The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 unde
r 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.