Sunny daze

By Adam Platt

updated 11:46 a.m. ET March 9, 2009

I’d been driving around the streets of Palm Springs for only a few bleary, sun-baked hours when Mr. Eddie Gustafson appeared before me as in a dream. Or if the sight of Gustafson in his gently glowing Hawaiian shirt wasn’t a dream exactly, then maybe it was a mirage, the kind of thing tightly wound, psychically parched big-city travelers often experience when they arrive in this eternally stylish town on the edge of the Sonoran Desert.

I’d driven into the Coachella Valley in the pre-dawn dark, gliding east out of Los Angeles in my wide-body rental car, past brush fires burning high in the mountains and giant, newly minted Indian casinos lit up like Christmas trees. My tasteful retro-modern motel in Desert Hot Springs was locked up for the night, but the proprietors had left a key taped to the door, so I let myself in and went to sleep on a mattress laid out on the polished-concrete floor of my spartan-chic digs. When I awoke, the room was filled with the smell of oleander and hibiscus and the sun was beating down on the garden courtyard, but the chairs around the three burbling hot spring pools were empty and all the other guests were gone.

The Coachella Valley is protected from the harsh desert weather on both sides by tall mountains, and its townships stretch south, from Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, through Sinatra’s old residence, Rancho Mirage, to Indio and the Salton Sea. Gustafson appeared to me later that day as I was enjoying a fishbowl-size “Double Up” mai tai at Haleiwa Joe’s Seafood Grill, on the outskirts of Rancho Mirage. From the outside, Haleiwa Joe’s looks like an alien spaceship that has crash-landed into a rock. The famous structure was designed by the architect Kendrick Kellogg as part of a steak house chain in 1978. The low-slung wood-beamed room is filled with a profusion of plants and is hung here and there with brightly colored paper lanterns, so that the impression after a cocktail or two is of a Hobbit’s garden under the upturned hull of a giant Viking ship. “This style is called organic modern, but no one who works here knows that,” said Gustafson, whose slight stature, round, glinting spectacles, and perpetually sunny disposition make him look a bit like a Hobbit himself.

Gustafson is a waiter at Haleiwa Joe’s and also, it transpired, a professional healer. “I lay hands on people and they’re cured,” Gustafson told me as though he were talking about yesterday’s weather. Celebrity is a business in Palm Springs the way, say, horses are in Montana, and Gustafson has plenty of rich and famous clients, although he won’t say who. Gustafson heals animals, too. He’d recently cured a German shepherd with scoliosis (“I laid my hands on him for forty-five minutes and he was fine,” he said). When Gustafson drifted off to tend his tables, I asked the bartender whether all the waiters in this strange bat-cave of a restaurant were celebrity healers. The bartender shrugged. “Welcome to the desert,” he said.

Spend a while in Palm Springs and the surrounding townships of the Coachella Valley and you will experience all sorts of little marvels and revelations. When I called my jaded L.A. friends from my home in New York to tell them I’d be coming to recuperate for a time in the desert sun, they’d given a collective world-weary shrug. People went to Palm Springs to get nose jobs (rumor has it that there are more plastic surgeons per capita here than anywhere else on earth), to dry out (at the renowned Betty Ford Center) or to perfect their golf game (at the region’s more than 120 chemically enhanced courses).

It’s A Snap! See the latest entries See the amazing images sent by msnbc.com readers and submit your own for next week!

But times change. These days, I told them, you can gamble in state-of-the-art casinos in the company of crazy Russians. You can drive down to Indio to see Portishead play at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Or you can amble along the trail with Braille signage at the fragrant Michael S. Wolfson Park in Rancho Mirage, where the voice of Sinatra himself emanates from speakers concealed behind bushes and trees. “Look at all this sunshine,” said Mel Haber, who arrived in 1975 as a failed auto accessories salesman and turned, overnight, into a successful restaurateur and friend to countless aging movie icons. “Miracles happen in this town! It’s heaven on earth!”

It’s hard to argue with Haber, who runs the venerable Melvyn’s restaurant and who has seen successive generations of martini-sipping, LSD-tripping, Prozac-popping celebrities come to this famous oasis and make it their own. In the late 1920s, young movie moguls drove out from Beverly Hills to take the waters at places like the Desert Inn and El Mirador Hotel. In the ’30s and ’40s, austere European architects like Richard Neutra and Albert Frey transformed the little desert town into a playground for trendsetting modernists. A decade later, Sinatra and his friends invested it with a patina of Rat Pack cool. The latest wave of desert celebrities includes Oprah, who has purchased a parcel of land in La Quinta, not far from Brangelina’s and George Clooney’s.

msnbc.com travel teasers See the latest contest winner and take the quiz

When I asked a Hollywood film director I met to describe the timeless nature of Palm Springs, he thought for a moment and said, “It’s the Baden-Baden of California.” We were in our baggy surfer trunks at the time, twiddling our toes in a blue-tiled mineral pool rimmed with spiky aloe vera plants and other decorative desert flora. It was late morning, or maybe early afternoon, and we were ensconced at Hope Springs, my refurbished ’60s-era motel and the first stop on my desert relaxation tour.

It was my plan to duplicate the evolution of this resort region by starting out in properly sparse mid-century modern accommodations and working my way slowly up the leisure ladder. From Hope Springs, I would repair to the Viceroy, a small, hip hotel in the middle of residential Palm Springs, before concluding my stay in grand neo-Hollywood style among the spindly palms and burbling fountains of the Parker Palm Springs, which has gardens fit for a pasha; the grand white-walled estate used to belong to Merv Griffin.

MORE FROM U.S. & CANADA

U.S. & Canada Section Front

TV tours a big attraction for N.Y. tourists America’s most attractive people America’s favorite cities Which Hawaii is right for you? Twilight-themed restaurant for Washington town Uncle Remus museum still grapples with race Explore Savannah’s squares, parks and homes Winter Olympics 2010 trip guide Top 13 most scary U.S. haunted attractions Park service to take on Clinton’s first home U.S. & Canada Section Front   Add U.S. & Canada headlines to your news reader: