by Bill Barich
The open house at Golden Era Productions was “open” only a crack. After I signed in at the gate, I was admitted to the compound, where there was a nice Olympic-sized swimming pool with palm trees all around it. The ship was a beautifully crafted piece of work done in rich mahogany and polished brass. Belowdecks, in the captain’s quarters, it did feel comforting and enclosed, a space that was safe from any harm.
A journalist had visited the ship shortly after Hubbard’s death and had noticed that the Sea Org cadets kept things exactly the way he’d liked them, as if the Commodore might drop in again at any minute. Glasses of drinking water were set out, along with the pads and pencils that Hubbard used to jot down ideas. A pair of his favorite black Thom McAn clogs were positioned in each bathroom, ready to be slipped into after a bath or a shower.
While I was in the captain’s quarters, a woman from Golden Era Productions introduced herself to me and said that she would accompany me for the rest of the tour. Free-range browsing would no longer be an option. She was pleasant and ingratiating and had a fixed smile. She would give me the pitch every step of the way, I feared, and try to hook me on betterment again and probably make me pay for it, so I left the compound and missed my chance to listen to the tapes that celebrities such as John Travolta and Karen Black had recorded.
Dianetics was not for me, even though the Commodore had stated in Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary that Scientology “is used to increase spiritual freedom, intelligence, ability, and to produce immortality.” To my way of thinking, he was really just another miner who’d struck it rich in California, finding some gold in the broken hopes of those who’d migrated to the Coast in search of transcendence and had seen the elephant instead.
IN THE EVENING, feeling overjoyed, as though I’d survived a trip through the Bermuda Triangle, I reached Palm Springs at last. The sky above the city was an immaculate blue, and the temperature hovered near one hundred degrees, a dry and searing heat.
Palm Springs was a celebration of water where water didn’t belong, a liquid flaunting that bubbled in fountains, coursed down the sides of hotels, rippled in ponds and in swimming pools, and sprinkled in rainbow arcs over greens and fairways.
The water came from the Colorado River and from snow melting on the peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains. It came from aquifers that were in such good shape that the Agua Caliente Indians, the region’s first settlers, claimed that there was enough water underground to last through seventeen years of drought.
The Colorado was a civilized desert. Trash didn’t collect in it as it did in the Mojave, Nobody was driving around equipped with nuclear capability. It was hotter and more arid, with just three inches of rainfall in an average year. The main vegetation was creosote bush, not sagebrush. The mountains, a peninsular range running down into Baja California, were high and broad and rocky. They rose like a bulwark between the dire demands of daily life and your privileged vacation.
Raymond Chandler, a desert rat, knew Palm Springs well. He called it Poodle Springs “because every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle.”
Beginning in the 1920s, it was the resort for affluent Angelenos and Hollywood stars. The town’s very name was like an imprimatur of class, and in winter, in high season, a visit could entail a misery-inducing round of social obligations. You had to attend cocktail parties and charity balls and never, ever, show that you were aging.
Now there were many desert resort towns, and the competition among them was intense. Palm Springs still had a classy element, but Indian Wells and Bermuda Dunes challenged it for toniness. Rancho Mirage had a less formal, country-club atmosphere and was much favored by retired, Republican golfer-presidents like Gerald Ford.
Dinah Shore Drive ran through Palm Springs, and so did Gene Autry Trail. Gerald Ford Drive and Frank Sinatra Drive guided you east toward Indio. The lanes in South Palm Desert, a subdivision, were named for tennis greats, Bill Tilden, Rod Laver, and Pancho Segura. The roads in Sahara Park honored Aladdin, Araby, and Mecca.
Some roads bisected the Agua Caliente Reservation, and the Agua Calientes collected a toll.
Palm Springs was the native habitat of silver-haired devils. They had uncorruptible tans and skin as taut as lizards. They wore pastel shirts and white slacks and costly loafers without any socks. On their arms were women sometimes half their age and half a head taller, leggy in tennis skirts and always perfectly groomed. There was nothing mortal about them. Money had built another bridge.
