TRAVELING IN STYLE : WHERE MOGULS MEET MOGULS : Inside the small world of American luxury winter resorts, the slopes of Beaver Creek, a former lettuce patch, and Deer Valley, an old mining camp, are today what Sun Valley was in the 1930s--snowy playgrounds for the quietly rich.

In Colorado this Christmas, paparazzi from People and the National Enquirer will stake out every ski run and watering hole in Aspen for glimpses of Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Don Johnson or Donald Trump. But if the folks at Institutional Investor want to photograph the celebrities their readers follow, they should head about 2 1/2 hours northwest to Beaver Creek. There they might bump into Peter Magowan, Roger Peterson, Jere Thompson, Norman Dean, William Coors or F. Ross Johnson. Not exactly household names but stars in the world of high finance. Magowan is chairman of Safeway Stores, Peterson heads the giant Ace Hardware chain, Thompson is president of 7-11’s Southland Corporation, Dean runs Hills Brothers Coffee, Coors is president of the beer company and Johnson is RJR Nabisco’s former chairman.

Meanwhile, over in Deer Valley, Utah, Forbes Magazine might try trolling the lodges for colorful quotes from Charles Schwab on investments, Edgar Stern on hotels and Roger Penske on his automotive empire.

Inside the small world of American luxury winter resorts, the slopes of Beaver Creek, a former lettuce patch near Vail, and Deer Valley, an old mining camp near Park City, are favored by conservative captains of industry rather than by the glitterati. These ski resorts are today what Sun Valley was to skiing in the 1930s--snowy playgrounds for the quietly rich. Moguls for moguls.

Their guests do not cavort for the cameras. They radiate beige to Aspen’s neon, preferring tailored $1,500 Bogner suede ski jackets to chartreuse ski suits and Day-Glo pink accessories. And you can bet no overly enthusiastic animal-rights activist will be tolerated sneering at the sable and chinchilla jackets that their wives don to keep out the evening chill.

Both Beaver Creek and Deer Valley were conceived and built from scratch to cater to Fortune 500 families, not ski bums or Hollywood hotshots. Olympic gold medalist Bill Johnson, who raced at Deer Valley last winter, labeled the place “snobbish,” saying racers were told not to hang around in the day lodge. “They didn’t want us interfering with their millionaires,” he commented. The racers didn’t have an alternative night spot--the closest real saloon is in downtown Park City, one mile and light years in atmosphere away.

In fact, these resorts are state-of-the-art vacation experiences where dining, interior decoration and real estate are as important as skiing. At Beaver Creek, the centerpiece is the very exclusive Shearson Lehman conference center, designed under the supervision of Ralph Lauren himself, built for $25 million before the investment house suffered serious losses. At Deer Valley, the daily buffets at the two posh “cafeterias,” the Huggery and the Snuggery, are so renowned that Craig Claiborne wrote a whole column about them, complete with recipes for its “uncommon” blue cheese and pear pizza and its “delectable” cornmeal-fried oysters with spinach.

Unlike Aspen, tales of bizarre or unseemly behavior are rare at both resorts. Cyrus (Buck) Allen, the municipal judge in whose jurisdiction Deer Valley lies, presides over far more marriages than felony sentencings. And the most unusual wedding touch he could remember was the casual clothing worn by guests, bride and groom in an open-air wedding involving a whole bunch of people from Arthur Andersen & Co., the accounting firm. “They were all in jeans!” he exclaimed, as if such informal togs were an anomaly.

Nor did anyone fire shotguns at hovering photographer-filled helicopters, as happened at the Don Johnson/Melanie Griffith nuptials near Aspen a few years ago. On the other side of the ledger, unexpected confrontations with your spouse’s lover on the slopes, a la Ivana and Marla, are less likely than unplanned business encounters. “I’m always running into my partners,” Shelley Seevack of Goldman Sachs, a homeowner at Beaver Creek, complains with a chuckle.

These resorts serve as the ultimate in secure honcho havens, hideaways from the stress of managing millions or preserving world peace. Beaver Creek, which opened 11 seasons ago, features a Christmas tree lighting conducted by no less a personage than former President Gerald Ford. Deer Valley, a year younger, is the spot Vice President Dan Quayle chose last year to hide out for a week with 82 of his closest friends.

