The Palmy Springs (All That Money Can Buy)
If the “only way in the world” to get into Society is with money, then why is it that so many very, very rich people are not in Society? It is a question worth pondering. Is it because they lack some mysterious ingredient of “leadership”? Not really; many of these “outsider” men and women are people of great influence and power. Is it that they lack some qualities of polish or good manners? No, for many people solidly in Society are far less mannerly than they. Is it that they don’t care? Not at all; they care greatly. Or is it that they think they are in Society? For one answer we might turn to a gold-plated desert mirage known as Palm Springs, California. For here is gathered a random selection of the richest people in America, strenuously enjoying all that money can buy.
The discrepancies between Palm Springs and Palm Beach are more than geographic, and rest upon more serious matters than differences in climate and the quality of the citrus crop. Palm Springs insists that it has better people than can be found anywhere else, Palm Beach included, and has the statistics to prove it. Palm Springs has, among other things, “More swimming pools per capita than any other city in the world”; to accommodate a winter population of 18,300, there are over 3,500 pools—or roughly one pool for every five residents. In summer, when the population drops to around 10,000, there is an even higher per capita gallonage of swimming space, and the proportion of pools to people may explain why most Palm Springs pools seem empty of swimmers at all seasons of the year.
Palm Springs also boasts more Cadillacs (locally called Caddies, or Cads), more Lincoln Continentals (Connies), more Rolls Royces (Rollses), and more Thunderbirds (T-Birds or Teebs) than can be found assembled on any other 41.6-square-mile area on this planet. During a recent nose count of Cads, Connies, and Rollses, the census taker was asked why he did not tally Bentleys. “We’re interested in prestige cars,” he replied. Palm Springs is also the home of “the world’s most luxurious thermal baths,” “the world’s largest and longest single-span, passenger-carrying aerial tramway,” “the world’s most sumptuous Mobile Home Park,” “the world’s only flying great-grandmother,” and “the world’s wealthiest tribe of Indians.”
No Palm Springs resident can escape for long his own personal, identifying superlative. A Seattle retailer is pointed out, in local promotional literature, as “the owner of one of the largest department stores in the West.” A Milwaukee restaurant owner is referred to as “the head of one of America’s biggest chains of steak houses.” Clearly bigness is what counts in Palm Springs. A Pebble Beach lady named Laurena Heple is identified as “the world’s largest manufacturer of remote-controlled gates.” In the meantime, when one is not rubbing tail fins with Paul Hoffman, Benjamin Fairless, Conrad Hilton, Jack Warner, Leonard Firestone, Floyd Odium, William Ford, or George Schmidt—“owner of one of the biggest amusement parks in the country”—a visitor may be grabbed by the shoulder with, “Hey, there goes Billie Dove! No need to tell you who she is. Hiya, Billie!”
If a superlative statistic can be attached to a slogan, so much the better—as far as Palm Springs is concerned. Palm Springs is advertised as “The Winter Movie Capital of the World,” and as the place “Where the Sun Shines on the Stars.” The Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce publishes a two-page list of “Hollywood Personalities with Homes in Palm Springs,” with names arranged alphabetically from John Arcesi to Myron Zobel. Similarly, a list of “prominent business people” is available, ranging from George Allen, “friend of several U.S. Presidents,” to Farny Wurlitzer, “Wurlitzer Music Corporation.” Clearly, Society in Palm Springs is the Society of the self-made. The town is also touted as “The World’s Friendliest Place,” and proof of this, according to one resident, is that “Most of these stars and millionaires don’t even bother to have unlisted telephone numbers out here. You’ll find Allan Jones right in the book—go ahead, look him up! That’s what I call friendly.”
