After, the trip, Pittman appeared in a commercial for Vaseline that billed her as a “world-class climber,” an outrageous boast that has been the subject of endless jokes. Her subsequent accounts of the Kangshung trip—including a lecture she gave at the Explorers Club—have made her less than popular within the community because of her habit of referring to the elite mountaineers she was with as her “climbing team,” as though they were her equals rather than her guides. Steve Swenson, one of the expert climbers with her on the Kangshung Face, defends Pittman and argues she has become too easy a target. “We were fixing all the ropes, and she was following after us,” he concedes, “but she contributed as much as anyone to the trip in terms of fund-raising, dealing with the sponsors and media issues.”
There is a long history of wealthy amateurs who are passionate about climbing, including Texas financier and oilman Dick Bass and the late Disney president Frank Wells, who co-authored Seven Summits (with Rick Ridgeway). Neither ever presented himself as anything but a beginner, and each gave full credit to his guides. More than anything, it seems to be Pittman’s grandstanding which has made her such a pariah. “I’ve watched the media circus, and I think Sandy Hill Pittman is a story about marketing,” says Jim Clash, a business and adventure writer for Forbes who climbed Kilimanjaro with Scott Fischer last January. “Sandy is an amateur who has been able to manipulate the press and promote herself because most of the people she was talking to didn’t know much about climbing.”
“Some people climb for the publicity, not the experience,” says David Swanson, a past Explorers Club president and former publisher of Summit magazine. “And I would say that 85 percent of the people [within the climbing community] dislike that sort of thing and would not climb with that person. Climbing is meant to be elemental, simplistic—you are meant to respect the dangers and the environment. A movable circus is not what it is meant to be.”
But that is exactly how many climbers regarded Pittman’s electronic sideshow at Base Camp, to which a Sherpa had lugged bags full of high-tech communications equipment provided by NBC. Before they left for Nepal, Pittman wrote everyone on the team and told them about her NBC deal and invited them to participate. Most declined; this is precisely the kind of thing that they go to the mountains to get away from. Not Pittman. To maintain the NBC Web site, she would rise at 5:30 in the morning, and often be there working at 9:30 at night, diligently keeping the journal entries up-to-date and holding chat sessions on-line with New York luminaries such as novelist Jay McInerney. “She really worked at it,” says Charlotte Fox. “I said, ‘You’re climbing Everest and you’re doing all that!’ ”
Pittman was by far the busiest camper. Scott Fischer was floored by her announcement, just two days before their summit bid, when everyone was lying low, that she was meeting two friends for lunch in Pheriche. Hoge and Sailor had showed up with 20 Sherpas in tow and linen tablecloths in their little trekking tent. So, instead of resting with her teammates, Pittman hiked five hours down the mountain, stopping on the way to do an interview with the Today show. She seemed happy to drop everything and play Himalayan hostess, even leaving notes of introduction for her friends on parchment from the exclusive stationer Mrs. John L. Strong. All of this was happening at a time when even the strongest climbers on her team were resting. “Her priorities were all over the place,” observes a climber from another team. Then he speculates, “Those women were there as her mouthpieces for later. They would be so blown away by what they saw that they would go back to New York and spread the gospel about Sandy Hill Pittman.”
No one can say that Sandy Pittman hasn’t worked hard or seriously committed herself to building her prowess as a climber and sportswoman. She had grown up in the foothills of Northern California, and as a girl walked the mountains with her father. At 10, she started going on camping trips. As a chubby adolescent, she opted for backpacking over the beach and worked as a junior ski-mountaineering guide in Yosemite. She spent summers white-water rafting, kayaking, and climbing. Her first big peak was Disappointment in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons. When she got to the top, she said to herself, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.”
At the University of Colorado in Boulder, she fell in love with Jerry Solomon, now a sports agent married to former Olympic ice-skater Nancy Kerrigan. They eventually transferred to U.C.L.A. together and Pittman earned a degree in art history. They split a year later. “She was always into climbing, but it seems to have become an all-consuming thing,” says Solomon. “She was always an ambitious person, and I don’t just mean about climbing mountains.”
Pittman moved to New York and got a job at Bonwit Teller. Later she worked at Mademoiselle and Bride’s, where she was a beauty editor. Climbing took a backseat to her career. In 1979, at age 24, she married Bob Pittman. They had met on a flight to Los Angeles and, according to a story they have often told, were in love before they landed. As fate would have it, the plane was diverted to San Francisco, so Sandy took him home to meet her parents. When they arrived to find her folks out of town, they reportedly made passionate love on the living-room floor.
