Fifties (29 page)

Day by day on the trip, Wilson became more irritated until he finally turned to his wife, Dorothy, and announced that he was going to go into the motel business. Everyone in this country, he thought, had a car and a family, and sooner or later everyone had to go somewhere. Dorothy Wilson listened to him with growing trepidation—when Kemmons Wilson said he was going to do something, he did it. “How many of these motels are you going to build?” she asked nervously. He felt she was laughing at him. “Oh, about four hundred,” he answered. “That ought to cover the country.” “And,” he added, “if I never do anything else worth remembering in my life, children are going to stay free at my motels.”

The Wilson children finally got to see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, but their father had seen something else: a vision of the American family on the road. He was absolutely sure it would be a success. “I like to think that I’m so damn normal that anything I like, everybody else is going to like too. The idea that my instincts are out of line just doesn’t occur to me,” he once said. That was the beginning of the modern American motel chain, a phenomenon made inevitable by America’s growing love and dependence on the road.

Wilson did not waste any time going ahead with his idea. He was thirty-eight at the time, a high school dropout, but possessed of limitless self-confidence. He loved dealing and selling (as a young jukebox salesman, he had taken his wife to a Wurlitzer convention on their honeymoon). At the time of his trip to Washington, he was already a millionaire from his home-building business, but he lived so unpretentiously that no one but his banker knew for sure. “The things that Kemmons does now that he has money,” one friend noted later in his life, when he was worth some $200 million from the motel business, “are the exact same things he would be doing if he didn’t have money.”

On the way home from Washington, Wilson measured the rooms of the different motels his family stayed in, and by the time he got back to Memphis, he knew exactly how big a motel room should be: 12 feet by 30 feet, plus a bathroom. Though he was neither artist nor architect, he had always done the basic sketching for his designs. He called a draftsman friend of his named Eddie Bluestein, gave him the specifications for the rooms, and asked him to draw up the plans. Wilson emphasized that he wanted everything as simple as possible, so that anyone who could build the simplest of houses could also build a motel. A few days later Bluestein delivered the sketches, and at the top of the drawing he had written
HOLIDAY INN
. Wilson asked him where he had gotten the name. “I saw Bing Crosby’s
Holiday Inn
on television last night,” Bluestein answered. “It’s a great name,” Wilson said. “We’ll use it.”

If anyone embodied the old-fashioned American success story, it was Kemmons Wilson. He was born in 1913 in Osceola, Arkansas; his father was an insurance man who died of what was probably Lou Gehrig’s disease when Kemmons was nine months old. But Doll Wilson, who never married again, told her son that he could do anything he wanted, and she proceeded to help him do it—some forty years later, as a woman in her late sixties, she was still working full-time for Holiday Inns. As a boy, Kemmons held many jobs: He sold the
Saturday Evening Post;
he sold popcorn at movie theaters; and he became the pinball king of Memphis. He was surprisingly successful in all these pursuits, and before he was twenty he made good on a long-standing vow: He built a house for his mother. He was nothing if not fearless. Taking $1,000 worth of pinball profits to buy the land, he put up the house himself for $1,700. He was so enthusiastic that he built it on the wrong lot, and eventually had to swap deeds with the real owner. Shortly thereafter, the local Wurlitzer distributorship became available; the price was $6,500, and
Wilson approached a mortgage company to see if he had been able to borrow the money against the house. A banker duly approved the loan. That set Kemmons Wilson to thinking—he had built a house for only $2,700 and yet he could borrow $6,500 against it, even in the worst of times. The future was not in pinball machines or jukeboxes, he decided: It was in building houses.

In the three years before he entered the service at the start of World War Two, Wilson was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. There was a reason for his success: He always built a significantly larger house for the same price as, or for less than, his competitors. The secret to this, which he told no one else at the time, was that space in the middle of a house doesn’t cost very much. A house with big rooms had the same number of windows and bathrooms as a smaller one. Everything else was essentially the same—the cost of the plumbing and electrical wiring. In those days, building in Memphis cost about $10 a square foot, but the cost in the center of a home, he was sure, was something more like $2 or $3 a square foot.

