JUST a few years back, Tim Blixseth saw Yellowstone as nothing short of his kingdom. He described himself in other media interviews as the club’s “benevolent dictator,” and with Ms. Blixseth at his side, he ruled with a velvet fist.

People who knew them say that Mr. Blixseth — who had made his fortune in timber, then famously lost it, then made it again — was the visionary, the dreamer, the one whose salesmanship and sheer audacity made the club a reality. Early on, Ms. Blixseth served as chief operating officer for a time. But her knack for hospitality was her real contribution.

Members say, mostly with fondness, that Ms. Blixseth’s aesthetics were more madam than monarch. Indeed, décor in some parts of the clubhouse almost smacked of Montana bordello. There, just as at Porcupine Creek, quality met kitsch, with Persian carpets and antiques rubbing up against huge marble statues and a couch covered in real zebra skin.

“I mix centuries together,” Ms. Blixseth acknowledges. She opens an ornate trinket cabinet to retrieve a brown, gourdlike object. “Do you know what this is? A camel scrotum! It holds water.”

By design, Yellowstone welcomed only members who were willing to check their egos at the door — one of the club’s chief selling points.

“You go to Vail, everyone’s trying to show they’re the biggest guy on the planet: the newest Bogners, the fanciest car, the power table at the power restaurant,” says Brian Klein, a former Goldman Sachs vice president who joined Yellowstone in 1999. Such “hey look at me people” felt out of place at Yellowstone, says Mr. Klein, who now runs an investment management firm in Seattle.

Not that Yellowstone was a monument to austerity. Some homes had private elevators, wine cellars, movie theaters and spas, and one spec house — called the River Runs Through It home — featured an all-glass passageway to the guest quarters with a heated river flowing beneath it. For a while, the club had $1,000-a-head New Year’s Eve bashes, a sommelier and concierge service.

But members say such perks revealed more about the Blixseths than anyone else and contend that it was the club’s rustic spirit — not its bells and whistles — that attracted most people. That, and the A-list fellowship.

When it came to luring new prospects, Mr. Blixseth used the club’s best-known members as bait, according to members. In the early years, Jack Kemp, the former congressman who until his death in May was on the club’s honorary board of directors along with Dan Quayle, the former vice president, helped recruit. More recently, Mr. Chernin of the News Corporation — another board member and one of the first to build a home at the club — has done his part.

Len Hill, a former television executive turned real estate developer, says Mr. Blixseth courted him for a year to become a member, including a lunch at the club, where Mr. Blixseth hoped to close the deal. “You were in the entertainment business — you must know Peter Chernin,” he recalls Mr. Blixseth saying. Mr. Hill says that after he answered yes, “Tim waves, and mysteriously, Peter appears at the table.” (Mr. Chernin declined to be interviewed.)

Some members chafe at the perception that Yellowstone was a billionaires-only club. While many arrive via private jet, others fly commercial and everyone ends up at the same airport in Bozeman, about an hour north of the club. This helps explain why the Credit Suisse loan — the spending spree it enabled, the myriad legal actions it prompted, the bitter divorce it helped fuel — has been such a resounding bummer for members.

“The promise of the Yellowstone Club was somehow sacrificed to the madness of Yellowstone Club World. The plan that worked was held hostage to the ever more grandiose plan that didn’t,” Mr. Hill says. “There is more than enough material to create a roman à clef that would make ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty’ seem mild in comparison.”

LIKE every good drama, this one has an intriguing setup. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Mr. Blixseth grew up poor in Oregon and, he said in a magazine interview, executed his first deal when he was about 13 — buying three donkeys for $75 and reselling them as pack mules for $225. He briefly attended college, according to earlier profiles, but dropped out. Later came his timber deals.

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