In Palm Springs, Society and public relations have merged, or at least have come to a working arrangement. Everyone is a booster. Conducting a tour of “Society mansions” in the low hills around Palm Springs, a resident delivered the following monologue: “Now here is the house where Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher spent their honeymoon. Over there is the house where Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor spent their honeymoon. I forget which house Liz Taylor and Mike Wilding spent their honeymoon in, but the house where Liz Taylor and Mike Todd spent their honeymoon is back over in that direction. Up ahead, that’s the house where Debbie and Harry, her present husband, live now—some layout, huh? That other house belongs to the biggest parking meter manufacturer in Chicago—boy, what I wouldn’t give to have his millions! He also manufactures the Yo-Yo—I guess you’ve heard of Duncan Yo-Yos. Hey! There goes Alice Faye behind the wheel of that white Connie! Hiya, Alice! No, sir, you can’t tell me that this isn’t the richest town in the U.S.A. We’ve got more than three hundred millionaires living here in Palm Springs! See that home up there on the hill? That’s where Joan Crawford and Alfred Steele spent their honeymoon—they were a swell couple, Joan and Al. Yes, I guess you could say that the best in America is here in Palm Springs. Now over there—that’s Alan Ladd’s hardware store. He was a great guy, Alan. But there’s one thing that burns me up, and that’s folks who come out here and get the impression that Palm Springs is nothing but movie stars and millionaires. Why, we’ve got much more here than that.…”
Palm Springs is “The Winter Golf Capital of the World.” Golf, which may have become a middle-class sport elsewhere, is the required Society sport here. Few who cared about advancing socially would admit to disliking golf. There are eighteen golf courses in full operation—most of them private clubs—and there are more abuilding. “And this,” the booster reminds one, “doesn’t count all the pitch-and-putt courses.” Palm Springs is either “The Birthplace of the Golf Cart,” or “The Site of the Development of the Golf Cart,” depending on which handout you read, but in any case undoubtedly has more golf carts per capita than it has golf courses, and can go so far as to make this dizzying claim: “More homes with specially built, semi-attached golf-cart garages than any other resort area.” Because they speed the game, and allow the fairways to accommodate more players, golf carts are now required on nearly all Palm Springs courses. Though this may decrease the amount of exercise to be gained from a game of golf, one golfer comments, “You’d be surprised how much exercise you can get climbing in and out of a golf cart.”
Recently, too, Palm Springs has become “The Playground of the Presidents,” where, as one Palm Springer put it, “Three reigning U.S. Presidents have visited.” The “reigning” Presidents have been the late Dwight D. Eisenhower (who spent a portion of each winter there in a cottage on the grounds of the Eldorado Country Club); the late John F. Kennedy; and Lyndon B. Johnson. Harry Truman and the late Herbert Hoover visited Palm Springs as nonreigning Presidents. On the occasion of President Kennedy’s last visit, barely two months before his death, a local Palm Springs magazine took it upon itself to state, rather loftily: “Desert residents are getting so used to Presidential visits that many, this past month, regarded the Kennedy sojourn as a prerogative of this unique resort area rather than as a compliment that would dazzle any other small community in the nation except, of course, Hyannis Port. So the excitement was confined to Democrats, traditionally a desert minority group, and visitors.”
On the other hand, this blasé attitude was not at all in evidence during President Johnson’s first visit in the spring of 1964. The town decked itself with hectic bunting, thousands of residents mobbed the airport, and the mayor declared, “We’ve got to get some kind of gimmick to welcome guys like this—something that will be symbolic of Palm Springs. You know, the way Honolulu greets folks with hula dancers? Is there anything we could do with a bunch of golfers in golf carts?”
The center of all this fanfare is a tiny corner of the crescent-shaped Coachella Valley in the great Southwestern desert of the United States, some one hundred miles east of Los Angeles—a flat, arid, windswept stretch of landscape, where less than three inches of rain fall yearly, where irrigated patches show surprising green (a million gallons of water a day are required to water the average Palm Springs course), but where even the city’s promoters admit, “The predominating color is beige.” Here, on the outwardly unpromising terrain, surrounded by implacable beige mountains, one of the most extraordinary real estate booms in the country has been in progress, dwarfing anything that ever happened in Florida. Since 1940, Palm Springs’s permanent population has doubled itself every ten years; in the next ten years, it is almost certain to double again. The winter, or “in season,” population climbs at an even more alarming rate, and during winter weekends as many as fifty thousand extra people a day crowd into the city. These figures, which would certainly dismay members of a traditional Society, delight the wealthy who have made Palm Springs their winter home; the popularity of the place assures them of the wisdom of their original investment.
Admittedly, the surrounding landscape has a certain drama. In early spring, acres of wild verbena outside the town come violently into bloom, turning the desert floor an intense purple, and casting lavender shadows in the air. A little farther on, the vineyards and the citrus groves are in blossom, and in the vast date gardens, rows of palms form deep cathedral arches. In rocky canyons, the century plant sends up its tall, improbable flower, and the bearded Washingtonia palms gather in conspiratorial clusters. As the sun moves across the valley, the deep ridges and arroyos which articulate the mountain slopes come vividly into focus, making slow, snaky patterns of light and shade, while the color of the mountains gently edges from beige to yellow to pink to mauve.
Great clouds of fog and rain often drift eastward from the coast and pause at the tops of the western ranges where, from the valley below, they can be watched doing battle with the hot desert air that rises from the valley; almost inevitably, the clouds lose the contest, dump their rain or snow on the mountaintops, and disappear. In fact, a true Palm Springs enthusiast keeps his eyes tilted loyally upward toward the hills—toward San Jacinto Peak to the west, or San Gorgonio to the north, or the soft sand mountains to the east—admiring their shifting shapes and hues.
