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Like one more idiosyncratic collectible, Rosalie Wise Sharp, wife of Four Seasons honcho Isadore Sharp, sits in her large living room, surrounded by museum-quality ceramics that fill every corner of her stately Toronto home.
"Look," says the slim, young-looking 71-year-old, standing as she yanks up her T-shirt to show me the top of her jeans. "I cut some material off the bottom hems of my pants and have it sewn on the top. I like my pants high-waisted, and it's elastic," she says, snapping the top. "That way, when you go to the bathroom, you can slip the whole thing off easily," she continues, laughing.
In what passes for Toronto's beau monde, behavioural conformity is expected. You hire Joe Brennan to build your dream mansion. You shop at Holt Renfrew. Drive a luxury car. Purchase $2 organic lemons without batting an eye.
But anyone who meets Mrs. Sharp, or reads her recently published memoir, Rifke: An Improbable Life, knows that she confounds the expectations for a corporate or society wife.
Mrs. Sharp drives a four-year-old Toyota Highlander, slightly rusted. "Fancy cars don't interest me," she says dismissively. To her book launch last week at the Four Seasons hotel in Yorkville, she took the subway.
She rarely lunches with the ladies. "I really prefer staying home on my own. I read and write and do my hobbies. If you go out, you have to make small talk."
In her book, she divulges secrets that would make most society matrons want to slip silently beneath the starched linen cloth of the luncheon table.
When they met more than 50 years ago, Mrs. Sharp was only 16. Isadore, five years her elder, soon persuaded her to have sex. (She was so naive as a young girl, she once blurted in health class that boys "menstruate white stuff," she confesses.)
Before the teenaged sweethearts married, she got pregnant. Then 19 and living with her parents, she took pills to make herself sick. Nothing worked. She opted for an illegal abortion at a stranger's apartment in the WASPy enclave of Rosedale.
"Of course, I regret it," she says now, unabashed. "It was a terrible thing. Very bad. Criminal. [But] in those days, we were our parents' children. It was different. We couldn't disappoint them. There wasn't any choice."
She took a bus home after the procedure, which included a soap-and-water douche on a kitchen table.
"Issy could at least have taken a taxi and picked me up," she deadpans.
The Sharps are one of Canada's greatest business success stories -the luxury brand of 74 properties started with the Four Seasons Motor Hotel, on Toronto's Jarvis Street, furnished and built almost entirely on credit in 1961 - but they represent more than just the advantages of hard work and good timing.
They prove what few people ever get to know: a long marriage can be a good thing.
Theirs, which has lasted 51 years, has helped them overcome emotional tragedy. They lost one of their four sons, Christopher, at the age of 17, from misdiagnosed melanoma.
"You don't really ever get over it. But you put it over there," she says, motioning to one side with her hands. "When you have a husband and other kids, you do what you can to make it easier for them."
Perhaps most importantly, their marriage has allowed them to flourish as individuals.
Mrs. Sharp decided to write a memoir because she is "the last link to the vanished world of the Eastern European shtetl."
Her parents emigrated from a small Polish town in 1930 and later lost many of their family members in the Holocaust.
Settling in the Toronto Jewish ghetto of Kensington Market, they spoke Yiddish in the Kosher household. (Rilke means Rosalie.)
For nearly 50 years, Mrs. Sharp could not eat soup because of the memory of her mother's broth, "made out of water and onions and flour, and that was dinner," she recalls.
She was not encouraged to go to university despite her love of reading and learning, and the fact that her family did well. They later moved north of Lawrence Avenue, where they ran a dry-goods store on Yonge Street called Wise's.
It is her husband whom she credits with encouraging her to follow her creative interests in art, interior design (frequently for the Four Seasons hotels) and writing.
"He pushed me; he prodded me to do everything," she says. "He always supports me. Issy is an unusual man," she adds. "He is very, very sweet-natured. He's angelic."
On his way to work, Mr. Sharp briefly makes an appearance. Did he worry about his wife's lack of discretion about their private lives? He shakes his head no and smiles. "I read the manuscript and I thought it was very good," he says calmly.
He is a good sport about all the ways she expresses herself. Mrs. Sharp is known for showing up to fancy balls in unexpected outfits. Once, for the Venetian Ball, a champagne-and-cleavage Toronto society event, she persuaded her husband to forgo black-tie attire and wear a white suit and dark sunglasses instead. She also insisted he carry a white cane. Then she dressed herself in an outfit handmade out of narrow window shades.
Venetian blind. Get it?
"He did draw the line when I wanted us to both go with beards as Hassidic Jews. The theme of the ball that year was Merchant of Venice," she explains with a shrug, as if she considers his reluctance small-minded.Together they have navigated the years and everything life has brought them, good and bad, with an admirable equanimity. She expresses no regret that none of their children are involved in the company, which Mr. Sharp recently took private.
"It's too big a business for anybody to do except Issy, who grew up with it. Besides, we raised our children to follow their instincts. Like we did."
They never sued the doctor, now deceased, who misdiagnosed their son's cancer. "What good would it have done to sue him? It wasn't going to help my son or us, so if it wasn't going to be helpful there wasn't any point. You just have to accept it.
"Look, you're dealt blows. Life does that. People always say that cancer patients have so much courage. But what choice do you have? We are here to enjoy our lives."
She has her husband, her unconventionality, her three boys and three grandchildren to give her a daily dose of pleasure. Plus, a glass of red wine. "Just one," she says, holding an index finger in the air. " I have one little 18th-Century drinking-glass full every day."
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