Chapter 17
For Chairman J. Willard Marriott, his last year, 1985, began with an accidental milk spill, which resulted in a trip to the hospital.
On New Year’s Eve, J.W. spilled some milk, and when he stooped over to clean it up, he fainted and fell, wrenching his back. The back pain prompted him to go to Georgetown Hospital on New Year’s morning, where exams determined that he had experienced a heart episode. He was hospitalized for nine days until the doctors felt it was safe for him to go home.
On January 22, J.W. and Allie flew to their Camelback desert home for a three-month getaway. During that time, J.W.’s strength waxed and waned as he entertained a string of visitors from Church leaders to grandchildren to Roy Rogers. He found time to grouse about quality-control issues at the resort, including railing at the restaurant manager for an hour. “He knows nothing,” J.W. fumed. Nevertheless, that manager and every other supervisor of the resort gathered to say good-bye to J.W. and Allie the morning of April 19. It was the last time J.W. would see Camelback.
That spring, there were final moments in the spotlight for J.W. On May 1, he and Allie flew to Wayne, Pennsylvania, and were met by their friend Bob Hope. He drove J.W. in a golf cart across the parade grounds of the Valley Forge Military Academy to the grandstand, where J.W. enjoyed the thirty-minute parade that the 650 cadets put on for him, complete with horses and cannons. Hope then presented J.W. with the “5-Star Civilian Award.” Four days later, he received an honorary doctorate from George Washington University.
May and June were a great time to visit his beloved Fairfield Farm, fussing as usual about its upkeep and hiring a new manager. Accident-prone Allie, who wasn’t as fond of the farm as her husband was, tripped over a neighbor’s dog and fell flat on a cement floor, injuring her back. June 25 was the last day Willard Marriott spent on the farm that reminded him so much of his childhood. His oldest friend and first Hot Shoppes business partner, Hugh Colton, had come to Washington for a family wedding, and he had asked to spend a day at the farm.
The previous January, when J.W. had been hospitalized with heart failure, Colton had sent him a letter full of memories. “As you know, for more than one-half a century, you have been the best friend I have ever had,” he wrote. “I well remember our trips to the Yellowstone . . . and your good marksmanship in killing elk, deer, and even a bear. Also, your skill in catching big trout on Jenny’s Lake. My memory also runs to the ruggedness of the high and beautiful [Uinta Mountains in Utah] when you nursed broken ribs for days, along the Skyline Trail. I also recall how you saved our lives with your rowing skill going down the turbulent Yampa River. . . . When I think of the fun times we have had together, my regret is that youth could not be perpetuated.”
Both old cowboys knew they were near the end of the trail during the reunion at Fairfield Farm that June. “We sang old songs—well, Mr. Marriott and I sang while Grandpa listened and once in a while joined in,” recalled granddaughter Carolyn Colton, who joined the two friends that day. “The love and admiration each felt for the other was contagious. Even though they didn’t say it when they shook hands goodbye, I felt Grandpa was saying, ‘I love you and I don’t think I’ll see you again.’”1
There were four places J.W. referred to as “heaven on earth.” By July 1, when Bill put him on a chartered jet from Washington to New Hampshire, J.W. had unknowingly said good-bye to three of them—the farm in Virginia, the “Jackrabbit Casa” at Camelback, and the house on Garfield Street. J.W. and Allie were happily traveling to their fourth “heaven” on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee.
Only a few weeks earlier, the extended family had gathered for a dinner to celebrate J.W. and Allie’s fifty-eighth wedding anniversary. The family sensed that their patriarch was more mellow than usual. “In the last year, he seemed to be a little more at peace with himself, and more at peace with what Bill was doing at the company, even though he still didn’t agree with the debt the company took on,” Donna recalled. There were some evidences of this as he and Allie settled in for a summer at the lake.
The first night, Bill and Donna invited his parents to a family dinner. Instead of criticizing Bill’s expenditure on his classic car hobby, J.W. looked over what he called “the new old cars” and pronounced them “beautiful.”
The “old” J.W., however, erupted on the Fourth of July with his own kind of fireworks. Dick had hired a crew to tear down dozens of trees at the end of the family’s pasture so he would have more clearance for the landings and takeoffs of his new ultralight plane. When J.W. went for a walk that holiday morning, he discovered that the trees were missing. “Looked at what Dick has done to our pasture to make an airport with hangar for plane,” he recorded. “Am writing him—no airplanes!” Father and son had a talk before the family barbecue that evening, and the tempest passed. Dick didn’t need his father’s permission to clear the land. It had been deeded to him and Bill in the mid-1960s.
