To the world, McTaggart was famous as the builder of the aggressive international environmental organization, Greenpeace. But before Greenpeace, in the 1960s, he was well known in the ski industry.
A British Columbia native, McTaggart was a superb athlete—at one time he ranked as the world’s number two badminton player. He was handsome in a craggy way, and possessed a forceful enthusiasm that he used to promote himself and his causes. He could usually count as many enemies as friends.
As Ski Magazine‘s editor-in-chief, I’d known McTaggart in his lotus land days when he was working at Bear Valley, Calif. Women, I enviously observed, seldom failed to find him attractive and irresistible. When he visited me in New York, energetic rounds of party-going had convinced me, a naif, that he was perhaps hail-est fellow I’d ever met.
For Bear Valley Resort, McTaggart created a controversial poster and advertising campaign around the nude figure of his wife at the time. He took over ownership of the Tamarack Lodge, but when an explosion destroyed part of the lodge, McTaggart unsuccessfully sued the gas company and was left unable to pay the mortgage. Burdened by defaulted loans, McTaggart, who had experience in construction, moved to Aspen. There he took charge of a potentially huge real estate development on 6,500 acres of land contiguous to Bill Janss’ Snowmass. The development was called Aspen Wildcat. Its developers included Citibank and the Tishman real estate people.
At an Aspen press conference McTaggart boldly announced that Wildcat would have condominiums and homes, amazingly, for 40,000 people. He opened a spacious office, printed a lavish coffee table book costing $25,000, sponsored his own ski team, “The Aspen Wildcats,” and drove around town in a Mercedes. When the project needed more money, he helped persuade Bob Lange, the plastic ski boot inventor, and his two brothers to invest a half million dollars each. McTaggart rapidly exhausted the funds building lift towers, a dam, roads and cutting down trees, even though he had no approvals from the county or town.
Indeed, Pitkin County’s commissioners were no more likely to approve a project of the size outlined by McTaggart than they would allow a Coney Island honky tonk atop Aspen Mountain. The Langes claimed they didn’t know this, but Doug Burden, an investor and Aspen resident who raced on the 1954 U.S. Ski Team, said it was common knowledge in town that permission would never be allowed for such a development.
“What McTaggart was proposing outraged environmentalists and town and county commissioners,” Burden says. “It could never have happened.” (In 1992, in a monumental piece of downsizing, a group of real estate developers, led by the actor Michael Douglas, sub-divided the Wildcat ranch into thirteen 500-acre homesites, selling for $5 million each.)
Eventually McTaggart spent all of Wildcat’s money, then hastily departed Aspen under a cloud of suspicion. The Lange brothers, holding a giant mortgage on Wildcat, declared personal bankruptcy and lost control of their ski boot company, which was taken over by the Garcia Company. After leaving Aspen, McTaggart returned briefly to Vancouver, B.C., and he never re-entered the United States.
While McTaggart was at Bear Valley, he conceived a canny marketing idea. If he let airline stewardesses and Hertz and Avis counter-girls ski for free, he believed, guys would pour in. Asked what would happen if his marketing idea didn’t work, McTaggart responded, “Maybe, I’ll jump into a large boat and sail around the world.” Which is what he ultimately did.
In 1972, naming his boat Greenpeace III, McTaggart sailed into the southern Pacific to protest atomic bomb tests being conducted by France. Later, in a second courageous foray seeking to halt the tests, he made headlines in newspapers around the world when he was wounded in an attack by French naval vessels. Greenpeace became famous and McTaggart rose to become the head of the international organization. Members admired his heroism, but some were critical of his management. Was this Aspen Wildcat all over again?
McTaggart retired from Greenpeace, and went to live on an olive farm near Perugia, Italy.
He was one of the most charming guys I ever met.