Over what goes on at eye level he manages to draw a little curtain. He does not see Palm Springs the real estate phenomenon: the speeding, honking traffic, the gaudy motels, the trailer parks, the used-car lots, the pennant-flapping service stations, the pancake parlors, the giddily decorated shops and bars and real estate offices. These become, in a sense, invisible. When a new development of “exclusive, luxury homes” called Southridge Estates began advertising “the most spectacular view in Palm Springs,” it was not talking about what Southridge overlooked at the time—a forlorn trailer park. It was talking about its view of the mountains, several hundred feet above the level of the chrome.
The invasion of civilization here has been, in many ways, reckless and haphazard. Downtown Palm Springs, with its drugstores, dress shops, and pastel-painted banks is indistinguishable from any of the “strips” of Los Angeles or, indeed, from any other bright suburban shopping area. The town is proud of a zoning law which prohibits buildings over thirty feet in height, and of the absence of overhead power lines; but these measures have merely emphasized the flatness of the valley floor. Palm Springs is also proud of its main street, Palm Canyon Drive, with its row of “exclusive shops”—so exclusive that one woman complains, “You can find plenty of mink-trimmed sweaters in Palm Springs, but you have to go to Los Angeles to buy a pillowcase.” Yet just a short distance behind the exclusive shops lies an area called Section Fourteen, which visitors are seldom taken to see. Much of it remains a slum of appalling squalor, with rutted streets leading past sagging shanties of tin and matchwood, where the rusting hulks of derelict automobiles lie overturned in the weeds. Here is where many of Palm Springs’s Negroes and Mexicans live.
Most Palm Springs dwellers like their night views best. At night, thousands of palm trees are dressed out with amber floodlights which make the trees look like fiery torches; lighted swimming pools provide sapphire dots across the valley floor;* and everything ugly that mankind has done to the valley becomes swallowed in a pretty sea of twinkling electric stars.
The mystique of “desert living,” which has drawn so many fanatics to Palm Springs, consists of many things. One of them, certainly, is what Palm Springs calls “the world’s most healthful climate.” Whether or not there is any basis in medical fact for this assertion is debatable, but Palm Springs insists there is. Arthritis is what brought such people as financier Floyd Odium to the area; he conducts his business while immersed in a pool heated to ninety degrees, where jets of water circulate around him as he sits aboard a floating chair, behind a floating desk, with a floating telephone. But it might be disputed that a climate in which the daily extremes of temperature may vary by as much as forty degrees—from eighty in the daytime to forty at night—is actually “salubrious,” the word Bing Crosby uses to describe the weather. One Palm Springs housewife describes the following routine for keeping a house at a livable temperature throughout the day: “I get up in the morning and turn on the heat. Then, after an hour or so, I turn off the heat and open the windows. Then, around noon, I close all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning. Then, toward evening, I turn off the air-conditioning and open the windows, to let in the last of the warmth of the day. Soon it’s time to turn on the heat again, and light the fires.” Because of the chilly desert nights, nearly all Palm Springs swimming pools are gas-heated. And it must be admitted that Palm Springs people seem to suffer from colds and ague no more and no less than do those in Bangor, Maine, and that during the winter months the flu circulates as efficiently here as it does in New York. Still, when you ask a Palm Springer what he likes best about the place his first reply will certainly be “the climate.” And the local health joke is, “Visitors come here and leave us their germs.”
“You either love the desert and the Palm Springs way of life, or you hate it,” one woman admitted recently. “There are desert people, and non-desert people, that’s all there is to it. People who don’t like it here should just get out!” This reaction is curiously common. Faced with a critic, the Palm Springs fan grows testy; he is not in the least defensive about the place; he is merely angry. When an Eastern visitor remarked, at a cocktail party, that she was “disappointed” in Palm Springs and “had thought it would be prettier,” her hostess said, “Oh, go soak your head!” and left the room. The assumption here is that since Palm Springs was created by man’s ability to spend money it has got to be pretty.
Non-desert-oriented souls object to the place for a variety of reasons. A Philadelphia gentleman recently found it “a concentration of everything that is vulgar, meretricious, and nouveau riche in America,” and added, with a little smile, “and aren’t we fortunate that it’s all concentrated out there.”
Others find the celebrated desert climate oddly debilitating. There is something about the crisp morning air and the brightness of the morning sun that makes one want to rise early; by 7 A.M. the pancake houses are doing a brisk business, and by eight the golf courses are crawling with golf carts. But as the day progresses and the mercury climbs, a curious lassitude creeps over one, a feeling of deep—though not unpleasant—physical exhaustion. The golf carts are now filled with dozing passengers. This is not the oppressive torpor of the Tropics, but a passivity of the senses and a spiritual languor. One longs merely to find the nearest unoccupied contour chaise and to stretch out upon it, content to gaze at the distant mountains, thinking of nothing.
