Chapter 25
Bill’s father had long dreamed of going on an African safari, partly because of the early 1960s encouragement of friend and former Eisenhower administration budget chief Maurice Stans. The friends finally made firm plans for a 1966 safari, only to have J.W. change his mind—deciding to take Allie to the Holy Land instead. A second safari plan was also canceled, and J.W. never went. But, what the father was not able to do, the son did.
Bill’s family was growing, and he realized he needed to find a place to “get away from it all” and take the whole family. He came up with a plan for the safari in Africa about which his father had once dreamed.
Because of Stephen’s health and disabilities, he and his family had to decline, but the rest of the family was enthusiastic about the prospect. Debbie and Ron Harrison joined the group with their five children; John and Angie joined with their three; and newlyweds David and Carrie completed the group. The clan met up in Nairobi, Kenya, spending the first night at the famous Norfolk Hotel, which had hosted Ernest Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, and other notables. The next day, a private charter plane flew them to Lewa Downs in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, and the safari was on.
The most exciting thirty minutes of the trip—at least for Bill and the boys—occurred as they watched a thin female cheetah with two hungry cubs hunt a gazelle. As John recorded in his trip journal, “The chase only lasted about 10 seconds as she ran, weaved, and pounced on her prey, which would be enough food for her and her cubs for the next few days. She carried the gazelle to a nearby tree. We sat and watched—some in amazement, others in a bit of disgust—as the dead animal was slowly devoured by the cats. Interestingly, she showed the cubs how to move the stomach to the side so as not to open it and create a smell that would attract other animals.”1
Bill saw a metaphor in the hunt: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
Besides family retreats, Bill also found rare respite in his car collection, which began with a Lamborghini.
In 1967, while in Rome to acquire a European catering business, Bill dropped in at a Lamborghini dealership, where a salesman convinced him to take a ride in the demonstrator Miura model. It was one of only three handmade prototypes Lamborghini produced, and it had been driven 1,000 miles. Bill hung onto his seat while the car raced through the capital’s narrow and winding streets at eighty miles an hour. He was sold. Because it was used and a prototype, Bill got it at a bargain price of $12,000. Only 761 Miuras were ever produced, so, as time went on, Bill’s Miura, which became the oldest surviving model, increased exponentially in value.2 Bill kept the car at Camelback Inn for many years and finally sold it to John.
The Lamborghini Miura was the first collectible car Bill ever purchased, and it was another decade before he bought a second one, which he did with an eye to delighting his father. During World War II, J.W. had driven his family around in one of the first automatic transmission vehicles, a ’41 Cadillac 60. As they rode around, young Bill often heard his father complain that he should have bought the top-of-the-line 60S or “Special,” which had a glass divider between the front and back seats, almost like a limousine. In 1979, Bill found one, bought it on the spot for $8,000, and drove to White Post Restorations in Virginia for a makeover.
Mechanic Skip Hurt recognized junk when he saw it. “I wanted very badly to tell Mr. Marriott, ‘You don’t want to restore this car,’” but the owner of the shop intervened, and the work went ahead. Over the next year, Bill enjoyed going out to White Post on weekends to check on the restoration progress. He and Hurt became good friends.
Before the Cadillac project was done, Bill read that a 1936 Mercedes Benz 500K Roadster had sold at auction in Los Angeles for $400,000, making it the most expensive passenger car in the world. He hunted for a similar one, locating a 1934 500K in a barn in Cologne, Germany. For $155,000, Bill purchased the unique car, which had been owned in the 1930s by Hitler’s race-car driver Manfred von Brauchitsch. Word of the purchase price and the restoration that followed stirred great excitement among auto collectors across America.
Meanwhile, the restoration of the Cadillac Special was finished, and Bill proudly drove the car to J.W.’s house to show it off and to give it to him as a present. But J.W. had recently bought a new Cadillac Seville. He took one look at the vintage car in the driveway and said, “What the hell is that?”
“That’s the 60 Special you always wanted. It’s yours,” Bill said.
