March 2010

Just to finish up on Frank Capra…

I titled yesterday’s blog entry “It’s a wonderful life” in obvious reference to Capra’s most beloved movie of the same name. But as for Capra himself, it wasn’t as wonderful a life as you might imagine for someone who won three directorial Oscars so early in his career.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Capra joined the Army, spending most of his time producing propaganda movies. When the war ended, Capra went back to writing and directing movies, producing It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, the quintessential Capra fantasy that most closely reflected his own belief that “no man who has friends is a failure.”

The film, starring James Stewart as a small-town banker who is saved from suicide by an angel, was harshly criticized when it came out and did little business. In fact, Capra always considered the film itself to be a failure. And just like that, the famed director’s career was pretty much over.

Frank Capra made the cover of Time magazine on Aug. 8, 1938, but less than a decade later, his movie career was over.

Although he made a few more movies in the ‘50s (anyone remember 1959’s A Hole in the Head?), “the remainder of his work consisted of formulaic exercises and remakes of earlier films, banal star vehicles and clinkers pure and simple,” according to a 1992 story in the New York Times. It was, wrote Joseph McBride in his biography of Capra, “the most precipitous decline of any American film maker since D. W. Griffith.”

Why the decline? One critic, William S. Pechter, believed that Capra had nothing more to say in his films. The fact of the matter was that Capra was very much a man of his time “and the times had passed him by.”

According to McBride’s biography of the director, the period after It’s a Wonderful Life was grueling and terribly sad for Capra. “Capra found it increasingly difficult to secure work. One sign of Capra’s desperation in these years was his offer to direct an episode of the television show “The Addams Family.” Another was his idea for a movie on the life of St. Paul—starring Frank Sinatra. He suffered from debilitating headaches and was often suicidal. Though his first wife and many of his closest collaborators, including Harry Cohn and Robert Riskin, were Jewish, he now began blaming the Jews for his troubles. He finally retired from film making in 1966 and devoted the next several years to writing his autobiography. “The Name Above the Title” was published in 1971, and appears to have been a lie practically from beginning to end.

“Amazingly, Capra hung on for another two decades. When he died in 1991 at the age of 94, he had been out of the movie business for 25 years. He had not made a major motion picture for 45 years. No doubt many people who saw his obituary were taken aback, believing he had died long before. The truth is, he had.”

The San Anselmo casita, originally built in 1926, at La Quinta Resort.

So why was I looking for the old San Anselmo casita? Well, to understand that I have to take you back twenty years to when I was staying here for a story on the desert I was writing for Sunset magazine. Although I was out here by myself at the time, I was expecting a large contingent from the magazine—photographer and assistant, designer, models—in a day or two, so the resort had put me in a lovely, oversized casita that just happened to be next to San Anselmo, telling me that there was a “special guest” in the original casita, a long-time resident, actually, who had been living there for years, though they wouldn’t tell me the guest’s name.

I figured whoever was in there must have been elderly (the only activity I ever saw was a nurse going in and out) and wanted privacy since the shutters were always kept closed and the place looked dark. Then one morning, I saw the nurse wheel a small, frail man out into the courtyard and into the shade of one of the massive citrus trees. Although it had to be at least 80 degrees out, the old man was warmly dressed and had a blanket over his legs.

I surreptitiously peeked out from behind the shutters of my room while his nurse read aloud to him from a book, wondering who the heck this frail little man was. He certainly wasn’t anybody I recognized.

Anyway, while the nurse was reading to him, the phone rang inside the San Anselmo casita and she ran off to answer it. That’s when I decided to stick the morning newspaper under my arm and nonchalantly go for a stroll in the courtyard.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” I said, stopping in front of the hunched man in the chair.

“It is!” he said in a cheerful voice. “A perfectly fine morning!”

I made some small talk, keeping an eye out towards the open door of the old man’s casita. The nurse was evidently still on the phone. I introduced myself. The old man, looking up at me a bit quizzically with a cocked head, like a bird, was quiet for a moment before saying, “My name’s Frank. Frank Capra.”

Undated photo of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart.

The name seemed faintly familiar, but to be honest with you, I can’t say I immediately knew who this was. He was a Hollywood writer or maybe a director, I thought, but I couldn’t have told you any of his movies. And I think he got that—that here was this young man standing in front of him who really had no idea who he was. And I don’t think that bothered him.

He invited me to sit down, there in the shade of the citrus tree, and when his nurse came back out, looking a little concerned, he introduced me (although he couldn’t remember my last name) and asked her to bring me out a cup of coffee.

“I can’t drink it anymore,” he said, “but you go ahead.”

