Chapter 15
There were two words to which Bill Marriott had an aversion. Marriott executives jokingly referred to them as the company’s curse words, the “S” and “V” words, strategy and vision. Time and again, journalists asked Bill, “What is your vision for the company?” His good humor would temporarily diminish. “I am not going to give you a lofty vision statement—I’m not into that,” he responded once. “I work by gut instinct, and that has been more often right than wrong. I see myself as a tactical leader, not a visionary. I serve one customer at a time and build hotels one brick at a time. That’s the way I am.”
He was perturbed enough by the repeated question that he asked a consultant, “What is strategy?” That consultant was his friend Mitt Romney, CEO of Bain Consulting. Romney’s definition of strategy was, “Anything that’s important to your business.” Bill liked that. “That’s the way I look at strategy,” he said. “It’s what is important to our business—delivering to our customer, taking care of [employees], making sure they have a good experience, that they’re motivated, that they enjoy their work, that they take care of the customer and have an opportunity to grow and develop and advance.”
A few years after he became company president, Bill hired a corporate strategic planner, but the department remained a corporate backwater with little influence. Bill continued to look at opportunities on a case-by-case basis. But that changed—primarily because of the company treasurer, Gary Wilson. According to Bill, “Gary came to me and said, ‘I want planning.’ I said, ‘Fine. We don’t do any.’” Then Bill allowed Wilson to hire a consultant, Tom Curren, to fill the gap. It was Wilson and Curren who came up with something that was revolutionary for the entire hospitality industry in the early 1980s—limited-service, moderately priced hotels.
At the time, American hotels and motels offered about two million rooms falling into four pricing categories: “luxury” or “boutique” (which included Camelback), “high class” (which was Marriott’s main tier), “moderate,” and “budget.” It was the “moderate” tier that most tempted Bill. It was often called the “Holiday Inn segment,” and it was ripe for a Marriott entry. Moderately priced hotels were a backwater of dubious quality. Bill wanted to offer the Marriott reputation for first-class lodging without the full-service convention and restaurant experience.
Bill hired Don Washburn as the team leader, and Washburn hit the road to scout the competition. He discovered, “There was no consistency of image in these hotels. Their properties were dilapidated in many areas. They were facing a demand for hotel rooms that was in excess of the supply. Since they didn’t need to fight for business, they were not eager to spend any money upgrading them.”
Washburn sketched the first designs for Marriott while riding a bus in Dallas. He reflected on a visit to the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston: “I walked into the lobby and immediately saw this beautifully landscaped courtyard of flowers, shrubbery, and lawn. I’d seen a few other courtyards like this, and it always gave the hotel a country club sort of feel, a residential feel. Holiday Inns had institutional courtyards, but they filled them with swimming pools, so it wasn’t the same feel.” Thus was born the central design of what would become Courtyard by Marriott.
Part of that process required a new financial model that would allow the team to refine the concept by trading off various kinds of investments, Curren explained. “For example, if we wanted to make the room six inches wider, that was equivalent to 50 cents on the room rate. Customers wanted security, especially the businesswomen who were becoming an increasing factor in the workforce. If we provided additional security by having a twenty-four-hour guard service instead of a one-shift guard, that added 20 cents to the room rate. Customers also wanted the feel of a fresh room. That meant replacing the ‘soft goods’—bedspreads, sheets, and the like—on a four-year cycle rather than a six-year cycle. Well, that added 37 cents to the room rate. So we were incessantly faced with tradeoffs. Which would be better? Fresh bedspreads, an extra guard, or a wider room?”1
Then there was the unique design of the room itself, whose success in the end turned on the placement of the lamps.
From the inspection tours of competitors, and from extensive surveys with potential business customers, Washburn’s team decided they needed, somehow, to create three distinct areas for business travelers in the room—a place to work, a place to relax, and a place to sleep. Typical twelve-by-seventeen-foot or twelve-by-eighteen-foot hotel rooms of that era had one or two beds, nightstands, and a small desk—which did not allow for the superior room Marriott needed to compete with the established, franchised chains.