The pasture-clearing incident was minor compared to the last stand J.W. planned against his son Bill at what would be his final board meeting, which was to be held on August 1 in Boston. For months, J.W. had been marshaling his arguments to halt Bill’s secret negotiations to acquire the once-dominant Howard Johnson lodging and food-service chain. He saw the August board meeting as his last chance to put a stop to it, so he spent the night before the meeting listing reasons that the acquisition should not go forward.
Ironically, J.W. could have taken credit for the acquisition; he had first proposed a merger between Hot Shoppes and Howard Johnson restaurants in 1947. Those merger talks went on for almost two decades. J.W. could not close the deal before Howard Johnson Sr. died in 1972. “Neither of them could ever agree who would be in charge of the new company,” Bill laughed in recollection.
At its peak in the mid-1960s, the Howard Johnson empire—colloquially known as HoJo—was the largest restaurant chain in the United States. Instead of reinvesting in the business by upgrading and remodeling its restaurants and lodges, Johnson Jr. sat on the profits. The chain began to rot from within. It was bought in 1980 by Imperial Group, a London-based tobacco, food, and beer conglomerate. After HoJo barely broke even in the first half of 1984, Imperial decided it was time to unload it. Bill was interested in the turnpike restaurants but not the brand—and not the hotels. His plan was to sell those. The best restaurant sites would be converted to Big Boys or Roy Rogers, and the rest would be sold.
In March 1985, Bill joined a half dozen other bidders for HoJo. Imperial announced that the winning bidder would be revealed on May 15. The day before, J.W. begged Bill to pull out. Bill vehemently refused, but he did lower his bid because HoJo had just recorded a $9.9-million loss. Imperial said it would not agree to the lower price.
When it came to business, Bill could show a lot of patience. Time and again, he simply waited until he got what he wanted. Over the next month, the competition narrowed, and Imperial invited Bill to the table again. J.W. knew the August 1 board meeting was his last chance to stop the acquisition.
All the directors were present when J.W. called the meeting to order at nine-thirty a.m. at the Copley Place Marriott in Boston. J.W. lobbed a volley of questions and objections about the quality of HoJo’s operations. Dick, who had spearheaded the deal, replied that Marriott was not buying the operations; it was buying the properties and would quickly sell the ones it didn’t want. J.W. expressed doubt about whether that could be done. Sensing the vote was going against him, J.W. finally questioned the cost of converting HoJo restaurants to Marriott brands, but Dick told him a conversion would be half the price of building from scratch.
J.W. called for a vote, announcing that his was a definitive “No.” He polled the board, and each in turn voted in favor of Bill and Dick’s deal, until it came to Allie. She was between a rock and a hard place for the last time. A “no” vote would please her husband, while a “yes” vote would favor her sons. She abstained. Judging from J.W.’s journal entries and accounts of family members, when he returned to Lake Winnipesaukee after the board meeting, he seemed resolved and peaceful, as if he sensed that he had only a short time left to savor life. That meeting turned out to be the lion’s last roar.
When death came calling for eighty-four-year-old John Willard Marriott, Sr., that summer, it was neither unexpected nor unwelcome. The previous summer, he had been sitting on the porch at the lake home when he suddenly felt dizzy, stood up, and then fell onto the lawn. He spent twenty days at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, where tests determined that he had had a cardiac “incident” but not a full-scale heart attack. J.W. didn’t care what they called it; he knew what had happened. “I felt like I died,” he told Bill. “It was a sweet, wonderful experience for me. I am not afraid of death anymore.”
J.W. had never been afraid of much, and certainly not of death. Once when he and Bill were on a morning flight to New York, the plane flew into a thunderstorm. J.W. slept through it until a particularly violent jolt awakened him. He looked over at Bill, who was terrified. “What’s the matter with you, Bill?”
“It’s apparent to me that in a few moments, we will surely die,” said Bill.
J.W. replied, “Don’t you know that dying is one of the great experiences of life?” And then he went back to sleep.
Like most Latter-day Saints, who believe life is eternal, J.W. knew he had an appointment with death, and he also was certain that life would go on after death. He had missed a few of his “appointments.” He had come close to dying from Hodgkin’s disease in 1933 and believed that healing priesthood blessings had saved him. He had escaped death twice in 1967—the first time when he suffered a heart attack and the second time when a blood vessel burst in his brain. Exceptional medical treatment was aided by the same spiritual system that had always sustained J.W.: his own faith, the ministrations of his “chief nurse,” Allie, the faith and prayers of family and friends, and healing blessings.