Deserts traditionally provide havens for hermits, Foreign Legionnaires, and other escapees, and in this atmosphere one succumbs to solitude and lives with the minimum of effort. Perhaps this inertia accounts for the many mechanical devices developed in Palm Springs to make physical activity, or motion, unnecessary: for example, the “sun disk,” a huge padded backyard lazy Susan on which a number of sunbathers can lie while an electric motor rotates them slowly in the sun; and the poolside telephone which one can answer without picking up the receiver.
The mental lethargy induced by the desert may also account for the fact that there is very little “cultural life” in Palm Springs, and even less political life. “People just don’t get whipped up about politics out here,” says Frank Bogert, the Mayor, who was elected on a non-partisan ticket, “the only way I could be elected.” He adds, “People don’t come here to get whipped up about things. They come to relax.” Another says, “We forget about international problems and national issues here—it’s wonderful.” And still another man says, “Fortunately, because of the time change, the brokerage offices open very early in the morning, to coincide with the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. So we all go down early, see how our stocks are doing, and then spend the rest of the day relaxing.” Palm Springs is not a late-staying-up town, either. Nightclubs are few, and by 9 P.M. at parties most of the guests are yawning.
Other sensitive souls who find the desert a vaguely dispiriting place blame the otiose tenor of desert life not so much on the heat as on the ever present encircling influence of the mountains. “I feel hemmed in when I am there,” one woman says, “and after a while it gets absolutely claustrophobic. I keep looking up at the hills, thinking: there must be some way to get over them, to get out.” And not long ago a visitor who had ridden to the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and had refused a specialty of the summit restaurant, a “tramburger,” stood shivering in the thin, sub-freezing air at 8,516 feet above sea level, and asked absently, “What am I doing up here?” Then he said, “I guess it’s because I was down there.”
Among permanent residents in the valley, a good deal of controversy goes on as to whether Palm Springs is or isn’t a good place to bring up children. One mother of a teenager says, “Well, the thing is that most of the people who move to Palm Springs are very rich. And, before a person gets very rich, he’s usually pretty old. This is a community of wealthy retired people, mostly, and the young people feel pretty much out of things. Most kids who’ve grown up here can’t wait to leave.”
But another young woman, the wife of an up-and-coming businessman and the mother of a teenage daughter, feels that “It’s good for children of medium-income families to grow up in a community like this, where they can mingle with the sons and daughters of millionaires. They learn that millionaires are no different than you or I, and it may even make them ambitious to become millionaires themselves!” She praises such local institutions as the Palm Springs Boys’ Club, “where millionaires’ sons and the sons of the less well-off can meet,” and adds, “Even the high school has started teaching things like tennis and golf, the things that will really be important here, in later life.” In fact, climate and leisure aside, the real inducement to live in Palm Springs is the coziness, even the joy, of being able to rub shoulders with movie stars and millionaires, in being able to speak with truth of having run into Benjamin Fairless or John J. McCloy at the supermarket, and in being able to talk about, and see at first hand, all the glittery, improbable things that lots and lots of money can buy.
Take piano bars. Piano bars are so popular in Palm Springs that they are a commonplace; to enter a Palm Springs living or rumpus room and find stools around the concert grand is tantamount to finding a sofa and chairs in a Scarsdale parlor. A more imaginative piece of furniture is Bing Crosby’s specially designed combination piano stool, tea-server, and bed tray. Equally unsurprising have become the various shapes into which swimming pools have been twisted, from the simple hourglass and kidney to the “monogram,” built to match the owner’s initial. In fact, plain heated swimming pools are becoming old hat. Nowadays they are being installed with whirlpools.
When it comes to building costs, Palm Springers do not believe in cutting corners, but occasionally one is forced to. One man reluctantly gave up plans to have an indoor swimming pool in his fallout shelter (“It would have been beautiful—it was going to be surrounded with tropical plants”) because it was “just too impractical.” Even so, the finished shelter, larger and more luxurious than most Fifth Avenue apartments, cost $75,000 and should provide a comfortable hideout come doomsday.
“No, many people here do not have good taste,” admits Howard Lapham, the Palm Springs designer who has designed some of the town’s most spectacular houses, including thirty-eight of the houses along the fairways of the Thunderbird Country Club. (The “cheapest” Lapham house, a three-bedroom, three-bathroom affair, runs $100,000.) “But we try to educate them toward good taste,” he says. Lapham confesses to having mixed feelings about some of the residential fillips his clients have directed him to make. Somewhat ruefully he refers to the house he designed for Debbie Reynolds as “the flying boxcar.” Cantilevered on steel beams, high on a hill—“It’s so heavy-looking up there,” he says.
