Palm Springs Eternal

Out in the Coachella Valley, where the Los Angeles basin meets the Colorado Desert, lies a glittering elephants graveyard known as Palm Springs. It's where fading movie stars simmer in the sun, where golf courses glisten and hot springs burble and there's never really much happening, and that's why you go there. Which is true enough---except that Palm Springs also has a black ghetto, busing for racial balance, smog (from L.A., 100 miles away), overgrowth, high-rise hassles, an Indian war (in the courts, anyway), hippies, street demonstrations, a community relations coordinator and a population that---when a mile-high resort area in the nearby mountains is finished---could reach 100,000 in a decade or so.

If you end up at one of the big hotels and make the kind of turista trip taken by the Pickle Packers International, the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis or the Third Annual Weathermen's Weekend (three recent convention groups)--- that is, play a few rounds at the municipal golf course, take a Gray Line tour of the date farms (including a color film, The Romance and Sex Life of the Date), see a show at the Dunes Hotel, take a two-and-a-half-mile ride on the aerial tramway---you get a certain surface view of this place. You see a desert resort town of 21,000 with a near plethora of golf courses. Thirty-two of them. Los Angeles, with a population of over 2,000,000, has only 49 courses. The country clubs here drench about 1,000,000 gallons a day on each course, which makes you feel that your efforts to adjust the toilet float or cut your morning shower short are mere drops in the conservation bucket. A regular at Ruby's Dunes Bar estimates that if every city in America used water like this place, the world's supply of potable stuff would be depleted in six days---with everyone resting, and thirsting, on the seventh.

There are 5000 swimming pools here, one for every five residents. The pools and the saturation water bombing of the links---plus the cultivation of all those front lawns---have given rise to fears that the dry Coachella climate, ever a lure for those wanting to leach out their emphysematous conduits, may be on the way out. All that instant water could change the relative humidity, the theory goes, and the same philosopher at Ruby's is certain that when the rains come, they'll have a definite tinge of chlorine and pool cleaner.

The attitude toward money in the Springs---and there is plenty of it, although it's mostly the newer tainted stuff ---is one of reverence. Nobody jokes about the estimated 300 millionaires in the area. A businessman's wife put it this way: ''It's good for children of middle-income families to grow up in a community like this. . . . They learn that millionaires are no different from you and I and it may even make them ambitious to become millionaires themselves.''

Palm Springs is the home of ''celebrities,'' mainly Hollywood celebrities. One such is Charlie Farrell. Charlie first became a celebrity when he starred with Janet Gaynor and people like that. There are even folks around L.A. who knew him when. These people, most of them at the Motion Picture Home, say he was called Charles then but can't always remember what pictures he played in. (Charlie later made common commercial cause with actor Ralph Bellamy and they started the Racquet Club of Palm Springs. Ralph's face is easier to place, because he can be seen almost any month on channel four in Sunrise at Campobello.)

But the point about Farrell is that he became another kind of celebrity---a Celebrity II. What Celebrity II connotes is that you are better known by the second thing you try than the first. Most talkshow hosts are. They didn't quite succeed at what they first tried and now are doing better than the guests on their shows who did succeed. Most of the celebs in Palm Springs aren't really celebs. They're more like celeb 1/2. I mean, a celeb is someone who's doing something now---who's in the lime. Right? Jack Nicholson. That's a celeb. Henry Kissinger, bless his stout little torso. Bobby Fischer. Jane Fonda. Margaret Mead. Neil Young. Evel Knievel. The Watergate Five, Six, Seven or however many. But what do you make of names like these in the ''Movie Star and Celebrity Homes Guide,'' issued to each bona fide tourist with reasonably short hair and wearing shoes---Bonita Granville, Bob Cummings, Gummo Marx, Phil Harris, Jolie Gabor, George Gobel, Billie Burke, Dennis Day, Dennis O'Keefe, Jackie Coogan, Percy Faith, Lily Pons? Truman Capote, who is a true celebrity---and may or may not still live here---says the town is ''square but charming. Everyone looks like Eisenhower.'' Sounds like a description of himself.