Over a twelve-day period in 1975, J.W. had suffered three heart attacks that should have taken him down for good. During that period, sixteen-year-old grandson Stephen was on his knees with impressive frequency, earnestly pleading with God to save his grandfather’s life. “I still remember praying to let him live at least ten more years—enough for him to see me go on a mission, get married and have a child,” Stephen wrote. “My wish and prayer were granted” exactly to the year.2
When J.W. returned to the lake from the board meeting in Boston, he was greeted as something of a conquering hero by his family. The fact that he had lost the Howard Johnson vote was irrelevant to them. Instead, they were cheered by the clean bill of health he had been given during an examination at Massachusetts General Hospital. Pleased that their patriarch would be around a while longer, they gathered in the field adjacent to their lakeshore homes and waved as J.W. and Allie’s helicopter hovered, then landed in the pasture at three p.m. Thursday.
Privately, J.W. was not so sure he was as fit as his physician had suggested. On Friday, he ventured out to hit a “bucket of balls with Bill.” But after knocking a few of them around, he was too tired to continue. On Saturday, he took the boat out for a trip around Rattlesnake Island, but he almost fainted at the wheel, and so he turned back.
J.W. on horseback in 1985.
On Sunday, August 11, he was able to make it to church meetings at the new Wolfeboro chapel he had helped fund, which was scheduled for an official dedication in two weeks. J.W. enjoyed hearing Dick’s wife, Nancy, sing on the program, and he joined her later at a Protestant church where she also sometimes shared her talent. That afternoon, J.W. asked Nancy, “Do you know ‘Abide With Me; ’Tis Eventide’?”
“Yes,” she said, noting the catch in his throat.
“Will you sing it at my funeral?” he asked.3
J.W. and Allie went to Bill’s house for dinner in the early evening on that Sunday. Probably because of the religious meetings he had attended, J.W. was more sober than usual, and he did something that was entirely unexpected—he hugged Bill with a strong embrace, telling him he loved him and expressing how proud he was of his grown-up boy. Bill was taken aback; he had not heard such sentiments from his father in a long time.
• • •
When the sun rose over Lake Winnipesaukee on Tuesday, August 13, 1985, it was evident this was going to be a beautiful day. J.W. had pancakes for breakfast and helped plan the family cookout. Then he took a nap while Bill took the younger family members on a long boat ride.
By the time the boaters got back and walked to J.W.’s summer house, Grandpa was up and, as usual, ordering around his longtime chauffeur—the ebullient jack-of-all-trades and barbecue chef for the day, Cornelius “Mack” McNeil. Before the hamburgers were cooked, J.W. wanted everyone to gather on his porch for a family photo. “Take the picture of us, Mack,” J.W. directed, but McNeil had another idea and asked a caretaker to take the photo. “You always told me I was a member of the family,” McNeil said. “How can I take a family picture and I ain’t in it?”
After the first photo, McNeil stepped off the porch to take over the photographer duties. When he put the viewfinder up to his eye, he saw a fishbowl-shaped light around J.W.’s head. He lowered the camera to check it, and J.W. asked what the holdup was. McNeil didn’t answer. “When I put the camera back up again, I saw that aura again. It was a glow. I wouldn’t lie to you. I remember just like it was yesterday,” he recalled, quietly weeping more than twenty-five years later. “Something was going on here and I knew it.” At the time, he kept it to himself.
After the blessing on the food was offered, and the family was chowing down on hamburgers and baked beans, J.W. got to his favorite part—the sweet New Hampshire corn on the cob that had been purchased fresh that day. When he was about to eat a second piece, he looked over at the cob on Bill’s plate and remarked that it wasn’t as good a piece as the one he had in his hands. “Here, take this one, Bill,” he said. J.W. had never done that before.
About seven-thirty p.m., J.W. got up and walked into the house to his recliner with its window view of the shimmering lake. Before eight p.m., he began feeling some discomfort in his chest and sent the cook to bring Mack and Allie into the house. They applied the oxygen inhaler and gave him nitroglycerin pills. Bill joined them in time to see J.W. take his last breath, peacefully, without complaint.
An ambulance was summoned, and first responders attempted to revive J.W. on the way to the hospital, but it was too late. When Allie returned home after the ambulance left, McNeil was there to meet her. “Mack, Mr. Marriott is gone,” she said.
“Mrs. Marriott, I know it. Mr. Marriott died in this house. He didn’t die in the hospital.”
