew, the stake expanded to twelve congregations during Bill’s tenure. President Mecham’s term of service ended in December 1982, and, to Bill’s chagrin, President Spencer W. Kimball chose him to be the new stake president, a position he would hold for eight years.
As Bill’s responsibilities multiplied, J.W. eased more into semiretirement. He and Allie spent more than three months every year at Camelback, from late December to April. An outdoorsman who loved the West, J.W. flourished under the desert sun or atop a horse at Camelback. Bill was happy to escape his father’s criticism while his parents were in Arizona. J.W. compensated by turning his perfectionism on the staff at Camelback and across the street at the Mountain Shadows resort, which Bill bought in 1981, the sole purchase to survive the Del Webb negotiations.
Perhaps more than any other Marriott property, J.W. treated Camelback as his personal fiefdom. When there, the aging restaurateur couldn’t help but meddle in the affairs of food. Once when Bill was preparing to address a gathering of Marriott general managers, he called J.W. at Camelback to ask him for input. J.W. complained about the pancakes. “They are cooking them ahead and putting them on the steam table, and they get soggy and you can’t eat them. Tell the general managers to cook the pancakes to order and don’t ever put them on the steam table!”
“Are you kidding me?” Bill responded. “These are sophisticated GMs from around the world. They want to learn about the latest technology and marketing trends. So what do you really want me to tell them?”
“Tell them to cook the pancakes to order and don’t put them on the steam table, as they get soggy and you can’t eat them. That’s all I have to say.” Then J.W. hung up.
Steve Hart, the manager of Camelback’s Chaparral Restaurant, recalled a busy Sunday night when an influx of conventioneers lined up outside the restaurant. Hart noticed J.W. and Allie making their way to the head of the line. J.W. said he and Allie just wanted a bowl of Camelback’s famous chicken soup, the Sunday night special.
Less than fifteen minutes after the Marriotts were seated, while the line of conventioneers was still out the door, Hart found J.W. at his elbow asking him to come take a seat at their table. “‘Gosh, Mr. Marriott, we’re really busy right now,’ I said. He said, ‘No, I think you need to have a seat.’ We sat down and he said, ‘Have some soup.’ So I grabbed the bowl. . . . He gave me a spoon. The soup was cold as hell. He said, ‘Holy smokes, Steve, what’s going on?’ He never cursed. He never, never, never, never lost his composure. But he started in about the checklist that must not have been followed. There was no excuse for cold soup.”
After about an hour, Allie sweetly patted Hart’s hand and asked him to have a bellman escort her back to her room. “‘You’re going to be here for a little while longer,” she knowingly smiled at Hart.
J.W. was just getting started. “I was sitting there like a disciple listening to every word over and over,” Hart said. “For two hours and fifteen minutes, he repeated the same story a dozen times about how he’d entrusted this part of his business to me and that he counts on me to make sure that everything is absolutely perfect all the time. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew from that point on that there would never be anything less than a perfect cup of soup that was served out of any hotel that Steve Hart ever had anything to do with. He was never cross about it, and finally, he got that most adorable smile on his face and he said, ‘Let’s have some dessert.’ He wanted to say that he really thought I was an okay guy, that I was worth keeping by the fact that we could have one piece of cherry pie and one piece of rhubarb à la mode together.”
For Hart, it was a lesson in how the Marriotts operated. “They will invest that kind of time in a young Turk restaurant manager just to make sure that I will never have a cold bowl of soup that’s ever served in any of my hotels. It’s precisely this attention to every detail that has made Marriott so successful.”
At Camelback, J.W., Allie, Bill, and Donna were surrounded by an interesting group of friends and family, many of them wealthy businesspeople and Hollywood celebrities. One of the most interesting friendships was with film star Charles Boyer and his wife, Pat. The French-born Boyer was the “Great Lover” of the silver screen, starring in more than eighty films between 1920 and 1976. In real life he had only one true love, the British-born Patricia, his wife of forty-two years. In the same year of his last film (1976), when the couple was living in Geneva, Charles was informed by doctors that Pat was in advanced stages of liver and colon cancer. Anxious to make her final days worry free, he made the doctors swear they would not tell his wife of her fatal illness.
Ailing himself, Charles persuaded Pat almost overnight to move to Arizona, where the climate would be good for his health. They checked into Camelback Inn in November 1976 and called on the Marriotts, with whom they hit it off immediately. Allie helped Pat shop for new clothes because everything had been left behind in Geneva in their rush to move to Phoenix. Though the Boyers were Catholics, Pat enjoyed reading the Book of Mormon that the Marriotts gave her. Pat and Charles died within two days of each other in Phoenix in August 1978.
There was also the Marriotts’ three-decades-long friendship with the reclusive millionaire Nelson Davis and his wife, Eloise. Davis invested in nickel mining, auto sales, real estate, paint and varnish manufacturing, trucking, and highway paving. “A smart, ruthless fellow—a financial genius. Good habits—doesn’t drink or smoke but loves money,” J.W. observed in his 1955 journal.13 Davis once invited the Marriotts to stay in his palatial estate north of Toronto, which included a private eighteen-hole golf course on which J.W. played a few rounds. After they returned to their own Garfield Street residence, J.W. concluded: “It is good to be home. Ours is a humble cottage compared to Nelson’s, but there is love here and that is all that is important. Allie has made it a real home.”14
The Davises were a continual reminder of the lifestyle the Marriotts could have afforded but did not want. Davis bought the Phoenix home of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Booth Luce, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating it. “It’s more like a museum than it is a home,” J.W. noted after his first visit. “He has priceless things in it from all over the world. When we came home [to the Camelback casita], we said we wouldn’t trade our little cottage here for his big house with all the fabulous things in it.”15
Bill and his father shared the same values. People magazine observed contemporaneously that Bill “places family and friends above fortune. [He] disdains the trappings of wealth. His brick home looks like a condensed version of a Marriott hotel, done in pink and green colonial style. He drives himself to work in a two-year-old Cadillac and flies coach, except for long trips.”16
Often asked about what it means to be wealthy, Bill cites a Chinese philosopher who once said a rich man can only eat so much. He concludes: “I believe money should only be a means to an end. If we do good with it, help those in need, provide an opportunity for others to have some of the good things in life, contribute to worthy causes, do things that make others happy, then money is a great blessing. Otherwise, if we are selfish, it becomes a curse and provides no happiness for anyone.”