To create what was needed, Washburn’s designers needed another foot in the width. “We had to do it in thirteen feet because anything wider made the room too expensive,” Curren explained. The best way to achieve the three-area feel was to angle the bed or beds differently. “But when we turned the bed, there was no room for a nightstand. So then we asked, why do we need a nightstand? Well, to put a lamp on it. Why don’t we do a wall-mounted lamp sconce? A&C warned us, ‘Bill will never allow a wall-mounted lamp because they break off. They’re too high maintenance.’ So we went searching for a sturdier wall lamp and I met with Bill, holding my breath. I told him, ‘If we can wall mount the lamp, we can turn the bed and create the separate rooms for our targeted business traveler and penetrate the Holiday Inn segment with the best room and become the best and most diverse lodging company in the world—if we wall-mount the lamps. He approved the lamps.”
At a cost of several million dollars, the Courtyard project incubated for three years, which was unprecedented at Marriott. The majority of Marriott managers and employees had no hint of the Courtyard project, which had been conducted on a need-to-know basis. When the concept was presented to the board in May 1982, J.W. did not speak up, but it was evident to Bill that his father was skeptical.
Washburn’s team had secretly built several model Courtyard rooms within the Gaithersburg Marriott in Maryland, and Bill asked Washburn to give J.W. and Allie a tour. They were polite, but firm: “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Why put more square footage in the room? Why make them wider? Why turn the bed like this? Nobody cares about the bed being like this.” Washburn tried to answer their questions. J.W. remained unconvinced, but Allie decided it made sense, and told him so. Later, when the board called for a decision, J.W. was the last to vote. “I’ll vote for it, but I hate this idea.”
Atlanta was a booming market and the best incubator for Courtyard by Marriott. The first hotel was under construction by September 1982, and still the plans did not leak to the public. When Bill made the announcement rolling out Courtyard in early June 1983, competitors were stunned. Within hours, Marriott stock hit a new high of $75 a share. Courtyard became an unqualified success story for Marriott. Every one of five test-market Courtyards had a higher occupancy rate than was projected, and thus were more profitable than expected. Bill went all in—building 100 Courtyards in the next five years.
The success caused a paradigm shift at Marriott, not only encouraging out-of-the-box thinking but verifying the economic value of long-term study and research before jumping into any new business.
The Courtyard venture was a big success.
It also prompted a revolution within the hotel industry, whose CEOs were now prodded into looking beyond their own market segment to others. “Courtyard was the first venture by a full-service hotel company to diversify into a different tier,” observed Marriott executive Brad Bryan. “This was huge. This was a big decision by Bill Marriott, and a big win. Not incidentally, it was yet another example of how fortunate the company was to have Bill at the helm, and not the Chairman. Remember, J.W. opposed Courtyard.”
Having made a year-round success of Camelback in Arizona, Bill turned his sights on Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage in southern California. He was enthusiastic about a resort condominium project when he sat down with Bill Bone of Sunrise Corporation in 1975 to discuss a joint venture. Bone’s contribution was to be a twenty-seven-hole golf course, along with most of the equity for development of twenty-six acres adjacent to the golf course in Rancho Mirage. Over the next two years, costs rose by more than $2 million, and Marriott was forced to put up half of the equity.
Reading between the lines of the Executive Committee minutes in October 1977, it was apparent that J.W. was fit to be tied about the ballooning project. He wanted it canceled, but Marriott had already committed to Bone and had spent $1 million in the planning phase. “How could you negotiate such a long-term contract without including a rejection clause?” J.W. was right about that oversight, and Treasurer Gary Wilson apologized and admitted his mistake. “Mr. Chairman, it will never happen again,” he promised. Bill defended Wilson and informed J.W. that the best option was to move ahead with the project. Hesitantly, J.W. joined the unanimous vote to build Rancho Las Palmas.