If Detroit is automobiles, Palm Springs is golf carts. There are around 1300 of them in town. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson, whose longhorn style seemed to mesh here as easily as John Kennedy's didn't, was royally (that adverb is possible here) welcomed in a Presidential visit. Afterward, the mayor reflected: ''We've got to get some kind of gimmick to welcome guys like this---something symbolic of Palm Springs. You know, the way Honolulu greets people with hula dancers. Is there anything we can do with a bunch of golfers with golf carts?'' Well, sure. Sod 'em over.

Just thinking of all those Panzer divisions of electric carts, you flash on this fued duello, with the forces from Montague Dunes ignorantly clashing by night with the Capulet Chamber of Commerce in their Biltrite carts with telephones and wet bars. . . . But it could never be. A Palm Springer would clash neither by night nor by day. Takes too much energy. There's a kind of Beau Brummellian disdain for lifting the finger in everyday chores, an urge to put the sorcerer's apprentice to work, wherever possible. In Robert McCulloch's golf-course home, guests awaken to servomechanized draperies being drawn and the plangent rush of the morning tub filling. At the mountain station of the aerial tramway, which leads down to Long Valley, you find not a rude path but a heated sidewalk to melt the snow and keep your feet warm.

''Shangri-La in the Desert,'' they call this place. But in that mythical Tibetan land, people never grow old, whereas here the average age is 47 and going fast. A local brochure points out that ''there is evidence that ancient man inhabited the oasis known today as Palm Springs,'' an observation that applies to today equally well. A visitor cruising the streets on a Tuesday evening has almost given up looking for a coffee shop when he finds a solitary place open for business: Sambo's. He checks his watch to make sure it's running. It reads 9:45.

Rose-colored glasses are sold in the shops and are figuratively worn by most residents. The address here is ''Euphemism, California.'' Light colors carry out the theme. The banks, stores and markets are often pink or powder blue---depending, one supposes, on whether they are considered to be male or female. The fire engines are white, avoiding the sanguine associations of red. The policemen are white, avoiding the baadasssss associations of black. The service stations have small demure signs and dogwood and rhododendron borders, as though they wouldn't be caught dead with anything so messy as crankcase oil. The polite word shoulders aside the rude. If you seek a motel, you must look for a villa, inn, lodge, manor, bungalow, pueblo or château. Even the Old Goats' Tourney, an annual tennis romp for the barely ambulant, fell victim to these evasive tactics and was renamed the Senior Tennis Division. And how's this for gilding the pill? What other town would have the chutzpah to give Frank Sinatra its annual Good Citizen's Award? And have the chief of police present it?

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The fact that Palm Springs has a community-relations coordinator can mean one of two things: (a) They care here or (b) Community relations need improving. The term, of course, is a euphemism for placating citizens of the darker skin hues. Gene House is the youngish coordinator and he says they are making the best progress of any city its size, which doesn't tell you where they were when the progress began. House extols an ethnic census being taken of city employees, with a view to increasing minority help. (One look around city hall and you can see they have a long way to go.) You ask about the 200 or so blacks who sat down on Palm Canyon Drive a few years ago and he says, more in sorrow than in anger, that they weren't too well organized (most of the ''demands'' had already been met) and there was little follow-up.

House introduces Noris Paul, one of the two hometown blacks who have earned college degrees. There is only one black doctor in town and no black (continued on page 189) Palm Springs Eternal (continued from page 142) attorney. The only black business I saw was a small hairdresser's favored by the sisters in the ghetto. The blacks came here as domestics and restaurant help and have pretty much remained in those jobs. A few of these raisins in the sun have token clerical jobs---such as at the desk of the Spa hotel or at the Bank of America. There are more Mexicans than blacks (eight percent vs. five percent), but everyone assured me there is no Mexican discrimination. Like a fool, I forgot to ask the one person who might know---a Mexican.

Furry folk are not much in evidence here, except maybe hitchhiking with a backpack on the main stem. They are said to be mostly up in Tahquitz Canyon (that is. whatever bunch of laid-back freaks would mistake this place for Mendocino). House says the city has declared Tahquitz a fire hazard and ''this keeps the straights out, who would dirty the place up.''

