“I want to learn to ski just a little bit,” she explained, “I’m going to Gstaad and I don’t want to look too silly.” “Gstaad!” cried the ebullient Engl. “Why, if you go to Gstaad skiing the way you do now, you’ll spend your whole time in the lounge waiting for the others to come down off the mountain!” Engl started her out on Dollar Mountain, his mountain for beginners. Before starting down the hill for her first run, Jackie said, “I’m warning you—if I fall this is my last time!” “If I’m going to be your last ski instructor take a good look at me,” Engl called back. After four days of lessons, Engl had Jackie nine thousand feet up on the top of Baldy Mountain, and she made it safely, if a little slowly, down without a fall.
“She just hadn’t been having any fun at it,” Engl says. “Also at first she was a little lazy about certain exercises I wanted her to do, but she snapped out of that.” Engl modestly refuses to claim that he taught the present Mrs. Onassis how to ski, but he does feel that he helped her learn to enjoy the sport, which, along with overcoming fear, is more than half the skiing battle.
Engl is prouder of results he has had with others of his rarely accepted private students. Though it is little known, the late Gary Cooper had a leg injured in an automobile accident (when he rode horseback in his Westerns, he could be photographed only from one side because he could maneuver only one foot into a stirrup; the other foot dangled). Sigi Engl taught Cooper to execute difficult skiing turns despite this handicap. Engl has had several one-legged skiers as students, and even once taught a blind man to ski, “by telling him which way to turn as we went down the mountain, and by letting him get the feel of the mountain under his skis. I taught him to read that mountain like Braille.” Sigi had less luck with the Shah of Iran, who has visited Sun Valley twice. The Shah is a good skier, but likes to ski dangerously fast. “Your Majesty, I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself,” said Engl politely. “If I should hurt myself, I would be a great hero to my people,” replied the Shah, and went on skiing as fast as ever.
Sun Valley took Jacqueline Kennedy to its heart, and she took the resort to hers. Even the press and Women’s Wear Daily photographers gave her more privacy there and spent most of their time squabbling among themselves or sabotaging each other’s cameras. After the fourth day of lessons Engl tried once more to turn her over to one of his instructors. “Oh, but you and I have so much fun, Sigi,” she murmured, and he relented. She had so much fun that one night in the Duchin Room she asked Hap Miller to play some Russian music. He obliged by playing the Fifth Hungarian Dance for her, and she rose to her feet and performed a Russian dance for the room at large. “She did it beautifully, too,” says Miller.
Sun Valley was less sure how it felt about her late brother-in-law, the Senator from New York. Things got off to a bad start when the Senator appeared tieless at dinnertime in the dining room, and was politely told that gentlemen were required to wear neckties. He came back with a tie, but out of a spirit of revenge—or fun—he had removed his shoes and was wearing bedroom slippers. The crowd in the Harriman cottage was a loud and boisterous one, and the Kennedy children are a particularly energetic lot. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, along with the Andy Williamses, preferred late, noisy evenings in the boiler-room discotheque. Jackie Kennedy had quiet dinners with her children in the cafeteria of the Challenger Inn (recently rechristened the Sun Valley Inn, on the public-relations theory that the old name suggested that skiing was a challenge, and not a right sport for everyone.) Some of the complaints about the Senator are directed not so much at him as at overzealous members of his staff. One young man, about to start down Baldy Mountain on his skis, was approached by an officious Kennedy aide and told, “Get out of the way. Bobby Kennedy wants to ski through here.” When the young man demurred, the aide opened his parka to reveal a shoulder holster with the handle of a pistol emerging from it, patted it significantly, and said, “I told you to move.” The young man is a well-muscled Westerner, full of grit, and he replied, “Well, I reckon if I don’t have as much right to ski down this mountain as he does, you’re going to have to shoot me to prove it, mister.” He was allowed to continue on his way.
There was disgruntled talk that the Bobby Kennedy party was staying in the Harriman house simply because, as Averell Harriman’s friends, they could stay there free, and after the Kennedys left, there was a puzzling discovery. The several pairs of expensive Head skis which the Kennedy party had been renting from Pete Lane’s ski shop had been, without a word, packed up and taken home. The rented Heads have never been returned.