Bob Hope, who was completing a mansion on a hill nearby, agreed to cut the ribbon for the February 1979 grand opening. He did it with a hard-hitting golf drive. The resort was an instant success, and in 1987 Bill would open a second resort in nearby Palm Desert, the Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, for which son-in-law Ron Harrison would be tapped as the first resident manager.
Bill was on the road much of the time during this period. In his view, scouting sites and inspecting hotels were pivotal uses of his time and leadership. In the first six months of 1982, he kept meticulous track of every flight and found he had flown a total of 106,000 miles. He recalled once flying into Miami and learning that the Marco Island hotel might be for sale. He immediately rented a car and drove to the resort, then drove to Tampa to check out another site. Marriott bought Marco and built in Tampa. “I figured that was a pretty good day—two hotels in one day,” Bill said.
Unexpected events on the trips kept travel interesting but not necessarily enjoyable. For example, when Bill flew Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to the opening of Marriott’s Hilton Head hotel, the elderly senator lobbied during the whole flight to put his young wife on the company’s board of directors. More than once the senior senator said, “My wife should be on your board. She’s really pretty!” Bill later laughed about that. “He was dead serious, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’ Of course, it never happened.”
Most of the time, Bill flew commercial. At a time when other CEOs were purchasing company jets, Bill didn’t feel it was worth the expense. Occasionally, he used a charter Lear jet company on an as-needed basis—that is, until an unusual incident during an inspection trip to the New Orleans Marriott. The charter pilot went barhopping in the French Quarter and was jailed for public drunkenness. Afraid to call his boss, the pilot made his one allowed call to the customer, Bill, at one a.m. “I went out and bailed him out of jail, which I never should have done,” Bill said. “I should have let him sit in jail.” The owner was called, the pilot was fired, and another pilot was sent for Bill’s return trip. Bill then changed charter companies.
The worst trip of that era was for the opening of the Denver City Center Marriott. As Bill was leaving the plane, he reached deep into the closet for hanging bags and dislocated his left shoulder. He was rushed to a hospital, where doctors worked for three hours before they could put the shoulder back in place. He left the hospital in time to get to the hotel and speak to the employees the evening before the opening ceremony. “Then I went to bed.”
Unlike his father, Bill was not a big fan of Hollywood celebrity events, personally preferring, for example, the groundbreaking for the Houston Medical Center Marriott, when he was able to spend time with pioneering heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey and former Texas Governor John Connally. He also got a kick out of the twenty-two circus elephants who were part of the Long Island Marriott opening.
Still, the closer his hotels were to Los Angeles, the more necessarily star-studded his hotel events became in order to attract wider press coverage. At the Rancho Las Palmas opening, Cary Grant made a rare appearance. Hollywood stars were also frequently on hand for Santa Barbara Biltmore events after Marriott acquired that storied hotel. The 747-room Anaheim Marriott hotel opening was especially memorable. As guns blazed in the streets, a horse-drawn stagecoach rolled up to the hotel’s front door, and out stepped legendary Western film star Gene Autry.
“Is this Tombstone, Roy?” Autry asked as Roy Rogers clambered out of the stagecoach.
“I don’t think so,” Rogers laughed.
“Well, after the hundreds of films you’ve made, Roy, and the hundreds of films I’ve made, I think we got the payroll here OK,” Autry continued.
The two proceeded to cut the ribbon with a hot branding iron, and then they burned an “M” for Marriott into a big wooden key. As Bill watched, he could not help but remember that a quarter century before, he was offered the management of the new Disneyland hotel in Anaheim and turned it down.2
There were four hotels opened during this time that were particularly important to the Marriott family. First was the Bethesda (Maryland) Marriott on the outskirts of Washington, which was nearly a decade in the making. After the hotel opened in mid-1979, the Marriott family frequently gathered at the hotel. The Kona Kai restaurant was a favorite of J.W.’s.
