Scandal Aspen, Part II
In a town and valley where scandal is as common as tomorrow’s newspapers, some stand out. In May of 2007, we discussed the shooting death of Spider Sabich, the escape of serial killer Ted Bundy, the murder of alleged local drug king-pin Steve Grabow, the Dr. Feelgood killing and Ken Lay’s heart attack. Welcome to the sequel.
MARGERY URIS SUICIDE
Longtime Aspen resident Leon Uris, who passed away at 77 in 2003, was a highly successful, internationally best-selling author when he married his second wife, Margery, in 1968. Famous for "Exodus," "Topaz" and "Trinity," among his many books and movies, Uris’s large and luxurious A-Frame-styled house was the first really famous home on Red Mountain. It was near there, in February of 1969, where Margery was found dead of what were eventually ruled self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
When Uris divorced his first wife in 1968, it followed 23 years of marriage and what The Aspen Times described as “prolonged litigation.” He and Margery, a New York model almost 20 years younger, had barely been married six months when she apparently killed herself. Because there were three shots fired during the act (suggestive, at the least, of poor, but determined, marksmanship), and because three-shot suicides are unusual, the death was the subject of a full inquest.
Said Uris at her services: “On the surface, there was no apparent reason why Margery took her life. She was in good health, young, beautiful and we were deeply in love.” Yet at the inquest he testified that they had been quarreling so badly for so long that he decided to hide the loaded handguns they had in their home.
The evening she died Uris had telephoned his Los Angeles lawyer to discuss a divorce, and he testified that he had mentioned separation plans to friend Walt Smith while skiing with him that day. Smith stopped by later to introduce Margery to a mutual business associate of his and Leon’s from Denver.
“Lee said, ‘Margery was a bad girl and she’s up in the room’,” recalls Smith. Smith then went to shave in the downstairs bathroom before leaving for a music gig that evening. His associate, Mrs. Baumgartner, waited near the front door of the house, supposedly the only way in or out of the building. She later testified she did not see Margery leave nor hear any gunshots. Equally significantly, she did not see Leon Uris leave, either, confirming his story that he had remained in the house. But Baumgartner also testified she had left the couch near the door at one point to use the telephone.
Uris came to the bathroom around 7:15 and asked Smith if he had heard any shots. Smith, who was using an electric razor, hadn’t. Uris told him Margery had left the house and he noticed that a gun was missing. When Smith and Uris couldn’t locate her, the sheriff’s office was called. It was 10:00 a.m. the following day when deputies found Margery on the road above the house. One shot from the .38 caliber revolver went through her purse. One reportedly “glanced off” her head. The one that killed her was administered through the mouth.
According to Uris family friend Martie Sterling (who was asked in the next day to help with phone calls), in the weeks leading to the suicide, “Marge had begged not to be divorced and threatened to do herself in.” Sterling says that Margery Edward’s own family told her she had previously tried to kill herself, twice. And Walt Smith has spoken to a former boyfriend of Margery’s who said the same thing. In spite of all that, notes Sterling, “there are still people who think Lee murdered her.”
CAT FIGHTS—IVANA AND MARLA, DEWI AND MINNIE
When Ivana Trump and Marla Maples encountered each other on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1990, the story went around the world in at least three or four different versions, one of which made the front page of the next day’s New York Post. What is known for sure is that both women were in Aspen, with The Donald, at the same time. And only one of them, Ivana, was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.
Some claim Ivana approached Marla in Bonnie’s restaurant and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!” Others say the confrontation occurred on the ski slope at the bottom of Little Nell, where they threw snowballs and hissed at each other. Ivana has said, "She came to me on the mountain and told me she was in love with my husband and they were having an affair. It was extremely painful.” Still others insist that the real source of the contretemps was that both were wearing identical expensive ski suits, possibly purchased by Trump for each of them. Whatever really happened, the result was divorce court.
Another famous Aspen cat fight also resulted in a court date, this time for Dewi Sukarno, one of the wives of the late Indonesian President Sukarno. While at a jet-set soiree at Primavera restaurant on January 2nd, 1992, hosted by German Prince Heinrich Hanaii-Schaumberg, Dewi allegedly slashed the face of another woman with a champagne glass. The victim was socialite Victoria (Minnie) Osmena, granddaughter of a former president of the Philippines. The cut required 37 stitches and Dewi was charged with second-degree assault.