Though the Kennedys and their friends may have helped publicize Sun Valley and make it chic, Bill Janss and his staff insist that this is not the image that they wish to cultivate—in fact, that this would be a dangerous image for a resort of Sun Valley’s new size and scope to maintain. That sort of thing could frighten trade away. “Sun Valley isn’t for the Beautiful People,” Bill Janss insists. “It’s a family resort, and always will be. We want people to come here with their families, for long stays. We’ve made this a wonderful place for children—they can be on their own, and there’s no place for them to wander off to. That’s why the condominiums and the new houses are selling so well. People who like to ski are coming with their families. We’ll never be like Acapulco.”
If Beautiful People come, he adds, they will have to learn to ski well if they are going to have any fun at all. Towering over the resort, and at its very heart, is the massive Baldy Mountain—“a very disciplinary mountain,” in Sigi Engl’s phrase. Baldy’s trails—such as the one called Exhibition, which is about as steep as a trail can be without being vertical—are not to be undertaken lightly, or by those who take skiing lightly. Skiers who have skied only Eastern mountains are overwhelmed, breathtaken, when the lift deposits them at the top of Baldy. The view of white peaks and green pines stretches out horizontally, for three hundred and sixty degrees, and for miles. One might be balancing on tiptoes on the top of the world. Some, less used to being up so high, go to pieces completely at the view and have to be carried down, blindfolded, to the base. Experienced skiers, though, gasp at the view and start down the mountain on their skis with wild cries of joy.
Baldy and the Baldy pin—a badge given to skiers who have made it all the way down without a fall—are essentially what Sun Valley is all about. The new owner knows this, as he continues to expand the skiing facilities, adding new lifts, building new trails. “The possibilities of this mountain are limitless,” Sigi Engl says. “Already you could ski down this mountain over a hundred times, trying one series of trails after another, and never repeat yourself.” The facilities for teaching skiing continue to improve. One of many innovations is the use of videotape; a skier is photographed going down a slope and, immediately, the tape can be played back to him showing him his mistakes. At the same time, the slopes will never be crowded, nor will there be lines at the lifts, because the capacity of the mountain is equal to the capacity of Sun Valley’s Lodge, Inn, and outbuildings. It will remain so, because Sun Valley is a pocket of land locked within thousands of square miles of National Forest. No competitors will ever remotely encroach upon it. Carl Gray, a wealthily retired electronics manufacturer who has been skiing at Sun Valley for years, says, “I’m a businessman. I ski at Sun Valley because the cost per mile is cheaper—there’s no waiting.”
Sun Valley is still not all that easy to get to. From the East Coast, for example, one must fly via Chicago or Denver to Salt Lake City, and then north, by twin-engine plane (unless you own your own jet) to Hailey; and then there is a half-hour drive into the Valley. But still the Valley burgeons. The late Ernest Hemingway came to Sun Valley a number of years and, like so many people before and after him, began a lifelong romance with the place. He built a sturdy house in Ketchum, facing Sun Valley, and it was in Ketchum that he took his own life. He is buried in the shadow of Baldy, and a small monument to him has been erected nearby. Hemingway was regarded with great affection in the Valley—he wrote For Whom the Bel
l Tolls in a suite he rented in the Lodge—though there is still some disagreement about the manner in which Hemingway hunted game. Northern Idaho hunters are selective, they say, about what they hunt, but Hemingway, with a gun in hand, fired at every beast in sight, large or small, indifferent as to what he killed as long as he killed it. After a while, there were a number of his Ketchum friends who refused to go out with him.
