Words: Kitt Doucette 2018-12-10 15:13:07
It’s midwinter in Sun Valley, ID, 8:30 a.m., bluebird and cold. It snowed an inch or two last night. Snow squeaks underneath our boots as we walk to the lift, anticipation of those first turns quickening our stride. Our breaths puff crystalline clouds into the cold air. We drop our skis on the snow and step in. Thump. Thump. Click. Click. There’s no lift line. Hardly ever is. The smiling mustached liftie scans our passes. Beep. Beep. Recognition comes with a quick glance up. “Good morning, Jann!” It’s a familiar conversation. Not everyone in Sun Valley knows who Jann Wenner is, but a lot of them do. The place is full of baby boomers who grew up reading Wenner’s magazine, Rolling Stone, religiously, just like this happy liftie. “Morning, Bob,” Jann replies and I can’t tell if he knows Bob the liftie personally or is just reading his nametag. “How many days is it today?” Jann’s asking about the number of ski days recorded on his pass. He asks the same question daily. He’s hoping to ski the same number of days this winter as his age. He’s 72, but a thick head of dark hair and his youthful exuberance on the hill dial that particular measuring tape back by a decade, maybe more. “Forty-two today, Jann,” Bob says as we pole past him and onto Warm Springs’ Challenger lift. “Have fun up there!” It’s just before President’s Day weekend and we have the place to ourselves—partly because a few hundred bucks and a private instructor let you get on the lift 30 minutes before the mountain opens to the general public at 9 a.m., but also because it’s a Wednesday and once again the forecasted storm barely nicked Sun Valley. Maybe everyone went to Jackson. The lift scoops us up gently, lifting our skis off the ground as Warm Springs Creek gurgles beneath us. We sail up Bald Mountain on the high-speed quad. It’s too cold this morning for Jann to check his phone for emails from the office in New York, so our conversation turns to the task at hand. Two solitary tracks set by ski patrol on Warm Springs—a top-to-bottom, 3,000-plus-vertical-foot, absolute Cadillac of a ski run swooping down a natural gulley—confirm our initial diagnosis. Buttery corduroy covered by an inch or two of light flakes—as smooth as it gets. Jann’s favorite conditions on his favorite mountain—the man is in his happy place. With a conspiratorial grin he pulls out a plastic bag of chocolate chip cookies and takes a nibble. Some of Jann’s closest friends are on their way to Sun Valley for the holiday weekend. Names like Bruce and Patti, Tom and Rita, Mickey, Johnny, and Liv, who is dating one of Jann’s handsome sons, are mentioned in passing. The casual inference transcends name-dropping but can’t help spiking the conversation with a touch of celebrity glamour and gossip. Powerful pop culture gatekeepers don’t really exist anymore, but not that long ago they certainly did, and Jann was definitely one of them. He’s cried with John Lennon, partied with Mick Jagger, hugged Bruce Springsteen as he walked off stage, done drugs with Hunter S. Thompson, taken acid with the Grateful Dead, sung karaoke with Tom Hanks, played guitar with Bob Dylan, exchanged favorite books with David Bowie, interviewed U.S. presidents on Air Force One, and is expecting a call from his good buddy Bono later this afternoon. Right now, however, Jann is smiling like a mischievous schoolboy playing hookie as he pulls his poles out from under his leg, wraps the straps around his wrists and clicks them together twice. Tink. Tink. Racer ready. The sun’s first rays bloom golden and sparkling over the summit’s crest as we’re lifted above the peak’s shadow. Bald Mountain’s extraordinary 360-degree view expands around us as we push off the chair. The sky is a piercing cobalt blue. Layers of unmolested ridgelines covered in white ripple away in every direction. Evergreens laced in the same silk stand quietly at attention. “Dear God, it’s beautiful,” Jann says with a contented sigh and wide smile. After a few quick stretches while savoring the view, we point our skis downhill, picking up speed quickly. We swoop down Christmas Ridge in the early morning sunshine and roll unimpeded onto Christmas lift with euphoric giggles. Like an addict falling off the wagon or a wild animal let out of its cage, his inner ski bum raged. When Jann learned to ski at Squaw Valley, CA, during family trips with his parents—who met at a ski shop in New York while signing up for a trip to Hunter Mountain in the early 1940s—it was love at first slide. His dad was a passionate skier and skiing was decidedly cool, especially in the ’50s and early ’60s at Squaw Valley. “I just fell in love with every part of skiing, right away,” Jann says. “I have such fond memories of leaving with my dad at 4:00 in the morning, stopping for breakfast pancakes outside San Rafael by 5:30, putting chains on my dad’s old car. Then we’d be on the hill by 9 and spend the entire day skiing. The whole skiing trip was just a grand adventure and I loved every second of it.” High school took Jann from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and away from his beloved Sierra, but he quickly identified himself as one of the few skiers in school and struck up loose friendships with the other snow sliders. Trips to Mammoth with his dad and to Bear Valley and Snow Summit on school-sponsored ski weeks kept his edges from rusting. “There were only a few other guys at school that really skied and we