J.W. said nothing and closed the front door, so Bill drove the Cadillac home. Soon after, it won its first auto show in Winchester, Virginia, and Bill’s pride of ownership was renewed.
When restoration of the $155,000 Mercedes was finished, it easily won its first national Concours d’Elegance at Pebble Beach, California, with judges including famous photographer Ansel Adams. The cost of restoration totaled $228,000. The mechanic, Skip, felt his boss at White Post had charged too much, so he quit. When Bill found out about the principled decision, he offered Skip a job to be his mechanic and caretaker at the New Hampshire summer home. Bill never blamed White Post. He could afford to be gracious, since he ended up with an excellent mechanic and lifetime friend, not to mention a beautifully restored ’34 Mercedes with a value reaching nearly $3 million.3
Bill’s fascination with cars is a family trait—one that nearly killed his son David. In the predawn hours of a frigid winter morning in 1993, David “borrowed” his father’s Ferrari Testarossa for a quick spin. The joyride ended when he lost control of the car going more than 100 miles an hour on a wet curve in the road and slid sideways into a concrete pylon. It was a wake-up call for the nineteen-year-old, who had struggled with school and gravitated toward a crowd of fast friends and fast cars.
The red Ferrari was a late-model vehicle, not one of Bill’s museum pieces. An ambulance took David to the hospital, where John quickly joined him. David had been diagnosed with a broken clavicle. When Bill and Donna, who had been out of town, were unexpectedly met by John at the airport, they knew something was wrong. “What did David do now?” Bill instinctively asked.
They went straight to the hospital. “I woke up from the anesthesia, and there were my parents standing over me,” David recalled. Bill spoke just four words: “I’m glad you’re alive.” Then he turned around and left the room. “My mom is definitely the more compassionate one,” David observed. “Quite honestly, I’m amazed that he handled it as well as he did, given the way he was raised by his own father, who had a real temper.”
David was then at the age when he had to decide whether to commit to serve a two-year mission for his church. “His attitude toward the Church was one of indifference,” Bill recounted in a subsequent speech to a group of Latter-day Saint youth. “He attended Church meetings reluctantly, and when he did, he assumed the head-on-the-bench-in-front-of-him position—where he slept. His mother and I became more frustrated each day. The harder we tried to force David into Church activity, the more he resisted.”4
The red Ferrari after David’s near-fatal accident.
So it was something of a victory for Bill when, a week after the accident, David agreed to go on a mission. The accident had been life-threatening, but David’s mission to England turned out to be life-changing. His parents had long prayed for a miracle, and they got it. “In retrospect,” David later said, “I honestly feel that the reason I had that accident was to get me on a mission.” He gave this response to a Washington Post reporter’s question: “The mission was a phenomenal experience for me. It was the first time in my life, as a young 19-year-old, that I really looked outside myself. It taught me how to work and to think about others’ interests and needs above mine. It taught me how to be grateful.”5
Though Bill can afford many things, he is not a self-indulgent man. His house is large, but not showy. He doesn’t have a yacht, and he has rarely partied with the rich and famous. Cars are the primary exception to his modest lifestyle. In the mid-1980s, when Bill was still a little touchy about the “indulgence,” he told a reporter that his antique sports cars were mostly investments. That made him feel better about splurging on his hobby, and in the early years he really believed they represented a major investment.
Evidence of his initial intention is found in a handwritten note in 1979 to his personal financial assistant, Carolyn Cullers.6 It was dated just a few days after he bought the Cadillac Special 60. “Please talk to Arthur Andersen [the accounting firm] about my investing in Classic automobiles. Can I depreciate them? Can I set up a company to own them and charge off the repair and storage expenses? How can I handle this Hobby as inexpensively as possible?” Bill dropped the idea after his accountants advised that for tax reasons the proposed business would require him regularly to sell off the cars.
