The Right Places (17 page)

Sun Valley, Idaho, for example, was designed to be next to impossible to get to. That was the whole point: it was not a resort for “most people.” For years it sat there, shining and serene, aloof and inaccessible, like a queen at a command performance—very much
there
, and yet very much removed from the general audience. No stranger would have dreamt of approaching her without the proper introduction. This is not to say that Sun Valley was stuffy. On the contrary. She was merely self-assured. After all, she was America's original ski resort, the first resort in the world to be created purely for winter sports, and created in a day when only a very special breed of the very rich could get away in winter. As a queen, Sun Valley was proud and, as a queen, she regally bestowed lavish favors upon her most loyal subjects.

Most great resorts have been built within so-called “resort areas”—the Adirondacks, the mountains of northern New England, the Florida coastland. Not Sun Valley. She was special, and above all that. She was built as herself, pure and simple, and she was all there was for miles and miles. For years, her only neighbors were the harshly soaring peaks of the Sawtooth Range which guarded and enclosed her sunny, Shangri-La-like glen—a formidable spite fence. As a queen, Sun Valley was not to be easily wooed by commoners.

From the beginning, Sun Valley's fate was guided by large sums of money. Young Averell Harriman had inherited some one hundred million dollars from his father, E. H. Harriman (the “little giant of Wall Street”) and had, by the early Thirties, become board chairman of his father's Union Pacific Railroad. Harriman the younger, and his second wife, Marie, had also become avid skiers, but had to journey to Austria or to Switzerland in order to enjoy their sport, since skiing was then almost unheard of in America. The Harrimans were regarded as very exotic types, and Sun Valley was the exotic brainchild of Marie Harriman—who simply wanted a stateside place to ski. Sun Valley was the money child of Averell Harriman, who agreed to pay for what his wife wanted. At her suggestion, he hired an Austrian Alpine expert named Count Felix Schaffgotsch to go into the American West and find a perfect spot for a ski resort.

Count Felix spent months looking at mountains. He visited Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Yosemite, and any number of mountains of the San Bernardino range. He scouted the areas around Salt Lake City and around Lake Tahoe. He also spent considerable time in Colorado and crossed the Teton Pass in winter to get a view of Jackson Hole. None of these places—where numerous ski resorts now exist—struck his fancy. The mountains were either too high, too windy, too near a large city or too far from a railhead. Then someone suggested that he look at Ketchum, Idaho. Ketchum—once a mining boomtown of two thousand people—had shrunk to a hamlet of two hundred and seventy, nearly half of whom left the valley in wintertime. Soon after the count's arrival, little Ketchum buzzed with the news that an Austrian nobleman was out there in the snow, climbing mountains and going down them on skis, of all things, and talking of building a million-dollar hotel. “Heck, we'd tied boards on our feet to
go out across the snow and get our mail, if you call that skiing,” recalls old Jack Lane, a prominent sheepman of the area. After one look at the crazy-acting foreigner, Jack Lane cautioned his fellow businessmen, “Don't cash any of his checks.”

A mile north of Ketchum the count skied into a windless basin surrounded by totally treeless slopes, and with pine-covered Baldy Mountain towering at the valley's western mouth, seeming to close the valley off from all intruders. The topography of the place was immediately striking, for hills in this region all have two features in common. Their north-facing flanks, shielded from the sun, remain cool and moist and therefore are covered with thick stands of pine. But the south-facing slopes, drained of moisture by the sun's heat, are bare of vegetation and smooth as a baby's cheek. This, the count figured, meant unimpeded skiing. It also eliminated the need for cutting trails. The count wired Harriman that he had found his spot. Within ten days, Harriman was at Ketchum with his private railroad car, and a Union Pacific check was written to pay for an initial forty-three hundred acres.

When the Union Pacific began building the resort—which still had no name—it chose as an architectural scheme something very close to the design it had used for the cars on its first streamliner. The earliest Sun Valley buildings have a railroad-station look. Jim Cur-ran was the bridge engineer for the railroad. He knew nothing about skiing. But he had helped build tramways for loading bananas onto freight cars in the tropics, and saw that lifting a skier to a mountain-top and hoisting a bunch of bananas to the deck of a ship presented much the same sort of engineering problem. In place of the hook that carried the bananas, he put a chair, and the world's first skiing chair lift was born. The Harrimans had estimated that the cost of the original installation would be “about a million.” By the time the place was nearing completion, in 1935, almost three million Depression dollars had been spent.