didn’t get to ski that much,” Jann recalls. “It was such a fringe thing at that time, but when we got on the hill we always had fun, skiing all day and goofing around.” College at UC Berkeley and the thriving youth culture brought Jann back to the Bay Area and skiing faded even further into the background as a love story interrupted. From the time Rolling Stone began in 1967 through the next decade or so, it was all rock ’n’ roll and Rolling Stone, all the time. In the first issue, Jann wrote, “You’re probably wondering what we’re trying to do. It’s hard to say: sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper. The name of it is Rolling Stone which comes from an old saying, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” By the mid-to-late ’70s, Jann was a wealthy man and budding political power player with a thriving magazine and a gaggle of rich and famous friends. “That’s when my doctor told me I was an absolute nervous wreck and really needed to do something about it,” Jann says. “I needed to get away from the stress and find a release. So I went to a ranch-spa place in Arizona for a few weeks. Resting and hiking a lot helped and I began to get back in good shape. That’s when it occurred to me how much I missed skiing.” He departed for Aspen. His old friend and creative sparring partner Hunter S. Thompson had set up shop in a nearby canyon and at that time Highland Bowl was the peak of radical in the American ski world. Aspen was also one hell of a party town. “I went to Aspen the first time to see Hunter,” Jann explains, “but Hunter was not a help for my skiing. I’d be at his place and we’d stay up all night and I wouldn’t get on the hill until 2 p.m. in the afternoon…so that was fun, but completely useless skiing-wise.” Aspen would eventually become like a second home to Jann from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, catapulting him back into the skiing life. Like an addict falling off the wagon or a wild animal let out of its cage, his inner ski bum raged. Helicopter skiing in British Columbia? Absolutely. A quick trip from New York to Aspen for a few turns and some fresh snow? Wheels up. Snowbird? Yup. Jackson Hole? You bet. Priorities were changed, meetings rescheduled. Skiing was a focus once again and woe be it to those who got in Jann-the-ski-bum’s way or slowed him down on the mountain. Hell, at one point he even met with Powder magazine cofounder Jake Moe about possibly buying the ski magazine. “That’s why I bought a jet,” Jann says with a chuckle, “I wanted to go to Aspen and ski as much as possible and getting there from New York any other way took too much time.” The first time I went skiing with Jann, he took a friend of his, who also happened to be a friend and ski client of mine, on a spur-of-the-moment trip from Sun Valley to the Yellowstone Club. I showed up ready to ski on Baldy when the friend smiled and said, “We’re going to Montana this morning. Would you like to come with us?” Forty-five minutes later we were blasting off in Jann’s G5 and sipping champagne. By lunchtime we’d been shredding the Yellowstone Club’s untracked ridgelines and chutes for a couple of hours. Evening found the three of us thoroughly skied out, drinking margaritas in the hot tub and talking about John Lennon’s musical genius. The main impression I got from spending that first day with Jann was twofold. First, he certainly knows how to live, have fun and enjoy life. Second, holy shit does he love to ski. When he hired me later that season for a day on Baldy, I found out about his predilection for high speeds. As an ex-ski-racer who fell in love with going fast early on and grew up listening to his parents’ rock ’n’ roll music, Jann was a dream client and we hit it off immediately. Yes, he tipped well, but mostly he was just really fun to ski with—easily one of the most ski-stoked people I’d ever met. He uses code names for certain runs, nibbling on pot cookies, hugging and high fiving friends and basically having the time of his life, every day. The joy of skiing, personified by a man Caroline Kennedy once called “the Jimmy Buffet of skiing.” Anyone who’s skied with Jann Wenner will tell you this: he likes to ski fast, really fast. Jann likes to ski fast more than anything. Sure, he’ll spend a few days every winter in a helicopter skiing untracked powder and will go on to finish this particular season up in Haines, AK. Annual trips to the European Alps are also part of the program, but what he really loves is banking turns while going “mach schnell,” which is probably somewhere between 50 and 60 mph. It’s why he loves Sun Valley so much. That singular combination of long, uninterrupted fall lines and precision grooming create an ideal playground for speed freaks like Jann. It’s a life-circle of sorts. In his home office in Idaho is a framed postcard with an old photo of Bald Mountain, sent to Jann by his father in the early 1960s. On the back of the postcard the senior Wenner has written, “Dear Jann, wish you were here. Best skiing I’ve ever had.” It wasn’t until the late ’80s that Jann found his way to Sun Valley during a stopover from Aspen to Blue River, BC on a heli-skiing trip. He immediately connected with Terry Palmer, an Olympic racer and stylish bon vivant at the time, and fell in love with Sun Valley’s small-town feel, friendly group of hot local skiers and unbroken fall lines. Having skied all over the world, Jann doesn’t take Sun Valley for granted. After one