Debbie agreed. “Grandpa had died, but his spirit was still in the room,” she said later. “It was really interesting to look at the body that the EMTs were working on. That was not my grandpa. Grandpa was in the room, but he wasn’t in that body. The thing I remember most clearly was that he was still the same person, same personality, same sense of humor, and that he loved us and his death had nothing to do with us. It was his time to go.”
When Bill returned from the hospital, he sat at his father’s desk and began the funeral preparations. Given the likely number of mourners, Bill knew that the funeral had to be held at the largest Latter-day Saint facility in Washington, which was the stake center adjacent to the temple site. As the stake president, it would fall to him to conduct the meeting, if he could keep his composure. That evening, Bill decided to put his grief in abeyance until he had conducted the funeral with a dignity that would honor his father.
As he made plans, he read a note in his father’s handwriting, apparently scribbled the night before after he had watched a movie on TV that featured a famous old song. “The best things in life are free,” J.W. had written, by way of affirmation. “The moon belongs to everyone; it shines just for you and me.”
Bill called his closest friends in the Church’s leadership and learned that three Apostles, Elders Gordon B. Hinckley, Ezra Taft Benson, and Boyd K. Packer, would attend the funeral. All three agreed to speak. Bill also asked Dr. Billy Graham, the most famous preacher in the world, to offer remarks. The choice of the next speaker was a surprise to everyone, even himself. Former President Richard Nixon called Allie to express his condolences, then asked Bill if he could attend the funeral, if his presence wouldn’t be a distraction. Nixon had resigned in disgrace eleven years earlier and usually kept a low profile. Of course he should come, Bill said. In fact, “Would you consider speaking at the funeral?”
Between Wednesday and the funeral on Saturday, condolence calls, letters, and telegrams poured in by the hundreds. J.W.’s death was front-page news across the country. In a rare tribute for a nonpolitician’s death, the Washington Post devoted an editorial to his passing, seeing it as an end-of-an-era event: “Pardon us for taking a slightly parochial view of J. Willard Marriott when we point out that with him died another bit of small-town Washington. A community’s merchants give it much of its character. And the quality of its individual businesses reflects the quality of those who are responsible for them.” The city’s “warm recollection of the Hot Shoppes institution is a tribute to Marriott. For many years, his little chain of restaurants helped give this capital something of the flavor of a courteous, pleasant, overgrown village before he became a towering business figure and the city also went on to bigger things.”4
From a vacation at his California ranch, President Ronald Reagan told reporters that J.W. had been “a living example of the American dream.” In spite of his rise “from modest beginnings [to] become one of the world’s most successful and respected businessmen, he never lost the value of honesty, decency and hard work, instilled in him as a youth. He built an enterprise and raised a family, both of which are models for us all.” The president also sent a private letter to Allie, which concluded: “May our Lord comfort you with warm memories of your life together.”5
Vice President George Bush called Bill and offered sympathy. Former President Gerald Ford sent a handwritten note from Rancho Mirage calling J.W. “a person of greatness. . . . I will forever be grateful for his many kindnesses and loyal support while I was President.”6
Former governor and presidential candidate George Romney told the press: “For me the world will never be the same. He was a magnificent individual and friend and was so well-balanced in every way.” Romney’s son, Willard Mitt Romney, wrote to his “Aunt Allie”: “I have looked to Uncle Bill as a model since I was old enough to know that I was named for him. . . . I remember the ranch, Uncle Bill as a tall, lanky smiling cowboy. . . . I warm at the thought of his humor and twinkle. . . . It was the character, integrity, fairness [and] loyalty [that] makes him so worthy of respect and emulation. . . . I love him, and look forward till we meet again at Jesus’ feet.”7
Bill and the Marriott family received more than 640 condolence notes, telegrams, and letters, which his secretary recorded on a list that covered twenty-five pages. The king of Saudi Arabia sent Bill his best wishes, as did Coretta Scott King, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Dr. Robert Schuller, the popular preacher of Los Angeles’s Crystal Cathedral.
In the end, the tribute Bill considered to have the most reassuring eternal significance came from the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Spencer W. Kimball, who wrote that J.W. “was a man whose accomplishments in business and industry provided an unparalleled example of integrity. Even greater than these accomplishments was his devotion to his God, his family and his country. . . . We rejoice in the knowledge of his life, so well-lived, and a posterity devoted to the same principles which made him such a remarkable man.”8
Hundreds attended the viewing at the funeral home on Friday, where the flowers filled four rooms. Allie had asked Ellie Colton—wife of Sterling, Bill’s longtime friend and the company’s General Counsel—to arrange the funeral flowers in the stake center to look like an English garden. The Coltons worked until two a.m. Saturday arranging cuttings from dogwood and magnolia trees, along with a profusion of floral arrangements.
