Travel Reports
Palm Springs / Santa Monica
Whether it’s the secret of immortality in Palm Springs or the tantrums and tiaras of Santa Monica, Southern California is hot.
Everybody dreams of experiencing a touch of Hollywood glamour when they come to California, but nothing prepared me for the apparition at the door of Room 706 of the Hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica. Feeling somewhat fuzzy headed from jetlag, I’d misheard my room number as I checked in and was now fumbling around stupidly at somebody else’s door. And there she was, the ghost of Bette Davis, in a long chinoiserie dressing gown with matching turban, fixing me with huge, inscrutable, lacquered eyes. “Can I help you?” she said in an imperiously dismissive Katharine Hepburn drawl. “Is this Room 704,” I stammered, looking at my key, instantly realising my mistake and feeling like Hugh Grant in one of his more bumbling roles. “You’ve got the wrong room,” she barked like an irritable diva, and slammed the door in my face. Secretly delighted at having stumbled across a living relic of a more glamorous bygone age, I quickly found my room and wasted no time in tripping down to the Verandah Bar to enjoy a long-overdue welcome Mojito and soak up the atmosphere of this legendary Santa Monica hotel.
It was built in 1926 as one of the original Hollywood beach clubs, and entering the lobby is like going through a time warp, back to the heady days of the silver screen. It’s an Art Deco masterpiece of Aztec decorated pillars and glittering blue-and-gold mosaics, and the comfortable rattan armchairs in the bar are still the best place in town to spot celebrities. But if Britney or Paris aren’t around to vie for your attention you can always gaze out of the huge bay windows and enjoy the wonderful views of the palm-fringed beach, which stretches endlessly away to meet the magnificent Santa Monica mountains plunging into the Pacific breakers in distant Malibu.
It’s amazing the effect an eight-hour time difference can have on your body clock. At six in the morning, the well-equipped hotel gym was already buzzing with jet-lagged Europeans frantically burning away the boredom of excessively early mornings. It’s a good routine to get into, though, because with food at half UK prices and portions twice the size, you’ll soon need an early morning jog or workout to save your waistline. Immediately cancelling out my good intentions, I was soon enjoying a huge “stack” of fresh butter pancakes at Pedals, the charming beachside brasserie of Casa del Mar’s neighbouring Riviera-style hotel, Shutters. It’s a great place to come for breakfast to watch the early-morning Pacific mists lift and the Barbie-perfect joggers and surfing hunks in their skin-tight wetsuits blank each other as their paths cross on the huge expanse of sand.
After a quick stroll along the Promenade to Santa Monica Pier, you’ll soon appreciate that this is one of the world’s great city beaches and a godsend to Los Angeles, which would otherwise be a collection of suffocating, landlocked suburbs. One of the most enjoyable ways of exploring the famous beach life is to cycle along the 22 miles of refreshingly breezy tracks which meander through the landscaped palm groves. The ride reads like a screenplay to 20th-century youth culture. Right next to Santa Monica Pier is the original Muscle Beach. I’d hoped to find a scene straight out of a 1950s’ tinted postcard, but there were only a couple of grizzled diehards pumping away on the parallel bars. These days, you’ll find your perfect Californian dream man on the beach volleyball courts, among the legions of tall, ruggedly handsome ripped hunks leaping around in tropical-print shorts. You’ll soon be making too many unnecessary map stops by the volleyball courts, and should you want to join in you’ll find the rainbow flag proudly fluttering on Lifeguard Station 15 at Venice Beach.
Venice itself has a grittier edge than bourgeois Santa Monica. What I whimsically mistook for a seaside attempt by hundreds of Raelian Sect members to contact their alien masters turned out to be the biggest AA meeting I’ve ever seen.
Venice is the spiritual home of skateboarding, and it’s worth stopping at the rinks to watch the boys defy gravity with their hair-raising spins and somersaults. But it’s serious stuff, as the booming hardcore Hip Hop music proclaims, and I couldn’t help hoping that their precariously low baggy jeans would suddenly fall down, making complete asses out of their designer coolness. By the promenade, Jim Morrison and the Beat Poets once held court over the 60s’ counter-culture, and their legacy of protest lives on today in the patchouli-reeking street market, a maelstrom of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Bush-bashing anti-war demonstrators and dreadlocked anti-globalisation activists.
Away from the clamour, Venice’s few remaining stretches of a once-vast network of canals are a haven of tranquillity. Home to the Flower Children where love-ins took place on psychedelically painted barges in the late 60s, little remains from the Hippy era except a couple of ramshackle, junk-strewn clapboard houses. It’s now a millionaires’ playground of stunning, ergonomically designed villas where the only noise disturbing the waterside cocktail parties are from flocks of raucous ducks, which you’d swear have Californian accents if you listen closely enough.
The best place in town to come for a lingering sunset drink, and to watch the fairground illuminations on Santa Monica Pier light up, is in the 18th-floor bar of The Huntley. The lobby of the hotel is a startling example of cutting-edge boutique-style design, including a viciously beautiful wall of 300 white ceramic piranha fish and a stingray-skin laminated reception desk. For dinner, the town has some lovingly preserved bars and diners which date back to the 1930s and which still have a loyal celebrity clientele. The Galley is an excellent choice, and is crammed with props from the original 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty film. It offers a simple, delicious menu of seafood and steaks but don’t even think of asking for an espresso; the bar hasn’t changed much from 1934 and has no truck with such new-fangled concepts as an espresso machine. Alternatively, Big Dean’s Muscle In Café is a great place to join the lads from the beach to grab a burger and a bud, watch a baseball match and secretly admire the wall-to-wall black-and-white photos of 1940s’ bodybuilders from Muscle Beach.