Mayor Howard Wiefels, attired in a powder-blue golf sweater and striped shirt and tie, said they are losing young people here because there aren't enough job openings. This was in response to a question about who will replace the old folks when they---excuse the expression --- die. Sitting there in Wiefels' office, my usually alert mind bedimmed by Shangri-La, I overlooked the obvious: They'll replace them with other old folks.

Wiefels has some doubts about building new condominiums---something to do with the kind of people they bring in. He thought the black sit-down was two or three years ago, but he knew it was around this time of the year, because it was during the Bob Hope Desert Classic. ''They [the blacks] wanted a lot of things we already had. . . . I have never felt that we have had a real serious minority problem.'' He said the city was putting $2,000,000 into the north-side ghetto---such stuff as a recreation center, sewers, curbs, sidewalks---and some blacks are leery of even that much city-hall help. (You get the impression from Wiefels that the more conservative blacks here would consider Abe Lincoln a damn-fool meddler.)

Frank Bogert, who was mayor before Wiefels and is now a broker at George Beebe Realty, remembers the sit-down with more precision, since it occurred outside his offices. Sixtyish, robust, outgoing, stentorian, he sports a string tie and gold-rimmed glasses and feels he knows something about the problems of minorities. ''They were kind of led by some guys who were very militant,'' he recalls. ''They had Angela Davis and Rap Brown signs. . . . But we have probably the nicest group of black people any town ever had. I know a lot of real good black kids who are well educated, but there are no jobs for them. . . . As to Mexicans, I've never seen any discrimination against them here. I always work with Mexicans, build their morale up, make them proud to be Mexicans. I tell them, 'I want to be Mexican, and here you are, running around telling everybody you are Spanish.'''

Bogert, who first let the genie out of the bottle by building an 18-hole golf course back in the Forties, has equal respect for the Indians on the tribal council. ''They're all bright kids,'' he says, ''but if the Indians start selling their land despite our zoning laws, we'll have a Picasso area.'' (At least I think that was the word. I hope so, because I like the phrase.) ''There's a couple of loggerheads on one side and a couple of loggerheads on the other, and there you go---you're on the warpath.''

It may have nothing to do with the fact that Bogert sells real estate, but he belongs to a group called Balance, which believes in ''reasonable'' growth for Palm Springs and which is at . . . well, loggerheads with an ecology group known as Desert People United. He opposes the recent moratorium by which the city council froze all building of apartments, hotels and condominiums.

Meanwhile, the Indians have realestate problems of their own. The 150 or so Cauhilla Indians (popularly called Agua Calientes) have had to bear up under the persistent myth---supported by journalistic hyperbole---that they are a rich tribe. Holiday magazine once called them the ''kept Indians'' and the Los Angeles Times characterized them as living on an ''ermine-lined reservation.'' To scotch these rumors, the Indians published a booklet, ''All That Glitters Is Not Gold,'' that tells the history of their land grant. In the latter half of the 19th Century, spurred on by Helen Hunt Jackson's book Ramona, the U. S. Congress gave the Indians some land in the Coachella Valley ''in trust.'' The appearance of the land grant was that of a checkerboard with alternating one-mile squares, one square for the Indians, one square for the Southern Pacific Railroad. (You can see this pattern from an airplane: The less developed Indian squares contrast with the lush private land.) It wasn't until 1917 that an act to secure allotments for each tribesman was passed by Congress; and it was not until 1949, after years of litigation by the Indians, that a plan to divide the land was approved---and which turned out to be inequitable. Finally, on September 21, 1959, President Eisenhower signed the Equalization Act, which parceled out land to all the Indians then alive and allowed them to lease the land for 99 years instead of five. But even this act had a spider in the valentine: a provision appointing whites ''guardians'' and ''conservators'' over Indian landowners. What with timber and mineral rake-offs, these white appointees lined their pockets nicely for performing often nonexistent services. It took a Pulitzer Prize-winning essay, a national scandal and an Indian delegation to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to end this plunder.