Until 1981, Marriott did not have a hotel within the District of Columbia. That changed when Ulysses “Blackie” Auger, proprietor of the well-known “Blackie’s House of Beef,” proposed a joint-venture hotel above and around his restaurant on 22nd and M Streets. That first D.C. hotel’s progress was marred by two controversies. Workers erected an illuminated red-and-white Marriott sign on top of the building. After several weeks of local protests calling it “an eyesore,” the D.C. zoning board rescinded approval for the large sign, claiming that the original permit had been a clerical error. Then, at the March 1981 grand opening, fifty labor-union demonstrators marched and shouted outside the hotel protesting Marriott’s long-standing nonunion policy.
Among the honored guests at the grand opening of the Salt Lake City Marriott were (left to right) Church leaders Ezra Taft Benson, N. Eldon Tanner, Spencer W. Kimball, and Marion G. Romney, along with Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson.
For many years, Bill had wanted to have a hotel in downtown Boston. For Marriott’s twelfth hotel, he had built in the less-expensive suburb of Newton. But by the late 1970s, he was ready to move downtown. Mayor Kevin White provided the best opportunity when he held a design competition among hotel developers hoping to build on the city’s prime waterfront site close to historic Faneuil Hall. Marriott won the contest and built the Marriott Long Wharf Hotel, with every room providing panoramic views of Boston Harbor.
The most emotional opening, at least for J.W., was the October 1981 Salt Lake City Marriott. Both he and Bill always planned to build in Salt Lake but were averse to competing directly with the premier downtown hotel, the Church-owned Hotel Utah. That reluctance was overcome when Bill found an ideal site close to Temple Square and was encouraged by Church leaders to build there. Many Marriott relatives were on hand for the grand opening in their home away from home. The evening reception with 3,000 guests was nothing short of overwhelming. “We were pushed and shoved by every one of our old friends and relatives. It was not fun and we were glad when it was over,” Bill confessed. But his parents relished the evening. “All the people we had ever known were at [this] beautiful party,” Allie wrote.3 “Couldn’t move for friends crowding around to say hello—have never seen so many people under one roof that I knew.” Bill had seldom seen his father so happy. He said, “A lot of [Church leaders] came to honor my dad. I remember him being so proud that his name was on a beautiful Salt Lake City building near the temple.”
As the hotel division was booming, three divisions were limping along: dinner houses, theme parks, and Sun Line cruises. In a restaurant industry wracked by escalating costs and overpriced meals, the Marriott dinner houses, by virtue of their limited menus, inexpensive extras, and reasonable overhead, offered dining bargains wrapped in a high-class atmosphere. By mid-1978, it was evident that profits were declining, with only a slight possibility of improvement. Bill told the executive committee of the board that it was time to sell, and he had two interested buyers. J.W., who always believed any Marriott restaurant could be turned around, opposed the sale but reluctantly agreed to it in the end.
Though the Great America theme parks in Santa Clara, California, and Gurnee, Illinois, were profitable, the margin began decreasing in the late 1970s because of the increased costs of capital improvements (multimillion-dollar thrill rides), foul weather (long periods of rain in Gurnee), and advertising campaigns combined with heavy discounts.
Santa Clara park attendance was also hit hard after a tragic accident on the “Willard’s Whizzer” roller coaster killed a thirteen-year-old boy in March 1980. Largely because of Bill’s compassionate response to the family, the company was never sued over the accident. But the press was not satisfied. Reporters pushed the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission to use the Great America accident as a test case for federal regulation of thrill rides. So CPSC, for the first time, fined a company for alleged safety problems. Like the rest of the park industry, Marriott didn’t recognize CPSC’s jurisdiction, a position that Bill continued to maintain even after paying the $70,000 fine. The showdown prompted a final congressional resolution the following year against CPSC. The new federal law declared that the states, not the federal government, had regulatory authority over amusement parks and carnival rides.4
In the end, theme parks were simply not a good fit for Marriott. Both were sold in 1984 for $215.5 million.