One of Mr. Lapham’s recent clients is Mr. S. A. Healy, “a big subway and tunnel man” from Chicago. In his shoot-the-works, damn-the-expense house, Mr. Healy—a man in his seventies—has a basement play area with two bowling alleys and automatic pinsetters; an electronic golf range with shifting photomurals projected on a wall to simulate progress from hole to hole; a Swedish sauna bath; and a whirlpool swimming pool. One nice thing about Palm Springs home builders, Lapham says, is that “Most of these guys okay a sketch, say, ‘Let me know when it’s finished,’ and take off.” They don’t hang over an architect’s drawing board, in other words, offering penny-pinching suggestions or otherwise making nuisances of themselves.
Home builders place similar faith in their interior decorators. People who don’t want to be bothered with such details as upholstery and paint samples simply depart for several months in Europe, leaving their decorators with carte blanche. One woman, whose decorator chased her to the airport with living room fabric swatches, said airily, “Oh, just surprise me, darling,” and climbed aboard her plane. When My Fair Lady composer Frederick Loewe left actor-turned-decorator Gar Moore (“I was once married to Nancy Walker”) in charge of refurbishing his house and garden, he gave Moore only one instruction: “Don’t move my mountain.” But Moore, who had ideas of his own, got to work “rearranging” the mountain—actually a large hill behind the house—moving giant boulders by the ton, and in the end decided to build a whole new mountain somewhat closer to the house “for privacy.”
As the time approached for Loewe’s return, Moore grew apprehensive. “I decided to let him walk through the house and out into the garden alone, while I waited in the living room,” Moore says. “Pretty soon, I heard him shouting, ‘Gar! Gar!’ I came running out. He was standing there, on one of the seven terraces I’d designed, looking at my new mountain with tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘I don’t deserve such a beautiful place!’” One of the subtleties of the garden, Moore explained, is that the boulders in it have been artfully arranged to suggest erotic objects, or rather certain parts of the human anatomy. This proves a great source of fun to Loewe’s friends. Inside the house, in addition to such routine features as a sunken bathtub, curtains that open and draw on electric motors, and a television set that can be lowered electrically from the ceiling, there is Loewe’s enormous glass-walled bedroom with a bed that can be power-swiveled about the floor so that its occupant can face whatever prospect pleases the recumbent. As the bed turns, its attendant bedside tables and lamps turn with it. “He can lie in bed and never get tired of the view,” Moore says.
In his bar—surprisingly not the piano variety—Loewe likes to point out an arrangement of four framed pictures on the wall: an etching of two clasped hands “of friendship”; a depiction of a female nude; the photostat of a check; and a piece of sheet music. “These symbolize the things in life I value most, in that order,” he explains. He has vowed that he will never write another line of music, and will not even tolerate a piano in the house. The check, symbol of his third most valued commodity, is payable to Loewe from Columbia Records in the amount of $1,840,000, representing a year’s My Fair Lady royalties. The reverse side of the check has also been photostated. It is endorsed “For deposit only,” and has been negotiated.
The rich and powerful of Palm Springs may have more fun with money than the rich of any other rich city in the world. Innocent jokes are always being played with checks, currency, or other tokens of exchange. Outside an elaborately done-up trailer in Sahara Park, the owner has installed a parking meter and “for a gag” has placed behind the glass of the meter’s face a crisp new $1000 bill, to indicate that he lives in a trailer by choice and not out of necessity. The parking meter is one of the sights, along with the house where Joan Crawford and Alfred Steele spent part of their honeymoon, which visitors are taken to see. Palm Springs takes civic pride in such affluent, imaginative gestures.
Even the banks join in the financial whimsey. When the Palm Springs National Bank opened its doors not long ago, its directors decided to publicize the event by having their first depositor, the Eldorado Country Club, present a large check to the Desert Crippled Children’s League. The check was four feet wide, nine feet long, and weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. The check was legal tender but, of course, would not fit in the bank’s canceling machines. So the directors appeared merrily with electric drills and punched the proper holes in it. How the crippled children felt about the joke is not recorded. “Palm Springs is Free Enterprise at play,” says one businessman with a good deal of accuracy. An Easterner, reacting with horror, says, “Palm Springs Society is a perversion of Society.”
I sing of Palm Springs, and its joys multifarious,
Be one hermit inclined, or a type most gregarious,
All rustle and bustle, making bucks in a hustle;
Or sunning, or funning, or resting, or nesting;
Where you wear what you please,
Where Eastern goes Western,
Where the fair-skinned get tan-skinned
And an eyeful of bareskin—and I don’t mean a rug!
Where great-grandmothers fly and visitors vie
With characters local and whimsical
Who wear zany hats, painted
Cravats and costumes cut briefly, and lyrical!
Where a President visits, and you and I hope
It’s a yearly occurrence—
Rumor is that it will be.
