Once and Future Queen

There is a restaurant in Paris on Boulevard Montparnasse that has been there since the 1920s, the decade of myth, the decade of Josephine Baker, Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Stravinsky, so many others. The restaurant is called La Coupole and there one saw and still sees le tout Paris, which translated roughly means “everyone.” A certain kind of everyone, that is, the kind that writes or is written about.

La Coupole is very big and has always stayed open late. Marvelous faces, some with reputations attached, others hoping to achieve them, were there at all hours, framed by the worn red material of the banquettes, eating, drinking, and deep in conversations one could not hear or even imagine. Over it all was the haze of talk and the faint aroma of Gauloise cigarettes. You might see a dozen people you knew, you might see no one. Below was a dance hall—I don’t recall ever going down to it but it lent its presence.

A few years ago the restaurant changed hands. The new owner gave it a minor facelift and much needed refurbishing. The walls were freshly painted, the banquettes recovered, the inconvenient bar relocated. The room is still huge, the service impeccable, and the prices are not much higher. There are still crowds at night and all the animation one could desire, but something is different: the place has been perfected and in the process has become a kind of replica of itself, wonderful as long as you have never seen the original.

The queen of American ski towns, Aspen, is a bit like that. At its heart, Coupole-like, is the old Hotel Jerome, the exterior looking the same as ever but, with the exception of the lobby and bar, completely done over and raised to a luxurious level. In the former Jerome the rooms were homely and the plumbing questionable and one used to be able to rent Parlor A or B, the best in the hotel, for parties. The price was about $30. The windows, then as now, looked out toward Aspen Mountain and over the glittering town which in memory was always white with snow. In those days the Jerome bar was the chief gathering place. You could ski to it right down the streets from the bottom of the mountain, and from the closing of the lifts until past midnight everyone was there or had been. One beautiful woman—the town then held only a recognized handful of them—was said to have picked up a different man there to take home every night.

No conventions or groups came to Aspen then, nothing larger than a family or two unless it was the gathering of business executives that came every other week to seminars at the Aspen Institute. Skiing was not still in its infancy but certainly in its careless youth, the days when one stuck skis in the snow at the bottom of the lift before it opened to mark a place in line and then went off to breakfast, days before double black diamonds though the runs were the same.

As a boy, a true city boy in days when one traveled by rail and the great coast-to-coast meteors had a barbershop and chefs who prepared real food, I never heard of skiing. I first encountered it in Europe about ten years after the war. It was winter and Europe was still poor but the sheets in the hotels were crisp and freshly laundered. Perhaps it was this first experience that somehow made winter and cold essential factors.

I like to ski in snowstorms and on icy days. I like snow-laden boughs and a silence that seems like that of the North. It’s true one sees them skiing by on spring days in bikinis and shorts and going up in snowmobiles to steep, remote bowls in May and June—I have gone up myself after the lifts have closed for the season, climbing on mountain skis for hours and coming down, the snow wetter and wetter, in much shorter time, but to me this all seems somehow larky. For me the real days of skiing begin when summer is long gone.

There is something called the true life which I cannot describe and which perhaps varies as one sees it from different angles and at different times. At one point it is travel, at another a certain woman, at another a house somewhere with a view you will worship till you die. It is a life apart from money and to the side of ambition, a life lived in one way or another for beauty. It does not last indefinitely, but the survivors are usually not poorer for it. There was a woman in Aspen who one day confronted an old, conservative judge on the street and told him, “I’ve been married five times, I’ve run whorehouses, I’ve been all over the world. I’m not like you. I’ve lived.” Perhaps that cannot be classified precisely as the true life, but something in the boast is the same.

There was a true life in the mountains around Aspen—the girl who lived year-round in a teepee up past Lenado with a white horse in the meadow and her little child, others who had cabins or old houses, new-age people never to be old. There was a true life and though diminishing it exists still, the sky dark with autumn, the wind beginning to blow, the homeless bees wandering around the shacks being insulated, alighting desperately on clothing, a dry flower, a bit of sage. Winter is coming. There will be no survivors.

Skiing all day, with someone you like, riding up together, drinking the light. Runs at the top of which you could murmur And gentlemen in England, now abed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap . . .

Billy Kidd once listed his favorites in the West, the hardest ones. Many were only names to me, though not Elevator Shaft or the Ridge of Bell, which are both in Aspen, or White Out in Steamboat Springs, or Prima in Vail. He left out, I don’t know why, the long ones in Telluride—Spiral Staircase and the Plunge, at the top of which, late in the day, the local desperadoes, male and female, gather for the last descent. In the ski shop at the bottom one day I overheard a girl talking about Spider Sabich and his being shot to death in Aspen the day before. We listened to the evening news as one does in wartime. It was true.

Sabich was admirable, both in character and appearance. I never skied with him, of course—he was a professional champion, the first real one—but I saw him occasionally on friendly terms. He was killed in a lovers’ quarrel, a crime of passion, and missed the second half of what would have been an enviable life. It was impossible to imagine him as ex-anything, a has-been—he was too confident and personable for that.

So, winter with its snow, the ground all white. In the house across the street a woman in a bathrobe opens the balcony doors, brushes some snow from the railing, and looks toward the mountain before stepping back into the warmth of the room. It’s barely eight o’clock, there is time for coffee, to dress. The bed will go unmade. She will carry her skis to the gondola, the entire world of fresh snow above. Nothing is more thrilling than a talented girl skiing—boldness, grace, speed.

Morning. From another house, a large one, bursts a yellow Labrador followed by a black one and then a young boy who walks them every morning, hands in pockets, long trailing ski cap on his head. There was a time when all the license plates of town began with ZG, and when the dogs were more or less citizens and everyone knew to whom they belonged.

I remember the day that Tim Howe, at one time in his life a marine biologist but for far longer a veteran figure of the ski patrol, went up the steps of the courthouse in the uncharacteristic outfit of blazer and tie to defend his dog against the charge of running loose. The dog, a handsome old black Labrador wearing a bandanna around his neck, was arthritic and nearly blind. He had to be carried into the courtroom.

He had lived all his life accustomed to freedom, his owner pleaded, it had been his birthright, and it was inhumane to expect him now to be attached to a leash.

The charge sheet read that the police had to chase him for six blocks. Was this correct, the judge asked? Yes, sir. “It doesn’t speak well for the fleetness of the force,” the judge observed. “Mr. Howe,” he then said, “you have to understand that Aspen has changed—it’s no longer a place where dogs can sit in the middle of the street or run free.”

I forget the outcome; perhaps there was a fine. One might claim it was the sale of the Aspen Ski Corporation to non-skiing billionaires, or the advent of Hollywood stars at Christmas, or the construction of the huge Ritz-Carlton Hotel, but in my memory it was the trial of Spade, Tim Howe’s distinguished old dog, that marked the vanishing of the old queen and the coronation of the new.

Rocky Mountain Magazine

1994