Marriott’s Sun Line cruises got off to a stuttering start because of an oil embargo, a recession, and a war in Cyprus. When the aftereffects of those challenges receded, Bill tried flexible itineraries and new routes to increase business. One summer Marriott even moved the Stella Maris, which was the smallest of the line, to the Great Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway for freshwater cruises. At the end of the summer, the Maris sailed up the Potomac River, navigating the fifteen-foot-deep channel off Hains Point to dock at “Port Washington.” The 300-foot cruise ship was an unforgettable sight for Washingtonians, whose city had not been an origin point for cruises for at least fifteen years.
At the same time, Marriott tried to end the division’s hemorrhaging losses by selling off the ships one by one, but the deals fell through. So Bill turned to his friend Fred Malek for help. Having supported Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, Malek was first made deputy undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare and then appointed special assistant to the president, where he earned a reputation as Nixon’s hatchet man, firing presidential hangers-on who became excess baggage.
After Nixon’s second inauguration, Malek was promoted to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. He never got involved in the illegal Watergate activities, so he survived Nixon’s resignation. But the Maleks were anxious to leave Washington, so he resigned with no clear plan for what he might do next. In one of his last days in office, he had a White House lunch with Bill, which had been arranged by their mutual friend Jon Huntsman. “I was looking for a senior executive, and Jon convinced me that I could develop Malek into a star for Marriott,” Bill recalled.
Bill urged Malek to stay in Washington while he searched elsewhere for a job. In the meantime, Bill hired him to consult on the Sun Line problem. That led to a permanent job with Marriott. Malek’s most important advice about Sun Line was to convert the Stella Polaris into a dockside hotel. A Kuwaiti company offered to partner with Marriott to refurbish the ship, tow it to Kuwait, and plant it in a beach. The conversion cost $4 million.
Malek succeeded in moving Sun Line from red to black ink, but there was still no potential for healthy profits, so Marriott finally sold the ships at a loss. Bill summarized: “We spent fifteen years trying to make a go of it before finally getting out. We had felt confident that we could pull it off. Weren’t cruise ships essentially just floating hotels? Wrong! Sun Line provided our first major lesson about the dangers of getting into a completely unfamiliar business. That lesson served me well, as mistakes often do.”
Not one executive at Marriott could match Bill as CEO or was ever considered a possible successor in the 1970s and 1980s, which made the Marriott board of directors nervous. Across the country, most CEOs were required by their boards to have a succession plan in place in the event of their injury, resignation, or death, but Bill deflected such concerns.
The Marriott board was particularly worried when in 1982 Bill participated in a risky powerboat race up the Mississippi River. More than a century earlier, the first 1,027-mile New Orleans-to-St. Louis race had pitted two stern-wheelers against each other—the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez. The Lee won the 1870 race, steaming into St. Louis three days, eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes after it left New Orleans. The Natchez arrived six and a half hours later in what historians regard as the most famous race in the river’s history.5
More than a thousand record-challenging attempts had been made over the next century, with only twelve of them being successful. The most recent record had been set at twenty-six hours and fifty minutes in 1972. Larry Smith, the founder and designer of Scarab powerboats, thought one of his outboards could beat the record, so he approached veteran racer Michael Reagan, considered one of the top five powerboat racers in the world, to be the team leader and primary driver. Reagan was the oldest son of President Ronald Reagan.
Michael Reagan was leery of using his celebrity in a stunt race to promote Scarab, so he redesigned the event as a fund-raising effort for the U.S. Olympic Committee. Reagan signed up corporate sponsors, with Anheuser-Busch being the most energetic and generous. As a result, Reagan named the diesel craft Bud Light. Reagan invited speedboat enthusiast Bill Marriott to join the team as one of the alternate drivers.
When Bill mentioned it to Marriott board members, they were quietly alarmed. They knew it was impossible to forbid Bill to race. But when they expressed qualms, he made a persuasive case. The event was good for the Marriott corporate image, and the kickoff benefit luncheon featuring Vice President George Bush would be held at the New Orleans Marriott. Best of all, President Reagan himself had agreed to host a benefit dinner at the end of the race at Marriott’s downtown St. Louis Pavilion Hotel. A compromise was finally reached between Bill and the board: he would race only part of the route and get off at Vicksburg, Mississippi.
