A quick spin through the Coachella Valley reveals Hollywood homes, desert oases, ghost-town quirk and sexy restaurants…
By Doug Wallace
A random hug from a drunk karaoke singer sets the tone for the evening. “I’m just gonna get hold of this handsome guy here, and we can go,” he half-slurs to his buddies, who are trying to marshal him out the door of Streetbar. My ego inflates while I suck in my stomach.
I don’t normally gravitate to popular gay vacation spots, but I will take Palm Springs any day. The clichés are fun and the drinks are big. I love the tans, the white teeth and matching white shorts, the slicked-down eyebrows. And feeling like a majority in a straight world for a change is kind of liberating. I swear there’s a patterned shirt inside me waiting to get out.
Palm Springs has always been a chameleon as far as resort communities go: White Party one minute, Stage Coachella the next. The last time I was here, there were gay men in short denim shorts and high-tops sharing the sidewalks with straight women in short denim shorts and cowboy boots. Practically the same outfit, but with different soundtracks.
But there has always been a glam thread running through the Coachella Valley, just a hint of glitter in the sand in addition to the quartz. The region’s Hollywood connection amps up that glamour, with celebrities throwing pool parties in their backyards here since the 1920s – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, to name-drop just a few. Nowadays, celebrity sightings include Kris Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Justin Bieber, housewife Kyle Richards, John Barrowman and his husband, Reza and GG from Shahs of Sunset, Chance the Rapper – the list is both odd and varied.
On the Palm Springs Mod Squad tour with architecture authority Kurt Cyr, we not only drive by the homes currently or previously owned by the likes of Liberace and Leonardo DiCaprio, but also gain excellent insight into Desert Modernism architecture itself. The tour highlights the local architects who helped shape the look of the city, including Albert Frey and Richard Neutra, and explains how the buildings were constructed, design considerations made to suit the desert environment and the weather. Cyr also has a Rat Pack-specific tour that ends with a martini, of course. He is a bit of a local celebrity himself, his finger in a number of artistic pies. We pile out of the van at a side entrance of Frank Sinatra’s former home, but are shooed away by a bossy event planner. I am forever relegated to the D-List.
Make time to get out of Dodge
Having never really been in the nearby cities – the exotic-to-me names like Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage sound like an old TV show – we take time for a road trip. As with many populated regions, one town blends into the next. But we head out southeast, finding a mix of lesser-known cultural, geological and historical oddities – lights years away from the region’s posh-playground visage.
The best of the boho quirkiness comes at Bombay Beach on the shores of the land-locked, salt-water Salton Sea. It was once a thriving resort town filled with cottages and hotels, tour companies and yacht clubs. But shifts in the environment and in agricultural use beginning in the 1970s brought a drought that caused the sea to shrink and subsequently become toxic. Safe to say, resorting was over, at least until recently, when the area was reinvented as a hub for desert art, the beach becoming an outdoor gallery filled with works created mostly from found objects. Nearby artist-squatter commune Slab City and the religious-themed outdoor folk-art environment of Salvation Mountain add to the Mad Max vibe.
We pull into Bombay Beach’s landmark roadhouse Ski Inn for a bit of air conditioning, and find it refreshingly laced with Americana – walls covered with dollar bills, neon lights, a taxidermized fish, a CD juke box and all.
The desert really starts to grow on me when it comes time for some actual exercise. We take the short drive to Indian Canyons to get the lay of the land, arriving before the day gets too hot to hike. This is a significant cultural and historical site for the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who began living in the region two to three thousand years ago. We decide on Palm Canyon, noted for its natural beauty and the fact that it is one of the biggest natural palm oases in North America. The canyon’s resources include streams and California fan palms – massively tall and bushy – which provided early inhabitants with materials for huts and tools.
Later, we find more Indigenous history at the new 930-square-metre Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, a permanent gallery in downtown Palm Springs that showcases the history and culture of the band. The museum is in a cultural plaza built at the site of a sacred hot spring, which also includes the new Spa at Séc-he.
When we are not driving and touring, we are eating, of course. Road trips need nourishment, and Palm Springs delivers in spades, not to mention the fabulous date shakes. Seriously – come noon, this whole town really doesn’t have much to do except have lunch, it seems. Like, don’t these people have jobs? The patios are all packed, ditto at dinner, when we feast at hotspots like the sexy Rockwood Grill and the playfully designed Eight4Nine.
The waiter at Azúcar restaurant is so handsome, I don’t hear him recite the dinner specials and have to ask for them to be repeated. Such obvious buffoonery, honestly. I really am shameless. The restaurant is the luxe eatery at La Serena Villas, a colonial-contemporary designed retreat that recently received a Michelin Key, one of the first hotels in the US to be awarded this honour.
We finish the night looking up Marilyn Monroe’s skirt, of course. Seward Johnson’s eight-metre statue “Forever Marilyn” is a representation of the famous skirt-blowing scene from Billy Wilder’s 1955 film Seven Year Itch. Her underwear – and the fact that her ass faces the architecturally significant Palm Springs Art Museum – has been causing an uproar since the piece was erected, which I find funny, seeing as how this town is pretty laid back.
Despite trying, and perhaps because of all the wine, we can’t seem to see her gitch, it’s simply too dark. Just as well, really.
DOUG WALLACE is an international travel and lifestyle writer, photographer and custom-content authority, principal of Wallace Media and editor-publisher of TravelRight.Today. He can be found beside buffet tables, on massage tables and table-hopping around the world.
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