I’d been driving around the streets of Palm Springs for only a few bleary, sun-baked hours when Mr. Eddie Gustafson appeared before me as in a dream. Or if the sight of Gustafson in his gently glowing Hawaiian shirt wasn’t a dream exactly, then maybe it was a mirage, the kind of thing tightly wound, psychically parched big-city travelers often experience when they arrive in this eternally stylish town on the edge of the Sonoran Desert.
I’d driven into the Coachella Valley in the pre-dawn dark, gliding east out of Los Angeles in my wide-body rental car, past brush fires burning high in the mountains and giant, newly minted Indian casinos lit up like Christmas trees. My tasteful retro-modern motel in Desert Hot Springs was locked up for the night, but the proprietors had left a key taped to the door, so I let myself in and went to sleep on a mattress laid out on the polished-concrete floor of my spartan-chic digs. When I awoke, the room was filled with the smell of oleander and hibiscus and the sun was beating down on the garden courtyard, but the chairs around the three burbling hot spring pools were empty and all the other guests were gone.
The Coachella Valley is protected from the harsh desert weather on both sides by tall mountains, and its townships stretch south, from Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, through Sinatra’s old residence, Rancho Mirage, to Indio and the Salton Sea. Gustafson appeared to me later that day as I was enjoying a fishbowl-size “Double Up” mai tai at Haleiwa Joe’s Seafood Grill, on the outskirts of Rancho Mirage. From the outside, Haleiwa Joe’s looks like an alien spaceship that has crash-landed into a rock. The famous structure was designed by the architect Kendrick Kellogg as part of a steak house chain in 1978. The low-slung wood-beamed room is filled with a profusion of plants and is hung here and there with brightly colored paper lanterns, so that the impression after a cocktail or two is of a Hobbit’s garden under the upturned hull of a giant Viking ship. “This style is called organic modern, but no one who works here knows that,” said Gustafson, whose slight stature, round, glinting spectacles, and perpetually sunny disposition make him look a bit like a Hobbit himself.
Gustafson is a waiter at Haleiwa Joe’s and also, it transpired, a professional healer. “I lay hands on people and they’re cured,” Gustafson told me as though he were talking about yesterday’s weather. Celebrity is a business in Palm Springs the way, say, horses are in Montana, and Gustafson has plenty of rich and famous clients, although he won’t say who. Gustafson heals animals, too. He’d recently cured a German shepherd with scoliosis (“I laid my hands on him for forty-five minutes and he was fine,” he said). When Gustafson drifted off to tend his tables, I asked the bartender whether all the waiters in this strange bat-cave of a restaurant were celebrity healers. The bartender shrugged. “Welcome to the desert,” he said.
Spend a while in Palm Springs and the surrounding townships of the Coachella Valley and you will experience all sorts of little marvels and revelations. When I called my jaded L.A. friends from my home in New York to tell them I’d be coming to recuperate for a time in the desert sun, they’d given a collective world-weary shrug. People went to Palm Springs to get nose jobs (rumor has it that there are more plastic surgeons per capita here than anywhere else on earth), to dry out (at the renowned Betty Ford Center) or to perfect their golf game (at the region’s more than 120 chemically enhanced courses).
But times change. These days, I told them, you can gamble in state-of-the-art casinos in the company of crazy Russians. You can drive down to Indio to see Portishead play at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Or you can amble along the trail with Braille signage at the fragrant Michael S. Wolfson Park in Rancho Mirage, where the voice of Sinatra himself emanates from speakers concealed behind bushes and trees. “Look at all this sunshine,” said Mel Haber, who arrived in 1975 as a failed auto accessories salesman and turned, overnight, into a successful restaurateur and friend to countless aging movie icons. “Miracles happen in this town! It’s heaven on earth!”
It’s hard to argue with Haber, who runs the venerable Melvyn’s restaurant and who has seen successive generations of martini-sipping, LSD-tripping, Prozac-popping celebrities come to this famous oasis and make it their own. In the late 1920s, young movie moguls drove out from Beverly Hills to take the waters at places like the Desert Inn and El Mirador Hotel. In the ’30s and ’40s, austere European architects like Richard Neutra and Albert Frey transformed the little desert town into a playground for trendsetting modernists. A decade later, Sinatra and his friends invested it with a patina of Rat Pack cool. The latest wave of desert celebrities includes Oprah, who has purchased a parcel of land in La Quinta, not far from Brangelina’s and George Clooney’s.