Bill has sold a few cars over the years for a substantial profit. Once, though, he bought back a car he had previously sold. He first bought this particular 1957 Ferrari TRC in 1983 for $135,000 and sold it seven years later for $1.5 million. “Mr. Marriott likes cars that look fast even while they’re sitting still. And he always loved that TRC 500 because he thinks it is the prettiest sports racer ever built,” explained auto restorer David Carte. “So he bought the same car back [in 1997] for $910,000, which was substantially less than he had sold it for seven years before.”
When Forbes asked Bill why he collected the cars, he answered with a question: “Why do people get hooked on art? It’s the same thing.”7 Bill sees little difference between himself and those who buy an original Rembrandt or Monet. The classic car designers and builders were masters in their own right, creating rolling works of art. To Bill, they are his Renoirs of the Road.
Nostalgia also significantly drives Bill’s collection, as it does for many other collectors who tend to buy the cars they admired in their youth. An example of this in Bill’s collection is his 1951 Cadillac Allard J2 Roadster. While in college at the University of Utah, he saw Bill Pollack finish first at Pebble Beach in the Allard. When the same car came up for sale in 1996, Bill didn’t hesitate to buy it.
After the Lamborghini Miura, the Cadillac 60S, and the ’34 Mercedes, Bill went all Italian. Over the next four years, he bought six Ferraris, three of which were Spyders, including the California model that the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made one of the most desired in the world. Over a four-month period, Bill paid $400,000 in total for the ’59 California Spyder, ’67 Spyder 275, and ’71 Daytona Spyder. They are currently valued collectively at more than $9 million, but Bill will not sell them, preferring to save them for his children.
Once he had acquired all the Ferraris he wanted, he looked around for something equally exciting. During a visit with a Beverly Hills collector, Bill discovered several French models sometimes called “Paris gowns on wheels” because of their exceptional designs. He soon bought a trio of 1938 French showstoppers: a Delahaye 135 MS Roadster with a unique, sculpted dragonfly hood ornament, and a pair of Talbot-Lagos, one of them the T150-C-SS Teardrop Coupe with its pioneering streamline design.
His collection eventually expanded to an eclectic mix including a ’57 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, a ’59 Corvette Scaglietti Coupe, a ’48 Buick Roadmaster convertible, and a ’36 Voisin Saliot Cabriolet. Many in his collection are valued in the millions of dollars, including a 1960 Aston Martin DBGT Coupe ($3 million) and a 1954 Maserati A6 GCS Coupe ($5 million).
In spite of his expensive hobby, the fact that Bill remains well grounded was evident in an interview with a South Carolina magazine when he served as the honorary chair of Hilton Head’s 2007 Concours d’Elegance. Most of the questions were about his passion for vintage races, but the last question took Bill off guard. “For what would you most like to be remembered?” the reporter asked. “That is a hard question,” Bill responded. “I think that I would like to be remembered for helping people, that I have been able to give many people the opportunity to achieve their ambitions.”8
When Bill turned sixty-five years old—a traditional retirement age—he was not ready to give up on the mission of “helping people” through his growing empire, even though at that age it was not uncommon for people to confuse the graying Bill with his late father. One newspaper reporter asked him to describe what it was like opening his first root beer stand in 1927. “I know this is a tough business, but I’m not quite that old!” he replied.
A portrait of J.W. and Bill in nearly every hotel lobby occasionally prompts confusion between father and son, with many assuming the older gentleman in the picture is Bill. “I really like that picture of you and your son,” a stranger told him. “I hear he’s doing a great job.” Bill got used to it. “When they say, ‘I hear your son is doing a better job than you are,’ I smile and say, ‘Absolutely!’”
For the Marriott board, Bill’s age was no joking matter. Since the early 1980s, a contingent of the board led by Harry Vincent had consistently pressed Bill to groom a successor. When Bill became president at the age of thirty-two, the Hot Shoppes company was much smaller and less complex than the international conglomerate he had built since then. In the early ’80s, all three of his sons were in their late twenties or younger. They were many years away from being ready to stand at the helm of the large corporation.
