When Laurence Geller finished his last O-level exam in 1962 he went straight to Edgware station in London, where his father was waiting. He handed Geller a one-way ticket to Switzerland and £5 in cash. “He told me I could come home to visit, but I could never come back to live,” Geller says. He was 15 at the time. On arrival in Zurich he spent nights sleeping on park benches and days knocking on doors trying to find work in hotels. A couple of decades later he was one of the most successful hoteliers in the US.
“I didn’t get on very well with my father,” Geller, now 76, tells me. We’re in a bright meeting room in one of his Loveday properties, but more on those later. “He was a prodigious drinker, a crazy musician, always broke. He laid a finger on me once or twice. But look, this was the 1960s . . .” His face crinkles into a smile and he spreads his hands wide, as if that explains everything.
Given their complicated relationship, it’s surprising that his father’s dementia — soon followed by that of his mother — is what has driven so much of Geller’s philanthropy. He is the single biggest donor to dementia care in the UK; he also donates his time and money to everything from children’s hospitals to sports charities. “I decided to give away 75 per cent of my wealth and I’ve stuck to that,” he says.
Geller is the single biggest donor to dementia care in the UK
RORY RAE
Philanthropy, he says, has always been part of who he is. “From day one. I didn’t have to think about it. We always had a culture of philanthropy. This was postwar London and there were Holocaust survivors, disabled people, children without families . . . My parents never had any money but they gave away everything they had, and more.”
Geller’s life story sounds like a fast-paced bestseller, of which he’s written two himself, both based on the hotel industry. He worked his way up through five-star hotels in Switzerland and London before moving to Memphis, Tennessee, to work for Holiday Inn, via a 15-month stint in Israel. His time in the country taught him a lot about himself, he says. “It taught me ambition. It taught me to take on stuff that no one else would do and work harder than everyone else.” He applied that knowledge in the States, where he quickly rose through the ranks of Holiday Inn and then Hyatt, eventually owning a variety of luxury hotels with brands such as Four Seasons and Waldorf Astoria. He still runs Geller Capital Partners, a property investment company based in Chicago.
Giving away money, he says, is only part of the picture. “You’ve got to give the three Ws: work, wealth and wisdom. Work is the most important,” he says. He works as hard now as he ever has, getting up at 4am every day and leaving his desk by 8 or 9pm. “I’m no genius so I need to work twice as hard,” he says.
Most of that work is now devoted to dementia care, inspired by his parents, whose experiences of dementia still visibly upset him. “Every day I wish I’d known then what I know now,” he says. “I refused to recognise it and then it was too late.” The signs were clear with his father, but it wasn’t until a particular lunch when he could no longer remember the words “white wine” — his favourite drink — that Geller accepted something was wrong. “And then I watched this deterioration. I’m so sad about it. I was so ashamed of myself for not having recognised it earlier and researched it, and done everything I could.” His mother also succumbed to dementia, dying six years later. “I could have done a lot more,” he says, shaking his head.
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He’s made up for it since. When Geller’s son, Guy, who was working in the care industry in the US, introduced him to the Alzheimer’s Association, he started looking into dementia care. He was shocked by what he found. “It was primitive. It was where the hotel industry was 50 years ago. There were no qualification standards, no real training. There weren’t any specialist dementia care homes, just secure wings where they’re given psychotropic drugs. I visited a lot of them and I would come out sick to my stomach.”
By now Geller was back in the UK and had become chancellor of the University of West London, his alma mater (he completed a hotel management course there when it was the Ealing Technical College), where he had funded the London Geller College of Hospitality and Tourism. What was needed, he decided, was a whole new model of dementia care, starting with qualifications. In 2013 he donated £1.4 million to create the Geller Institute of Ageing and Memory, as well as the country’s first specialist MSc programme in dementia care. “I wanted to make it a career path, like the hotel industry.”
It has become the leading institute for research in Europe for dementia care. “I couldn’t be more proud,” he says. Geller has donated about £3.5 million to the university so far, including the Westmont Enterprise Hub, where he funds start-ups focused on dementia care.
The library at Loveday Kensington
He has turned his interest into his latest business venture, launching Loveday, a group of ultra-personalised dementia care homes in London. “My objective was to have a brand in the care industry equivalent to Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.”
Geller shows me around the Kensington branch, which does indeed feel more like a smart hotel than a care home, with a stylish lounge, daylight-flooded dining room and boutique hotel-style bedrooms. Clever touches include “very expensive” circadian lighting, acoustic monitoring and mirrors hidden behind doors in the bathrooms — people with dementia often struggle to recognise themselves and find it upsetting. They work with researchers and universities to test and fine-tune everything, from the most nourishing food to the kind of activities needed to keep guests as sharp as possible. And everything is open sourced, allowing others to learn from what they’ve discovered. “I want to make lives better and longer, because I wish I’d done it for my parents,” he says.
Geller’s approach to philanthropy, which led to him being appointed CBE in 2012, has always been deeply personal. His eldest daughter, Tanya, was born with a serious heart defect which required surgery when she was two, so he and his wife at the time, Ruth, began donating to a range of children’s health charities. “When we moved to Chicago, we started giving a lot of money to the new Lurie’s Children’s Hospital. I’m still on the board.”
He also served on the President’s Council of the Midwest Region of the US Fund for Unicef, and has funded a variety of health projects in Israel, while his natural sportiness — he was a talented rugby player at school, first for Middlesex and then for England until he was 15 — has led to him founding and becoming the chairman of Love of the Game, which lobbies the sports industry and conducts research into the prevention of concussion in sport.
And then there’s Winston Churchill. There’s a bust of him watching us in the meeting room. Geller donated $1 million to digitise Churchill’s papers and make them available to schoolchildren, and has been the chairman of the International Churchill Society for several decades. His involvement took a personal twist in recent years. “I was at a lovely event and I met a lady called Jennie Churchill,” he says with a little smile. Geller married Jennie, Winston’s great-granddaughter, in Chelsea Town Hall last year.
How does he find the time for it all? By getting up at 4am, he says, and by choosing to. “I was first asked to do [charitable work] in my late twenties, and my initial reaction was ‘I can’t do it, I don’t have the time’. Now, when I’m asked to do something, I ask myself ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’” He smiles and spreads his hands wide again. “And how much money do you need to be happy, anyway?”
alzheimers.org.uk