When I asked a Hollywood film director I met to describe the timeless nature of Palm Springs, he thought for a moment and said, “It’s the Baden-Baden of California.” We were in our baggy surfer trunks at the time, twiddling our toes in a blue-tiled mineral pool rimmed with spiky aloe vera plants and other decorative desert flora. It was late morning, or maybe early afternoon, and we were ensconced at Hope Springs, my refurbished ’60s-era motel and the first stop on my desert relaxation tour.
It was my plan to duplicate the evolution of this resort region by starting out in properly sparse mid-century modern accommodations and working my way slowly up the leisure ladder. From Hope Springs, I would repair to the Viceroy, a small, hip hotel in the middle of residential Palm Springs, before concluding my stay in grand neo-Hollywood style among the spindly palms and burbling fountains of the Parker Palm Springs, which has gardens fit for a pasha; the grand white-walled estate used to belong to Merv Griffin.
“I’m in town for a little R and R,” continued the dreadlocked Hollywood director, who grinned a wide crocodile’s grin. Palm Springs isn’t like the Hamptons, he said, where the manic chatter of New Yorkers continues in more salubrious surroundings. Or Cap-Ferrat, where the fashion-obsessed migrate from Paris to preen obsessively on the rocky beaches. Palm Springs is a refuge, a place for ultra-public personalities to disappear for days, weeks or even years at a time, to realign their senses and get their heads screwed on straight. All around us, L.A. refugees were arrayed on deck chairs, shielding their eyes from the desert glare under stylish porkpie hats, muttering furtively into their Palm Springs iPhones.
“Hope Springs is a slice of old Palm Springs,” said Chloe Peppas, a former photo shoot producer who fled L.A. seven years ago and now manages the little motel. Desert Hot Springs was founded in the early 1900s, and when Peppas arrived, many of the roads leading out of town were still dirt. The region has almost tripled in population since then, and as you move east along the interstate toward Indio, the subdivisions and malls make parts of the valley look frighteningly like L.A. But at Hope Springs, things still move at a slow desert pace.
The motel sits on a plot rimmed with oleander trees in a shabby residential neighborhood, and in the evenings Peppas locks the place up tight and guests come and go with their own passkeys. There is no restaurant (bowls of cereal and fruit are laid out in the morning, alongside containers of esoteric lemon-scented tea), the rooms are stripped of decoration (whitewashed walls, bamboo rugs, no phones or TVs), and if the guests communicate at all they tend to do so in hushed, half-whispered tones, like monks in an abbey.
Of course, it wasn’t long before I was whispering like a monk myself. I poached in one of the mineral pools, then got a hot-stone massage from a whispering masseur who heated fifty-two rocks in a roaster oven, then placed them on my eyebrows, my forehead and between each of my toes. Afterward, I drank a large jug of iced tea at an old roadside café called The Sidewinder, then drove my big rental cruiser over new pavement to visit an actual oasis fringed with hundreds of shaggy palm trees. There I met a geologist who showed me where the San Andreas Fault runs diagonally across the valley, and I arrived back in Palm Springs in time for dinner at a well-known celebrity watering hole called Le Vallauris.
“With the snow-topped mountain peaks and the smell of citrus in the desert air, Palm Springs always reminds me a little of Marrakech,” said the owner, Paul Bruggemans. As I sipped a cold, iceless martini, he discoursed on the eating habits of his restaurant’s famous clientele. “Catherine Deneuve, she’ll eat anything. And the Sultan of Brunei, he likes very good wines. Barry Manilow is a simple eater — he likes chicken. But Sinatra was quite sophisticated; Sinatra liked Belgian endive, as I recall.”