“Bill was very reluctant to choose a successor who was not a member of his family,” Vincent recalled. “He finally named Bill Shaw, who was then the CFO, but we forced him to do it. And he said he would not be comfortable with it until after Shaw gained some operational experience.” In 1992, to accommodate the return of Steve Bollenbach, Shaw was shifted from CFO to head the nonlodging half of the company, where he gained that operational experience.
Bill said of Shaw, “I’ve never met a more honest man. Plus, he’s a tireless worker and wonderful contributor who rarely ever loses his cool.” One of the greatest evidences of that came the day in 1994 when the two Bills traveled to South Bend, Indiana, for a football game that pitted their respective teams—Catholic Notre Dame and Latter-day Saint BYU—against each other. The press called it a “holy war.” Not only did BYU hold the Fighting Irish to the fewest points Notre Dame had scored at home in almost a decade, but BYU won, knocking Notre Dame out of the national rankings. “I can’t imagine a more difficult situation than to sit next to me at that football game and see BYU defeat the Fighting Irish for the first time ever. He didn’t even say ‘Damn!’” Bill laughed.
Far more important was the coolness and competence Shaw exhibited during the company’s financial crisis. In a later tribute, Bill said: “If I could pick someone to be alone on a desert island with, it would be Bill Shaw. I know. I’ve been there with him. 1990–91 were the most difficult years of my career. Bill Shaw’s leadership saved the day.” When Bill offered Shaw a modest raise during that period, “Instead of being delighted, he was somewhat embarrassed and—I must say this had certainly never happened to me before—he turned me down.” A year later, Shaw actively recruited Steve Bollenbach to come to work for Marriott, even though it might put his own job on the line. “He has always put the company and not himself first,” Bill said.9
Shaw was very much on Bill’s mind in early 1997. At that point, Bill had been the Marriott president for thirty-three years, CEO for twenty-five, and chairman for twelve. He was ready to give up the lesser of the three titles—president—and Shaw was just the man to be the company’s first non-Marriott president. In February, Bill announced the fifty-one-year-old Shaw’s promotion to president and chief operating officer. Shaw was under no illusions about who was still boss.
Bill tried to delegate more to Shaw, but it wasn’t easy. Bill said he would stop going to budget meetings so Shaw could run them. Bill skipped one meeting and stewed at home while it was going on. Shaw told him to come back, and it was business as usual.
Besides Shaw’s promotion and the Renaissance acquisition, the corporation’s seventieth-anniversary year of 1997 was also notable for the publication of Bill’s first book, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way. The impetus for the book had come from his public communications department, which felt that a new Marriott book was overdue. J.W.’s biography, Marriott: The J.Willard Marriott Story, was two decades old. It was a rags-to-riches tale of a restaurateur. But in the twenty years since, Marriott had been radically transformed into an international conglomerate. It was time for an update, and Bill approved the corporate project as part of the seventieth-anniversary celebration.
In late 1995, a husband-and-wife team of oral historians, G. Wesley and Marian Johnson, conducted a series of interviews with Bill and seventeen other top Marriott executives. By spring 1996, the company hired a writer, Virginia-based Kathi Ann Brown, to craft the book Bill envisioned. The Brown and Johnson interviews comprised a behind-the-scenes look at the company’s successes and missteps along the way. Few of those interviews were used for the final book because, before the writing began, Bill changed the emphasis from a biography to a promotional vehicle for Marriott International.
Published by HarperBusiness in the fall of 1997, the book received fair reviews. The universal theme of the reviews was that Bill Marriott deserved his place as one of America’s best and most-admired CEOs, but his “magic formula” for success was nearly impossible to describe in depth. Since he had no illusions that the book would be a bestseller, Bill was happy with the result. “What I like the most is celebrating our employees, and having them get excited about what they’re doing,” he later explained.10 The Spirit to Serve did that in spades. “I’ve said again and again that our associates are number one,” he wrote in the book. “It won’t hurt to say it one more time. Without the hard work and dedication of our team, Marriott wouldn’t exist. Period.”
