The Right Places

Sun Valley: “Mr. Harriman’s Private Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More”

The late Mrs. Edward MacMullan, who for many years more or less ruled the social seas of Philadelphia, once complained: “It’s getting so difficult these days to find places where one can be sure of meeting one’s own kind.” She was referring to the no-longer-exclusive nature of such social institutions as private schools and private clubs, as well as to neighborhoods, committees, coming-out parties, and even churches. (Being an Episcopalian, Mrs. MacMullan pointed out, no longer seemed to carry much weight—not even in Philadelphia.) The same today is true of what were once the private playgrounds of the rich. As Mrs. MacMullan liked to put it, rolling back her eyes in dismay, “The camel has gotten into the tent.”

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.

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.”

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 Bell 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.”