"Rumors swept the mountain," reports Vanity Fair in its August issue. "Rumors and questions."
Back in May, several groups of climbers were caught in a blizzard near the top of Everest, and eight of them died. The most widely reported story at the time concerned a guide named Rob Hall, who, when things were looking very dire, pulled out a portable phone and called his wife at home in New Zealand.
"Hey, look, don't worry about me too much," he told her. Not long afterward, he was dead.
For drama, that one is tough to beat. But now comes Vanity Fair with a whole new way of looking at the Everest debacle, and high drama of a different sort. In Jennet Conant's version, the central figure of the deadly climb is not Hall or any of the others who perished on the mountain, but one of the American survivors. She is Sandy Hill Pittman, a 41-year-old New Yorker whose mountain-climbing career Conant sums up as follows: "Years earlier, bored with life as the socialite wife of MTV creator Bob Pittman (estimated worth, more than $40 million), she had transformed a girlhood enthusiasm for mountaineering into a high-profile outlet for her energy and ambition."
The key words in this sentence are "socialite," always a subtle pejorative, and "ambition," which can cut either way, but in this case feels negative. Soon Conant gives us the contours of that ambition, as she explains why Pittman joined the expedition, and the dark theme of the piece begins to emerge:
"The experience would provide an operatic finale to her book-in-progress, already titled Summits of My Soul,' and bring her one step closer to realizing her dream of becoming a sportswoman with media tie-ins, the Martha Stewart of mountaineering. A tireless promoter, Pittman tackled the publicity with the same zeal she applied to her demanding training regimen, which included running up the 26 flights to her Central Park West apartment eight times daily. . . . Before the trip, she modeled climbing gear for Vogue and made arrangements with NBC for her electronic diary to be transmitted from Everest (via satellite phone) and posted on the World Wide Web. Her farewell party at Nell's, thrown by society columnist Billy Norwich, was attended by admirers Andre Balazs, owner of the Chateau Marmont, Bianca Jagger and Calvin Klein."
Later in the piece we learn that among the electronic journal entries she made before departing for Nepal was this sentence: "I wouldn't dream of leaving town without an ample supply of Dean & DeLuca's Near East blend and my espresso maker."
If you put some of this stuff in a comic novel, you'd be skewered for implausibility. The Vogue spread is especially rich, and the Calvin and Bianca cameos are priceless. But that "Summits of My Soul" is too glorious. Please, the reader silently begs, let that be not just a vicious rumor, but the true title of this woman's book.
Taking us through the Everest nightmare with Pittman, Conant is out to demonstrate one simple point: that Sandy Pittman, who has promoted her mountaineering skills all over creation, would have died in the storm were it not for two guides, Anatoli Boukreev and Neal Beidleman, who kept her alive and got her to safety. Pittman, Conant writes, "had completely given up" and was just waiting to die.
But she didn't die. She made it back to Base Camp, and according to Conant, immediately started damage control. "Several climbers noticed that Pittman, although grief-stricken and upset, seemed worried about her image, her book.' That night she held her first post-summit interview, speaking with Tom Brokaw, a close friend, in New York . . . It was all centric to her,' recalls one disgusted team member. It's as if we were all there for her profit and publicity.' "
Most appalling of all, Conant reports that in interviews Pittman gave after returning to the United States, she "never mentioned that she had been in serious jeopardy or that she probably would have died had she not been helped by Beidleman and Boukreev. In a subsequent telephone conversation, when asked about her apparent lack of appreciation toward the two gentlemen who had saved her life, Pittman responded tersely: Which two gentlemen is that?' "
Though the piece has no direct quotes from the guides indicating what they think of Pittman today, Conant reports that Boukreev has said "wryly" to fellow climbers, "Princess Sandy. Very rich, very spoiled."
Pittman herself does not understand the skewering she has received from certain quarters, including the New York newspapers, Conant reports. Nor, it seems, does she understand that telling her side of the story -- which presumably would be a bit less damning -- might have diluted Vanity Fair's contribution to the feast the media are having on her. She spoke to Conant on background for an hour, but declined to give an on-the-record interview. The result is a gleefully one-sided recounting of the horrors of Mrs. Pittman, packed with those catty moments that nobody does like VF: "It wasn't long before the camp was buzzing about a 26-year-old snowboarder who was sharing Pittman's sleeping bag." The meows are almost deafening.
In the end, the one quote that stays with the reader is a character analysis from an unnamed "old friend," whom Conant calls on to explain why Pittman appears so clueless about the way her own behavior has been perceived: "Sandy is unfortunately totally self-absorbed . . . She missed signs of distress in her marriage. She sees motherhood her own way. She misses signs that she rubs people the wrong way. She just doesn't get it."
But did Jennet Conant get it? This was my question after finishing another of the recent articles on the Everest story, this one by Claudia Glenn Dowling in the August issue of Life. Here Sandy Hill Pittman is a minor character, appearing simply as Sandy Hill, and she seems hardly the focus of the other climbers' attention or anger. From this piece, one learns that Pittman was not the only climber publicizing her adventure. Both filmmaker David Breashears and writer Jon Krakauer were, like Pittman, sending dispatches to Web sites.
And the question becomes how much of a villainess the suddenly notorious socialite really is. Is one of the two magazines more correct in the way it treats Pittman, or is each simply catering to its own audience? Vanity Fair seized on Pittman because she offered exactly the sort of piece VF readers seem to love: rich, successful people showing themselves up as vain, venal climbers (literally, in this case).
The more mainstream Life reader probably cares very little about the likes of Sandy Pittman and her fab friends, and so that story isn't even explored. Life's piece naturally offers exceptional photos (some from rolls shot by Pittman's guide just before he died), and text in which nailing an ambitious socialite is not the chief concern.
Indeed, there are moments when Life suggests she shouldn't be nailed at all. For instance, the piece has some harsh language about rich people who buy Everest ascents as if they were just another deluxe lifestyle accouterment, quoting one disgusted guide who said, "I have too much respect for the mountain to take just anybody who can sign a check." But Pittman is implicitly exempted from this dilettante class when, in this same section of the piece, the experienced guide David Breashears says he "respects" her skills (but then the reader of the VF piece knows that Breashears is a Pittman pal).
In her own characterization of the disaster, Life's Sandy Hill casts herself as something less than heroic. "I wasn't among those who could walk . . . I can't believe how lucky I've been . . . It all just went haywire."
Three pages further along, however, the reader encounters a photo of Boukreev, one of Pittman's rescuers, posing with a photograph album that's open to a very strange shot. It shows one of the many corpses from past Everest expeditions that climbers encounter on the way up (conditions make it too arduous for anyone to carry the dead back to civilization). Boukreev, looking rather somber, seems to be presenting the photo as some kind of evidence of the horror of it all. And the curious thing about this photo is that it shows a live climber skiing past an unfortunate dead one, and looking by contrast rather jaunty.
And who is that lucky skier? Sandy Hill Pittman.