So stop in and see me at the fine
Potter Realty
In the heart of this glamorous town.
So sings Mildred Southwick Potter, Palm Springs’s poetess realtor, putting things in a nutshell, in her local ads, and proving, while she is at it, that Palm Springs, California, is a place where real estate and the arts have blissfully joined hands. It is a place where motion picture actresses have pool side conferences not about their careers but about their subdivisions; where silent screen stars sit under hair dryers in beauty salons discussing not their old loves but their new liens. It is a place where such as Desi Arnaz, Charles Boyer, Bonita Granville, and Gene Autry became hotelkeepers. It is where Bing Crosby—together with such stockholders as Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, William Goetz, Phil Harris, Danny Kaye, and William Perlberg—has developed what must stand at the moment as the mobile-home park to end all mobile-home parks: Blue Skies Village.
The mobile-home, or trailer, park as an adjunct to the Social Establishment is worth pausing to consider, for that it is an offshoot—albeit a wild one—of Society there is no doubt. It is also a creation of the American Southwest. At Dana Point, on the Pacific coast, such established figures from Los Angeles Society as Mrs. Norman Chandler, wife of the publisher, retire to live in opulently outfitted trailers. So it is at Blue Skies Village in Palm Springs. In partnership with Crosby in this venture is a bubbly, roly-poly gentleman named Rex Thompson, who says, “We got a hundred and sixty-two families living here in Blue Skies, and twenty-one of ’em is bank directors! Fifty-two drive Cadillacs! Almost all of ’em is corporation presidents! We got three Rolls-Royces, eleven Thunderbirds, forty Lincoln Connies! We had a guy move here named Pierre Sicard, said he was a painter. Heck, I thought he painted ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ on doors, but it turns out he’s got a $800,000 home in Bel Air! That guy’s a great artist!”
To live in Blue Skies, one must lease trailer space in the park at rates from $750 to $1,200 a year. To this space one must add a trailer—agreeing, at the same time, to spend at least $7,500 “improving” or, one might say, immobilizing one’s mobile home, because the surest thing that can be said about the trailers that have been brought to Blue Skies Village is that they will trail no more. The improvements proviso does not faze the residents of America’s richest mobile-home community. On the contrary, it spurs them on to greater, more competitive, spending. In a recent eight-month period, Blue Skies trailer owners spent an aggregate total of $750,000 on terraces, porches, gazebos, cupolas, cabanas, and ramadas (a ramada is a superstructure covering an entire trailer). Several Blue Skies residents have gone off, unaccountably, on Oriental flights of fancy, and have enclosed their trailers in strange pagodas. One man, in an Egyptian mood, has surmounted his trailer with a replica of the Great Portal of the Temple of Karnak, complete with exterior friezes and frescoes.
Mr. Richard E. Bishop, retired president of the A. C. Horn Chemical Company, says he has spent “about $50,000” turning his 55 by 18 foot trailer into a facsimile of Mount Vernon. “I’m not quite sure how we got started on Mount Vernon,” he says, “but we put on the big porch across the front with the white columns, and one thing sort of led to another.” The Bishops’ maid has a separate, smaller trailer of her own, also in the Mount Vernon style. Mount Vernon is topped by an enormous flagpole from which Old Glory can be seen from miles around, and upon which Mrs. Bishop occasionally hoists a flag emblazoned with a coffeepot, signifying that she would welcome other ladies for a Kaffeeklatsch. The Bishops also frequently fly the cocktail flag by way of asking neighbors over “for a little drinkie.”
“People in other trailer parks around here call us ‘the Blue Skies snobs,’” one trailer owner says, “and frankly we’re proud of that label. We’re a more international group than you’ll find in other parks, and we’re more social too. I mean Bing drops around for songfests, we hire professional entertainers for our shindigs, we have twenty-dollar-a-plate dinners—things like that. We’re the only park that has cocktail parties. And sure we’re exclusive.” Blue Skies operates, he explains, as a private club. “No Tom, Dick or Harry can move into this place. We want nice people living here. We check on everybody. We even find out if they snore.”
Meanwhile, the eyes of Blue Skies’s manager Rex Thompson grow misty as he dreams of an America covered with mobile-home parks, based on the success of the Blue Skies venture. “I’m responsible for Dana Point, too,” he explains. “I’m starting a whole chain of deluxe parks across the West! I’m building one right now in Vegas—it’ll have everything this place has, plus slot machines! Most people in the East don’t understand trailer living. Easterners look down their noses at trailer people, but tell ’em to come out to Blue Skies and see the aristocratic types we’ve got. Captains of industry! Why, these folks here hobnob with the cream of Palm Springs Society!”