Deceased celebrity icons are the pharaohs of old Palm Springs. Their spirits hover over the valley (Frank Sinatra Drive leads to Bob Hope Drive, which leads to Gerald Ford Drive), and people from far and wide are drawn to their various shrines. A steady stream of tour buses cruise solemnly by the Sinatra grave in Cathedral City (among the town’s celebrity pharaohs, Sinatra is the undisputed Tut), and you can rent his first house (purchased in 1948 with first wife, Nancy) in the old movie star colony of Las Palmas for a cool $2,600 per night.
Later on, a former hotel concierge named Joe Alvese would take me driving past Sinatra’s white-walled compound in Rancho Mirage (one whole room of which, someone told me, was given over to a toy train collection) as part of a private “desert celebrity” tour. These days, Alvese said, the movie stars lead hidden lives in their lavish gated communities farther down the valley. But in the old days, they would stroll up and down Palm Canyon Drive, play cards together at their country clubs, and live in streetfront houses with two-car garages and regular mailboxes.
“It’s not like it used to be,” said Alvese, who discussed the habits of local celebrities the way old river guides talk about schools of slowly vanishing fish. We drove by Ronald Reagan’s former home in Las Palmas (“No stars here anymore,” said Alvese, “just doctors, dentists and gays”) and Elvis Presley’s honeymoon hideaway, before ending up at Casa de Liberace. The famous schlock pianist died in 1987, and his house is operated as a kind of museum by his former companion, Stefan Hemming. Hemming greeted us at the door and took us on a tour of the dusty, baroquely appointed rooms. There was a long dining table set for 24, and a hot tub hidden under a red-velvet settee adorned with mink pillows.
Many of the star’s original possessions were at the Liberace Museum, in Las Vegas (Hemming had to sue the estate for the house), but there were still suits of armor in the halls, a boudoir filled with gilt-edged cologne bottles, and an impressive wardrobe of sequined jackets and dressing gowns. “The robes are mostly mine,” said Hemming, with a touch of catty pride. “Liberace was a little more heavyset.”
After another night of desert quietude, I left my ascetic lodgings at Hope Springs and put up at the Viceroy, a venue where Liberace would have felt right at home. The garden courtyards were filled with Regency-style box hedges and statues of skinny Louis XIV greyhounds, and each room was decorated in a posh black-and-white scheme and fitted with a single yellow chandelier. Lucite containers filled with water and lemons were scattered at strategic points around the grounds, and behind one of the two eucalyptus-shaded swimming pools was a “quiet zone” where guests were being rubbed down in open-air massage tents.
In colonial Kenya, I’m told, the freshness of the air had a bracing, even libidinous effect on the dour northern European temperament, and it was the same in old Palm Springs. “This was their place to come and play,” said Emily Christie, an assistant curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum, who showed me around Albert Frey’s famous pocket-size bachelor pad. A towering aesthete from Switzerland, Frey had built his dream pied-à-terre on an outcrop of boulders overlooking the town, and when he died he left it to the museum, which opens the house only occasionally for private tours.
The modernists, said Christie, found an abundance of rich clients in Palm Springs, and the dry desert climate was the perfect backdrop for their streamlined, indoor/outdoor aesthetic. Frey’s landmark house has a roof made of simple corrugated metal and a small, jewellike pool, and the bed is situated next to a boulder in the front of the room, surrounded by sliding glass doors. When you sit on it, you don’t really feel like you’re in a house at all. You feel like you’re floating on a magic carpet high above the valley floor.
Later, I rode the tram up to the top of Mount San Jacinto to sniff the alpine air. I visited a trendy spa called We Care, where proprietor Susan Lombardi plied me with kidney-cleansing dandelion-and-parsley tea while proselytizing the benefits of a good colonic. “We scrub it down and move it out,” said Lombardi, whose celebrity guests (Ben Affleck, Gisele Bündchen, Carolina Herrera) subsist on strictly monitored liquid diets (plus a daily colonic) for up to a month at a time. I paid $45 for a twilight round of golf at an excellent course called Indian Canyons, where I played behind a foursome of Mexican gardeners who were drinking cans of Tecate beer and spraying their shots merrily in every direction. By the seventh hole, I’d lost most of my golf balls too, and ended up tacking around the fairways until cocktail hour, watching the sun cast a weird tangerine glow in the desert sky.
