Chapter 20

The Flagship and Fleet Expansion

Bill Marriott learned from his father the philosophy of Management by Walking Around (MBWA). J.W. began the practice of regularly inspecting the restaurants of his Hot Shoppes chain, giving Bill boyhood memories of trailing behind on those property tours. He grew up believing firmly in MBWA and embraced it wholeheartedly, even when the company expanded to hundreds of facilities in the 1980s.

In a television and magazine advertising campaign that made his face famous, Bill proclaimed: “I have to make sure we do things right. After all, it’s my name on the door.” His advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, pressed the usually shy CEO to be the spokesperson. “They wanted to provide a face—let people know there’s somebody named Marriott who’s concerned with customers. There’s no Mr. Hyatt, Mr. Sheraton, or Mr. Ramada,” Bill said.

Nation’s Business hailed him as “a modern-day Gulliver” who logged an average of 150,000 air miles a year to maintain face-to-face contact with the managers and employees of his far-flung business empire. In a typical year, Bill visited more than 100 of his hotels, 75 competitors’ hotels, dozens of airline kitchens, and at least 100 of his food-service outlets. He was away from home at least 180 days every year.1

Many other CEOs thought Bill was crazy to try to keep up such a pace. “A lot of them like to go to industry meetings; they like to mingle with other CEOs,” Bill said. “They think that they can learn a lot more by hanging around with other CEOs than they can by hanging around with their own people? Two-thirds of my best ideas come from visiting our operations. I gain a lot more than I give.”

“You will not walk through a lobby and find a piece of paper or anything on the floor if Bill’s around on a tour,” recalled Marriott executive Dan Altobello. “We checked out a Hyatt hotel once, and Bill bent over and picked up a gum wrapper. ‘You should leave it there—this is a competitor’s hotel,’ I said. He said, ‘Habit, habit, habit.’” Indeed, the Washington Post concluded that if there were “a true Marriott corporate symbol, it would be an executive reaching for litter.”2 Since most of Bill’s hotel inspections were anticipated by the staff, he learned to pack a small can of paint remover in his suitcase, just in case he brushed against a surface freshly painted for him.

As grueling as his schedule was, Bill lamented in a 1986 talk that he could not visit more properties that year and would only be able to “shake hands with maybe 15,000 employees throughout the company, only seven and a half percent of our work force.”3 But he also needed to be at headquarters for important meetings, spend quality time with his family, and fulfill his Church assignments.

During this period of unprecedented corporate expansion, Bill was president of the Washington D.C. Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a volunteer position, but equivalent to being the archbishop of a Catholic diocese. Why would a busy CEO willingly take on such a responsibility? He explained it in a 1989 speech to a Church gathering: “If I have been successful in business, it is because of the help the Church has given me. If I have been successful as a husband and father, it’s because of the Church. It has been the greatest influence in my life. I owe all I have to the Church.”4

Bill had been called to be the eighth president of the Washington D.C. Stake on December 12, 1982. He was president for eight years, including the time he was recovering from his burns. As the Latter-day Saint population in the D.C. area grew, and even after several wards spun off to other stakes, Bill’s flock grew to 3,143 members in eight congregations within Montgomery County, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

Latter-day Saint stakes operate by a plethora of leadership meetings, and Bill was a master at conducting them. He was never late. He always brought an agenda, and when that was covered, the meeting was over. Twice a year, Bill flew to Salt Lake City to attend the Church’s general conference, which included special training sessions for stake presidents. He also attended board meetings for the Church-run Polynesian Cultural Center in Salt Lake City and Hawaii. And he was assigned to the Church’s Public Communications Advisory Council, which met regularly to discuss ways to improve the image of the Church. There were literally hundreds of meetings over the eight years, ranging from local lay leadership to the top of the Church hierarchy.

Occasionally, Bill had to convene a “disciplinary council.” If a member committed a grievous sin—adultery, apostasy, a felony—the stake president invited him or her to a meeting to examine the person’s worthiness for continued membership in the Church. Excommunication might result from the council. Bill never rushed those meetings, letting everyone talk who might be impacted by the outcome. The same was true for any of the one-on-one counseling sessions he held with individual members in need.