The larger of the two, Beaver Creek was built by the owners of Vail as a tonier cousin to that huge resort, which is 10 miles to the east. Unlike Vail, which abuts an interstate, Beaver Creek is located in a lovely valley, bordered by huge gray cliffs on one flank and a forest on the other.

From the gated entrance way at its base, past the golf course that rolls out the green (or white) carpet en route to the village, all the way to its core at the base of a network of lifts soaring 3,340 feet into the Gore Range, Beaver Creek presents a rustically elegant face to the world. No parking lots interrupt the landscape of posh hotels and luxury condominium complexes. Day-trippers must leave cars behind and take a bus to the slopes.

It was once dubbed “the last resort” because of its long, costly gestation period. Pete Siebert, a founder of Vail Associates, had his eye on the Beaver Creek region long before Vail opened in 1962. Like numerous ski entrepreneurs, he first discovered the hills that were to become home to Colorado’s leading ski destinations while training for combat with the 10th Mountain Division ski troops during World War II.

For years, however, a crusty local rancher refused to sell the land. Each Christmas, Siebert would share a bottle of whiskey with the rancher and remind him of Vail’s interest. Finally, in the early 1970s, Vail acquired a ranch in northern Colorado that Siebert knew the landowner coveted. A deal was struck and Vail Associates made plans to create the first luxury-class ski resort since Sun Valley.

Colorado was being talked about as the site of the 1976 Olympics, so Vail promoted Beaver Creek slopes as an Olympic venue. Those plans were derailed when Colorado voters, led by a future governor, Richard D. Lamm, rejected the Olympic project. Faced with opposition at every turn from environmental groups who worried about elk migration, soil erosion, air pollution and the like, Vail Associates spent millions on studies, hearings and approval processes.

Finally, in December, 1980, the place opened. Sort of. President Ford, one of the first Beaver Creek residents (he was persuaded to sell his condominium in Vail in order to build a house on a choice lot right on the edge of the Beaver Creek slopes), presided over the opening ceremonies. Gov. Lamm, by then a convert, predicted it would become the Tiffany’s of ski areas. Ironically, there was so little snow that season that the lifts closed down the next day for several weeks.

Despite the hype, the village of Beaver Creek in 1980 was hardly more than a temporary vinyl “tennis bubble”-- instead of the permanent base lodge, not yet ready for the opening season--and a handful of enormous second homes such as the one owned by Ford and his next-door neighbor, former ambassador Leonard Firestone. As late as 1985, locals referred to it as a ghost town. It didn’t have a single hotel room.

Then George Gilette, a meat-packing magnate who also owned a string of radio and TV stations, bought Vail Associates. He decided to liven up Beaver Creek by offering incentives and discounts to hotel developers. Since then, two hotels, including a 300-room Hyatt at the base of the lifts with suites that rival small condos, have sprung up. More are on the way. Real estate sales began to build, reaching a crescendo of $140 million in 1989.

Corporate America responded. “There are more CEOs here,” says a real estate salesman in Beaver Creek, pointing on a map to Elk Track Park, the subdivision where the Ford and Firestone homes are located, “than any other community in the country.”

He exaggerates, of course, but not by much. This is the kind of place where Ross Perot and his ilk are routinely spotted strolling through the village core. It’s a place where hundreds of second homeowners, some of whom spend as little as a week a year in their million-dollar digs, think nothing of plunking down a $12,000 initiation fee to join the Beaver Creek Club, which allows them to have parties at Beano’s, an adorable restaurant-cabin on the ski slopes. Even better, club members can enjoy a meal in the Shearson Lodge dining room, a Ralph Lauren stage set with antique Navajo blankets slung over banisters, Western bandana napkins gracing the tables and huge Edward S. Curtis photographs on the walls.

Beaver Creek has no bigger booster than Gerald Ford himself, whose name is on an amphitheater, a park and a golf tournament in Vail. Each winter he chairs the American Ski Classic race, each summer a World Forum. He even judges the annual Fourth of July parade.

“We’re glad we were one of the very first people to build a house here,” says the former President. Although he says his golf handicap is “highly classified” because “I play with so many hustlers that I have to protect myself,” Ford is on the links nearly every day in the summer with friends such as Firestone, Pepi Gramshammer, a longtime Vail ski instructor, and lodge owner, Harry Frampton, the Hyatt developer.