By the time I steered my cruiser through the snow-white gates of the Parker Palm Springs, I was cool as a cucumber and moving at a stately desert pace. Valets in Schiaparelli-pink trousers whisked my car away and ushered me into the lobby, which was sealed away behind a tall red door.
The sprawling complex had been a Holiday Inn before the cowboy movie star Gene Autry purchased it and built an entire wing to house his California Angels baseball team. The billionaire talk show host Merv Griffin owned the property after Autry and filled the gardens with thousands of roses before partnering with the Givenchy company, which added a state-of-the-art swimming pool and spa. Today, the gardens are fitted with babbling fountains and courts for croquet and boules, and the designer Jonathan Adler has refurbished the interior in a swank '60s style. There are shag rugs in the lobby and a cavelike restaurant called Mr. Parker’s decorated with psychedelic black light posters. And when I arrived at my little garden room, I found photos of a skinny young Lee Radziwill on the wall and a vintage copy of Portnoy’s Complaint on the bedside table.
I woke the next morning to the buzzing of bees, and when I walked out to the garden, the ground was strewn with frangipani blossoms. I dined outdoors on pomegranate pancakes, then left the grounds to go once again into the desert to see what I could see. I turned east off Palm Canyon Drive and drove to the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, where I met a tribal ranger named William Beyal. Ranger Beyal wore a long ponytail and a weatherbeaten hat, and as we hiked up into the hot dry hills, he dispensed bits of local Native American lore. The Cahuilla had inhabited the valley for close to three thousand years, he said, and when the first foreigners came into the desert two centuries ago, the tribe served as guides in exchange for seashells from the coast.
Walking along, squinting in the sun, Ranger Beyal described how the tribes once used barrel cactus as slow cookers for rabbits, and he showed me the leaf of a plant called brittlebush that numbs toothaches. These days, Beyal said, there are nine bands of Cahuilla in the valley, one of which calls itself Agua Caliente. The Agua Caliente happen to own half the land in Palm Springs and recently completed a glittering casino at the intersection of Bob Hope Drive and the interstate. When I asked where the Agua Caliente live now, Beyal gave a happy shrug. “Pick any million-dollar home in the area,” he said. “That’s where the Agua Caliente live.”
On my last day in Palm Springs, I drove east toward Rancho Mirage, past houses made from railroad ties, Jetsons-style houses made of stucco, and houses, like Bob Hope’s famous bat-winged hillside palace, that look like they were conceived by Dr. Seuss.
After a week adrift in the desert, the healing powers of the famous old oasis had done their work. My mind was a pleasing blank; my skin felt smooth like butter, and smelled faintly of caramel ice cream. I drove to Haleiwa Joe’s for a farewell mai tai but Eddie Gustafson was gone, so I dropped in for a cocktail at Mel Haber’s place. In a corner of the room, a piano man was crooning Sinatra’s “Young at Heart,” and through the cocktail lounge gloom I could see photos of ageless desert icons on the wall: Haber with Jerry Lewis, Haber with Sonny and a deeply tanned Cher, Haber with Sinatra himself.
After my second martini, Haber appeared — another desert mirage, dressed in gold chains and a silk shirt with collar points the size of gull wings. Haber told me that Governor Schwarzenegger was planning to visit soon. He reminisced about Sinatra (“He would yell at a busboy for nothing!”), and pointed out a gentleman at the bar whose father had owned the famous Depression-era racehorse Seabiscuit. He gave me a copy of his self-published memoir and autographed the volume with a flourish.
When I told Haber I was flying back east in the morning, he made a sorry face. “Whaddaya wanna do that for?” he said in his honking Brooklyn accent. “I don’t care who you are, come here and you’ll be happy.” I looked around at the crowd, sipping their vintage, Prohibition-era highballs, enjoying their ageless platters of oysters Rockefeller. Outside, the sun was still shining, but here, in the weird, cocktail twilight, time stood still. Mel was right. The citizens of old Palm Springs looked happy; they looked like they could live forever.