Bill’s private files are full of letters from stake members who attested to his kindness to them and told how it had changed their lives. “Bill loved working with the members individually and helping them,” observed Marriott lawyer and fellow Latter-day Saint Steve West. “Instead of making financial and business goals at the company, it was a whole different thing where he could see their personal growth and achievement—and gain great joy from it.”

The Washington D.C. Stake had hundreds of people on the membership rolls who had drifted away from the Church. He challenged bishops of the individual congregations in the stake to visit every inactive member within six months. If they needed help, he went along with them. He also focused his efforts on young people, making sure that they had mentors in each ward and bishops who would be more inclined to counsel rebellious teenagers than to discipline them. The stake presidency also came up with a shadow leadership program for teens, making them responsible for organizing their own programs and activities.

In everything he did as stake president, Bill professed his faith in Jesus Christ. “Jesus never performed a selfish act,” he said. “Everything that he did was done for us. His love for us knows no bounds. He is the personification of love, the author of mercy, the prince of peace. . . . Civilizations rise, dominate the world, and crumble into dust. But Jesus Christ is eternal. He remains the same, and only in Him can we find refuge and strength. . . . He will be with us in the fiery furnace and the deep pit. He will accompany us to the hospital room, the funeral home, the gravesite. He will be our captain on a rough voyage and will be the eternal light which we may see, and the eternal warmth which we may feel.”

While Bill sprinkled his talks with references to heroic figures from history, he never included himself in that company. He lived by the code he established for his family: “No big shots here.” Instead, he endeared himself to stake members with self-deprecating remarks about his own imperfections, as in the following personal stories he shared:

—“The last time my wife and I had a serious argument was several years ago, when she had carefully baked three dozen cookies for a church [gathering] and I had sneaked into the kitchen and eaten some of them. She had committed to show up with thirty-six cookies. Now she didn’t have that many and we had to leave in ten minutes. She became upset with me and I with her. How silly it was on my part to have eaten the cookies and started the argument in the first place.”

—“Too often I find I am dictating to my children, telling them what to do instead of listening to them. My three married children frequently remind me that when they were small and all yelling at once, I would say: ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll give you something to cry about!’ . . . How unlike the Savior I had behaved in each instance. I always tried to do better.”

—“One night we were almost through dinner when our child David, who was three years old, opened the ketchup bottle to put some on his hamburger. I noticed that the entire bottle of Heinz Finest ketchup had just covered David’s hamburger and most of his plate. I let out a big yell: ‘David, watch what you’re doing!’ He looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I’m just a little boy. I’m sorry. Please don’t yell at me.’ Well, Donna and I began to laugh. We laughed with David until we were weary. The next night when David spilled his milk, I didn’t say a word. We parents must step back from the furious pace for a while, and really look at our children. There is so much to enjoy. The Lord only made one of each. There are no copies, and even tomorrow each one will be different from today.”

Among Bill’s most memorable sermons were those focusing on adversity, especially after he had gone through his own “refiner’s fire” in 1985. “In April my wife Donna’s only brother took his life and left behind a lovely wife and three children. My father passed away in August. Ten days later I almost lost my life in a severe boat explosion. I was in the hospital for sixteen days and underwent extensive surgery for my burns. A week after I went into the hospital, my mother fell and broke her pelvis. I was in one hospital; Mother was in another. It was then that I remembered my father’s prophetic words when I was little and didn’t want to go to Sunday School: ‘You’d better learn to love the Lord and serve Him because someday you’re really going to need Him.’ That time had obviously come. I have truly learned that adversity strikes everyone, but the blessings of our Father in Heaven can bring us through the most difficult circumstances.”

One of Bill’s great joys as a stake president was the beginning of a long friendship with a fellow stake president from Frankfurt, Germany, named Dieter Uchtdorf. The two first met on business, not Church business. Uchtdorf was Lufthansa Airline’s “chief pilot” and senior vice president of flight operations. As such, Uchtdorf was in charge of the airline’s food service, which was one reason Dieter wanted to meet Bill. The second was that Dieter wanted to meet one of his personal heroes. As a high-level German official, Uchtdorf was often in meetings with European airline chiefs who would quiz him about being a Latter-day Saint, a Christian religion they viewed with suspicion. Dropping the highly regarded Marriott name was one way of setting them straight.