He no longer skis (one entire knee joint has been replaced and the other needs surgery), but Ford still regards Beaver Creek as special, summer and winter. Why? “It’s a small, relatively self-contained place with a master plan that will not let it get built up too commercially,” he says.

If Beaver Creek’s fame rests on being, in Siebert’s phrase, “the jewel in the navel” of central Colorado, Deer Valley’s most noteworthy contribution could be summed up in a single word: lunch.

The Utah resort was the brainchild of hotelier Edgar B. Stern Jr., at one time the owner of the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco. Stern, whose family is the largest shareholder of Sears Roebuck, sold his interest in the Park City ski area, located in an old mining town 45 minutes from Salt Lake, in order to create nearby Deer Valley from scratch.

Park City is a sprawling melange of lodges and condominium developments that spreads out beyond the hokey Western main street. Deer Valley, on the other hand, consists of a pair of dominating, handsome day lodges around which are clustered two series of buildings--the first in a broad meadow at the base of the lower mountain, the second in a picturesque notch of the upper mountain.

Because Deer Valley’s ski runs are situated entirely on private land, Stern did not have to jump through the environmental hoops that held up Beaver Creek, where the lifts are on U. S. Forest Service land. As his director of skiing, he signed up Stein Eriksen, an Olympic gold medalist who is as lustrous a star in the ski world as Gerald Ford is in politics. Eriksen also was paid to lend his name to a posh condominium hotel on the slopes.

The two mountains that make up Deer Valley are much smaller than Park City or Beaver Creek, but Stern emphasized instead a word-class level of service and amenities unparalleled in the ski industry. According to Bill Nassikas (son of a former Stanford Court manager), who was brought in to run the food and beverage operations, food in ski areas had been a “necessary evil,” something to fill the bellies of a captive audience on the slopes. Deer Valley’s aim was to run the food and lodging with the same care that went into a world-class hotel.

While selling real estate to pay for the country-club atmosphere, Stern and his team introduced niceties ranging from a limit on the number of daily skiers to Kleenex dispensers at the bottom of each lift, to complimentary ski checking, to brass faucets in public restrooms, to epicurean slope-side eateries.

The Huggery and the Snuggery, serve meals at the base lodge and the mid-mountain lodge. “During the right time of the year,” recalls Nassikas, now at the Boulders in Arizona, “we’d fly in crawfish and oysters from the Gulf, mushrooms from the northwest coast, truffles and fresh duck liver from France.” The haute cuisine tradition continues to win reviews that would make St. Moritz proud.

Vacationers, ski writers and second homeowners have all sung the praises of Deer Valley food since Day One. The latter group, however, grew scarce in the mid-1980s as the resort found itself awash in inventory. The 1986 tax-reform act further battered real estate prices in the second-home market to such a point that in 1988, several units in the Stein Eriksen lodge were repossessed by banks and 20 five-level townhouses in the Pinnacle development, originally priced at up to $600,000 each, were auctioned off for as little as $235,000.

Real estate woes aside, winter sports enthusiasts who can afford to rent condos with a Jacuzzi in every bedroom (literally) for $600 and up per night continue to flock to Deer Valley.

One who stayed to become a general partner with Stern is Roger S. Penske, the auto-racing champion and president of Hertz Truck Leasing. Penske already had a place in Vail, but his wife’s family was from Salt Lake City and Deer Valley’s seclusion appealed to him. Four years ago, hearing that Stern might sell Deer Valley, he offered to inject some of his own money. “In a very short time we put the resort on a sound financial base,” he says.

These days, real estate remains a relative bargain in both Deer Valley and Beaver Creek. While townhouses in Vail and Aspen sell for $400 to $600 a square foot, their equivalents go for $200 to $400 a square foot in Beaver Creek and $80 to $200 a square foot in Deer Valley.

The differential doesn’t mean Deer Valley is a low-rent district. A salesperson at the Stein Eriksen lodge said that the resort seeks families with incomes of at least $250,000, primarily corporate types (rather than show business or sports people) who seek “a large amount of privacy.” The fact that Eriksen’s 125-room condominium lodge is the area’s biggest “hotel” and that only a small number of condos are available for rental is considered a plus.

