Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(74)
Paepcke brought Aspen back to life. European in his taste, his ideas leaned toward quality rather than size. He had a vision for the weary town—one in which the unrecognized beauty would be made whole again and preserved. For almost fifteen years, until Paepcke died in 1960, Aspen developed largely according to these ideals. It remained small in scale and aristocratically unstylish. The agreement now is that these were the golden years.
Paepcke encouraged his friends and acquaintances to buy houses and fix them up, and he bought a good deal of property himself—though not for speculative reasons. He then came up with an ingenious idea to put the town back on the map. The two-hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth was in 1949, and the authorities in Frankfurt were somehow persuaded by Paepcke (who was of German descent) that the bicentennial celebration should be held in Colorado, in a remote spot that had been Indian wilderness when Goethe was born. Celebrities such as John Marquand, Gary Cooper, and Norman Cousins were already frequent visitors, and now Thornton Wilder, Arthur Rubinstein, Ortega y Gasset, Gregor Piatigorsky, and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra came to Aspen. Albert Schweitzer—it was his only visit to America—gave the dedication address. A tone was established that somehow endures. Today, for all the town’s swinging dentists and gilded youth, there are still Nobel Prize–winning physicists and great musicians playing tennis, having lunch on the mall and hiking the trails.
In addition to the people Paepcke first brought in, there were others who somehow heard about Aspen, came, and stayed. Some had been members of the 10th Mountain Division, which had trained in Colorado at Camp Hale during the war. Others were the black sheep of prominent families, forever on the prowl for new haunts. There were young people, eccentrics, and talented unknowns. For a long time, Aspen was a kind of “in” secret, a refuge too perfect to be spoiled, and those who moved there were aware of their good fortune.
“It had everything I was really looking for,” says Andre Ulrych, who came to Aspen in 1968. He had been designing and building houses in the East. “It had a small-town quality without a small-town mentality. An interesting mix of people. Then there was the natural beauty of the place and the climate.”
Ulrych taught skiing for several years, opened a successful restaurant with his wife, and afterward launched the most elegant disco in town. He doesn’t seem like the owner of a gin mill. Born in Warsaw, where his father was a government minister, Ulrych has a degree in architecture from the University of London, good manners, and clear blue Polish eyes.
Andre’s, as Ulrych’s establishment is called, occupies an old restored building in the middle of town and has become the summit of Aspen nightlife. On the first two floors are the restaurant and bar, on the third is the discotheque. In a long room pulsing with strobe lights and roaring with sound, a gala goes on every night. Along the wall are deep sofas and chairs piled with fur coats and parkas; in the morning, packets of white powder are occasionally found between the cushions. There are beards above white turtlenecks, long hair, warm smiles exchanged beneath cowboy hats. In the beginning Ulrych sold memberships, and there was the impression that the club was exclusive, an answer to the desire of some residents for the kind of establishment one finds in St. Moritz—luxurious, private, and a natural resting place for Viva clones and young women who like to travel in private jets. In fact, Andre’s is open to everyone for a small fee. The liveliness increases as the evening wears on, and toward midnight the town’s waiters and sommeliers, finished with work, begin to show up at the bar to see who’s new. At 2:00 AM. everything closes, and almost anyone can go home with somebody. This is called the two o’clock shuffle, and last-minute consultations can be seen on every corner when the dance halls and bars empty out.
Strangely, all this success strikes a melancholy note in Ulrych. “I see this town going completely crazy now,” he says. “The people we all knew years ago who were into a certain kind of lifestyle can’t afford to live here anymore. There are so many people coming in, especially in the winter.
“I see an incredible degeneration in the human race in this country,” Ulrych says sadly.
The owner of the Jerome Bar, a popular establishment three blocks away, has a more positive view of things. Michael Solheim, like everyone in town, comes from somewhere else—in this case Chicago. Good-natured, sleek, he was running an espresso house in Sun Valley when he met the then mayor of Aspen, who took a liking to him. “I’m the mayor,” he informed Solheim. “The city has a lease on the Jerome Hotel, and you can run the bar.”
It wasn’t to be quite that easy. Solheim did in fact come to Aspen, but he had to run a paint and wallpaper company for five years before he could convince the new owner of the Jerome, who had bought the hotel in the meantime, that he could turn “a badly lit room full of African spears and winos” into a successful bar. Solheim finally took over in 1972, redecorated the interior in the style of fashionable San Francisco bars he admired, and met with immediate success.
The Jerome Hotel is one of the landmarks of the town. A massive brick structure, it was built in 1889 at the height of the silver boom. Never seriously modernized, it remains one of the most interesting places to stay in Aspen. The food in the bar is nothing exceptional, and the most popular drink is white wine (“We’ll go weeks without making a martini,” Solheim says), but there is the spirit of the place: it is pure Aspen. People have been known to ride through the door on horses. “Of course, there’s no sign saying that’s specifically prohibited,” Solheim allows.