Next, the late Steve Hannagan—the colorful publicity man who had been able to drumbeat a desolate Florida sandbar into something called Miami Beach—was hired to put Harriman's purchase on the map. Hannagan knew nothing about skiing either, and when he first visited the area he pronounced it a “godforsaken field of snow.” The
day was overcast. Then suddenly the clouds rolled back, the sun came out, and Mr. Hannagan noticed an astonishing thing happen. The temperature of the air shot abruptly up to ninety degrees. Immediately he announced that the place must be named Sun Valley. Both Harrimans objected to the name, but because Hannagan was assumed to be a genius in such matters they reluctantly agreed to it.

It turned out to be a brilliant choice. Both Averell and Marie Harriman, as skiers, felt that the word “sun” had unfortunate connotations. In Europe too much sunshine on a slope can produce the slush that skiers call “mashed potatoes.” When the temperature drops the result is an unskiable icy crust. But Hannagan knew that most Americans were
not
skiers and, furthermore, that Americans were a pampered lot who disliked the cold. The first Hannagan poster for Sun Valley showed a happy, handsome youth skiing down the mountainside stripped to the waist. Close behind him came a pretty girl skiing in a bathing suit. The two models must have had a chilly time of it despite their larky smiles, for Sun Valley's famous winter warmth is available for the most part on south-facing verandas that are protected from the frosty breezes. But it didn't matter. Hannagan seemed to have brought skiing to the tropics, and Sun Valley was on its way.

From the moment the resort opened its doors in 1936, it was apparent that Sun Valley was capable of exerting a strong emotional pull on those who visited it. The list of people who became smitten with Sun Valley at first sight is long indeed. At first, Sun Valley's fans consisted mostly of the Harrimans and their friends. But soon well-heeled skiers and would-be skiers were pouring in from all over the country. It is hard to explain, but those who took a head-over-heels tumble for Sun Valley became her amorous slaves for life, and the relationships formed were deep, sentimental, difficult to express in human language. As one woman wrote of her beloved, “How can I express what this place means to me? My whole
soul
is wrapped up in these mountains!” Wills were written with instructions that burials be at the foot of Baldy Mountain, or that the deceased's ashes be scattered across a favorite trail. Strong men have been known to make absolute fools of themselves in their efforts to stay in touch with Sun Valley. For years, one Sun Valley lover periodically telephoned the Lodge whenever he was away. First he would chat with the room clerk, then with
Frederick, the former captain in the dining room, then with the pool attendant, then with a favorite ski instructor. At last he would ask to be transferred to the bartender in the Duchin Room where he would want to know who was sitting at the bar, and what they were talking about. His final request on these long distance ventures would be that the receiver be placed on the bar so that he could listen and enjoy, vicariously, the simple murmur of Sun Valley talk. His calls would come from as far away as London, Paris, Palm Beach, wherever he might be.

Another man for years made regular calls from New York with requests for selections from Hap Miller's Orchestra (called “the Lester Lanins of the West”), the band that to this very day plays sweet and stately music from an older and more naïve time—“All the Things You Are,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Just One of Those Things”—society dance tunes, as they used to be called.

In its isolation, reachable only by Pullman, Sun Valley was intended not only for the wealthy but for the
dedicated
skier. It wanted nothing to do with the duffer, or even the average skier. At the same time it attracted a few outdoorsy movie stars—Ty Power on his wooden skis, Sonja Henie on her flashing skates, along with the society dowagers from Boston and Philadelphia who enjoyed doing nothing more than snowshoe through the pines. There, on their skis, were the lanky figures of the Gary Coopers and there, coming in for lunch, was the plump but still recognizable bundle of Ann Sothern, who built her own baby-blue stucco house in the Valley and lived there for years. There was Norma Shearer stepping out of an elevator in the Lodge (“Norma's too cheap to build her own house,” Miss Sothern used to sniff) with her husband, a ski instructor, Marti Arrouge.