In the years after the war, Wilson became very successful, building perhaps two hundred houses a year in the $7,500 to $12,000 range. He owned a lumberyard on the main drag from Memphis to Nashville, a prize location. He decided it was the perfect place for his first motel, which would contain 120 rooms. If he did everything right, Wilson believed, it would cost, restaurant and all, about $325,000. He took out a loan for that amount, but brought the entire project in for $280,000, thereby keeping some money for his next one. He built it in ninety days; it opened in August 1952, exactly a year after Wilson had taken his fateful trip to Washington. Most men would have been pleased with that kind of schedule, but Wilson was irritated that he had missed most of the summer tourist season. The first Holiday Inn had a restaurant, a gift shop, a swimming pool, and in each room there was an air conditioner and a free television set (at other motels it cost $1 extra to rent a television set). Wilson charged his customer $4 a night for a single room, and $6 for a double. Children, as he had vowed, stayed free. Within two years he had built three more motels, covering the three other main approaches to Memphis.

There was also the sign. From his childhood job working in movie theaters, he remembered how vital signs and marquees were. In the case of motels, the sign had to serve as a landmark, a powerful visual magnet, visible from far down the road. It had to be striking from both directions, and so it was—at a height of fifty feet.

Dorothy Wilson was pleased by her husband’s early success but amused by the fact that it was not yet exactly nationwide—he was 396 motels short of his original boast, to be exact. At this point Wilson turned to the people he knew best and felt most comfortable with—home builders. Getting into the motel business was a lark, he told those friends, nothing but sticks and bricks. They would be asked to do nothing but what they already did so well. He told his friend Wallace Johnson, the vice-president of the National Home-builders’ Association, that they had the basis for the biggest motel chain in America right at their fingertips. Wilson’s idea was simple enough: Each home builder wanting to be a part of his group would pay $500 for the right to own a Holiday Inn in his own city; he would also pay a user’s fee, plus five cents a night per room.

They called a meeting and some seventy home builders showed up. Wilson was excited—there he was, surrounded by his pals, builders all, men without illusions, who were doers, and he was sure that within a year there would be Holiday Inns in every major city and at every key highway junction in America. He was wrong. By the end of the year only three builders had followed through. In retrospect it was one of the great bargain-basement offers of all time, and Wilson was lucky that his colleagues did not take him up on it. Why so few had signed on always puzzled Wilson; his idea was so simple, he was sure.

Gradually, it dawned on Wilson that they did not see the world around them changing—the numbers of highways growing and automobile travel increasing. “They just weren’t interested—they had one business already going and they had no interest in trying another. They were not men who wanted to explore life,” he said later. So he came up with a new idea: He would become the head of Holiday Inns, franchise them to others. (In his mind—there is no proof of this—he became the first man to franchise ownerships of this kind in the country.) Wilson now turned instead to the men in Memphis who he knew had disposable cash and good credit—doctors, dentists, lawyers. The word spread, and soon a group of Nashville doctors called Kemmons Wilson to get in on the deal. Wilson started building his motels at $3,000 a room and selling the franchises at $3,500 a room. “We were,” noted Wilson, “already making a clean profit of $500 a room on just the building.”

The motels were a success from the start. The rooms always seemed to be filled. In 1954 eleven more Holiday Inns opened, and there was growing confidence among Wilson, his employees, and his investors they were all on the right track. That year saw the first
franchised Holiday Inn built. In 1956 the country passed a giant $76 billion federal-highway program; America was finding its way to Kemmons Wilson’s doorsteps. Not only would there be more and better highways, but with the coming of the cloverleaf and the bypass, travelers could avoid going through cities altogether if they wished. This was another benchmark in the decline of inner-city hotels. The growth of his company spiraled beyond his control, and in 1957 he decided to take it public; Wilson and his handful of partners sold 120,000 shares of stock at $9.75 a share in the first day.