In their booklet, the Indians tried to correct some of the popular misconceptions about their opulence: Is it true, for instance, that each Indian owns $335,000 worth of land? More than one third---all Indians born after the Equalization Act of 1959---do not. Is it true that land values have increased 122 percent in the past seven years? Some land has increased in value, but 95 percent of it produces no income for the Indians. Does each Indian, as widely claimed, have broad power over what he does with his land? Well, an Indian cannot sell, lease or encumber his land without the approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Indians themselves, however, are not at all eager to terminate their Government-protected trust, because this would subject them to taxation, which would exceed their present income and make it necessary for them to sell the land---the very thing the trust was set up to avoid.

Lawrence Pierce, vice-chairman of the tribal council, lives in what appears to be a medium-priced tract house not far from the airport. No Cadillac with buffaloskin upholstery was parked in the driveway. Pierce had sounded wary when phoned about an interview, but in person he was up-front and articulate. Somewhere in his 30s, he is a strong man with long hair tied back and a tattoo on his forearm.

According to Pierce, zoning is the big bone of contention at the moment. He feels that whites reserve lucrative zoning for their own land and that the city has no right to zone Indian land at all. ''We are a government,'' Pierce says. ''We have an elected tribal council and are a semisovereign body with the right of eminent domain, the right to tax, and so forth. We even have our own planner. The city says we can't have two agencies in Palm Springs. We would be willing to give them planning and administrative powers, but we reserve the right to zone and to have a veto---the same rights the Russians have in the UN. The city won't agree to this and we won't agree to anything less, because anything less won't work.''

We adjourn to another room to watch Frank Bogert, who, in addition to selling real estate, hosts a local TV show. He is interviewing Ray Leonard Patencio, chairman of the tribal council. The Indians in the room with us break up when they hear Bogert describe the Cauhilla clan as ''good basket weavers.'' Bogert then rhapsodizes about how fine it is to have ancestral ties going so far back; but from the expression on Patencio's face, it's apparent he'd just as soon settle for a better zoning deal.

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Then there's the oasis in the sky that will soon become the resort city of Palm Springs Atajo. The first man to cut an 18-mile road across the highlands of the Santa Rosas (at altitudes of 5000 feet) must have seen the gold in them hills, because it wasn't long before the Environmental Research and Development Corporation was set up to mine it. Palm Springs annexed 24,000 mountainous acres, giving it the largest altitude variation of any city (from 487 feet mean altitude on the desert floor to about 6000 feet at the top of Mount Santa Rosa), as well as five climatic and geographical zones, from Sonoran to Arctic-Alpine. In the works for Atajo are a skating rink, a commercial center, an Alpine village, two country clubs, a few golf courses, a tennis club, an arts-and-crafts center, English and Western villages, equestrian paths, an amphitheater, large luxury hotels, a trade and convention center and a mobile-home park.

A group of us board the aerial tramway, from which we should be able to see not only Atajo but even Arizona. Alas, it's raining and visibility is nil and it's even snowing up at the summit. Not only can we not see Arizona, we can't see California below us. The tramway, placards tell us, is the largest single-span lift in the world. It's quite a thrill ride. I tell our tram operator, Dale, I just talked to Mayor Wiefels. He says the mayor, whom he refers to as ''Waffles,'' is just right for this town. ''He's used to working with dead people.'' The mayor, it turns out, makes his living as an undertaker.

If your consciousness has been raised to any level above sea, you're prone to write off this town's future. It's laser straight and very untogether and there's almost nothing young people really dig about it and---face it---young people are the future by a simple process of elimination. Atajo, however, in happy tandem with Palm Springs, might turn the area into a pretty strong double bill at the box office. (Not my sort of double bill, mind you, but then I'm not everybody, as I keep finding out in elections.)

So it's hard to figure. Those furry folk in their sleeping bags up in Tahquitz Canyon may have more to say than is dreamt of in the philosophy of all the planning commissions and multimillion-buck ''development'' designers in heaven and earth. . . .

Anyway, I'm already thinking of something else as I make tracks on 66: I clean forgot to check out what kind of a women's lib movement they've got going there in the Springs.