Exactly what the cream of Palm Springs Society consists of is worth considering. It is a Society based—as elsewhere—on money and, in most cases, newly made money: first-generation fortunes that still have a bright, fresh taste in the fortune makers’ mouths. It is a Society, moreover, that makes no attempt to disguise the fact that money is the whole point. As one man says, “Out here we say we’re living on our heirs’ money. So what? My son comes to me and says, ‘Pop, you’re dipping into capital!’ I ask him, ‘Who made it?’ Why should I leave him ten million bucks? Let him go out and make it like I did.”
There is a great deal of talk about exclusiveness, and which golf or country club is more exclusive than another. But there is a simple rule: the most exclusive clubs are the most expensive. Thunderbird, Eldorado, and Tamarisk are, therefore, three very exclusive golf clubs. Originally, Thunderbird was built as a Gentile club which specifically excluded Jews, and Tamarisk was its Jewish and equally exclusive answer (though it was happy to accept the non-Jewish Frank Sinatra). In recent years, however, the memberships of both clubs have blurred considerably, religious lines are no longer drawn and, as one Thunderbird member says, “All you need to get in here is the scratch.” Eldorado, meanwhile, had the cachet of Eisenhower. Perhaps an even more exclusive club than these is Smoke Tree Ranch, which does not encourage golfers. Smoke Tree is not a country club but a private community of homes with a main guest building and cottages surrounding it, where life is determinedly ranchy. There are cookouts, riding picnics, chuck wagon breakfasts. For riding up into the chilly morning hills, members carry saddle flasks of vodka. The Bermuda Dunes Country Club, meanwhile, has the distinction of possessing the largest golf layout in the Palm Springs area. Its golf cars have refrigerated compartments for drinks. Bermuda Dunes is also the only local club with its own airport, its own hangar for private planes, its own fire department, and—for a reason that has never been quite clear—its own resident dentist All these clubs are in the real estate business, and offer lots for sale, apartments for lease, or condominiums along the fairways for purchase.
For years the traditional club for movie stars was the Racquet Club, with its éminence grise, the retired actor Charles Farrell. Here, at various times, such movie people as Charles Butterworth, Warner Baxter, Carole Lombard, Gilbert Roland, Ginger Rogers, Mervyn LeRoy, Mary Pickford, Frank Morgan, Marlene Dietrich, and “Big Boy” Williams could be seen playing tennis. Indeed, it was the arrival of Farrell and the club’s co-founder, Ralph Bellamy, in Palm Springs in the mid-1930’s that turned the first big spotlight of publicity on the area. The Tennis Club, on the other side of town, was created as the answer to the Racquet Club; it did not welcome movie stars or Jews. But here again, as Palm Springs has mushroomed, with all clubs furiously competing for members and in the selling of lots, membership restrictions have been dropped in both places, and movie stars and rich people of all faiths can be found in both.
Another very expensive and exclusive club is the Palette Club. Its membership, predominantly female, is composed of people who paint—the wives of millionaires and movie stars who clubbed together a few years ago to prove, as one member said, “that there is so some culture in Palm Springs!” The Palette Club occupies a comfortable old Spanish house which has been fixed up with antiques, mirrors, chandeliers, and a bar. Here, under the guidance of an affable bachelor named John Morris, the ladies gather for a painting lesson or a cocktail, or a painting lesson and a cocktail, draping their furs over their easels. Here one can see “Mousey” (Mrs. William) Powell working industriously on a still life, or the pretty young wife of an aging Texas oil man (“She’s not that young,” whispers Morris, “she’s just had her face lifted”) doing something “which expresses me.” The club has frequent invitation-only shows of Western painters, and of its own members’ work. The latter are particularly successful because, as one woman says, “We’re very loyal about buying each other’s paintings.” During the summer months, John Morris, a genial Pied Piper, guides his little band of lady painters on an artists’ tour of France, where his name becomes Jean Maurice.
But for all the talk about Society the plain fact is that Palm Springs isn’t very social in the ordinary American sense. For all the vast sums of money Palm Springs people spend building and decorating their houses, the amount of entertaining done is relatively modest. So is its scale. Large parties are infrequent, the average get-together consisting of as many people as will fit around the piano bar. Hostesses keep things simple in terms of menus, party decor, and flowers. The never fading plastic blossom has been found to be intensely practical. The lavish wedding, the debutante ball, and so many other events that stamp Society in other resorts from Newport to Santa Barbara, do not take place in Palm Springs. There is only an occasional charity ball. Life in the desert becomes introverted, and the “type most gregarious” of Mrs. Potter’s poem has a poorer time of it than those who are “hermit inclined.” Palm Springs houses are built to hole up in, and some of the costliest places have never been known to entertain a guest. People who move here from other cities, expecting to find the advertised friendliness, are often disappointed. A new acquaintance promises to telephone, but never does. People are invited to dinner, and forget to come. “There’s something about the climate here,” one woman says, “that makes you fail to remember things.”
