Checkmate at the Yellowstone Club
Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich
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| Jeff Minton |
Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in all. They’re due any minute. The zipper on her sternum-baring cocktail dress is jammed. Do you think it’s too tight? Can somebody help her?
Porcupine Creek is lavish, with a 240-acre private golf course and a pool guarded by bronze lions. Many visitors have seen all that, plus the automated fountain that splashes at the end of her 1,700-foot driveway.
But so far, only Ms. Blixseth’s good friends have wandered around the private space inside: the prayer room, the gym, the beauty parlor, the wet room, the cozy massage alcoves and the private theater adorned with murals; then there’s the 18th-century French furniture, the Italian stained glass, the bedroom suite from the Vatican, the ancient Tibetan Tankas. Until this day, she has never hosted a charity event inside her home. Given the circumstances, though, it’s the best she can do.
“I can’t write a check this year,” she says, referring to her usual gift to a shelter for battered women. Her Gulfstream IV has been grounded. Her jewelry, mostly sold. To help pay the bills, her boyfriend even had to sell his Bentley.
Edra Denise Blixseth, age 55, is tiny, barely 5 foot 3, but she is at the center of a huge financial mess. According to personal bankruptcy papers her lawyer filed in March, she owes $500 million to $1 billion and has assets of barely half that, almost none of them liquid. Earlier this month, the court approved the sale of one of her most prized possessions — the private ski resort in Big Sky, Mont., known as the Yellowstone Club — to the private equity firm of one of its members for $115 million. Just a year ago, that same buyer, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, had been willing to pay $400 million for the club.
The Yellowstone Club, a 13,600-acre playground 20 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, may be the world’s lone members-only ski resort. Its pristine natural beauty and remote location have attracted wealthy skiers who prize their privacy, including Bill Gates of Microsoft; Barry Sternlicht, the hotelier; and Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation.
In one of the signature, fin de siècle moments of our passing Gilded Age, the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 protection last November; four months later, Ms. Blixseth followed suit — a club and its doyenne, sucked into a financial downdraft that has wounded even once-untouchable elites.
Marketed with the phrase “Private Powder,” Yellowstone is the anti-Aspen — luxurious, sure, but discreet and child-friendly. Ask members what makes it so special, and more than one offers this simple fact: There, and nowhere else, the family of the world’s richest man can ski without bodyguards. One club member — who, like many Yellowstone members, requested anonymity so as not to be seen as violating the club’s tradition of not blabbing about one another — recalls Mr. Gates’s saying that his family once tried Vail but their need for security “made us look like jerks. Here, we don’t need it.” That’s because the club has long been kept safe by former Secret Service agents, and who can put a price tag on that?
“Once you ski there, you never want to go anywhere else,” says Burt Sugarman, a Beverly Hills businessman who with his wife, the “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart, was among the club’s first members.
Steve Burke, the chief operating officer of Comcast, has a place at Yellowstone. As do Todd Thomson, the former head of Citigroup’s private banking unit; Robert Greenhill, founder of the investment bank Greenhill & Company; Greg LeMond, a Tour de France winner; Annika Sorenstam, the Swedish golf star; Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and about 250 other low-key rich folks.
Membership has its price: a minimum of $250,000 to join, plus the cost of a $5 million to $35 million mountainside home, plus annual dues of about $20,000, according to members.
You should do a follow up invetigative article. Nothing has changed at the Yellowstone Club. Now the corruption is focused on it’s hiring and firing practices and they try to eliminate all minority emplyoees.
http://www.bozemantalks.com/2010/07/25/the-yellowstone-club-strikes-out-again