I had a sense that nothing in Palm Springs was ever finished or completed. Completion implied a kind of death, and death was to be avoided. Every house I saw was being renovated or added to, fitted with Roman shades, burlap side drapes, or an Ambiance luxury tub that could be commanded to fill automatically at a signal from your cellular phone. Gardens were tiered and transitional, sand verbena and brittlebush flowing between the mountains and the desert.
Faces and bodies were being renovated, too, on a scale that shamed Beverly Hills. No woman and few men over forty went untouched. The battling among cosmetic surgeons could be intense. A surgeon scored points for each procedure done on a president, a star, or a celebrity. Two prominent doctors, Borko Djordjevic and M. Reza Mazaheri, had even feuded in public over which of them had really “done” Betty Ford’s face.
Behzad Mohit, M.D., FAACS, saw himself as a toiler in the tradition of Michelangelo. “Medical schools and cosmetic surgery training programs will, by necessity, have to select artistic talents and train them in the fundamentals of art and sculpture,” he had once said, in public.
Toward the end of the 1920s, some Hollywood stars were tiring of Palm Springs, feeling put upon and overexposed, so they chose to ride in chauffeured town cars for another twenty miles to the outpost of La Quinta Hotel—Greta Garbo, Delores Del Rio, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Frank Capra, the list went on.
Summer was “value season” in the desert, a time when the heat forced resorts to cut their rates in half, so I drove the extra miles to La Quinta, where the buildings were light and airy, like a sun-washed village in Greece. My casita had a deck that looked out on the mountains and a big, comfortable bed that I sank into early, with the profoundest gratitude.
IN THE COLORADO DESERT, a paradise of golf, there were links for everyone. The pastel legions began their assault on the front nine at first light, striding briskly forward to get in a round before ten o’clock, when the sun would be too strong for all but the most dedicated players. In every part of the desert, you heard the thwock of clubs against balls and saw if you looked up hundreds of little white asteroids against that immaculate blue sky.
Marriott’s Desert Springs in Palm Desert, between Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells, was among the newer resorts to open. On its four hundred acres, it had two 18-hole courses that rolled through a “Fantasy Island” landscape of ponds and lagoons where ducks, swans, geese, and flamingos were sporting. Even in the heat of value season, the fairways were emerald green and smoothly flowing, and they would stay that way until the first winter frost.
Jim Lopez was a veteran of the Marriott chain. He had started as a doorman in Houston eighteen years ago and now held a position as director of marketing at Desert Springs. He was a genial, easygoing fellow, who had an athletic bearing and enjoyed the pastimes that he promoted, the golf and the tennis and the swimming.
Lopez assured me that golf courses were vital to every resort around. The links at Desert Springs were being planned and developed long before construction began on the hotel proper. The architect, Ted Robinson, had done some other courses in the valley and knew the terrain and how to make use of the native vegetation.
Sometimes a golf-course architect could make or break a place, Lopez said. The most famous of them, a Pete Dye or a Robert Trent Jones, attracted guests simply by putting his autograph on the turf.
The soil in the desert was quite fertile, Lopez told me. Grass took to it with surprising ease. The Desert Springs fai
rways were a blend of Bermuda grass and ryegrass. The ryegrass grew straight up, and the Bermuda grass ran across its grain. Ryegrass was sturdy and tougher to swing a club through, while Bermuda grass was greener and lusher and did better in the heat.
To build the lakes on the course, workers had scooped out beds and lined them with polyurethane to prevent seepage. A layer of sand went on top of that. All the lakes had to be filtered. The resort pumped about a million gallons of water a day through its filtration system.
The Desert Springs courses seemed to be a hit with golfers so far, Lopez went on. The eighteenth hole on one course was the trickiest in the valley. The hotel was booked to about 80 or 90 percent of its capacity on summer weekends. The Marriott tried to bring in conventions during the week—for that, the hotel absolutely had to have a golf package.