Then there are those wealthy Indians who, in a sense, have had a bad time of it. The tribe was initially given thirty thousand acres of land; they were given “every other section,” which divided the area in a checkerboard pattern. The grid design is quite apparent from the air as the pattern of a Palm Spring’s development because, unfortunately, clear title to Indian land for years could not be got for outright sale, and Federal law prohibited the land’s lease for longer than a five-year period, which did not appeal to developers. So, while alternate sections have sprouted motels and golf courses, Indian lands lay bare. Recently, Congress declared that Indian lands could be leased for ninety-nine years, and so their development is under way. Also, under the Equalization Act, each individual member of the tribe was given land valued at $335,000. At today’s soaring Palm Springs prices, each Indian—man, woman, and child—is worth easily a million dollars. The tribe, however, has dwindled. There are presently barely a hundred Indians left, and the number judged to be “competent adult Indians” is about forty. The wealth of the others is in the custodianship of banks. By the rest of Palm Springs’s population, the Indians are simply ignored.
The real Old Guard of Palm Springs consists of exactly one woman, Mrs. Austin McManus, and even she is not a native. Still, Mrs. McManus, known throughout the valley as Auntie Pearl, is easily the First Lady of Palm Springs. She is a cheerful-faced woman in her eighties who looks considerably younger, and she says, “My heart is bound up in the desert!” So, it might be added, is her considerable fortune. Her father, Judge John Guthrie McCallum, arrived in 1884, having sought out the desert air for the sake of a tubercular son. Palm Springs was a sleepy Indian settlement called Agua Caliente.* He became the area’s first white settler. Judge McCallum bought up between five and six thousand acres of land, built an aqueduct to carry water down from the mountains, nineteen miles of irrigation canals, and began growing citrus, fig, and other fruit trees. He never lived to see his investment become a success. At the time of his death an eleven-year drought had dried up his canals and aqueduct—this was before Palm Springs was discovered to rest on a series of underground lakes which made water plentiful and cheap—and his fruit orchards had withered and died. “Father died of a broken heart,” Mrs. McManus says sadly.
But his considerable land passed on to his daughter who has managed her properties with a shrewdness that has won her the admiration of every real estate man in town. She has also exercised a good deal of taste, and the buildings for which she is responsible show a style and dignity unusual in the town. It was she who built the handsome Tennis Club—which has been called, with customary Palm Springs excess, “the most beautiful two acres in America,” but is nonetheless a lovely place—as well as a number of the better-looking commercial buildings downtown.
Because she is widowed and childless, without direct heirs, Mrs. McManus has begun to think in terms of foundations and other beneficiaries of her money and properties. She recently became interested in the newly founded College of the Desert, a junior college outside Palm Springs, only to discover that this institution, too, seemed to have become afflicted with the curious logy-mindedness of the desert.
Not long ago she sent the college a check for $7,000. The president called to thank her for the gift, and suggested that the money might be spent to purchase new robes for the college choir. “Now wouldn’t you think,” said Mrs. McManus indignantly to a friend, “that the college—any college—could find something better to spend that money on than choir robes? Why not books, for example? Choir robes!”
It is real estate fever, Mrs. McManus admits, that has kept her young. Standing on the wide veranda of her comfortable but unpretentious pink-stucco house overlooking Palm Springs and the acreage her father bought, she talked not long ago of “whole new cities, whole new communities” being carved out of the far-off mountains and hidden canyons beyond. She had been taken on a private helicopter ride over some of those wild, lost ridges, and became excited about their development. “You see,” she said with a smile, “I own some of those mountains.”
“You see, son, this is real Society out here,” said one of the many local boosters recently. “The real thing. Not your flibberty-gibbet fly-by-nights with fancy manners and their pinky in the air. This is money, son, and the men that make America run. The men that make Palm Springs are bigger than any city—why, they’re international men, men that Presidents listen to, that can call up the heads of the biggest banks and give ’em hell. I’m talking about Ben Fairless, Len Firestone, Paul Hoffman, Monty Moncrief, Conrad Hilton, Greg Bautzer, Ernie Breech, Dan Thornton, Ray Ryan—that caliber. These men are the movers and the shakers and the doers, son—captains of finance, leaders of industry! That’s what I call Society, son—the big wheels. As far as the other kind of Society goes, son, that’s dead!”
* Whenever an important visitor—a President, say—is scheduled to make a nighttime arrival, Palm Springs pool owners are alerted to turn on their underwater lights “for the best possible impression.”
* Named for the warm mineral spring which bubbled up through the sand, now the site of the Palm Springs Spa and “The world’s most beautiful bath house,” which also belongs to the Indians.