The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 reso
rt’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.

  While all this was going on, with railroads in deepening trouble, Averell Harriman was becoming a figure of international importance. His interests were turning from skiing to public life, with several ambassadorships, a cabinet post, and the governorship of New York. Suddenly someone noticed that the Harrimans had not visited their Sun Valley house for years, and by the time Sun Valley was celebrating its mere twenty-fifth birthday in 1961, it was clear that the place was suffering from a sorry case of middle-age slump. The Union Pacific had, from the beginning, treated Sun Valley as a fiscal write-off. But, by the 1960s the question most often asked at the railroad’s board meeting in New York was, “Well, how much did Sun Valley lose this year?” At each successive meeting, the question became less and less a joke.

  In 1964, the Union Pacific called in the Janss Corporation, land developers in Southern California, and asked them what could be done. The Janss brothers, William and Edwin, are more than just developers. They are city-builders, having created, among other things, Westwood Village in Los Angeles. The brothers surveyed the property and reported that an additional investment of at least ten to fifteen million dollars was required to pull Sun Valley out of its doldrums. With this news, the railroad threw up its hands. Arthur Stoddard, then the president, announced that “running a railroad and running a ski resort have little in common” and agreed to sell the resort to the Janss brothers for an unpublished price that is said to have been rock-bottom.

  There was instant dismay among the faithful. Ann Sothern flew to her telephone, called Bill Janss personally, and accused him of wanting to build a “slum” next to her baby-blue cottage. Letters of indignant protest—and advice—poured in from across the country. But the Janss brothers proceeded with all deliberate speed to facelift Sun Valley and to give it a whole new image with a heroic injection of youth and spirit. An extensive building program was begun. A new competition-size pool was added, new tennis courts, and a new shopping mall, with a ski shop, a pastry shop, a mod dress shop, a delicatessen, a barbershop, a drugstore, a gift shop, a bookshop, a decorator’s shop, a jewelry shop, and a steak house slyly named the Ore House, featuring a mining-days decor. “Now get me today’s people,” commanded Bill Janss. In 1965, today’s people consisted largely of the Kennedy family. The days of “Pappy” Rogers were over, but all the Kennedys were given an invitation to ski gratis at Sun Valley. Needless to say, they accepted it.

  The Janss Corporation feels that the days of big resort hotels are over, and so there are no plans to enlarge the hotel facilities as such, though the lobbies, dining room and a number of the rooms in the Lodge have been redecorated. Janss has, however, been busily turning Sun Valley from a sleepy ski village into a bustling city for the new American middle class. This has meant condominiums, apartments, light housekeeping units, and hundreds of new single-family dwellings, which are attached row-house fashion in clusters of four to eight. Janss’s idea has been to broaden Sun Valley’s appeal as much as possible without, of course, permitting it to be anything like a slum. In newly opened areas throughout Sun Valley, private houses are going up which will sell for anywhere from twenty-five thousand dollars to four hundred thousand dollars. Some twenty million dollars has been spent already, and the end is nowhere near in sight. To make Sun Valley more accessible, a new jet strip has been opened just minutes from the foot of Baldy Mountain for private and charter planes, and Janss has seen to it that commercial air service has been improved to Hailey, Idaho, just thirteen miles away.

  Obviously not all the old-timers were happy with these developments, and there was some grumbling here and there. Ann Sothern has sold her little house, but not, they say, because of pique, but because she needed the money. Nonetheless, those who love Sun Valley have one thing to be thankful for in William C. Janss; he is a dedicated and accomplished skier. An ex-Olympian, he has spent millions of his corporation’s money in improving Sun Valley’s existing trails, adding new ones, and building new lift facilities. He has taken over Sun Valley personally, no longer in partnership with his brother. And of course what Bill Janss saw there all along was what anyone who has skied there soon finds—that Sun Valley offers some of the most superb skiing in the United States and perhaps in the world. Skiing aficionados claim that Sun Valley skiing is better than anything to be found in Europe. The occasional warm winds from the Mediterranean (which are the real villains, not sunshine, that cause mashed-potato skiing) never occur in Sun Valley. The normal skiing condition is deep—sometimes ten to twenty feet—powder. The weather averages three days of storm to twenty days of sunshine and, when storms occur, they have a unique habit of happening either on one face of Baldy or the other, never on both at once. This means that while one side of the mountain may become unskiable, the other is fine. Only rarely, when abnormally high winds cause the descending empty chairs to swing too violently, have Sun Valley’s lifts been closed.