Lopez traveled to Tokyo at least once a year to sell the resort to the Japanese. They were discriminating buyers, he felt. They worried about crime and about terrorists and played thirty-six holes on every day of their vacation, eighteen in the morning and eighteen in the afternoon, regardless of the temperature.
Television was the chief merchandiser of the golf courses around Palm Springs, though. Big tournaments like The Bob Hope Desert Classic, The Dinah Shore Invitational, or the Skins Game were brilliant advertisements that reached millions of viewers—advertisements for California, like the Rose Bowl Parade.
In snowbound Maine, in the dead of winter, duffers in their armchairs gaped at the perfect sky and the perfect grass and imagined themselves in the tasseled shoes of their favorite pro. The chance to play a world-class course like PGA West was as savory to them as taking batting practice at Yankee Stadium might be to the weekend Softball hero.
I wandered around Desert Springs astonished at how the raw desert had been transformed. Around the main swimming pool, guests who had already turned the color of peanut butter basted themselves with lotions that were the very scent of dwindling summer. Koi in the ponds shimmered in reds, oranges, and gold. The flamingos, Central American in origin and brokered through the San Diego Zoo, stood sleeping in their lake.
EVENING WAS THE PAYOFF TIME in the Colorado Desert. I sat on my deck at La Quinta pleasantly tired from walking and swimming, as others were tired from tennis or golf, and had a drink and watched the light fall across the mountains. There was nothing beyond the moment, nothing but a sensation that my body was surrendering to the elements, bathing in them.
I became a Republican drifting toward the libidinous dark and thought of women in hotel bathrooms, their skin flushed from the shower, touching a soft towel to the damp between their legs. I thought about the damp and saw them run a brush through their wet hair and touch the towel to their nipples.
They put on G-string panties and wriggled into leather miniskirts and applied red lipstick to their beestung lips, all for me. Republicans knew their secrets and what they were whispering. Republicans knew the right things to do.
Then I set off into the dusky valley, where the air was cooling but still warm on my skin, and the lights along the boulevards were coming on. It gave me that old feeling of being among the chosen in California. It was as if all the exercise and the sunshine and the oat bran and the mineral water were merely a prelude to this, bringing us all to a peak in the evening. My blood began to beat. Tiny motors began to whir.
Rudy knew about the evening. He knew about the light and the air and the sex. He earned a living by parking cars at various restaurants and hotels. He had a ponytail and good teeth and sometimes worried that he was wasting his life. He came from a farm town in the San Joaquin and wished that he had finished college and gone into business, but here he was parking cars instead. He was almost thirty.
Resort life had taught Rudy something, though, and he shared it with me once—money was not the same as class. Class, he told me, was “doing what’s appropriate.” He hated it when a beautiful girl fucked a guy just because he had a Learjet.
In Palm Springs, Rudy and two friends rented a house. It had four bedrooms and a swimming pool. Sometimes when he got home from work and the worries about his future put a knot into his back, he would turn on the stereo, fire up a joint, and slip naked into the pool. He would take the rubber band from his ponytail and let his hair flow all around him.
Suspended in the blue, he would close his eyes and feel his worries dissolving, made immaterial and insubstantial. At that moment, he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, not ever, because nowhere else could be so good.
THE GRAND RESORTS of the Colorado Desert vanished beyond La Quinta, and the landscape turned agricultural. Along Highway 111, in the first week of September, I came to Shields Date Gardens in Indio, in Coachella Valley. Date palms grew in rows, their fronds snapping in a breeze. Water stood in the ditches between rows. The trees needed the equivalent of 120 inches of rain a year to produce a crop. They were irrigated every ten days.
An old saying went, “A date palm must have its feet in the water and its head in the fires of heaven.”
Mission fathers had brought the first date palms to California, and Bess M. and E. Floyd Shields had gone on from there. They’d been in business since 1924. Sometimes in photos E. Floyd could be seen standing proudly in the grove, wearing a pith helmet and showing off a special palm, such as the great-great-grandmother date that the Shields had imported from Algeria. The tree was in its eighties now.