“I would explain that we had a worldwide, respected church,” Uchtdorf said. “Then I’d say, ‘Do you know Bill Marriott of the hotel chain?’ ‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard of him. He’s a good man, a fine businessman.’ They were very positive because Bill has always represented the values and principles of the Church in a very humble, down-to-earth, perfect way. There was never a risk of embarrassment taking Bill as the example of Mormon values.”

It was not until April 1988 that the two finally met—during the Church’s semiannual general conference in Salt Lake City. They scheduled a Saturday night dinner at the Salt Lake City Marriott to see if they could come to terms on a business deal.

Over dinner, “Bill was very friendly and we talked about everything,” Uchtdorf recalled. “He is a quiet person, very quiet, and he has a good sense of humor—a cool one.” Dieter discovered that Bill was an avid reader of books about or by Winston Churchill and about World War II, so Uchtdorf was pleased to answer questions about his growing-up years in wartime Germany, his escape from East Germany, and his religious conversion. Then they got down to business.

“As a Lufthansa guy, I wanted to have consistent, high-quality catering on my planes, and I knew Marriott would be a great partner to do that. I also wanted a good deal for our crews to stay in Marriott hotels. We already had several contracts with them for Lufthansa flights out of the U.S., but I wanted more. He was tough, and I was tough. He offered some good hotel deals, but some of his numbers for catering our flights in Europe were high, so we didn’t agree on everything.” Face-to-face, each earned respect from and for the other.

“I will never forget that night,” Dieter reflected. After their dinner, they attended a session of the Church conference together. “That was so unique for me. In Germany, I was not used to having my business partners being [Latter-day Saints]. So I was deeply impressed to do business negotiations with a wonderful businessman who knew what he wanted, and then go with him to the [conference]. That was very special.”

On other occasions, especially after Dieter Uchtdorf became an Apostle of the Church and later a member of the First Presidency, he was upset to hear occasional criticism of Bill from fellow Latter-day Saints because of a solitary but necessary aspect of the Marriott business. “They will say to me, ‘If he’s a Mormon, why does he serve alcohol?’ I have to laugh at this. They usually don’t know that at Lufthansa, I was responsible for buying all the wine and all the cigarettes we sold on board. That was part of my business, just as it is for Bill. Some criticized [golf star] Johnny Miller because he played golf on Sunday, or [star NFL quarterback] Steve Young because he played football on Sunday. We should not split hairs on these things. We should be more understanding—more merciful, really—with each other.”5

Elder Boyd K. Packer, the Apostle who was at Lake Winnipesaukee the day of Bill’s boat explosion, and the one who released Bill as stake president in 1990, later summed up Bill’s commitment to the Church: “He would do anything the Lord asked him to do. When I needed something—like helping the Church with his political, diplomatic, and other foreign connections—I got him on the phone and then he did it. I’ve known a few prominent men in the same kind of position whose membership in the Church kind of fades in the background. Not Bill Marriott. He is front and steady for the Lord’s Church.”

During those years he served as stake president, Bill’s corporate responsibilities never cut him a break: hotels were built, he launched a variety of product lines, he faced his own mortality, and he beat back financial ruin, all while juggling family and Church responsibilities.

Of course, Bill couldn’t have managed the Church workload without the help of a large stake leadership organization that included two counselors, a twelve-member high council, seven clerks and secretaries, the presidencies of six auxiliary organizations, two patriarchs, and, of course, a half dozen bishops and their “staffs” of more than 100 volunteer member-leaders. No one was paid to perform his or her service.

Among those helpers was Phyllis Hester, who juggled Bill’s Church appointments so they would mesh with his corporate schedule. Hester’s “day job” was as a secretary to Geico CEO Jack Byrne, whom she described as “the total opposite of the very organized Mr. Marriott.” Whenever Byrne ran into Bill at business events, he bragged about his Latter-day Saint secretary: “I couldn’t find my watch without Phyllis Hester.”

Sensing Hester was ready for a change after her husband died, Bill offered her a job at Marriott to become his assistant. While longtime secretary Mary Harne filled Bill’s primary secretarial needs, Phyllis was given the responsibility for Bill’s schedule. She quickly discovered his calendar was so full it was impossible to accommodate all the requests for his time. “Getting time on his schedule is always like getting blood out of a turnip!” she remarked.

