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Sharp's autobiography is brutally honest, and she's a terrific storyteller
ROSALIE Wise Sharp, the wife of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts founder Isadore Sharp, is an outstanding person in her own right.
That's what makes her newly published memoir such a great read.
At 71, with two other books behind her, she is a celebrated commercial interior designer of Four Seasons hotels and much more. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and received the Art Gallery of Ontario prize and the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for overall excellence. She's currently chancellor of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
The Sharps have been married for 51 years. They had four sons, one of whom died from cancer at age 17.
Sharp details her austere childhood in North Toronto where she and her parents, who had immigrated from Poland, were the only Jewish residents in the neighbourhood. The book's title, Rifke, comes from her given name in Hebrew.
The modesty of her beginnings is described well and in sharp contrast to her lavish, jet-setting existence with her husband, whose empire Fortune magazine named eight years in a row as one of the world's top 100 companies for which to work.
Earlier this year, the Four Seasons chain went private in a successful bid by shareholders Bill Gates and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Sharp's autobiography is brutally honest, and she's a terrific storyteller. As a child, she says, "Books were my world, my friends."
Even today, despite her status as one of Toronto's glitterati, Sharp confides that books for her remain "comforts and friends -- unlike people, who you have to get to know too well."
The candour with which she details her own life is simultaneously touching, disconcerting and admirable. There was clearly no financial motive to publish this book -- she is donating its proceeds to charity -- nor spend the time introspecting, often painfully.
Prior to their marriage when she was 19, Sharp aborted her and Isadore's child. She describes this as her "darkest secret."
Her description of the sorrow caused by the 1978 death of their son Christopher is incredibly moving. She says her life is divided into two periods: Before Chris died and after.
She shares Issy's business philosophy: "To run a respected business, to share the wealth, and to boast the happiest employees. It was integrity that counted."
Sharp says that she "has not yet learned how to be old." She admits to having the occasional cosmetic nip and tuck and to contemplating her own mortality.
"I feel somewhat diminished now because when I was young, I clearly recall feeling pity for the elderly because they had so little time left," she writes. "Death is an insult -- as if God screwed up and made a fatal flaw in his design of humans."
This is a five-star book by the interior designer of five-star hotels.
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