“You know, Lady Gaga just stayed here,” a fellow wedding guest whispers to me as we nose around the Gene Autry House, a 2,200-square-foot two-bedroom bungalow tucked between the adults-only pool and a pétanque court on the lush grounds of the Parker Palm Springs hotel. In 1961 Autry, a.k.a. Hollywood’s Singing Cowboy and the star of more than 70 Westerns, purchased what was then California’s first Holiday Inn and christened it Melody Ranch. He claimed this bungalow as his private residence. Later Merv Griffin, game show host and media mogul extraordinaire, took over the property for a few years before hotelier Jack Parker bought it in 2003. He renamed it and, to reimagine the design, tapped bon vivant home decorator Jonathan Adler, who swathed it in orange lacquer and added bronze sconces, jingly-jangly Moroccan blankets, and refrigerator-size lamps.
We’re now standing in front of one of the bungalow’s walls that’s been covered in African wood masks. “The Parker is a gateway drug for falling in love with Palm Springs,” my new friend notes as we stare into countless pairs of eyes. “Wait, no,” he amends. “The Parker is more like Palm Springs’ Ellis Island: Everyone lands here first.”
That’s true for me. It was the hotel I stayed at when I first visited the city 20 years ago—the same goes for Ryan and Jared, the grooms I’m here to celebrate. It’s the last night of their four-day black-tie wedding extravaganza that’s spread across the 13 acres of the Parker, the city’s only true resort and one as dazzling, expensive, and camp as Elton John’s sunglasses. But tonight the newlyweds are not toasting their love. Framed by a waterfall of fuchsia bougainvillea and the cinematic glow of the private pool, we raise our glasses to Palm Springs. “This is where we come to dream,” Ryan says. We all cheer in unison, “To Palm Springs!”
Palm Springs has always been a place to dream. A desert playground created out of pure yearning, out of a deep need to relax and heal—or to overdo it. It’s a place to live out loud and keep secrets, a place for experimenting and creating. The first to arrive were the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who discovered the area’s restorative waters, settled around the springs and have lived here for thousands of years. The first non-Native settlers came in the late 19th century, banking on claims that the desert air would cure any respiratory ailment. Soon after, beginning in the 1920s, thanks to Palm Springs’ proximity to Hollywood and its money (and to modern irrigation), the grass here was made greener. And it has stayed that way for over a century: a little desert town built on big promises and 350 days of sunshine a year.