To-Be-Announced

The past couple of years have seen a sort of glamour return to Sun Valley, bringing a visibility that many habitués find most unwelcome. For the Old Guard, the inaccessibility of Sun Valley defined its pleasures. For Ronnie Balcom (who first came the year after the Lodge was opened) and his wife, Lulu (formerly Vanderbilt), it would begin with a two-day journey from Palm Beach to Chicago, a day's wait, then a night, a day, and a night on the Portland Rose to Ketchum. "They would throw you off the train at seven in the morning. We would be picked up on sleds," Ronnie Balcom recalls. Rocky Converse, then Mrs. Gary Cooper, remembers cutting down the trees on what was to be the main run.

Things grew less primitive, but the privacy remained. The well-heeled and well-known have always been around Sun Valley, but it was considered uncouth to pay much attention. "This place is about physical activity. It's the mindlessness that makes it great. It isn't about celebrity," says Pamela Sue Martin, lately of Dynasty. "You might run into Clint [Eastwood—a regular of many years] buying groceries," says a local. "The meeting places are the post office, where everybody has a box, Atkinson's Market, and Chateau Drug. But it's no big deal." The "social life" other resorts indulge in barely exists. "The only real socializing is at Christmas," Dick Zanuck says. That, and an occasional late night at one of the shit-kicking cowboy bars, like the Pioneer Saloon, or Whiskey Jacques. "But this isn't a bimbo boomtown, like Aspen," says Marjoe Gortner, child evangelist turned actor turned celebrity auctioneer and tireless promoter of the place.

It was finished by Christmas 1985, and soon, as their workmen had predicted, they found themselves using the place just as much during the summer. Now Zanuck, an obsessive skier, where Lili is merely keen, can also bang himself up hiking and biking. It is typical of "new" Sun Valley that Zanuck, suddenly territorial, has paid eight times the price of his original plot of land for a piece the same size next door. But, as unshowbizzy as most regulars, he feels fears of the wholesale celebritifiation of the place are overblown.