A week before the race, the diesel engine in the Bud Light was unable to run more than thirty miles without a mechanical problem. Reagan ordered two more boats as insurance. He would drive the lead boat, a new thirty-eight-foot Scarab with 3,500 horsepower, which could take its speed up to 95 miles per hour. The questionable Bud Light, with its 600-horsepower engine capable of speeds up to 60 miles an hour, became the Bud Light II, with Bill and Larry Smith alternately at the helm. A third boat, slightly slower, was to follow with mechanics and spare parts. Reagan’s plan was to be driving whichever of the three boats arrived in St. Louis first.
Bill prepares for the big race.
Bill spent the day before the race opening the Albuquerque Marriott. The following morning, on July 21, 1982, he flew to New Orleans, where he joined Vice President Bush and brewery baron August Busch for the benefit luncheon at the Marriott. They left the luncheon early to board the boats and prepare for what was dubbed “The Assault on the Mississippi.” Bill, Larry Smith, and Tom George shared the driving on the Bud Light II. From four to ten-thirty p.m., as darkness fell, Bill drove the speedboat upriver for 343 miles at speeds in excess of 55 miles per hour, dodging barge traffic, tugboats, and debris. “It was really a great thrill. After we left Baton Rouge and almost until we got to Vicksburg, we didn’t see a single house. It was pure wilderness, and it was just delightful. The settlers discovered it 300 years ago, and here it was—clear, calm, and almost blue,” he said. One of his fondest memories was passing the Delta Queen, one of the last running overnight excursion paddle-wheelers. “It is a beautiful boat, and everyone was on the deck cheering and waving.”
Bill’s last two hours at the helm were in darkness. The radar and half the boat lights were not working by that time. “It was like being in a black closet with sort of a pale light in front of it from the buoys. There were several barges we almost ran into; once, we found ourselves in the middle of three barges, two going one way and one going the other way. We lost sight of the buoys and were completely off course. The pilot became disoriented and we almost ran aground more than once. It became quite dangerous.”
Not long before Bill pulled into the Vicksburg refueling stop, the boat struck a log, which caused some damage. The following morning, because of an unrelated mechanical problem, the boat had to be towed back to New Orleans, and, for Bill, the race was over. He took a helicopter upriver scouting for Mike Reagan’s boat, eventually flying on to St. Louis. Bill was on hand with President Reagan and a cheering crowd when Mike Reagan sped beneath the St. Louis Gateway Arch, setting a new record of twenty-five hours and seven minutes.
That evening, the mood was jubilant at the St. Louis Marriott Pavilion as President Reagan presided over the benefit dinner honoring August Busch. Security was so tight that at first Bill was denied entrance to his own hotel’s reception room. Anheuser-Busch had hired twenty-four off-duty St. Louis police officers as additional protection for the brewery’s CEO, and one of those guards refused to let Bill in. He went to another door and was waved through by the Secret Service, who knew him on sight. The next morning, Bill and Donna joined the president’s motorcade to the airport and flew on Air Force One with the Reagans back to Washington.
As thrilling as a flight with the president was, it paled in comparison to Bill’s memory of his hours at the helm of the speedboat. When the Washington Post profiled Bill two months later, the reporter noted that “an uncharacteristic passion crept into Marriott’s soft voice as he relived the adventure.” Bill was quoted as saying: “That trip was more fun than anything I’ve done in years. I thought, as I was driving that boat, ‘Not only am I doing something I like to do, but I am also trying to achieve something. I’m moving toward a goal. I’m not out for a joy ride in a boat riding around in a circle. I’m headed from Point A to Point B in an attempt to get there faster than anybody else has ever done it before.’”