  There is also another, somewhat subtler reason for Sun Valley’s allure—Idaho’s divorce laws, which require only six weeks’ residence. This is the same as Nevada but, because Idaho does not permit gambling, Sun Valley likes to think that it attracts the “carriage trade” of the divorce-bound, while the run-of-the-mill go to Reno or Las Vegas. Such carriage-trade types as Mrs. William Rockefeller, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, Mrs. Merriweather Post, Ralph Bellamy, Mrs. James Murphy (now Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller), and Mrs. Henry Ford have all gotten Sun Valley divorces. (Mrs. Ford’s daughter Charlotte, who was married to Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos, did a strange thing: she came to Sun Valley, stayed for a little more than five weeks, then flew off to New York—thereby canceling her residence credit—and a little later went to Mexico for her divorce. No one knows why.) Many divorcees fill their Sun Valley time by learning to ski. A number, while learning, have fallen in love with their ski instructors, most of whom are imported from Austria and are chosen, it sometimes seems, for their bronzed good looks as well as their skiing skill. There have been quite a few Sun Valley marriages in the little chalet-style church that stands hard by the Lodge. Love, or at least deep emotional change, is always in the air. Small wonder so many people have become addicted to the place.

  But it was really the Kennedys who were multi-handedly responsible for Sun Valley’s renaissance in the world of skiing. They came like fairy god-people with magic wands that conjured up instant publicity. All Joseph Kennedy’s children had skied Sun Valley
when they were youngsters, and nostalgia, as much as anything else, may have urged Robert and Ethel Kennedy to accept Bill Janss’s invitation. The former First Lady’s arrival was something else, and no one was quite prepared for that. It was preceded by a flurry of telegrams which issued conflicting instructions and plunged the Sun Valley staff into a frenzy of disjointed activity. Originally, the entire Kennedy party was to be housed in Averell Harriman’s cottage, with children placed three to four to a room. This is in keeping with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s technique of surrounding her own children with hordes of others, thereby making her two less conspicuous. But at the last moment, Jacqueline Kennedy’s secretary telephoned to say that Mrs. Kennedy would prefer a suite of her own. By working all night long, a decorating crew put one of the new condominiums in order for her group.

  She arrived, according to Pete Lane, who operates the ski shop, “looking all wrong. She had been dressed by Seventh Avenue,” Lane says, “and she turned up the first day wearing bell-bottom ski pants. Can you imagine that? Bell-bottom ski pants!” Soon, however, she saw the unwisdom of her ways and, after a visit to Lane’s store, made herself look more presentable. Mrs. Kennedy had only recently taken up skiing and, when she arrived at Sun Valley, she had really not quite mastered it. “Let’s face it,” says one who watched her the first day on the mountain, “she couldn’t ski at all.” She had tried skiing before, both at Stowe, Vermont, and at Aspen, Colorado, and had found little to admire at either place. “I was so cold at Stowe I could hardly stand it,” she has said. But she was determined to give it one more try. In New York, her friend Leonard Bernstein had told her to look up his friend Sigi Engl, the celebrated director of skiing at Sun Valley. Engl avoids giving private lessons whenever possible—he hasn’t the time—and tried to turn Mrs. Kennedy over to one of his large staff of instructors (so popular for private lessons that they have been nicknamed “Sigi’s Rent-a-Kraut Service”). But Mrs. Kennedy begged for the great Sigi himself. Sigi agreed—if she would agree to adjust her schedule to his. She agreed.