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After a few days at the Ingleside Inn, Palm Springs, they asked me how I’d enjoyed myself in the Garbo Room. She’d stayed there in the Thirties. That explained the ethereal voice whispering to me in the middle of the night. “Moof over fatso. I vant to be alone.”

It was definitely Garbo’s sort of room. White adobe walls, a campaign style bed, sparse smart furniture and a small yard suffocated with bougainvillea where one could sit with a glass of martini and a book, naked and baked in well over 100F. There was tree tunnel path to the back gate where her Pierce Arrown limousine would wait and she’d be gone in a cloud of dust back to the prying hell of Los Angeles, two hours west.

The Ingleside would have been Garbo’s sort of place because it has long been used to celebrity. Some walls away from me was Arnold Scwharzenneger, probably reading better in the buff than I was. Palm Springs would have fitted Garbo as it did so many stars, politicos and mobsters in ‘low profile’ because there is a bone dry sun blasted purity about the location with none of the leery attractions or prurience of Vegas. It is high in the desert, under the lee of a massive pile of desert geomorphology that is Mount San Jacinto, literally ‘Injun Country’ because the whole area around the town is a reservation.

An hour and a half out of Los Angeles east on the Interstate 10 to Phoenix and all points to Florida, the California 111 leaps across desert scrub, and twenty minutes later becomes Palm Canyon Drive, the main street of Palm Springs. Between the junctions of Tahcquits Canyon Drive and Ramon Road the open fronted bar restaurants, and the designer brand name shops intensify. Hiss-thin sprinklers, laid on by the merchants, spray the sidewalks.

Probably thirty minutes or so from this point, the first-time visitor will get the point of Palm Springs or turn around back to L.A or do the half day drive north west to the certain satanic kitsch of Vegas.

The point of Palm Springs, if there really must be one, is to enjoy the magnificence of the desert whilst cheating it of its rigours. It is a plateau of shimmering scrub with crests of bronzed rocks on either side. One lounges around pools under shade, eats decent food, drinks Californian wines, and at the lower point of the sun, strolls the main drag, cooled by sprinklers.

There is no ‘in’ place in Palm Springs. Where you are is where it is. The important decisions one makes concern accommodation, relaxation and pool. That will be your ‘in place.’ The residential signatures of Palm Springs are the smaller desert inns and the finest of these are in the ‘Tennis Club’ district named after the posh club above Palm Canyon Drive where the politico, star and mob categories would play. The inns are formed out of private hacienda estates built by the wealthy in the 1920s when Palm Springs became Hollywood’s ‘sandy back yard.’

There are renovations and amalgamations of these homes rarely consisting of more than thirty well-serviced but scant bungalows. Some have memories. At the Casa Cody Hotel, founded by Buffalo Bill’s cousin, they have one room with a slight wooden platform in the bay window where Charlie Chaplin worked out some of his routines. They have a room where George Patton planned the invasion of Sicily. Frank Sinatra’s ashes lie in a funeral home close to Bob Hope’s place. Former President Ford lives down the road.

In Melvyn’s Restaurant and Bar in the Ingleside Inn, there’s a stool by the door which was favoured by Sinatra. The owner, Melvyn Haber, tells,

“They had to go past him to even go to the ‘john.’ Amazing how many people never recognized Frank.”

There are 4 star hotels on the high rise side which may have ready rooms, but they are not the point of Palm Springs. The Ingleside, the Casa Cody and the Korakia [which has an antique Moorish decor style] are three of the ‘Tennis Court’ inns worth looking into and calling beforehand, because reservations can be dragons’ teeth in the cooler seasons. For the homosexual, there is a raucous colony of inns, all on one block, half a mile away, where nudity and alfresco interaction are variously tolerated. Straight or gay, the internet will not let you down for information

Eating out is just as much a matter of kerb appeal as heavy dining research. There are no fabulous dining experiences to be had. On Palm Canyon Drive, The St. James (Californian French) and The Conzuelas ( restrained Latino) are good for dinner and some music but otherwise, just go with the flow.

When rolling into the outer parts of town from the 10 freeway, the Palm Springs Desert Resort and Convention Bureau is prominent on the right with leaflets which fill in all contact details. Do not ignore the leaflet that explains the Air Museum, foremost and fabulous on the perimeter of the airport itself on Gene Autrey Drive. Wildcats, Corvairs, and Mustangs from all World War II theatres are in the two huge hangers. Trays catch their oil drips. Human legs dangle from cowlings. These aircraft still fly.

It seemed so right that, against this startling brightness and scant fierceness, once in a while, these roaring turbo props should be let out to play.

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