For a long time Wilson had the field all to himself. One of his singular skills, it turned out, was that he had a great eye. He could come into any city and instinctively pick out the single best site for a Holiday Inn. “Looking for land,” he once said, “is like going on an Easter egg hunt and sometimes you find the golden egg.” He always knew the kind of location he wanted—highly visible, on the right side of the road heading into a city, with a lot of additional acreage in case he wanted to expand.

He became ever more professional at it. Once, a friend in Meridian, Mississippi, asked him to come down and check out a potential site for a Holiday Inn. Wilson flew down, checked out the land, thought it awful, flew around some more, and saw another spot that he decided was perfect. His friend protested that he already owned the first tract of land. “That’s the worst reason in the world I’ve ever heard for building on a piece of land—just because you own it. Now, you listen to me, because I’m going to give you one bit of advice and it will mean the difference between success and failure: You sell that first piece, and you buy this other and you’ll be just fine.” Which the man did, becoming the owner in time of four successful Holiday Inns.

That, Wilson later realized, was the real fun of it—picking the sites, choosing the franchises. He would select the best areas and the best applicants and then chart a trip, going, say, west from Memphis, through Arkansas and Texas and New Mexico. He would then fly off in his single-engine Bonanza. He would eat his meals while he was up, flying, checking out these towns and small cities in the early morning and early evening—the best times, he thought, because you could see the traffic patterns.

His eye became legend in the business. Years later, when the world of chain motels had become much more competitive, Wilson attended a conference in New Jersey along with executives from Howard Johnson, Sheraton, and Ramada. At one point a young man got up and asked Marion Isbell of Ramada, “Mr. Isbell, what
criteria do you use for picking a location?” “It’s really simple,” Isbell answered. “All I do is go into a city and find out where Kemmons Wilson has a good Holiday Inn and I put a Ramada Inn right next door—it’s a good system and it really works.”

Kemmons Wilson’s chain quickly grew to fifteen hundred motels. At one point it was building a new inn every two and a half days and a new room every fifteen minutes. By the early seventies, Holiday Inns had more than three times as many rooms—208,939—as either of its main competitors, Ramada and Sheraton, and Wilson was getting as many as ten thousand requests a year for franchises. Wilson knew the people requesting franchises were people just like himself—people who had probably not been to college but who believed in themselves and saw this as their chance, he liked to say, to own a piece of the American dream.

THIRTEEN

A
S THE BOOMING POSTWAR
economy changed the face of American business, a technological breakthrough transformed the communications industry, sending powerful shock waves through all levels of the society.

By 1949, radio was on the verge of being overtaken by television as a commercial vehicle. For more than two decades, radio had virtually been minting money; now it was struggling, changing, and trying to find a new role. The signs of decline and flux were everywhere; one of the most startling took place in June 1949, when
The Fred Allen Show,
perhaps the best and most sophisticated radio show of its era, died after an eighteen-year run. The moment Fred Allen learned of television, he hated it. He called it “a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.” Allen had realized earlier that the handwriting was on the
wall. “Television,” he wrote, “was already conducting itself provocatively, trying to get radio to pucker up for the kiss of death. Young men with crew cuts were dragging TV cameras into the studios and crowding old radio actors out into the halls.”

For more than a decade, Allen owned his time slot. He had been the foremost of radio’s comics, living proof of continuity in that world. He was the rare entertainer who commanded both a mass audience and the affection of the intelligentsia. His jokes were not about mothers-in-law or women drivers; rather, they were dry, with a certain melancholy bite. There was nothing smooth about his delivery. Indeed, his voice, O. O. McIntyre, a Broadway columnist, wrote, “sounded like a man with false teeth chewing on slate pencils.” He was irreverent and, on more than one occasion, churlish. He feuded regularly with network executives, who, he was convinced, were always trying to censor him. It was said that he always slipped two or three outrageous jokes into his scripts in order to trade them off to network censors for the dicey jokes he wanted to save. Of one network executive who always seemed to be looking down, he asked, “Why don’t you look up?” he asked. “Is it because you’re ashamed, or did you play quarterback for Yale?”