Buyers often are experienced resort hoppers. “My wife and I are both graduates of the University of Colorado, and we both learned to ski at Sun Valley,” notes La Jolla businessman Tom Henry. “We also skied at Mammoth, but never seriously considered Mammoth because the atmosphere is crowded and uncomfortable.”

Henry also rejected Sun Valley as a second-home site because the weather was too unpredictable. “We spent many Christmases in the chapel praying for snow,” laughs Henry, who likes to fly his turbo-charged Mooney to Utah for weekends year round. When the Henrys rent their four-bedroom, four-bath, spa-equipped condo, it is to people such as Wall Streeter Charles Schwab.

Another Deer Valley owner, Christopher Jeffries, originally fell in love with Beaver Creek. But he thought Utah was a better investment value. So he bought a home in Deer Valley, and found romance there, as well as great snow. Four years ago friends introduced Jeffries, a builder from New York, to Princess Yasmin, who was visiting on a ski trip. Two years later, Jefferies and the Princess, daughter of Rita Hayworth and the Aga Khan, were married.

Although Mrs. Jeffries has skied everywhere in the Alps, her husband says, “Since we’ve been married she has never once said, ‘let’s go skiing in Europe.’ ”

The trails at both areas are as manicured as the guests. Deer Valley grooms all but the seven expert runs every single evening to make sure such “unpleasant surprises as moguls, ruts and icy patches are virtually eliminated,” according to its marketing department. Beaver Creek was among the first areas to use computers to design runs for aesthetic as well as athletic attractiveness.

“Skiers are a little bit tamer here,” acknowedges Beaver Creek’s Seevack. Indeed, you risk the equivalent of getting your license revoked--your lift ticket is taken away--if you are caught skiing too fast through Beaver Creek’s “slow skiing” districts, which are huge swaths of the mountain designed for toddlers and plodders to piddle around in. Deer Valley is not schusser-friendly, either. Says Tom Henry, the La Jolla businessman: “At our age (he is 51) we don’t feel we have to be daredevils. This is a cruising mountain. We enjoy slopes where you don’t have big bumps. On occasion,” he admits, “we’re a little bored.”

If boredom does set in, visitors can go to the bigger, better hills at Park City or Vail. But Beaver Creek and Deer Valley aficionados prefer their perks: Deer Valley invented the concept of valet skiing (uniformed attendants park your skis at the base lodge) and Beaver Creek has a masseur available at a mid-mountain restaurant.

If former Presidents and Wall Street tycoons relish these niceties, the air of refinement at both resorts may make some, like skier Bill Johnson, uncomfortable. Ties and sports jackets are favored over ski sweaters among diners at the Hyatt and at Erickson’s lodge. Star gazing means standing on your balcony looking at the sky, not swooning over Michael Douglas in an Aspen lift line. But as Roger Penske remarks, “We’re as real as any other ski resort.”

So what if the Black Diamond (advanced) runs don’t produce palpitations like they do at Taos? So what if there’s no vast cruising area like the Big Burn at Snowmass? Taos doesn’t have a Huggery; no romantic cabin in the woods beckons at Snowmass.

Even a couple with merely a five-figure income can play “let’s-pretend-we’re-wealthy” by renting a Deer Valley condo for a few hundred dollars a night. Imagine spending an evening dashing among three hot tubs. Think about chasing Stein Eriksen down a run and then bragging back home that you skied with the Norwegian deity.

Or, for a real fantasy, round up a few friends and book a stay at Trapper’s Cabin, an adorable three-bedroom log home set high above the Beaver Creek slopes near both cross country and down-hill ski trails. It comes equipped with a full bar, a hot tub and a telescope . . . plus a caretaker who brings you complimentary slippers by the firepace and a chef who prepares and serves you a gourmet dinner and breakfast. Price? A mere $1,600 a night.

One bunch of Aspenites did just that last March. They arrived on skis in late afternoon, their bags transported by snowmobile. While a few guests slid into the steamy waters of the hot tub, the rest setted in by the fire. Sipping a fine California chardonnay and nibbling on baked brie, one friend gazed at the scene and wondered aloud, “Why can’t Aspen be like this?”