The family asked another friend, internationally famous columnist Jack Anderson, to act as chief usher for the funeral. His job was to stand at the chapel’s front entrance and direct distinguished guests to the seats reserved for them. More than a few were anxious about what might happen if he and Nixon interacted, considering Anderson had once been Nixon’s archenemy in the media. “Nixon strode up to me to get his instructions, not paying attention,” Anderson recalled. “Then we made eye contact. When he recognized me, his face contorted into that old ‘hunted adversary’ expression. ‘Hrrumph,’ he growled, and walked away.”9
There had been a similar Cold War between George Romney and Nixon. Though Romney had served as a cabinet secretary under Nixon, he and his family were convinced Nixon had broken promises he had made to Romney during the 1967–68 presidential campaign, and that Nixon had lied to Romney about the president’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. Romney had not given Nixon the time of day for a decade, which is what made the funeral photo of Nixon and Romney, with Billy Graham acting as mediator, so rich with history. The spirit of the funeral program for their mutual friend was so powerful that the two old political warriors buried the hatchet. “The whole experience softened my feeling toward Richard Nixon and for the first time since I left the Cabinet we are going to have a visit. I had never wanted to see him before,” Romney wrote Bill.10
At 10:50 a.m., at the stake center and at a satellite temple visitors’ center location, more than 2,500 congregants all stood as Dick and Donna escorted Allie to the first pew, facing her husband’s red-rose–draped coffin. With his penchant for punctuality, stake president Bill Marriott began the meeting promptly at 11:00 a.m.
Bill had assigned himself to be the first speaker, the sole family member to offer remarks. “I’ve often said that the best decision I ever made in my life was to select my parents,” he began. “I feel as if a giant redwood has gone and left a great space in the forest. . . . His greatness was his goodness, his deep love of the Lord, his earnest study of the scriptures and his strong testimony that God lives and that there is life beyond the grave.”
Distinguished funeral guests and speakers, including (left to right) President Ezra Taft Benson, Bill Marriott, Elder Boyd K. Packer, President Gordon B. Hinckley, the Reverend Billy Graham, former president Richard Nixon, Mark Evans Austad, Governor George Romney, Ken Garff, and Richard Marriott.
Bill kept his talk short, thanking everyone for the support they had shown the family. “I loved my dad and I will miss him greatly,” he concluded.
Billy Graham came next: “The Apostle Paul once said that we are not to be slothful in business. No one can ever accuse [J.W.] of being slothful or lazy. He never believed in the forty-hour week for himself. He worked sixty and seventy hours a week. . . . He showed how you could build a great business with honesty and integrity and make a profit. . . . Now we say as the French do, ‘Au revoir,’ till we meet again, because we will.”
Some in the congregation nervously fidgeted when the next speaker, former president Nixon, came to the pulpit. No one knew what to expect. Any tension was quickly dispelled as he spoke in a folksy, personal manner about his friend. He spoke for twelve minutes without notes. J.W. was “a nice guy who finished first,” Nixon declared. He quoted Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.” Then he described J.W.’s last day of life at the lake. “I think all of us can be thankful today that in the evening of his life, he could look back and say, ‘How splendid the day has been!’”
Nixon and Graham had to leave right after the funeral. They shared a limousine to the airport and then flew on to New York together, still talking about the powerful spirit of the funeral after they landed. “Words cannot express the impact your family, friends, and especially the service, made on me Saturday,” Dr. Graham wrote Bill. “The deep spiritual content made a lasting impression on me. As a matter of fact, I told George and Barbara Bush that it was one of the greatest services I had ever attended.”11
The funeral procession to Parklawn Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland, was two miles long. Dozens of white-gloved police officers blocked intersections until the full procession passed. Flowers lined the entire route inside the cemetery. At the graveside, George Romney delivered the dedicatory prayer. Bill had introduced Romney as “a good friend for sixty years,” and Romney lamented in a letter to Bill a few days later: “As you probably know, while your father had many close personal friends, I had only one, and none really close, now that he has departed temporarily.”
Romney and other out-of-town visitors—about 250 mourners altogether—were invited to join the family for lunch at the Bethesda Marriott Kona Kai restaurant. Just as Allie had done for many decades when J.W. had been too busy or ill to write in his journal, it was left to her to write that evening’s entry: “It’s all over, and his wonderful life will be a wonderful memory.”12