When Harne retired after years of faithful service, Phyllis moved into the gatekeeper’s position just outside Bill’s office. For the next two decades and counting, she has been his Girl Friday, coordinating not only his corporate and Church work, but also some private Marriott family events.

“If Phyllis wasn’t here at the office, I don’t know if I would be,” Bill said. “She is terrific. She has always been kind and helpful to everyone who calls my office, and she seems to always be in the office—long before eight a.m. and long after five p.m. She eats lunch at her desk in spite of my efforts to get her out and have a nice meal. I could never—never—have done my jobs at work and in the Church without her tremendous help and support.”6

Phyllis Hester.

Adds his daughter Debbie: “Phyllis has one of the hardest jobs in the world—taking care of my dad! For decades she has been getting him where he needs to go, and on time. In a world of iPhones and iPads, she is his own self-declared ‘smartphone,’ typing out the daily schedule that he keeps in his pocket. In this way—and many more—she is always close to his heart. In fact, she is so near and dear to all of my family that she has become a part of our family.”7

• • •

Airline catering began taking Bill on a wild roller-coaster ride, and he wondered if he should be in that business anymore, even though Marriott was the undisputed leader. He reflected on the time when his father had invited Bill, then a college student, to join him at a sales meeting with George T. Baker, the autocratic president of National Airlines. Baker was an intimidating figure. He didn’t believe in serving his passengers food, but he had hired Marriott a few years earlier to run his headquarters employee lunchroom in Miami. J.W. heard that Baker was about to drop Marriott and operate the cafeteria in-house.

It was an unforgettable meeting for Bill, notable for its hostility, brevity, and lessons learned. Though J.W. was not cowed, Bill was taken aback by Baker, a big man with a bulldog jaw and a buccaneer swagger. Baker confirmed that he was going to end the contract with Marriott and run the cafeteria at a lower cost by buying inferior food. “That would be a mistake,” J.W. responded. “The quality of the food that your employees eat will do a lot for their morale. If they feel better about where they work, they will do a better job.”

“Nonsense!” Baker countered. “Anybody can cook hamburgers and French fries—what do I care? Frankly, I’ve got so many union problems that I just don’t give a damn if the employees like the food or not. They’ll take what I serve them.”

At that point, “my father said if he truly felt that way, Mr. Baker should do his own food service—and we left. My dad was glad to walk away from that contract,” Bill recalled.

The lesson Bill learned was that if Marriott could not provide quality food service, even in the face of cost-cutting, there was no point in doing it. This was the ongoing conundrum in the airline catering business. Marriott In-Flite served dozens of airlines, and each one had its own menus, which changed from month to month. Some airlines insisted that Marriott buy from specific vendors, such as Delta’s requirement that all its steaks must be purchased from a Texas wholesaler. During airfare wars, when “no-frills” service was popular, meals were downsized to snacks, which required the same labor and delivery costs but had to be done at a reduced price.

Excellence could not happen unless the airline valued good customer service, and that was usually out of Marriott’s control. Airline presidents concentrated on rates and routes, with little understanding of airline food. Bill visited with one airline CEO who said he wasn’t happy with Marriott’s food service.

“Do you eat breakfast or dinner most frequently?” Bill asked.

“Well, I’ve never actually tried a meal,” the CEO responded.

“How do you know it’s bad?”

“The flight attendants tell me,” he answered. Bill found out it was a single flight attendant who had made the comment to the CEO, and Bill tracked her down.

“What’s the problem with our food?” he asked.

“Oh, no big problem. I mean, every now and then the cake is dry.”

“Anything else?” Bill probed.

“Well, once the pilot said he didn’t like a serving.”

“How long ago?”

“Last year sometime,” she said.

On another occasion, Bill advised one director of catering to use canned instead of bottled soft drinks for safety reasons. “Mind your own business!” the man retorted.

One exception to the rule was Frank Borman, the astronaut turned CEO of Eastern Airlines. Bill and Borman had much in common. Both were modest men. Bill had no corporate jet, lived in an understated house, and bought his suits off the rack twice a year. When a People magazine reporter spotted him in a Halston sports jacket and remarked on it, Bill was surprised. He didn’t know. “My wife got it for me because she said it doesn’t wrinkle.”8 Similarly, Borman never let the astronaut hype go to his head. He lived as simply as did Bill and complained about the waste of company limos and jets. Both men were workaholics who collected information and ideas from their people, then made decisions and stuck to them. Both also firmly believed in “Management by Walking Around.” Borman asserted, “I don’t want many people between me and the baggage handler.”

