In the mid 1960s I had a nice deal going with Air France. All I had to do was show a takeoff and landing as my transition to the European portion of my ski film and the company would graciously transport me for another winter of filming.
I was getting used to the casual après ski attitude of the French resorts. Crêpes seemed to be popular. The vendors served them hot off of the griddle with your choice of many different liqueurs. And for those of us who didn’t drink, they always had some syrup. I had never experienced the crêpe craze before, and it looked like it would be a good business to set up at a ski resort back home. All I needed was a crêpe machine (griddle), which turned out to be harder to find than I thought.
I left Europe that year from Paris so that I could stop and meet the Air France marketing heads. I never learned very much French but the desk clerk in the hotel directed me to a cooking utensil store within a half- dozen blocks of the hotel. Once I found it, I had to use a lot of sign language to finally get my hands on the grill. It turned out to be a piece of plate steel or cast iron a little larger in diameter than an old 78 rpm record and was about three-eighths of an inch thick. Its size in no way indicated that it would weigh so much. It weighed about 12 pounds, and I carried it very carefully.
I had to carry it all over the airport while I was filming Air France jets taking off and landing. A half-dozen Air France employees pretended they were boarding the Concorde for a scene in my movie.
Halfway through the filming, one of the PR people asked me if they could help me carry my stuff. By then I was very tired of lugging around my 12-pound grill, so I handed it to him. He grabbed it with a couple of fingers, and naturally it fell out of his hands and cut about half an inch off of the front of one of his shoes as it crashed to the ground.
When Christmas came that year, I hauled the crêpe grill to Sun Valley, thinking I could interest one of my out-of-work ski bum friends into making crêpes in the Ski Patrol building at the top of Baldy. I showed him how he could double his business by cooking two at a time. It worked better than I imagined, and before long he was making a rucksack full of money every day. All cash, no credit cards.
With two crêpe grills going for six hours a day, he could turn out 120 crêpes per machine, or 240 a day, at two bucks per crêpe. About $500 a day, including tip.
His timing was great for the crêpe business. That was a long time ago though, and unfortunately I can’t even remember the name of the king of Crêpes. The second year he was making even more crêpes in the valley as well. According to legend, they had made so much money that they had bought the Hiawatha Hotel in Hailey. Soon thereafter, one of them got on the wrong side of a drug deal and the hotel “coincidentally” burnt to the ground.
Little did I know at the time that crêpes would lead to a major hotel fire in Hailey, Idaho. All I knew was that I enjoyed a hot crêpe after a day of filming at the great French ski resorts, and I thought people in America would, too.