Less than three months into Shaw’s presidency, Bill agreed with his suggestion to jettison one of the company’s oldest businesses—contract food services. The division had started in 1943 when Hot Shoppes Inc. contracted to run a United States Navy cafeteria. When the Food Services Management division merged with Saga Corporation in 1986, Marriott became the number-one private contract feeding operation in the country. FSM grew to include facilities management, child care, and other offshoot services. The name was changed to Food Service and Management and subsequently to Marriott Management Services (MMS).
MMS was a substantial help during the 1990–91 crisis, when its contracts provided the company with vital cash flow while hotel occupancy floundered. But the long-term prospect was not bright for MMS, in Bill’s view. It was a low-margin food-service business whose growth could be accelerated significantly only by acquisition. Even though MMS contributed about 30 percent of Marriott’s overall $10.2 billion revenue in 1995, it accounted for only one-sixth of its profit. It would never be as profitable as hotel management.
In late 1996, a French investment bank approached Shaw on behalf of the Sodexho Alliance about buying MMS. Sodexho was the dominant food-service outfit in Europe and had begun to make inroads into the U.S. market. After a series of acquisitions, Sodexho was number four in America while Marriott was still number one. If Marriott agreed to sell, Sodexho would become the number-one food-service contractor in the world. In September 1997, the Marriott board approved the sale—a four-year process of joint ownership with an option for Sodexho to buy out Marriott in 2001, which it did, for about $3 billion. Less gratifying, however, was a related shareholder vote, which became the only one Bill lost in his storied career.
During the merger-mania decade of the 1980s, many companies adopted a dual-class stock position, which involved giving existing stockholders more votes with “super voting stock” so future corporate raiders buying one-vote stock shares could not prevail as easily in a hostile takeover attempt. Long-term investors in a company, such as owners and employees, appreciated the extra power it gave them. But institutional investors sometimes opposed the idea because it was better for them to get the windfall of cash that came with takeovers.
In the Sodexho deal, Bill saw an opportunity to try the dual-class concept and further protect Marriott from a hostile takeover. Because the Sodexho deal was technically a merger rather than an outright sale, it required that Marriott International be dissolved and reborn in the blink of an eye as a “new” Marriott International that included Sodexho.
The company proposed that existing stockholders be given two shares of the new Marriott for every one share of the old Marriott. And that extra share would come with ten votes instead of one. The monetary value of the share would not be more, only the “super” power times ten of the shareholder when casting votes. This had to be approved by the SEC and a majority of the company’s shareholders, which Bill was confident would happen.
As expected, a number of Marriott’s institutional investors, such as pension funds, opposed the proposal. Collectively, however, the institutional opponents owned only 1 percent of the stock. The Marriott family, which accounted for one-fifth of the shares, would vote for the dual-class restructuring. So the victory or defeat would be decided by small investors—the individual shareholders, who, by this plan, would each be gifted an additional share and ten votes for every share of stock they currently held.
If a man is known by his enemies, Bill Marriott could hardly have had a more ignominious one than the proposal’s chief opponent, Edward T. Hanley, the iron-fisted leader of the 250,000-member Hotel & Restaurant Employees International Union. For nearly three years, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had focused on Hanley, uncovering allegations of rampant corruption at the top of the union.11 Hanley considered Bill Marriott an archenemy. Every new hotel the company built or managed was another reason for Hanley’s anger because Marriott ran nonunion hotels. The company was able to resist unionization using a simple strategy: it treated employees well, created solutions for their valid complaints, and, most important, paid them better salaries and benefits than any unionized hotel could offer. Marriott employees also didn’t have to pay union dues.
Hanley’s animus against Bill and Marriott International was so great that even though Hanley’s union was being monitored by the Justice Department, he still went after Bill. Hanley and the union pulled out all the stops to oppose the dual-class initiative. Their first move was to buy thirty-five shares of Marriott International so they could force the company to allow them to send protest information to their fellow shareholders. Their inaccurate and scary circulars hit a large group of individual shareholders (many of them elderly) like well-targeted grenades.
