The Right Places (18 page)

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a railroad and running a ski resort have little in common” and agreed to sell the resort to the Janss brothers for an unpublished price that is said to have been rock-bottom.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.

“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.”