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THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - February 23, 1998
Desert Cool
Nostalgia for a lifestyle of cocktails, cigars, Sinatra, and poolside cha-cha-cha has made Palm Springs hip again.
THE FIRST TIME a no longer fashionable style came back into fashion was probably in the eighteenth century, when architects became obsessed with classical Greek and Roman forms. The cycle of aesthetic rejection, oblivion, and renaissance, which took a millennium to play out in that instance, had speeded up considerably by the middle of this century: Tiffany lamps and Victorian houses, for instance, were only sixty or seventy years old when, to a gay and proto-yuppie avant-garde, these fusty, great-auntish grotesqueries suddenly came to seem charming and desirable. In our present hypertrophied consumer age, it takes even less time for the culture to move through a complete taste wave, from peak to valley to peak again-no more than thirty or forty years. The phenomenon has now become predictable enough to constitute a kind of postmodern socio-cultural law.
Take Palm Springs, California. From the beginning of the great freeway era until the time of the last New York World's Fair-or, put another way, from Marilyn Monroe's motion-picture debut until her death-Palm Springs oozed California smart-set swank. Palm Springs was to the over-sexed Hollywood of the fifties what East Hampton was to the overmoneyed Manhattan of the eighties: the getaway place a couple of hours east for all the swingingest people.
But after its first twenty years of chic, the place became decidedly, deeply uncool, and it stayed that way for another twenty years. The new golf-centric pseudo towns like Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert, which grew up during the seventies and eighties east of the city, between Dinah Shore Drive and P.G.A. Boulevard, reinforced the image of a character-free, climate-controlled elephants' graveyard, the world according to Gerald Ford. Harold Robbins and Zsa Zsa Gabor lived in Palm Springs; Sonny Bono became mayor.
But then comes the third, rehabilitative phase, which is now under way in Palm Springs. At first, the embrace is ironic, campy. In the nineteen-seventies, for instance, pediments and columns began appearing in serious new American architecture as tongue-in-cheek gestures, around the same time that the southern end of Miami Beach began to seem fetchingly zany. Soon tongues are removed from checks, and the aesthetically, correct take goes from contempt to amusement and on to earnest adoration, all within a decade.
The connoisseurship by baby boomers of mod, kitschy artifacts from their youth (amoeboid tabletops, plastic chairs, lava lamps) acquired serious momentum during the eighties. As this appreciation has extended outward and downward into the young heterosexual masses, it has taken the form of vicarious life-style nostalgia-nostalgia for the idealized young adulthood of one's parents (giant cocktails, lounge music, cigars, Sinatra, poolside cha-cha-cha). The 1996 film "Swingers" was a hit, and now Martin Scorsese is planning a Dean Martin biopic. Given this ascendant retro vector, plus the fact that the desert itself is a stylishly nineties kind of landscape-minimalist, unsentimental, extreme-the hipster rediscovery of Palm Springs was probably inevitable. Even the infrastructure seems serendipitously au courant: the four thousand sleek, giant white metal windmills west of town, acres and desolate acres of them in the desert along the highway from L.A., look like a collaboration between Philippe Starck, Richard Meier, and George Lucas.
Because Palm Springs itself did not prosper during the seventies and eighties, developers had no incentive to rip down the first-generation architecture. So the snazzy haute-Cold War houses survive-entire time-warped neighborhoods of them. And, unlike the rich neighborhoods of Los Angeles, where nineteen-thirties pseudo-Colonials are next to nineteen-eighties pseudo-Mediterraneans that are next to nineteen-fifties pseudo-Tudors and seventies suburboid mansions, Palm Springs posh sprang up in a single moment and shared a single architectural dream: desert modernism-low, glassy; horizontal, sleek. It remains perfect. Before the twenty-first century is finished, Palm Springs will seem as remarkable and precious as places like Georgetown or Brooklyn Heights do today; an American urban period piece preserved in situ.
There's a surprisingly high concentration of houses whose significance derives not from the fact that Elvis or Zsa Zsa once slept in them. The California modernist star John Lautner designed Bob Hope's house, and Richard Neutra designed a Palm Springs house in 1947 for the Edgar Kaufmanns -- the Fallingwater Kaufmanns. Albert Frey, who emigrated from Zurich sixty-seven years ago and still lives in his own glass house tip on a San Jacinto Mountain ledge, designed the city hall, a 1946 house for the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, and an early-sixties gas station that is currently the subject of a contentious preservationist battle. (The local establishment doesn't quite get it: Palm Springs' official city architecture guide lists twenty-six notable buildings, none built after the thirties and almost all of them cute Spanish stucco or Old West vernacular.)
It's not just the buildings from the forties, fifties, and sixties that are remarkably well preserved and that seem to 1998 sensibilities unwittingly hip. Human vestiges of the Rat Pack resort milieu survive as well, which is definitely, part of the ironic-cum-anthropological attraction of the place: imagine Williamsburg or Sturbridge Village if the actors in Colonial drag were real people from the eighteenth century. In Palm Springs, old guys and dolls of the Peter Lawford and Angie Dickinson generation, still well tanned and lubricious, drive their Cadillacs to supper at Melvyn's Restaurant and Lounge.
Do not rebuild it, and they, will come. The people in black are now arriving and meeting with real-estate agents. The word "fabulous" is being uttered on Palm Canyon Drive. At John's Mid-Century Modern, a two-year-old resale store in a building designed by Frey, cosmopolite newcomers buy their plywood Eames chairs and George Nelson coffee tables (for a song, still). In 1992, an Ian Schrageresque hotelier refurbished the nineteen-twenties Korakia Pensione, which is now booked weeks in advance by movie people-cool movie people, like Laura Dern. During the last five years, hypertstylish men from New York and Los Angeles (the creative directors of GQ and Clinique, the director of the Isaac Mizrahi documentary "Unzipped," and so on) have bought houses. Magazines are using Palm Springs for fashion shoots, which has the effect of making the space-age desert-swinger aesthetic seem more intensely voguish to more people, which will result in more fashion shoots and videos, and then the arrival of more emigrants from Manhattan and Los Angeles. There's still no Miamifled scene, no surplus tuna tartare, no VIP rooms, no roving packs of supermodels. Give it a few years. "There's a feeling of Camelot," says Jim Moore, the GQ creative director, who bought his 1962 steel house in 1993 and has meticulously restored it, "I don't want it to change."