Upgrading food service was high on Borman’s list. At the time, Marriott had some but not all of Eastern’s business. Borman invited Bill to fly to Miami for a Friday morning meeting. The night before, he called Bill and said, “I don’t like the idea that we’re tied up with all of these other caterers. You guys do the best job, so make me a proposal to take over as much of our airline catering as you can. Give me a list of all the stations that you want.”

Stunned, Bill asked if he could call back in fifteen minutes. “Then I frantically got on the phone with all of my people to put this dream list together,” he recalled. “Frank tentatively agreed to the whole list over the phone.” The next morning, the two men signed the deal, and Marriott took over a dozen Eastern airports overnight. The biggest coup was Atlanta, which was then the second-busiest airport in the world. Based on the Eastern contract, Bill built a large kitchen there, and other airlines switched to Marriott in Atlanta.

For nearly four decades, the airlines had been part of a government-controlled industry. No major airline went out of business during that period of regulation. It was a comfortable situation that allowed vendors like Marriott In-Flite to make money with dependable airline contractors. That all changed in October 1978, when the Jimmy Carter administration deregulated the industry.

In the beginning, Marriott In-Flite profits were increased because of the profusion of new airlines and routes. But when things began to settle, catering took a downturn. Bargain upstarts offered no food service, and the big airlines fought back by cutting fares and food. Eastern cancelled contracts with Marriott at four airports. Eventually Borman was forced out, and Marriott’s biggest contract shrank. Marriott’s competitors began making bargain-basement bids for contracts that wiped out profit margins. Braniff Airlines went bankrupt owing Marriott $6 million. Bill signed a deal with Continental Airlines only to have the airline declare bankruptcy a month later.

Bill’s best move was to make Fred Malek head of the In-Flite division. The former White House official had proven to be a gifted manager at Marriott, and he kept In-Flite afloat during those rocky years. When Bill promoted Malek to executive vice president in 1982, he tapped Dan Altobello to be the new chief of In-Flite. Nerves of steel and a willingness to take risks were critical, qualities both Bill and Altobello had in spades.

The highs often outweighed the lows. For example, there was the loan of Marriott’s hydraulic lift trucks to the U.S. Air Force to lift wounded soldiers into military aircraft after the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and the opportunity to cater all the flights for Pope John Paul II and his entourage during his 1987 tour of the United States. There were also the acquisitions of several competitors’ kitchens. And in 1989 In-Flite won the first joint-venture contract between the Soviet Union and a Western food-service company, catering Aeroflot flights out of Moscow. The deal was widely hailed as a significant milestone of Mikhail Gorbachev’s nascent glasnost strategy.

Marriott was able to hold its position as the world’s largest airline caterer. Thus, even though Bill’s hotel empire was growing rapidly during the 1980s, the company’s most ubiquitous “advertisements” were the hundreds of In-Flite trucks emblazoned with Marriott’s logo loading food carts onto airplanes at airports across America. At its peak, Marriott In-Flite serviced more than 150 airlines from more than 100 flight kitchens at forty-two U.S. and thirty-eight foreign airports—which produced annual revenue of $800 million.

Given all that, how could Bill decide in late 1988 that he was going to sell this golden goose? The answer is as simple as a number: $4 billion. It was the total revenue possible if Marriott owned all the airline-catering business in the world. Marriott already had nearly a quarter of the global market. Even if Bill won half of the business, the cap of $4 billion was simply not enough to make it worth his while. It was too low for the kind of growth to which he had committed his company.

Bill had a sentimental attachment to the business he had poured so many years and so much heart into, but that was tempered when Altobello and a group of In-Flite senior managers offered to take it off his hands. When former Marriott executive Fred Malek learned that Altobello wanted to spin off In-Flite, he enthusiastically signed on to make it happen. The new company would be called CaterAir Inc. Among other investors, Altobello would own 36 percent and Malek 33 percent. The sale resulted in a $231-million profit for Marriott.