Just a few months earlier at a similar party in Ibiza, Spain, Osmena had announced her intention of running for vice president of the Philippines and Dewi Sukarno had burst out laughing. According to rumors, Osmena, still rankled, had been discussing Mrs. Sukarno rather loudly at the party in Aspen, repeatedly referring to her as “that geisha.” While it has been widely reported that Dewi was a 19-year-old geisha in her homeland of Japan when she met President Sukarno, Dewi has always disputed this.
She also denied intentionally attacking Osmena. Friends of Dewi’s say that she insisted she went over to speak to Osmena, stumbled and broke her glass, which accidentally grazed Osmena’s forehead. “How can you charge me with second-degree assault with intent to kill?” she was quoted in the New York Times. “You don’t go to a New Year’s party thinking to kill Minnie Osmena! In any party a glass can break.”
Ultimately, Dewi pled out to disorderly conduct and served a 34-day sentence in the Pitkin County jail where, like Claudine Longet, she was allowed to decorate her own cell.
HUNTER THOMPSON—SEX, DRUGS AND DYNAMITE
No less an authority than Hunter Thompson, writing about Aspen in his book Kingdom Of Fear, noted that “Hideous scandals involving rich perverts, depraved children, and degenerate Hollywood whores looking for publicity are so common here as to be politely tolerable and even stylish...”
Of course he knew whereof he spoke, having been involved in more than one local scandal himself. Indeed, there are those who maintain his entire life was a scandal. His most famous peccadillo in this valley took place in February of 1990 when he was arrested for alleged third-degree sexual assault of porn film actress Gail Palmer-Slater. She stated she had come to his house to interview him and he twisted her left breast when she wouldn’t get in his hot tub.
District attorney Milt Blakey, who would soon thereafter be dismissed and charged with perjury (unrelated to Thompson’s case), meanwhile used Palmer-Slater’s allegations that she had seen Hunter plunge his face into a pile of cocaine or PCP and snort deeply while she was there, to authorize an extensive and highly questionable search of his home. The yield was relatively small: less than a tenth of a gram of coke, thirty-nine hits of LSD, four and one half ounces of pot and four Valiums. Thompson suggested that the headline should be: “Lifestyle Police Raid Home Of “Crazed” Gonzo Journalist; Eleven-Hour Search By Six Trained Investigators Yields Nothing But Crumbs.”
Given the amount and variety of drugs to have passed through his home in nearly 30 years at that point, many found it remarkable he could locate and remove as much as he had prior to the raid. Complicating matters, however, were four sticks of dynamite and three blasting caps that were also uncovered, along with a triple-beam scale and a .22 caliber machine gun. The initial tally was three felony drug possession charges, one felony drug use charge, a felony explosives possession charge, one misdemeanor drug charge and a misdemeanor sexual assault charge, carrying a total of decades of potential incarceration.
Thompson fumed that he was set up (he was known to be an active target of DEA agents in the area) and might go to prison because of a crooked DA and a bimbo. While summarizing what he felt should be everyone’s anger about his railroading, Thompson wrote in Songs of the Doomed: “Tom Wolfe, after all, had never disgraced his publisher by running amok in public and twisting women’s nipples... and Norman Mailer has stabbed more people than Brutus and they never put him in jail.”
Soon he turned the whole thing into theater, arriving for court in a blonde, pig-tailed wig, riding in a red convertible as fans paraded in his support. The DA finally concluded “that the people would be unable to sustain their burden of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, at trial.” The front page of the Aspen Daily News announced that, “Most of Aspen seemed to stand up and cheer Wednesday afternoon when word ripped through town that sex and drug charges will be dropped against local anti-hero and writer Hunter S. Thompson.”
THE KENNEDY CURSE
The Kennedy family has been coming to Aspen since the 1960s, when Bobby and Ethel would visit their friends Andy Williams and Claudine Longet here. Since then, nearly all of the Kennedys have been to the valley. Several still come here regularly and are well-liked in town. Unfortunately, even here they are accompanied by The Curse, or The Plot, or the Dysfunction. Whatever you call it, it’s bad luck and scandal writ large.