The reporter concluded with this insight: “Huck Finn lay on his back and looked up at the stars as he drifted down the Mississippi on a raft. But leisurely voyages of self-discovery are not the Marriott style. It is characteristic that Bill Marriott raced up the river in a test of speed and endurance fortified by the knowledge that his trip had ‘a purpose.’”6
A year later, Bill was in another long-distance Scarab speedboat race, this time with his son John, challenging the Northwest Passage from Seattle to Juneau. Scarab’s president, Larry Smith, wanted to demonstrate that his V-bottom hulls were as good as or better than the catamarans that were taking over offshore racing. According to Powerboat magazine: “After some gentle prodding, hotel magnate Bill Marriott and his son John agreed to handle the driving chores on the specially-prepared 34-foot Scarab.”7 For two days, Smith and the Marriotts raced up the Alaskan shoreline, averaging 50 miles per hour. There had been one new requirement imposed by Marriott’s board of directors for this Northwest Passage run, after they had realized just how dangerous the last part of Bill’s Mississippi River race in the dark had been. The rule was this: no night racing. That wasn’t a problem in the “land of the midnight sun.”
As with his powerboat racing hobby, Bill went full speed ahead with his business, which made him very different from his father. Bill’s success did not ease J.W.’s growing fears. When he was asked to write his life history for a Marriott family genealogy project in 1980, J.W. praised his son for “developing a great organization and expanding the business,” and then added, “but the business expansion of the ’70s was too much.” He conjectured that Bill’s zealous business pace might have contributed to the four heart attacks J.W. had experienced in the previous decade.8
The differences between the two, as well as J.W.’s frustration with aging, came to a boiling point in 1980 when J.W. wrote the most critical entries about his son in his journal while the whole family was vacationing at the lake. “Couldn’t sleep,” he wrote. “Thinking of Bill’s and my relationship. Can’t talk business with him. Everything is personal. He won’t listen to me on anything, so I have to go around him to staff. Very disturbing to both of us and makes for a very bad feeling. I would resign from the Board but must have something to do, and he needs my advice. He is travelling too fast in the face of a serious recession.”9
The next morning, J.W. walked to Bill’s house on the lake and “gave him the business.” Bill did not take it well. J.W. went back to his own house and penned the most bitter remarks about his two sons he had ever committed to paper. “Bill would rather I go,” J.W. complained. “I’m glad I didn’t give him my Washington home. I gave him and Dick everything else [including] control of the business—and they totally disregard me. If Bill were a [better] businessman, that would let me out. But he is a dreamer, a spender, a plunger. He disregards all the economic signs. . . . Well, what’s the use? It sure doesn’t pay to give your sons everything and then let them kick you around.”10
On the third morning, after Bill had gone back to D.C., a sheepish J.W. wrote: “I got over my madness.” Nevertheless, he still called Bill at the Bethesda headquarters and “listed all his big mistakes and policies.”11
When Marriott forged ahead with plans to build a $300-million hotel on Times Square in New York City, it precipitated another tempestuous row. J.W.’s biggest frustration at the time was that everyone on the board, many of whom J.W. had appointed, always voted with Bill. “I had a big argument with Bill, but he said I can’t stop him and he is right—without a lot of trouble,” J.W. recorded. “He said if I didn’t like it to resign and sell my stock. My remarks were not writable. I came home and was sick.” J.W. and Allie had invited Bill and his family over for dinner, but he had Allie cancel it.
Late that evening, J.W. recorded, “Bill called and we made up. I said I put him in the driver’s seat and I guess I would have to let him drive. But no money or company was worth breaking up the family.”12
To his father, Bill may have seemed fearless in business, but that was not the truth. What drove Bill was the company’s 20-20 mantra. He had pledged to stockholders that he would grow the company 20 percent each year, and add another 20 percent return on equity. The larger the company grew, the more difficult it was to achieve that growth without taking increasing risks. Thus, less than a year after the 1980 father-son eruptions, Bill went ahead with plans for a new $200-million hotel in Atlanta and another $300 million in acquisitions. He did not make those decisions easily, as his father seemed to think, and each one took a toll on him.
“The pressure is very heavy,” Bill confided in a journal entry in 1981. “I’m not sure how long I will hold up.”13