Popular as Santa Monica was with the early Hollywood brat pack, many stars preferred the sultry desert climate and peaceful exclusivity of Palm Springs, which, at two hours away from LA, was distant enough to escape the clutches of the studios but close enough to return for an emergency film shoot. Where the stars go, gay men will forever follow, and from its origins as a Hollywood bolthole, Palm Springs today is one of the premier gay resorts in the world with a permanent gay population approaching 50%.
It’s easy to understand the allure of the Springs. With 354 days of sunshine a year and temperatures never dipping below 74°F, it’s a “clothes optional” paradise where you can while away the days frolicking naked around the pools and lush tropical gardens of any number of charming hacienda-style gay-run properties. And something strange is happening in the town itself. It’s the only place I’ve been to where every man you meet on the street seems gay. Within two minutes you’ll have plunged into bitchy celebrity chitchat or be raving about how fabulous the 1950s’ design revival is. It comes as a real shock when a wife and two children are suddenly thrown into the conversation.
With my gaydar by now completely malfunctioning, it was high time to ground myself in some heterosexual celebrity nostalgia. Time and Place properties are custodians of some star-studded real estate, prime among which is the famous Twin Palms Frank Sinatra Estate. Dating from 1947, the house is a classic example of mid-20th-century modernism, with cool, airy, angular interiors of stained concrete, terracotta floors and low-slung, curvaceous 50s’ armchairs. Sliding glass doors lead out onto a spacious patio where the famous spindly twin palms rise above a delightful piano-shaped swimming pool. It’s famous for his legendary dinner parties, and regular guests included Bob Hope, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. It’s easy to imagine them lounging around the pool, cocktails in hand, listening to Ol’ Blue Eyes crooning away under the desert stars.
The real jewel in the celebrity property crown, however, is the futuristic Elrod/ Lautner estate carved into the mountainside above Palm Springs and immortalised in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. Built in 1968, it’s a 60s’ sci-fi-inspired masterpiece straight out of the frames of a Star Trek episode. A vast 60ft conical concrete dome supports a retractable glass wall, under which a swimming pool meanders into the cavernous living room. Boulders cascade into the house from the mountainside and you’ll be sorely tempted to roll around like Pussy Galore on the huge, decadent, white circular rug. The 220? view of the Palm Springs Valley over towards the violet-hued jagged peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains is hauntingly beautiful.
The balmy evening temperatures of Palm Springs are perfect for lazy alfresco wining and dining, and if it’s still too hot, many establishments have sprayers which waft clouds of cool, refreshing mist over the tables. The Falls in the town centre is the place to come for a luridly coloured, bubbling dry-ice Martini and to spot A-list gay couples having romantic candlelit dinners on the balcony. The town closes down early, so don’t expect to be clubbing until dawn. There are, however, countless bars which keep the candle burning until late. The Streetbar is a friendly option; a riot of kitsch, with life-sized gold pharaonic statues, chandeliers and red velvet drapes providing a fitting theatrical backdrop for some surprisingly good karaoke. From here you can move on to Hunters for a bop, or the aptly-named Tool Box for some serious cruising.
Before leaving Palm Springs, I just had time to take an eco-tour into the Mojave Desert. Jim, our infectiously good-humoured guide, had long ago ditched the city rat race in favour of devoting his life to the desert he’d long ago fallen in love with. It was easy to see why. Climbing up over the tortured, crumpled San Andreas Fault, we entered a surreally beautiful landscape of silent canyons filled with hairy-armed Joshua Trees and scarlet-flowered desert fuchsia bushes, fluttering with humming birds and purple-hair streak butterflies. We stopped off at Pioneertown, where many of the most famous Westerns were filmed, including The Lone Ranger and Annie Oakley. Built in 1946 to resemble an 1880s’ frontier town, the rickety wooden structures and dusty wagons have all been lovingly preserved. Standing in front of the OK Corral, I felt a strong sense of déjà vu. Growing up on cowboy films and rainy Sunday afternoon Hollywood Classics, the whole trip had been like revisiting a series of old friends. It’s this familiarity and shared cultural heritage that makes southern California such an immediately likeable, fascinating place to visit.
Getting There:
Virgin Atlantic flies to Los Angeles LAX airport (eight times south of Santa Monica) direct from London Heathrow. Tel: 0870 380 2007 or log onto www.virgin-atlantic.com
Accommodation:
ebookers offers a twin-centre, six night package, staying at the Casa del Mar, Santa Monica and the Westin Mission Hills, Rancho Mirage, with return flights on Virgin plus car hire. Also available: single-centre holidays to the Palm Springs Desert Resorts (staying at the Westin Mission Hills) or Santa Monica (staying at the Casa del Mar. Tel: 0870 814 6016 or log onto www.ebookers.com.
Play On:
For more on Santa Monica, including tips on things to do, restaurants, shopping and beach attractions log onto www.santamonica.com.
For further details on Palm Springs and to request a free information pack, including the Palm Springs Gay Brochure, tel: 020 7978 5233 or log onto www.palm-springs.org.