When you’re a Kennedy, everything takes on tabloid overtones. Several of the Kennedy kids over the years have had trouble here just as they have in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. A couple of them made the papers in the late 1970s for allegedly trying to buy Darvon with a bogus scrip at the old Aspen Drug. That earned a slap on the wrist and the derision of locals whose main response was, “Darvon? Who tries to buy Darvon?”
Several of the younger Kennedys were regular visitors at Hunter Thompson’s and he supposedly supplied Ethel with an alias she had to use here in order to get people to rent homes or condos to her. Properties the family used were frequently reported to have been trashed by the kids, who liked to put cherry bombs in toilets and play other sophisticated pranks. One local caterer sued Ethel over an unpaid bill, requiring William Kennedy Smith to make a court appearance here on her behalf.
When Senator Ted Kennedy was in his party-monster phase, rumors say that he often showed up at the old Paradise Club after hours, banging on the alley door demanding to be let in. His comings and goings at private parties here where lots of coke was available were standard gossip fodder for years.
All of this was, at most, mildly dysfunctional in a town like Aspen. Then the Curse, or maybe the Plot, struck. On New Year’s Eve, 1997, at 4:15 p.m. on Aspen Mountain, 39-year old Michael Kennedy was killed when he ran head first into a tree while playing football on skis with other members of the family. The accident was horrific and traumatizing to everyone who saw it and occurred as the slopes were closing for the day, while the ski patrol was waiting to sweep the mountain.
Some members of the patrol were longtime acquaintances of the Kennedys and had warned them that their traditional football games were dangerous and asked them not to play. The family felt that by waiting until the slopes were nearly empty they would be less of a problem for other skiers. Even so, there were witnesses who reported that William had just caught a pass and was going fast when he struck the tree.
The patrol arrived within minutes and administered CPR all the way to the waiting ambulance. But massive head and neck injuries were insurmountable. The tree was reportedly cut down before the mountain opened the next day to remove the potential for morbid shrines. Some seized on Michael’s death as further evidence of the Kennedy Curse, and others talk about an assassination plot that reached from JFK through Bobby to David, Michael and John Kennedy, Junior. In Aspen, where death in the mountains isn’t a rarity, many saw the tragedy as simply what can happen, especially in a large, adventurous and willful family.
BLACK WIDOWS
When alleged cocaine kingpin Steve Grabow was killed by a pipe bomb in a Jeep in Aspen in 1985, he left behind a widow whom some claimed he had only married so that she couldn’t testify against him. Not much was known about her past, although she was rumored to have been involved with a Grabow associate who had disappeared in South Florida in the early 1980s, whose body was never found.
The next time she made the local news was when her most recent boyfriend’s large home in Woody Creek burned down in the late 1980s. This time her significant other was said to have made his money by armoring cars for everyone from Arabs to gangsters, and to have a contract out on his life. The night of the fire, local wags still talk about how the wife of a big-time musician and another well known local woman had to leap into snowbanks out of second story windows wearing nothing but their furs and jewelry, while a famous actor was asleep downstairs on the couch.
In 2006 another Black Widow may have surfaced locally when Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents searched the Aspen home of Pamela Phillips, named as a “person of interest” in the 1996 pipe-bomb slaying of her ex-husband. Tucson businessman Gary Lee Triano was blown up outside of a Tucson golf course three years after his divorce from Phillips, and after being involved in several shaky business deals.
Phillips, who moved to Aspen following her divorce, turned out to have close ties to a suspect in the Triano slaying. Her two daughters were also the sole beneficiaries of Triano’s $2 million life insurance policy. Since the ATF raid, wherein computers and paperwork were seized that still haven’t been returned, Phillips whereabouts have not been known. Reportedly she hasn’t been in Aspen for some time, where rumors abound about her unusual finances that include large, untraceable withdrawals. [Update: Since this story was originally published in early 2007, Phillips has been charged with Triano's murder and is at large, possible in Switzerland.]