Never before had anyone opposed a Marriott management proposal to the shareholders in such a dramatic manner, and that alone created doubt in the minds of some stockholders. According to news reports, Hanley and his union hammered the Marriott family at every opportunity, implying that the proposal was only meant to line the family’s pockets and increase their voting power.
In March, the shareholders approved the merger with Sodexho and eventual buyout of the food services division. Then, at the May 20, 1998, annual shareholder meeting, they were asked to approve the dual-class stock proposal. Bill received an overwhelming majority of the shareholder votes cast in person or by proxy, but unfortunately that amounted to only 47 percent of the outstanding shares—which fell just short of the 50-percent-plus-one-vote majority he needed for stock plan approval. There was little doubt that the combination of the large number of shareholders who didn’t vote and the union’s scare campaign getting out a negative vote had delivered the public defeat.
As reporters surrounded Bill to pummel him with questions about the defeat, he had reason to be upset and bitter. It was the first time shareholders had ever said no to a Marriott family proposal. Bill and his family had been prime movers in the company’s enormous success, but the union had won by suggesting the family could no longer be trusted. With restraint, Bill said, “I’m disappointed but I’m not destroyed.”12
The Washington Post’s chief financial columnist, Jerry Knight, found Hanley’s so-called “victory” to be brazenly hypocritical. He wrote: “The hotel and restaurant workers union’s ability to muster moral suasion against what it portrayed as the Marriott family’s efforts to enrich itself at the expense of investors is ironic considering (that) the union’s longtime president (Hanley) was forced to resign last week by federal overseers, who alleged that he had ties to organized crime and enriched himself at the expense of union members.”13
Hanley had reached a plea agreement with the Justice Department in order to avoid prosecution on racketeering charges. Several months later, the federal monitor’s report was released. It concluded that Hanley had operated a virtual kleptocracy in which Hanley family members and friends lived lavish lifestyles at the expense of the lowest-paid union workers. Concluded the Chicago Sun-Times: “Headed by Hanley [the hotel workers union] has been run like a monarchy . . . an undemocratic union where funds were used as if they belonged to the organization’s royal family.”14
Bill put the defeat behind him, and in 1999 launched the “Spirit to Serve Our Communities Day.” This was to be an annual event each third week of May in which employees across the world volunteered to work for local nonprofits. The company also pledged that on that day it would raise at least $4 million in donations for worthy local charities. The first event enlisted 145,000 employees in 58 countries who gave community service.
For many years, the idea of giving back had been very much at the forefront of Bill’s mind. At both the national and local levels, the company was partnering with a wide variety of charities, including the Children’s Miracle Network, Second Harvest food banks, and Habitat for Humanity. Most Marriott full-service hotel grand openings included a gala benefit for a worthy local cause.
Bill knew few people who exemplified the spirit of service and volunteerism better than his own mother. Allie worked hard for an array of nonprofits, including the Kennedy Center and the Arthritis Foundation. Bill honored her in 1992 by establishing an annual Alice S. Marriott Award for Community Service for the Marriott units that made the most outstanding contributions to their communities.
In the years following J.W.’s death, with the gentle Allie as his sole parent, Bill had been able to put his stormy relationship with his father in perspective, and he began to appreciate his father’s uncompromising business philosophy. “My dad was never satisfied, which may have been his greatest strength,” he told one management gathering. “My life experience tells me that success is never final, but the decisions we make along the way determine the end and final outcome.”15
Meanwhile, the years were beginning to take their toll on Allie. “She has often said, ‘Old age is hell,’” Bill acknowledged in a speech. “She has fallen many times and severely injured her lower back. She is in constant pain, yet whenever I have asked her how she feels, she always says, ‘I’ll feel better tomorrow.’”16
Allie had round-the-clock nursing care at her home, where she preferred to live her final years. On one of her few outings to corporate headquarters, to celebrate Bill’s thirty-fifth anniversary with the company, she remarked: “Bill has been a wonderful son through the years and has added me to his long list of responsibilities. He supervises my health problems and finds me the best doctors and treatment. When he is traveling, he calls me every day from wherever he is and visits me several times a week when he is in town.”17
For the most part, their visits were time to reminisce about younger days—like the day nineteen-year-old Allie met President Calvin Coolidge. She had just moved to Washington, D.C., with J.W., who was busy operating a tiny A&W root beer stand. “She had never been out of Salt Lake City before, and she was certain that when the root beer stand went broke, she’d return to Utah,” Bill related. “So she took a few hours off each week to sightsee. In 1927, it was possible for anyone to visit the White House every day between noon and one p.m. to shake the president’s hand. So she met silent Calvin Coolidge, who said ‘Howdy do!’” And that was that.
