ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050136
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PALM SPRINGS, CALIF.
SOURCE: BARBARA SHEA NEWSDAY
Whisps of white flashed by the window, and I peered through a curtain of star jasmine to see what was haunting the desert night. But restaurant regulars didn't even look up from their steak Diane. They knew it was just the daily procession of sleek stretch limos, scattering the ghosts of the past.
Lots of ghosts inhabit the resort city of Palm Springs, longtime winter retreat for movie stars a handy 100 miles east of Hollywood. But apart from a mythical witch who prowls the canyons, they are beneficent spirits - familiar legends of the silver screen who help keep the resort's celebrity aura alive.
The list of entertainment greats who have lived or vacationed in Palm Springs reads like a Who's Who in 20th-century film. Many came decades ago to shoot a scene and simply stayed. Streets are named for them, their autographed photos cover walls of local businesses, and they're honored by larger-than-life statues and star-studded sidewalks a la Hollywood Boulevard.
Today's divas tend to breeze in and out like the dry wind across the California desert. But those who seek seclusion still hole up, however briefly, at discreet small hotels like the Ingleside Inn - whose popular Melvyn's restaurant was where I recently watched the limos come and go. Sixty years ago, one pulled up at the Ingleside bearing Greta Garbo, among the first guests to implore, ``I want to be alone.''
Some Palm Spring notables keep a considerably higher profile, playing in the endless desert golf tournaments or dabbling in politics. The city has had two celebrity mayors (not counting ``honorary mayor'' Bob Hope). The most recent - former singer/songwriter Sonny Bono - left the job in 1992 for Washington, where he's serving as the Republican congressman from California's 44th District.
For a discouraging period in the high-rolling '80s, it seemed that Old Palm Springs was losing its charm. A handful of upscale suburbs such as Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert - marketed collectively as the Palm Springs Desert Resorts - were increasingly luring away chi-chi shops and celebs. Mammoth self-contained properties like Marriott's Desert Springs - which offers everything from tennis to boat rides on an indoor-outdoor lagoon - started snapping up activity-minded families. And golfers found that the most challenging of the 87 courses within 20 miles of Palm Springs were actually in other communities.
But after almost a decade of decline, Palm Springs is on the rise again. A new city-owned championship course - Tahquitz Creek Palm Springs Golf Resort, managed by Arnold Palmer Golf - opened last fall. A sprawling restaurant/nightclub/entertainment complex is the latest addition to the shopping heart of main-drag Palm Canyon Drive. A new Palm Springs entertainment museum also is in the works.
Perhaps the city's biggest image boost came recently when Givenchy opened its first spa hotel outside of France at the former Autry Resort. Never mind that noted hotelier Rose Narva got the go-ahead to re-create Versailles at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains because she happened to know both fashion/fragrance icon Hubert de Givenchy and ex-singing cowboy/California Angels owner Gene Autry (who at age 88 was looking to sell his spread). Autry and his wife have kept a home on the property and often hobnob at Givenchy's Le Poteger restaurant with spa guests, who in the first month included Nancy Reagan, Leslie Caron and Tim Allen.
For all the name-dropping, Palm Springs isn't only for pampered jet-setters. Room rates start under $100, even at legendary lodgings. Just about every major chain is represented, including Motel 6, and virtually all have pools as well as million-dollar views of the mountain-rimmed Coachella Valley, which in March and April is carpeted with wildflowers.
With so much resort landscaping, the sneeze quotient has risen dramatically in the desert, but fans still see arid inland California as Florida without allergies. Vacationers can count on about 350 days of sunshine annually - though it should be noted that the average daily high tops 100 degrees June through September, and 120 isn't unknown (locals, of course, maintain ``it's a dry heat''). In the January-through-April high season, however, visitors usually find perfect days in the 70s or 80s, with comfortably 50-ish nights.
Such weather naturally attracts a large contingent of retirees, and a few wags have suggested that Palm Springs' mean high temperature - 88 - is the same as the average age. The man ahead of me at the airport car-rental counter did mention he'd been an auto-club member for 58 years, but the city also gets some of the spring-break crowd (though it tries to discourage revelers by scheduling lots of family oriented events during the April school vacation weeks).
Most of the 3 million annual tourists are content to play golf (many of the courses offer discount deals), go shopping (amid the malls, a slew of consignment stores occasionally offer celebrity collectibles) or just relax by a pool (Palm Springs alone has about 10,000 - almost one for every four residents).
Winter visitors also can luxuriate in hot mineral pools. The spring that inspired the city's name still bubbles from the sand in front of the downtown Spa Hotel & Casino, owned by the Agua Caliente Cahuilla Indians. Until the end of the last century, Palm Springs had been their exclusive paradise. But they remain the largest landholders in town, which reportedly has made them the richest tribe in North America.
Much of the Agua Calientes' ancestral homeland is still undeveloped, and four miles south of town tourists can hike and picnic in the lush Indian Canyons - three long gorges with waterfalls and the world's largest oases of fan palms. A fourth gorge, Tahquitz Canyon, starred as the idyllic Shangri-La in the 1930s movie ``Lost Horizon,'' but it's more ecologically fragile and is now off-limits to visitors. It has also been the scene of a number of hiking accidents - which Indians blame on the legendary witch whose shadow they say sometimes appears on the side of Palm Springs' skyscraping Mount San Jacinto.
The 10,800-foot mountain, which towers over the downtown area, is the steepest in North America, and you can zip via a hair-raising aerial tramway in 15 minutes to the 8,500-foot level, where there's a wilderness park and Nordic ski center.
It's a relaxed hour's drive north across the gentler Little San Bernardino Mountains to intriguing Joshua Tree National Park, where the "low'' Colorado Desert (where Palm Springs lies at an elevation of 400-plus feet) to the ``high'' Mojave, almost a mile loftier.
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: BARBARA SHEA/NEWSDAY. Palm trees and mountains towerby CNBover Palm Springs, for decades playground to the stars. color.