“Bill sold it—and we bought it—at its peak,” recalled Altobello. “He maximized his value out of it. The first three years after the buyout, we made great profits and Bill looked like a fool for selling the business. But then, the second three years, when the catering business went downhill, Bill looked like a genius for selling the business. This goes to prove the point at which Bill is a master: Timing is everything.”

• • •

While Marriott launched new hotel concepts in the economy and moderate price ranges, at the same time, the company continued to expand the fleet with convention and luxury hotels. The New York Marriott Marquis opened soon after J.W.’s passing, but before that, the flagship JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., opened in 1984, a year before J.W.’s death. That downtown Washington project had begun as an urban renewal idea and had taken almost six years to come to fruition. Bill had not been the city’s first choice. Atlanta developer John Portman was the front-runner, but the city fathers balked at his design and asked Bill to enter the competition.

The proposed convention hotel would be the first major hotel development in what was still a “war zone” after the race riots of the late 1960s. It was Bill’s hometown, but he was initially reluctant to wade in. The historic resonance of the location—14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue—persuaded him to take a chance. “It was along that famous parade route that I watched every inaugural parade beginning with Roosevelt. I witnessed the funeral processions of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy,” Bill recalled. “Our first A&W root beer stand was located on 14th Street, as was our first Hot Shoppe restaurant and our corporate offices until the early 1940s.”

Bill won the competition with Portman in large part because he agreed to build his hotel around the iconic National Theatre, which Portman was proposing to tear down. Bill had astutely pledged more than $4 million for renovations of the theater. Construction began, and when it came time to put up the “Future site of . . .” sign on the lot, Bill had a surprise for his father. On one of the happiest days for father and son, Bill drove J.W. to 14th and Pennsylvania and pointed out the sign.

“Do you see your name up there?”

“What do you mean?” J.W. responded. Then he saw it. The sign said, “JW Marriott Hotel at National Place.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” J.W. said quietly.

“Well, I figured we ought to name it for you since you founded the business up this street a few blocks. I’m planning to create a new luxury brand of JW Marriotts around the world in your honor, and it seemed right that this would be the first.”

Besides its name, another tip-off that this hotel was going to be a special place for the Marriott family was that it did not technically have a “grand opening” with the bells and whistles Marriott was known for. Instead, attendees were invited to the “dedication” of the hotel on May 24, 1984.

It was an emotional event for the family. It included a twenty-minute video with personal tributes to J.W. from Bob Hope, Billy Graham, President Gerald Ford, and others. J.W. was nearly speechless. “I couldn’t use my written speech. It had all been said, so I clowned around for ten minutes without notes,” he recorded in his journal. His off-the-cuff speech was a hit, however: “We are not just building buildings at Marriott. We are building people. We are trying to impress upon our people the value of fairness and how much opportunity a young man or young woman has for growth with us if they have good habits and live right.” Bill then presented J.W. with a 242-foot-long card containing the signatures and well wishes of thousands of Marriott employees in the D.C. area.

J.W. died a year later. Two years after that, at the D.C. hotel, Bill presented the first J. Willard Marriott Awards of Excellence to fourteen employees from throughout the company who distinguished themselves through exemplary performance. On the back of the medals were the words: “Character, Dedication, Ideals, Effort, Perseverance, Achievement.” The first recipient was Allie.

Many important events were held at the new hotel. The most publicized was an assist to the December 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev summit, which marked the signing of the treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet medium-range and shorter-range nuclear missiles. Seven thousand journalists and their crews from more than 100 countries converged on the capital for the three-day summit. In a last-minute search for a place to brief the press, the State Department asked Bill to turn the hotel’s grand ballroom into an operations center for the media.