Sometimes Bill joked with his mother about her parsimony in spite of substantial wealth. She had a drawer full of shopping coupons and bought glue by the gallon, pouring it into little bottles for thrift. Bill laughed with her about the recurring disagreement she had had with J.W. about her driving twenty miles across town to buy discounted prescriptions.
Allie and Bill often talked about the Hot Shoppes restaurants, including her 1987 visit to the last one Bill was about to open. “We went in, took a look around, and sampled some of the food,” he recalled. “Mother was not impressed. She tasted the chili and said, ‘That’s not how I used to make it. They’re using the wrong beans!’ She called me the next day to make sure all her corrections were in place before the opening.”18
By 1997, Allie was unable to travel to Salt Lake City to attend grandson David’s wedding. Two years after that, she couldn’t join Bill and Dick for the December 2 ceremony closing the last Hot Shoppe, in Marlow Heights, Maryland. The cafeteria-style restaurants were no longer sufficiently profitable, so when the lease expired in each of the last dozen, they were shuttered. Allie wanted to be present for this end of her era, but her own lease on life was close to expiration.
Alice S. Marriott died peacefully at the age of ninety-two on April 17, 2000. Longtime Marriott chauffeur and jack-of-all-trades Cornelius “Mack” McNeil had gotten a call from her earlier in the day.
“Mack, are you doing anything?” she asked him from her Georgetown University Hospital bed.
“Nothing much,” he said.
“Well, why don’t you come down here to the hospital? My mother is coming and I want you to meet her.”
Allie’s mother had been gone for almost forty years, but Mack was flooded with warm feelings about the reunion that Allie was anticipating with her mother. When Mack arrived, Dick was watching over his mother, so Allie asked Mack to wait in the hall to greet her mother, who would be coming in a few minutes. He stepped into the hall, and while he waited, Allie died, with Dick at her side.
At her funeral, Bill offered a tribute to his mother: “From my earliest memories she was my best friend, my teacher, and my advocate with a bigger-than-life father. When I was sick, she tenderly cared for me. When I was struggling with arithmetic in the second grade, she bought a small chalkboard and taught me how to add and subtract, and later to multiply and divide. As I worked on becoming an Eagle Scout, she encouraged me and drove me to all my appointments with my merit badge counselors. She always took me to church, as Dad was almost always going to another church meeting on Sunday. But mother and I never missed a Sunday. When I fell down, she picked me up, dusted me off, and encouraged me to keep going.”
He recounted her invaluable partnership with his father in creating the Hot Shoppes chain of restaurants when she worked as the company’s first CFO and executive chef. “She became very active in the community and in politics, but her family always came first. Her personal sacrifices for me and Dick and my family were enormous.”
A few years earlier, Allie had written a note to her son about her funeral service. “My funeral doesn’t need to be sad. It should be a celebration of a long life well lived. I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Expanding on that theme, Bill said it was only fitting that she passed away at Easter time. “The first Easter, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the greatest miracle that has ever occurred. His resurrection was real, and it gave immortality to all mankind. Because He broke the bonds of death, so will we, and so will Mother. She will always be a strong presence in my life. I am honored and blessed to be her son, and I am grateful for the sure knowledge that she lives.”19