Many of the Shields’ trees were from Algerian stock. They had about 1,200 date palms and 700 citrus trees—oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. They had dates in 119 varieties. One variety, Shields Black Beauty, was so rare that its sale was limited, one to a customer.
The Shields had an air-conditioned theater where a slide show, “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date,” played continuously. It told the story of date propagation in a comic way. To appreciate it, you had to be really hot and sweaty and so desperate for a break from the desert that slides of male and female date blossoms appealed to you.
I went on into Indio. The town was new and cheap, home to more retired people in trailer parks and Mexicans who worked at the resorts around Palm Springs and on farms in Coachella Valley. Sometimes Indians from the Cabazon Reservation blew through.
In Indio, the last soda fountain had just closed. A developer, Mirage Homes, had houses for sale at Avenue 48 and Arabia. I slept in a noisy motel and nearly wept with nostalgia for my room at La Quinta, for the high, broad, dusky mountains and the women fresh from their showers.
In the morning, I sat in my car in a business park drinking bad coffee that I’d bought at a donut shop. Before me were the offices of Doctors Badri and Arha Nath. I decided that Indio was not a town I had to spend time in. It couldn’t tell me anything about California that I didn’t already know.
THROUGH THE LITTLE VILLAGES of Thermal and Mecca on Highway in, Coachella Valley grew very wide. The earth was sandy and a pale brown color. There were olive trees, willows, fan palms, and citrus groves. Some table grapes were staked and trellised in fields. The light was delicate, even fragile, and very beautiful. In a split second, California had fooled me again by turning into Jerusalem.
I was on my way to the Salton Sea. It was 108 degrees when I left Indio. My radio was tuned to the hits on K-PALM, and I could feel the aridity in my nostrils and looked at my forearms and saw how tan I’d become without even trying.
The Salton Sea was a freak, an accident. At the very end of the nineteenth century, George Chaffey, an engineer, had teamed with Charles Rockwood, who’d been with the railroads, to form the California Development Company and bring water from the Colorado River to the desert. The CDC was a real estate setup to sell irrigated land to farmers, in an area that the partners agreed to call Imperial Valley.
Chaffey designed a canal to bring the river water to the valley. The system didn’t deliver enough water in dry years, however, so Rockwood took it upon himself to cut a bypass, the Rockwood Cut, around the canal and its gate. When the Colorado flooded in 1905, it overflow
ed the revamped system and poured into an old lakebed, the Salton Sink, which was about 250 feet below sea level. For nearly two years, the river kept pouring into the sink, leaving a “sea” that had no outlet, except for some irrigation ditches.
The Salton Sea was about 45 miles long and some 83 feet deep. I could smell it before I could see it—the heat had incited a powerful stink of algae and murk. It was saltier than the Pacific Ocean because Coachella and Imperial Valley farmers flushed the salts from their soil with irrigated water, and the water all drained downhill into the sea. So did high concentrations of selenium, a naturally occurring element that can cause birth defects and nesting failure among waterfowl and shorebirds.
At Salton Sea State Recreation Area, a ranger gave me a pass and some materials about the park. They advised anglers to dine judiciously on their catch, because the fish were likely to be tainted with selenium. So spectacular was the birding during migratory season, the materials said, that birders from abroad sometimes made a special pilgrimage.
Up close, the stink of the sea was hard to take, but some children were eagerly splashing in it, anyway. Their families had brought them down from Riverside for a day at the beach. The sea had a greenish tint and was swarming with plant life. Rangers kept it stocked with tilapia, who were algae eaters. Tilapia were rumored to be the fish that Jesus used to feed the multitudes.
You could also catch corbina and croaker in the sea. I watched two black couples scaling and gutting a mess of croaker that ran to the size of sunfish or crappies. The couples were from Riverside, too, and had driven down in a van. They came all the time, they said. They were fleshy and middle-aged. The oldest of the men seemed to be in a private funk out of which he rose to regard me with baleful, bloodshot eyes.
