Alexander Cushing, who persuaded Olympic leaders to hold the 1960 Winter Games at his new resort in Squaw Valley, Calif., which at the time of his application had a single chairlift and a 50-room lodge, died Sunday in Newport, R.I. He was 92.
The cause was pneumonia, his family said.
By building a ski resort that Olympic officials confirmed met the highest standards, Mr. Cushing helped elevate American skiing to the level of the great European centers. The Games were the first televised on a daily basis, inspiring the tens of thousands of middle-class Americans then beginning to ski.
They were also the first Winter Games in the Western United States.
Mr. Cushing, an Eastern socialite not averse to blue-blooded understatement, liked to say he had applied for the Games as a publicity stunt.
“I had no more interest in getting the Games than the man in the moon,” he said in an interview with Time magazine in 1959.
Unlike the founders of Vail and Aspen and other Western ski areas, Mr. Cushing was not a crack skier returning from World War II alpine combat with dreams of building a mountain mecca. Indeed, he made it something of a bragging point that he could not ski very well.
Continue reading the main story“I have an affinity more to the sea than the mountains,” he said in a biography prepared by his company, the Squaw Valley Ski Corporation.
But as the pioneers of the ski industry gradually sold out — the Harrimans of Sun Valley, the Nitzes and Paepckes of Aspen, Peter W. Seibert of Vail — Mr. Cushing clung to Squaw Valley, for years taking a salary of just $20,000, paying no dividends and plowing profits back into the resort.
As a result, at his death he was one of the few founders of the postwar American ski industry still in control of the winter wonderland he started. His personality was inextricably mixed with that of Squaw Valley.
Mr. Cushing was a shrewd lawyer, dealmaker and corporate cajoler who favored a tweed jacket cut by Davies of London over mass-produced ski clothing. He liked to wear a red bandanna.
His willfulness was legendary, as he repeatedly and flagrantly defied environmental and safety regulations. So were the social grace and promotional zeal that made his mountain into a Hollywood colony frequented by Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby and Sophia Loren.
His playfulness was suggested by the film-festival-cum-cocktail-party he held at the top of his mountain in 1965. It honored Douglas Dumbrille, the dignified villain of many movies, not all memorable, and attracted Manhattan socialites in Pucci gowns.
But Mr. Cushing’s conquering gift was gab: his first wife’s only public comment about him after their divorce was that he was good company. He called his Olympic sales campaign “a snow job.”
An interesting question was whether Mr. Cushing believed his own snow job. Associates insisted that he was secretly hopeful of winning the Games even as he scoffed that his application was a grab for publicity. Squaw Valley certainly had splendid qualities, most obviously 450 inches of annual snowfall and areas so difficult they had never been skied successfully.
The final result, the VIII Olympic Winter Games, was dazzling. Squaw Valley beat out internationally regarded resorts like those in Innsbruck, Austria, and St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Alexander Cochrane Cushing was born into wealth and position in Manhattan on Nov. 28, 1913. His grandfather Robert M. Cushing was a Boston tea merchant. His father, Howard, a well-known painter, died when Mr. Cushing was 3. Because of the poor health of his mother, Ethel Cochrane Cushing, he spent his childhood in boarding schools.
“When I was 8, I remember my mother telling me I would have to find my own way in the world,” he said in an interview with the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2003. “That stuck with me.”
He graduated from Groton, Harvard and Harvard Law School. Holidays found him in the whirl of society in Newport and Manhattan, and he became known as a graceful tennis player and an escort of debutantes. As a youth in Newport, he was deft enough at bridge to play imaginary hands without cards with Harold S. Vanderbilt, the inventor of contract bridge.
In 1938, while still a law student, Mr. Cushing married Justine Cutting, an heiress and a top amateur golfer. Time magazine in 1959 reported her comment when Mr. Cushing asked her if she would like to move to the mountains.
“Are you out of your mind, Cushing?” she asked.
They divorced after 27 years of marriage, much of it spent happily at Squaw Valley, and Mr. Cushing next wed Elizabeth Woodward Pratt. After that marriage ended in divorce in 1985, Mr. Cushing married Nancy Wendt, who survives him and is now president of the Squaw Valley Ski Corporation. He remained chairman at his death.
Mr. Cushing is also survived by three daughters, Justine Cushing Jr. of Manhattan; Lily Cushing Kunczynski of La Paz, Mexico; and Alexandra Cushing Howard of Manhattan; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After law school, Mr. Cushing worked for the Justice Department in the antitrust division, served in the Navy and got a job on Wall Street. On a ski trip to Sugar Bowl in California, he broke his ankle the first day but stayed because his companions needed a fourth for bridge.
While relaxing on a sun deck, Mr. Cushing struck up a conversation with Wayne Poulson, a Pan Am pilot and an avid skier. Mr. Poulson told him that he worked as a surveyor in the 1930’s and fell in love with a site in the Sierra just west of Lake Tahoe that he thought would be perfect for a ski resort. In the 1940’s, Mr. Poulson bought 640 acres of what became Squaw Valley from Union Pacific Railroad.
Mr. Poulson took Mr. Cushing to see it, and in June 1948 they formed the Squaw Valley Development Corporation. They had differences from the start, most of them a result of the opposing ways the men saw the enterprise: Mr. Poulson viewed it as a real estate venture, and Mr. Cushing wanted to be in what he called “the uphill transportation business.”
The upshot was that Mr. Cushing won complete control of the company from his partner, who was away flying at the time Mr. Cushing called the critical shareholders’ vote. Mr. Poulson never made a dime directly from the resort; he died in 1995. Mr. Cushing was reluctant to discuss his business dealings with Mr. Poulson, even in later years.
Squaw Valley earned a reputation for its capacious, rapid trams and chairlifts, embodying what Mr. Cushing called “the wow factor.”
He applied for the Olympic Games after reading that Anchorage and Reno were making bids. He won political support from the governor of California and financial help from Laurance S. Rockefeller to persuade the United States Olympic Committee to choose his resort. Mr. Cushing’s intense personal lobbying helped get the International Olympic Committee to choose Squaw by a vote of 32 to 30.
The committee then decided that it was a conflict of interest for Mr. Cushing, the resort owner, to be the promoter of the Games as well. He was barred from direct involvement, and complained to Time that he had been treated “like a criminal.”
After the Olympics, the Lake Tahoe area boomed, but Squaw Valley lagged. A series of accidents in the 60’s and 70’s culminated in the deaths of four in a cable car accident in 1978. In addition, Mr. Cushing had running battles with environmental regulators over matters including tree cutting and waste disposal.
Bill Newsom, a judge who ruled against some of Mr. Cushing’s environmental practices, once said he wished the businessman had never been born. But he also came to express grudging admiration.
“Very few people are able to do against the odds the things he was able to do,” Judge Newsom said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1995. “He put Squaw Valley on the map and made it into one of the great ski resorts in the world.”
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