Bill chose not to hang around, instead flying to Atlanta for the opening of the company’s first Fairfield Inn. Then he was off to Phoenix to bid for airport terminal facilities. “We all have to make choices in how we use our time,” he informed the Phoenix officials. “This week, the White House has taken over our JW Marriott Hotel in Washington as press headquarters for the summit. My wife and I were invited to the State Department today for a luncheon with [the Gorbachevs], but I preferred to be in Phoenix for this presentation. I didn’t tell my wife about the luncheon invitation,” he laughed.9

Bill was simply not interested in the spotlight. A single paragraph—headlined “An Ordinary Guy”—appeared in Business Travel News before the summit. It illustrated this aspect of his character: “It was a busy Tuesday at the JW Marriott Hotel here on Pennsylvania Avenue. The flagship of the Marriott chain was packed to the gills with delegates attending [conferences] and various other business meetings. At the hotel’s popular National Cafe, the line of would-be diners waiting for a luncheon table stretched back into the lobby. Near the end of the line, one gentleman waited patiently. When his turn finally came and the hostess asked his name, there was a shocked look of surprise and recognition: Marriott, table for one. It was Chairman Bill Marriott, sampling the wares and waiting in line like an ordinary guest for a table.”10

Bill didn’t like the label pioneer. When others referred to him as one, he would often respond wryly: “My definition of a pioneer is a guy with an arrow in his back and his face in the mud. We’re not pioneers.” His goal was “not to waste a lot of time and money trying to do it a different way than anybody else,” explained Marriott hotel executive Bus Ryan. “Our corporate charter did not include innovation. We were going to take a new concept that was out there and do it better than anybody else.”

The truth was somewhere in the middle. Marriott was at the forefront of the first large motor hotels; Marriott was the leader in suburban and airport hotels; Marriott was the first to have nonsmoking floors and concierge floors; Marriott came up with preregistration and express checkout services; and Marriott put frequent-guest programs on the map, along with partnerships with airlines and car-rental companies.

It was also Bill’s vision beginning in the 1950s to garner business through meetings, conferences, and conventions at his suburban hotels. By the end of 1985, he had big hotels in the top five convention cities and a dozen others. Bill didn’t always have to build a mega-hotel to attract large conventions. In Miami and San Antonio he linked his hotels with each other and with competitors’ hotels to create convention-worthy complexes.

One location Bill did not court at first was Orlando, Florida. “I may be dead wrong,” he told the Miami News, “but I have a feeling the Disney area will be saturated to a point where few of the operators will make any money.”11 A decade later, however, Bill foresaw that Orlando was going to be a major convention city, and he changed his mind. He would be the first to put Orlando on the large-convention map with construction of a spectacular 1,500-room hotel just five minutes from Disney’s EPCOT Center. It appeared on the horizon, a pink monolith surrounded by an eighteen-hole championship golf course. When Marriott’s Orlando World Center resort opened in May 1986, it was the largest hotel in Florida. Once again, in spite of his verbal disparagement of pioneering, Bill had been the first non-Disney hotel operator on the scene to go big.

The Desert Springs resort in Palm Springs.

In 1983, Bill got a foothold in London, where he bought the classy little Europa Hotel on Grosvenor Square, and in Paris, where he bought the Prince Charles de Gaulle Hotel. Back in the States, he secured two choice locations in the Los Angeles area—San Fernando Valley and Century City. The latter was one of Bill’s more exclusive and expensive projects, and he named it JW Marriott at Century City. The grand opening in June 1988 was a star-studded charity event on behalf of the Children’s Miracle Network.

One property that took Bill’s breath away was the company’s second resort in the Palm Springs area. Sunrise Corp., the developer of Marriott’s Rancho Las Palmas resort, came to Bill in 1982 and said it was time to work on a second project, since Marriott had proven that the desert could support year-round resorts. Bill agreed and put his team to work. They developed a plan for the largest resort in California, a $134-million complex stretching over 240 acres in Palm Desert. In addition to 892 rooms, there would be water everywhere—twenty-three acres of lakes and waterways, including a sandy swimming beach and a river that ran into the lobby so boats could carry guests to their rooms and restaurants.

The grand opening in February 1987 raised $1.2 million for the Bob Hope Cultural Center. Guests included Gerald and Betty Ford, Gene Autry, Willie Shoemaker, Don Drysdale, Ginger Rogers, and many other notables. Wayne Newton brought his Las Vegas act. “I realize this show is cheaper than a room here,” he quipped.

Debbie’s fondest memories happened away from that glamour, seeing her father’s joy as Desert Springs was being developed. “He was so proud of it all. I remember him saying once, in a quiet moment as we surveyed the work in progress, ‘You know, this is what makes my job worth it. I just love this!’ And that was only one little teeny piece of the big empire he was building.”