particularly good day, high on skiing and life, he sent a case of champagne and a heartfelt thank you letter to the snowmaking and grooming departments, in recognition of their “peerless perfection in the art of snowmaking and maintenance.” Skiing isn’t the only thing he likes that involves speed. The fast motorcycles in his garage speak to that. So do a few totaled sports cars during his wild past. Nowadays though, it’s mostly skiing and we spend the short lift ride discussing the cosmic nuances and celestial thrill found while gliding at high speed. The Warm Springs Cadillac cruiser is next and the feeling continues, a three-minute, 60 mph buzz of top-to-bottom goodness that turns us into blithering bags of stoke. The most absurd part being that we get to do it again and again and again, a beautiful hamster wheel of privileged recreation punctuated by moments of pure bliss. As we slide onto the lift after one particularly outstanding run, Jann, full to the brim with skiing’s potent elixir of freedom and adrenaline, along with a subtle dose of THC, exclaims to no one in particular, “WHAT AN AMAZING FUCKING FEELING!” His unbridled, stoke-filled statement makes perfect sense to me and every other skier within earshot. Occasionally the real world crashes the party. A phone call from New York would come in while he was on the lift or in the lodge. Jann, the powerful and mercurial business mogul, would rear his head and I often felt sorry for whoever was at the other end of the call. The conversations were always brisk and usually involved Jann saying no. He didn’t like it. They needed to do it again. The cover image was wrong. The story didn’t make any sense. Fix it. I don’t think he ever actually fired anyone on these calls, but there were a few times when it must have been a near thing. Running a media empire in New York from a ski mountain in Idaho came with a unique set of challenges, but Jann was adamant and skiing all winter was non-negotiable. He installed a satellite phone in his house to ensure uninterrupted WiFi and cell service and his iPhone is never far from his hands. Frequent trips to the Big Apple were required as the business mogul and ski bum learned to play nicely with each other. In the city, Jann was known, and sometimes straight-up feared, for his intense “my way or the highway” leadership style—a brazen and unrepentant risk taker at the helm of one of the most successful and recognizable media brands in the world. After three-and-a-half hours and 30,000 vertical feet of high-speed shredding, it’s time for coffee. The warmth of Seattle Ridge Lodge, a high-ceilinged chalet atop Sun Valley’s southernmost ridgeline, is a welcome comfort after the sub-zero temps outside. We set our gloves next to the large fire and Jann pulls out his iPhone while I go grab coffee. When I return, he’s on the phone with his son Gus, talking excitedly about how good the skiing is and putting pressure on him to come to Sun Valley for the holiday weekend. I set the coffee down and hear, “Gus, I’ve gotta call you back. Bono is on the other line. Get your ass out here already!” The conversation between Jann and Bono is punctuated by laughter, two old friends catching up and making plans to see each other. Jann inevitably starts talking about the skiing, relating some highlights from the morning. Lost in his own enthusiasm, he breaks down the intricacies of snow and slope for his buddy—a casual beginner skier at best—until Bono cuts him off, likely asking, “Jann, what the hell are you talking about?” Jann stops with a laugh, saying, “It’s just such an incredible feeling!” They say their goodbyes and make plans to meet up on some Caribbean island after the ski season ends. Jann sets the phone down, takes a long sip of coffee, smiles and looks out the floor-to-ceiling window muttering, “What a goddamn incredible feeling.” Back outside, Jann finds his skis, special-edition K2s made with The Rolling Stones’ iconic Hot Lips design that were ordered by Mick Jagger for Jann. We blast down a few quick runs on Seattle Ridge, but the crowd has started to fill in and the snow feels cut up and scraped off compared to the morning’s buttery glory. On the lift, a call comes in about Lady Gaga’s ridiculous rider request for this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that makes Jann laugh out loud. Then it’s another call about an HBO documentary in the works. A few more hot laps on Greyhawk—beautifully steep and still smooth at 2:30 p.m.—to finish the day and it’s unanimous, a five-star day all around. “Same time tomorrow?” Jann asks with a grin. A couple months later I find myself backstage with Jann, Gus, and Bruce Springsteen in Nashville. It’s my first Springsteen concert and the Boss lives up to all the hype. At one point, I, one weed cookie deep and completely enthralled by the show, look over at Jann. He turns to me and smiles, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment, and I recognize the look immediately. It’s the same one I see after every good ski run. I lift my head and shout toward the lights above, “Goddamn, what an incredible feeling!” Photo Caption: “Here I am, 21 years old in San Francisco at my first office, working on the mock-up of the first issue of Rolling Stone,” Jann Wenner says. Worth noting is the iconic Rolling Stone script logo in the background, created by legendary psychedelic artist Rick Griffin. Photo: Baron Wolman
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