Still, Hemingway belonged to Sun Valley and so does his widow, Mary Hemingway, a diminutive and gingery lady, seldom at a loss for an opinion, who still lives most of each year in the house her husband built. Mary Hemingway and her best friend, Clara Spiegel, another widow, entertain frequently at cocktail parties, and Mary Hemingway complains, “The cocktail parties here get bigger and bigger. There are just so many people coming here, people you have to ask or they’ll be hurt—it’s endless. I lead a much busier social life out here in the mountains. Everybody comes here now.” It used to be, she says, “sort of exclusive—I’m no snob, Lord knows, but it was a little set out here of people you knew. Them days is gone forever! Look at the beautiful float trips people used to take on the rivers up in our primitive areas, further north. They were for real explorers, aficionados. You’d be on the river for a week and never see another soul besides your own party and your guide. Now it’s like Broadway and Forty-second Street up there. You look down the river and there’s your dentist from Larchmont! Well, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with dentists.…”
Every year, on her late husband’s birthday, which falls on July 21, Mary Hemingway gives a big birthday party for him at Sun Valley’s Trail Creek Lodge. The Sun Valley chefs cater the meal for her, but she likes to provide some small culinary touch herself—she will make her own curry powder, for example, if there is to be an Eastern dish. Each year, Mary Hemingway’s party is bigger than the last. At the most recent one she suddenly looked around the gathering and asked, “Who are these people? New Sun Valley people, I suppose—and plain gate-crashers. Everyone I see here is a total stranger! Well, Ernest was a gregarious man. He was always terribly cordial to strangers, to total strangers—sometimes even a little too cordial, it used to seem to some of us. This isn’t at all like what it used to be. But it is Ernest’s birthday, and I really think Ernest would have approved.”
Photo by Dick Davis, Photo Researchers, Inc.
The beach at Zihuatenejo
10
Mexico: In Search of What Acapulco Used to Be
Travelers have become as restless and changeful of their ways as resorts and small suburban towns—endlessly searching out new and just right places. The new breed of new rich, thirsting to find itself in the new social scheme of things, keeps looking for new oases of pleasure and peace.
And so, when American travelers say that a resort is ruined, they mean that it has been improved. Conveniences—such as the mixed blessing of air conditioning—have been installed. When Americans say that a resort is ruined, they mean that its prices have risen to equal those of other resorts. On both these counts, Acapulco certainly qualifies for the ruined, or at least considerably damaged, label, and so for several years the search has been on for the perfect little beach resort that is “just like what Acapulco used to be”—cheap, inconvenient, somewhat squalid, but with miles of white sand and turquoise ocean, where palm leaves click in sunny breezes, and where fat fish leap onto the line.
Excited reports have come back from this or that little-jewel port—reports which announce that this is it; this is what Acapulco was. All these reports have had the heavy support of local chambers of commerce, needless to say. And, needless to say, they have been contradictory, confusing.
The west coast of Mexico is favored (or afflicted, depending on your point of view) with a particular topography along nearly its entire length: stern and abrupt ranges of the Sierra Madre Occidental rise steeply from the ocean’s edge, leaving the towns and villages of the coast cut off from the interior. Such roads as exist frequently turn into surging rivers in the rainy season, and a number of places are accessible only from the sea or by air. (This was once true of Acapulco, before a superhighway made it an easy drive from Mexico City.) The same terrain is repeated along the skinny peninsula of Baja California. Indeed, the mountains of Baja are so brave, rock-strewn, and arid—spiky with cactus, wild with jaguar, deer and bright parrots—that most of the peninsula is still an unpopulated wilderness. There are stretches where Baja California is scarcely more than thirty miles across, and yet those thirty miles from ocean to gulf are next to impossible to travel by land. Las Cruces, a hamlet in Baja, is in one of these remote regions. Though only forty miles from La Paz, Baja’s capital city, Las Cruces does not appear on most maps of Mexico and, making use of a bumpy landing strip, can only be reached by privately chartered plane.
Las Cruces got its name, according to the local legend, when Cortes first sailed into the Gulf of California in 1535 and put ashore in the tiny harbor—before sailing north to discover the larger, more protected harbor at La Paz. Upon landing, there was a skirmish with the Indians, and three of Cortes’s men were killed. Years later, three stone crosses—one larger than the others, possibly to indicate that one was an officer and the others enlisted men—were found lying on their sides in the undergrowth. These crosses, one is told, were carried to the top of a hill overlooking the harbor and erected there, though they hardly look to be over four hundred years old.