Not long after the birth of her son in 1983, Pittman began the kind of climbing that propelled her to the top of the benefit circuit, and put her and Bob on the cover of New York magazine in 1990 as “The Couple of the Minute.” One thing everyone seems to agree on is that both Pittmans are brilliant at self promotion. Bob, who was a runner-up to be Time’s Man of the Year in 1984, has been dogged by controversy for claiming what some see as undue credit for MTV—which he has called his “crazy idea.” The concept had been kicking around for years, and many believe that executives John Lack and Tom Freston contributed just as much as Pittman, who went on to form Quantum Media (The Morton Downey Jr. Show) before moving on to Time Warner, where he was in charge of the Six Flags theme parks. Last August he left entertainment for real estate, becoming chief executive of Century 21. “People say, ‘My god, he’s had glamorous jobs, he must worship glamour,’ ” Bob Pittman told the Los Angeles Times somewhat defensively. “But my close friends know I was only in it for the challenge.”
In the 80s, the Pittmans seemed the prototypical high-concept couple. They bought a 15,000-square-foot 1910 dairy barn in Falls Church, Connecticut, and converted the place into a yuppie playground stocked with every imaginable toy. They called it Birthday Hill Farm because it had been a gift from Bob to Sandy when she turned 30. She transformed the 50-foot silo that looms over the barn into a climbing wall and, after dinner and drinks, was known to take guests out for a vertical stroll which she calls “the Ultimate Challenge.” She built a makeshift gym in the barn, complete with pulleys and ropes, and carved out another room for her piles of mountaineering gear. At one point, the Pittmans even housed a trio of traveling Sherpas in a smaller barn out back. A tackle room is filled with archers’ bows, fishing rods (she fly-fishes), and canoes. “They never relaxed,” gripes a houseguest. “It’s not my idea of how to spend the weekend.”
Sandy Pittman—a woman compulsive enough to have colored threads representing each season (green for summer, etc.) sewn into her clothes to avoid packing mix-ups—never does anything halfway. She applies what a friend describes as a “gangbusters approach” to everything. When she and her husband bought a twoseater helicopter for commuting, she got her pilot’s license. When she planted the garden with flowers, she won blue ribbons at the local fair. When she decided to raise sheep, she asked designer Isaac Mizrahi to help her turn the first year’s fleecing into hats and mittens for homeless children. When she entertained, it was mind-boggling. Once, she bused 100 guests from New York, stocked canoes with coolers filled with juice and muffins, and arranged a pig roast on the front lawn. Hot-air balloonists took people for rides over the fields.
This past October, the Pittmans threw one of their famous parties, with 50 guests dining under an elaborately embroidered Tibetan tent. On the menu were yak stew and Sherpa tea. In attendance were the couple’s country friends—the Brokaws, Lerers, and others. “Everything was beautifully done and so tasteful, as always,” recalls Jurate Kazickas, “so it was a real shock to hear they split up just a few weeks later.”
Bob Pittman reportedly moved out a few days before Halloween, quitting their Central Park West apartment, which is crammed with artifacts from her farflung travels. She told friends that it came as a complete shock, saying, “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.” He told friends that there had been signs for a long time, but that she never noticed. She was gone all the time. “Enough is enough,” he said.
Ironically, it had been Bob Pittman who, in the mid-80s, encouraged his wife to find something meaningful to do. “It was he who turned my head around,” she once acknowledged.
But even her friends agree that Sandy Pittman’s single-minded dedication to her avocation complicated her relationship with her husband. “A lot of people look at mountain climbing as discretionary, but Sandy looks at this as her job,” says Nina Griscom, adding, “But in a marriage, it’s hard when someone finds out who they are in the middle.”
On Sunday, June 9, a private memorial service was held for Scott Fischer at Kiana Lodge, near Seattle, Washington. Most of Fischer’s team, as well as the Sherpas, came to pay tribute to their fallen leader. Sandy Pittman arrived with Todd Harris, a senior producer at NBC’s on-line interactive service who designed Pittman’s Everest Web site. After everything that had happened, she had little time for Beidleman or Boukreev. There were photographers everywhere.
At the ceremony, the Sherpas chanted a Buddhist prayer, and Fischer’s closest friends recalled his love of the mountains. Neal Beidleman, so thin he almost looked frail, told the mourners that his late friend’s body still rests on Everest, “the place he thought the most beautiful in the world.” Beidleman had saved his friend’s engraved expedition knife, found in his pack, and entrusted it to Fischer’s two children, Andy, nine, and Katie Rose, five, passing on the legacy of their father. Then Fischer’s wife, Jeannie Price, his parents, and other family members released a cloud of butterflies into the wind.
For the survivors, it is time to move on, though the majesty and fury of the world’s highest mountain will never leave them. Most intend to keep climbing. Others will follow. The Mountain Madness company says that it is planning no Everest trips in the near future, but reports that business is booming. Since the tragedy the company has been besieged with calls about future expeditions. Pittman will certainly continue her exploits. “Sandy is definitely a driven person,” says Fox. “But no matter how controversial she is, she stood on the top of that mountain, and no one can ever take that away from her.”
