The Local Questions, Vol. 7 | Field Notes from Palm Springs: Just How Much Trouble Can a Celebrity Get Into Here?
Harpo, Chico and Groucho Marx
Welcome to Field Notes, our slightly random collection of questions a tour guide occasionally hears about this weird and wonderful place we call Palm Springs.
We've always attracted celebrities.
But you already knew that, didn't you?
Perhaps more interesting is what celebrities felt entitled to do here.
Which brings us to today's question:
What is the most outrageous thing a celebrity ever did in this desert sandbox we call Palm Springs?
This is not an easy question.
There is Olympic-level competition for this particular gold medal.
We can start with Harpo Marx.
Do you remember him? Part of the Marx Brothers. The bewigged silent one. Never spoke, would toot a horn and chase women. Comic persona of a simple-minded man-child.
That persona gave him a lot of cover in real life.
Harpo was one of the founding members of Tamarisk Country Club in nearby Rancho Mirage, which means he had every right to be on the golf course.
What he would wear, or in his case… didn't wear… is another matter.
Harpo liked to golf naked.
He didn't ask permission. He simply did it.
The jokes write themselves.
He didn't ask the members if he could show his member.
The club was well endowed.
Eventually matters came to a head.
I'll stop.
I promise.
Please keep reading.
The Palm Springs area in August can make clothing feel like an unnecessary administrative burden, so perhaps Harpo was merely taking things to their logical conclusion.
He would tee off, play a few holes, and, when the desert heat became too much, look for a swimming pool. The nearest swimming pool.
It did not necessarily belong to him.
According to Harpo’s son Bill, and others, he would simply jump in, cool off, get dressed and continue his round. This was apparently tolerated by whatever neighbors were around at that time of year.
In the heat of August, maybe they were a little crazy too.
There was something about the character he had created—the silent, mischievous, apparently innocent waif—that allowed him to get away with behavior you wouldn't accept from your five-year-old.
Groucho could insult you.
Chico could hustle you.
Harpo could be naked in your backyard and still be the most harmless person you had encountered all week.
“Oh, never mind... that's just Harpo.”
Q: Was his golf game good?
A: Harpo apparently thought so.
At least once, he decided to make history.
On one of those hot August afternoons, he brought his clubs and fifty balls out to the tee box for a par-three hole, enough for fifty tries at history. He teed off, again and again, until the balls ran out.
He was, as we have mentioned before, naked.
He wanted to become, as he put it, the first naked man to make a hole-in-one.
He did not quite succeed.
The ball came within six inches of the cup.
How did he know?
We can only assume he had his own method of measurement.
Q: So Harpo is the winner?
A: Not so fast.
Because Palm Springs had another kind of celebrity misbehavior.
And this one is harder to laugh about.
Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner arrived in Palm Springs at almost exactly the right moment to become part of the mythology of the place.
They were young, beautiful, famous and increasingly consumed by each other.
They also drank. A lot. This night, too much.
It was the late 1940s. After a party at Darryl Zanuck's Palm Springs home, Sinatra and Gardner got into his Cadillac and headed east toward the nearby town of Indio.
They had two .38 pistols with them. At some point, they began shooting.
Streetlights. Store windows. The desert night.
There are different versions of the story, but Gardner herself later acknowledged that she and Sinatra had been drinking and had shot up Indio with a couple of .38s.
Eventually they ended up at the Indio police station.
And then something else happened that would have been almost unimaginable for ordinary people.
The problem went away. Poof. Gone.
Money and influence have a way of changing things. According to one account, Sinatra's publicist arrived with $30,000 in cash.
The matter was contained, the damage dealt with, and Sinatra and Gardner went on with their lives.
But the story has acquired a different weight with time.
Because this wasn't simply another episode of Hollywood behaving badly.
It was part of the beginning of Frank and Ava.
They would marry in 1951.
Their relationship would become one of the great love stories of twentieth-century Hollywood—and one of its great tragedies.
They loved each other intensely. They fought with equal passion.
They separated. They reconciled.
They hurt each other. Eventually they divorced.
Gardner would later call Sinatra the love of her life.
Which makes the shooting story harder to file under “funny old Hollywood stories.”
At the time, perhaps it was simply another night when two famous people got away with something ordinary people could not have gotten away with.
In retrospect, it looks like something else: two people famous enough to live outside ordinary boundaries, discovering that there really weren't consequences.
At least for them—in that moment.
Q: So what does this have to do with Palm Springs?
A: More than we might think.
Palm Springs didn't just offer celebrities privacy. It was a town unusually willing to let them be themselves.
For Harpo, that meant being naked on the golf course and, according to the stories, occasionally taking a dip in somebody else's pool.
For Frank and Ava, it meant shooting up Indio and somehow walking away from it.
The difference is important.
Harpo's celebrity made outrageous behavior seem harmless.
Frank and Ava's made dangerous behavior seem acceptable.
And maybe that's one of the stranger privileges of being famous around Palm Springs: eventually, people stop asking whether what you're doing is normal.
If it's harmless, they smile and say,
“Oh... that's just Harpo.”
And if it isn't?
Well, in the desert, morning light has a way of sweeping away the broken glass.
The Palm Springs area has been attracting celebrities for nearly a century, and the stories they left behind are part of what makes the city so much fun to explore.
If you’d like to discover more of Palm Springs’ food, history, architecture and celebrity lore, join us on an Artisan Food Tours walking tour. Come hungry, leave like a local—and perhaps with a few stories you won’t find in the guidebooks.
Enjoyed this article? The Local Questions are just one part of Devour the Desert. Explore our other "Local…" series for stories about the food, architecture, history, celebrities, and culture that make Palm Springs unlike anywhere else.
Dave Ball is a local guide and co-owner of Artisan Food Tours with his wife, Phyllis. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about Palm Springs history, neighborhood architecture, and where to find a great meal. Unlike Harpo, he is known to be rather verbose.
copyright: david w. ball