Happy 90th birthday to Isadore Sharp, a true mensch
The hotel company he founded turned 60 earlier this year.
The man himself turned a cool 90 on Oct. 8.
I certainly hope Isadore Sharpe got a dance in.
Hearing about his big birthday — chiefly from Instagram, where various Four Seasons properties chimed in to send him wishes, from Amman to Palm Beach — my thoughts turned immediately to the waltz the Canadian icon is known for. Every year. In December. A rite. (When there is no pandemic, that is.) When the Four Seasons holiday party, here in town, famously kicks off in the same way: Isadore taking the hand of his wife, Rosalie, as the room stands back.
They twirl. They jive. Often to that old Irving Berlin tune, “Let’s Face The Music and Dance.”
Doing the do in the town where Sharp first hatched an empire six decades ago — one that now spans from Buenos Aires to Bora Bora — the rug-cut nods to the elasticity of time in any number of ways. For one, he and Rosalie — both the kids of Polish immigrants — have been twirling ever since he asked her to dance at a friend’s wedding. It was 1953. He was wearing blue suede shoes.
For another: it all speaks today to the manner in which Sharp embodies the purposeful courtliness for which the Four Seasons is now universally known. “Lisbon, Riyadh, Athens …”
That was Sharp, a couple years back, after I had been summoned to his home, for something I was working on, blithely checking off the cities he’d just come from visiting on a whistle-stop tour. Ever the mensch (the word could have been invented for him), and speaking with “the soft-spoken, lowkey style of an undertaker,” as was once described of him, the only wink to a style less straitlaced was a glimpse of
the jazzy, multicoloured socks he wore.
His house, in north Toronto — a sleek, sprawling uni-level structure that brought to mind a Donald Wexler design — had beckoned earlier with a vast circular driveway (very “Dynasty”), complete with Brancusi sculpture in its centre. Inside: the requisite art, including works by Lawren Harris, plus floor-to-ceiling mountings, on two opposing walls, of hundreds of pieces of 18th century English and French porcelain, considered to be the biggest such private collection in the world. (The wonderful Rosalie, an artist in her own right, is the collector!)
The sitting area in which we were perched faced an IMAXsized window with an unobstructed view of the rolling greens of the Rosedale Golf Club.
“It was Ramadan when I was in Egypt,” Sharp shared, elaborating on his voyages. “I broke fast with the people at the hotel.”
On the go: clearly. Regarding his exact role with the company since relinquishing the CEO role in 2010, and while keeping 5 per cent ownership following a buyout made jointly several years prior to that by Microsoft chief Bill Gates and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia (Gates recently upped his share), Sharp explained it this way: “I speak from a different pulpit now. The CEO has to be centre stage; I am its ambassador.”
Even now at 90, I like to think of him as the world’s oldest “influencer.”
The stories thickened the air. Remembering what it was like opening his first hotel in Russia, in the ‘90s, he marvelled: “It’s on Red Square, you have to understand. I walked on Red Square after it opened, and looked around. There is the Kremlin, and there is our hotel. I thought to myself: How did this happen to me??”
How is a story that’s been told many times, mostly vividly in Sharp’s 2010 autobiography, “Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy.” At age 21, armed with a degree in architecture, he joined the construction business with his father, Max Sharp, who had started off as a plasterer. The eureka moment presented itself sometime later when Isadore was working on a motel project for a client and, noting its potential, decided to make his own. The first hotel bowed in 1961, high style in a decidedly seedy part of downtown, on Jarvis Street — rooms going at $10-$12/a night, and a name borrowed from the English translation of a German hotel that a friend had visited.
“My original name for it was Thunderbird,” confirmed a sheepish Sharp.
What he lacked in know-how he made up for in perspicacity. As the company expanded, many things that are now de rigueur in high-end lodgings were brainstormed by Sharp: monogrammed bathrobes, mini-bars in suites … even shampoo in the bathrooms!
Service has long been the name of the game. “The Golden Rule,” as the man often proselytizes — a philosophy also applied to the way the company is run, which might explain why the Four Seasons has been named one of the “best 100 companies to work for” by Fortune every year since the list began.
Does the founder have a fave hotel?
Unsurprisingly, the question solicited a shrug, though our conversation did ultimately segue to memories of the truly stunning Four Seasons in Florence, housed in an old palazzo and one-time convent, flanked by the largest private park in the city, once owned by Pope Leo XI.
His wife, Rosalie, he suggests, might name a property in Thailand: “Chiang Mai. I remember when we were going through the rice fields (on the property), and there was a buffalo sitting there. And she commented that it was special.”
Staying on the subject of family, I asked: have any of his children been hit by the hotel bug? Turns out that, while two of his three sons did work for the company for a spell, it was a fourth son, Christopher, who tragically died of melanoma in 1978, who “had shown the most
interest …” Sharp, who is now both a grandfather and a greatgrandfather, trailed off.
The loss of that son, just as his company was soaring, is clearly a life-defining moment. “I say a prayer for him every morning, though you do have to prepare a shield,” he said. Then, he described how that pain was eventually translated into founding the Terry Fox Run, his early support galvanizing the wider corporate community to pony up. The run has now raised millions for cancer and grown to include approximately 9,000 such runs around the world.
For now, though, he stays focused on the future. More hotels. More journeys to make.
His passion for the business? Clearly what keeps him relatively virile — plus, a bout of tennis-playing, and a newlyadopted appreciation for bridge. He and his wife play about once a week, whether they are in Toronto or in Palm Springs, where they split their time.
“It is a clearing of the mind, where you are ultra-focused on the task at hand,” he explained.
Like dancing! Happy birthday, Mr. Sharp.