In the late 1940s, a dashing young Mexican named Abelardo Rodríguez—whose wife, the former Lucille Bremer, once danced in a film opposite Fred Astaire—came to Las Cruces and decided to build a hotel there. (Sr. Rodríguez’s father had been president of Mexico, then governor of Baja California, and had, in the process, collected considerable wealth and Baja real estate.) Serving as his own architect and interior decorator, Rodríguez built a low, sprawling building in the villa style with wide terraces, airy loggias, fountains, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a trapshooting range, and a putting green. The rooms—there are only twenty—have stone fireplaces, and all face the sea and the harsh profile of the deserted island of Cerralvo, twenty miles offshore, which seems to hang in the sky. The mood here is of quiet elegance. In the bathrooms, fresh cakes of Guerlain soap are placed daily (though the chilling sight of a scorpion scrambling up the wall reminds one that one is, after all, in the tropics); all fruits and vegetables are flown in from Los Angeles. Still, the place is remote. The hotel has a radio that can reach La Paz, but there is no telephone or telegraph service (a gasoline-driven generator provides electricity) and, when one is a guest there, one literally cannot be reached.
Rodríguez also built himself a large house at Las Cruces and, because there was none in the area, he built a handsome church (a priest flies in every other week to say Mass). Then, flushed with the success of his first resort, he went on to build two others—Palmilla, some distance to the south near the little town of San José del Cabo, and the Hacienda Cabo San Lucas, practically on the top of the peninsula. (At each of these places he also built churches, and Rodríguez today sees a symbolic connection between his three churches and the three original crosses at Las Cruces, and with the Trinity, and now says that having built his churches, he no longer worries about getting into heaven.) From a business standpoint, however, the two new hotels—both larger than Las Cruces—put Rodríguez into serious competition with himself. Guests were abandoning Las Cruces for the other places, and Rodríguez hit upon the idea of turning Las Cruces into a private club, “for members only,” which charged annual dues—a gimmick, needless to say, to insure Las Cruces a fixed income. Rodríguez dressed up his membership list with a number of movie stars, including Bing Crosby, who built a villa of his own and spends several months a year there, fishing and snorkeling, and Bob Hope, who has never been there at all.
The new status of Las Cruces as a club has had an off-putting effect upon prospective guests. Some people have got the notion that Las Cruces is now some sort of private estate belonging to Bing Crosby, and others,
afraid of being turned away, no longer try to stay there. Their fears are unfounded. While it is “up to the discretion of the manager” whether or not a nonmember may stay at Las Cruces, the place is, after all, in business to make money; if rooms are available, the manager never says no. Also, though membership is “frozen” at a hundred and eighty members, there are plenty of vacancies. Dues are two hundred and forty dollars a year, and they entitle a member to stay at Las Cruces for ten days a year free of charge.
On the other hand, Americans who suffer from either the There’s-Nothing-to-Do or the There’s-No-Place-to-Go syndrome, should be discouraged from visiting Las Cruces. There is no place to go. Of the two kinds of fishermen—those who are serious fishermen and those whose wives think they are serious fishermen—Las Cruces is for the former. Some of the richest waters in the world lie offshore, teeming with sail-fish, marlin, albacore, roosterfish, and dorado.
At regular intervals, pods of whales swim into the gulf to mate, and manta rays the size of grand pianos flip their preposterous bodies in the air. But night life is nonexistent. There is excitement, of sorts—a bitter feud between Crosby and Desi Arnaz, another member (Crosby, they say, wants Arnaz expelled from the club), is always worth a few minutes’ gossip and speculation. Las Cruces is popular with men who fly their own planes because that remote landing strip is an excellent means for getting illegal goods from the United States into Mexico (the planes unload quickly at Las Cruces, then fly on to La Paz to complete their flight plans), and the clandestine flights arriving and departing are fine fodder for conversation. (Materials brought in this way—such as firearms for hunting trips—are generally for their owners’ use, and so the Mexican government, aware of the practice, looks the other way.) But the greatest asset of the place, for those who fancy it, is the isolation, that splendid quiet.
The Right Places Page 14