Naturally, nobody wanted anything about Sun Valley to change. As Sun Valley gradually aged, so much more vociferous did its original fans become about seeing to it that nothing must be altered. The two main hotels, the slightly more “swell” Lodge, and the somewhat more modest Challenger Inn, began, in time, to reflect a bygone era, and this was just fine with everyone from the Harrimans on down. The interiors had been done in what might be called Depression Moderne, a style that relied heavily on indirect lighting, mirrors, copper, and whatever may have been the earliest ancestor of Naugahyde. The
famous heated swimming pools—among the first in the United States—were “free-form” in shape, predating the now-common kidney and oval shapes. A number of the public rooms began to wear a faded, even seedy air, and it was not hard to forget that the Lodge's main cocktail lounge, the Duchin Room, had been named not for Peter but for his late father, Eddie Duchin. Into this comfortable and familiar mold, even the guests at Sun Valley seemed to settle for a while. Through the nineteen-forties, the Fifties, and even into the Sixties, most of the people who arrived annually at Sun Valley were families who had known and skied with each other “forever”—Mellons, Goulds, Pierreponts, with their children and their children's nannies. Then, not very long ago, a strange thing happened.

Sun Valley had been “fashionable” from the beginning. But overnight (or so it seemed) it started becoming chic, which is quite a different thing. Suddenly Andy Williams and his wife were helping turn a cavernous below-stairs boiler room into a noisy discotheque, along with the Henry Mancinis and Janet Leigh. Art Linkletter was there, and so were William Wyler and his wife, plus Van Williams—television's Green Hornet—and Charles Schulz (of
Peanuts
), along with the wife of Austria's ambassador to the United States, the Leonard Bernsteins, Ray Milland, Claudette Colbert, the Jimmy Stewarts, and the Robert S. McNamaras. Then came the Kennedys—all of them. Robert and Ethel Kennedy arrived first with what appeared to be dozens of their children, in their own jet, barely making it into the tiny Hailey airport. Next a suite of rooms was being hastily flung together to accommodate Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy and her children, their two nurses, her two secretaries, and their accompanying Secret Service people. In other words, Sun Valley's old-shoe dowdiness was being discovered by what were already being called the Beautiful People, that heady mixture of the powerful and celebrated from the world's politics, society, the arts, and just plain money. With them, or just a panting step behind them, came such familiar institutions as the ubiquitous photographers from
Women's Wear Daily
to report on what they wore and what they did. (“I'd never even heard of
Women's Wear Daily
before this happened,” said one Sun Valley regular.)

How did it all happen? The answer has less to do with the vagaries
of fashion or sport or resort life than with sheer economics. From the outset, the emphasis at Sun Valley had been on luxury, and splendid food and service had been the rule in all the resort's restaurants and public rooms. Under the Harriman regime, a what-the-hell attitude toward expense had been encouraged. Among other things, the resort maintained its own private hospital with a highly paid staff which specialized, understandably enough, in repairing bone fractures. In a casual way, as the years went by, Sun Valley kept adding more chair lifts, opening new trails—all at great cost. Through these years, furthermore, Sun Valley had been managed by an affable man called “Pappy” Rogers whom guests held dear to their hearts for his lovable habit of saying, whenever they were about to check out, “Oh, why don't you stay on? It'll be on the house!” Rogers was forever treating guests to elaborate parties, and buying them expensive dinners. While all this freehanded spending was going on, labor costs were rising. Railroad travel, at the same time, was declining. Sun Valley had been conceived as a railhead resort, and in the great postwar air traffic boom, Sun Valley was suddenly awfully far away—particularly to a young and impatient new breed of American skier who had never heard of Norma Shearer. Skiing as a sport was sky-rocketing to mass popularity, and among the new breed of skiers, certain mystiques developed. One of these was that the newer the resort, the better it must therefore be. Also, skiers no longer demanded opulent service, nor were they particularly willing to pay for it. Skiing had become a family sport, and skiers looked for kitchenettes or even hotplates and cafeterias rather than hotels with maids' dining rooms. As these new skiers hopped from resort to resort, looking for the best skiing at the lowest prices, Sun Valley found itself in a kind of social backwater, a resort for skiing's Old Guard, the grayheads.