While I drank my coffee, he talked. He told me he’d been coming out here for years. “From the beginning,” he said. “Walter Morgan himself invited me out here. Had a chauffeur pick me up and drive me out himself. Blew a tire or two. Didn’t matter. We’d just sit on the side of the road and drink some wine while they changed the tire. Imagine that!”

When the photographer arrived the next day, I asked him if he knew who Frank Capra was. “Of course,” he said. “Jimmy Stewart…It’s a Wonderful Life. Why?”

“He’s our neighbor,” I told him.

Well, he went nuts over that and for the rest of our stay, we both kept an eye on the San Anselmo casita, but Frank Capra never made another appearance. A year later, I read he died, at his casita in La Quinta, at the age of 94. Reading the obits, I finally got the big picture: the dozens of classic movies he wrote and directed, the three Oscars, the special awards. According to one story, Capra wrote the script for “It Happened One Night,” which went on to win him his first directorial Oscar in 1934, while holed up in the San Anselmo casita and, after that, became superstitious about the desert, returning every year to La Quinta Hotel where he wrote several other film classics including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can’t Take It With You, both of which also won him Oscars, as well as It’s a Wonderful Life.

According to his NY Times obituary, after making his last movie in 1961, a stinker titled Pocketful of Miracles, “he and his wife left Hollywood for La Quinta, where he gardened, golfed, fished, hunted and, as a self-taught musician, played many string instruments.”

Anyway, that’s why I was wandering around Saturday afternoon looking for the San Anselmo casita. I wanted to sit beneath the shade of that gorgeous citrus tree as we’d done twenty years ago thinking about Frank. And that’s just what I did.

La Quinta Hotel...in the beginning.

It was so balmy Saturday I decided to go for a walk around the grounds of La Quinta, where I’m staying. The air was saturated with the scent of orange blossoms from the hundreds of citrus trees around the beautiful courtyards as I wandered around looking for the San Anselmo casita. There were a few grapefruits, the size of softballs, floating in one of the pools, and every once in awhile as I was walking around I’d hear a thud and watch an orange or lemon roll away from the tree where it had fallen. So much ripe fruit everywhere you looked; like being in the Garden of Eden.

When Walter H. Morgan opened La Quinta hotel around Christmas in 1926, it consisted of a small office, dining room, and six casitas (called cottages back then), all in a style now known as Spanish Revival. The design, by a then unknown Pasadena architect named Gordon Kaufmann, incorporated what would become known as Kaufmann’s signature details: thick stucco walls, tile roofs, loggias, arches, private patios enclosed by walls.

Originally the hotel was designed around three courtyards, which are still present and now full of the mature citrus trees I was so admiring. Around the courtyards, Kaufman designed six casitas, named alphabetically for saints: San Anselmo, San Benito, San Carlos, San Dimas, San Jacinto, and San Lucas.

That was the hotel—a dining room and lobby, administrative offices, and six small cottages. No pool (the resort now has 41 pools, but the first wasn’t built until 1937) and certainly no golf courses.

According to a 1951 book I have on the history of Palm Springs, “the little community of La Quinta…was, strangely enough, a product of the First World War. In a front line trench, thick with mud, two young officers huddled against the rain and bitter cold and made a pact, resolving that if they lived through the war, they would return to the United States and seek the driest, warmest, most enjoyable climate they could find and settle down.”

One of these two young men was Walter H. Morgan, the youngest son of John S. Morgan, the wealthy owner of the Morgan Oyster Company. In 1921, Walter Morgan did in fact go looking for someplace dry and warm and ended up buying 1,400 acres of land named “Happy Hollow” by the Cahuilla people, writing in a business plan that he figured it was the best place to build a little hotel because of the site’s “abundance of water reasonably close to the surface for irrigation, minimum wind, warm winter climate, and high percentage of clear blue sky.”

How’s that for a business plan?

Palm Springs Weekend stars Troy Donahue and Stefanie Powers (who was William Holden's girlfriend when he died).

One other small, classic Palm Springs hotel—the Orchid Tree Inn—also holds a special place in my heart. It’s where my mother lounged around the pool with Troy Donahue. I’m guessing that must have been around 1965, a year or so after his oh-so-brief marriage to Suzanne Pleshette and a couple of years after he’d made Palm Springs Weekend with Connie Stevens and Stefanie Powers. Donahue was an interesting character. Born Merle Johnson (supposedly he got the Troy Donahue monicker from his agent, Henry Wilson, who had tried giving it to James Darren, but it didn’t stick), Donahue was part of the ’50s pretty boys pack that included Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Doug McClure among others.

Of course, Hudson and Hunter turned out to be closet homosexuals (in the late ’50s Hunter used to hang out at the Desert Inn with his boyfriend, Anthony Perkins who, a few years later, would, as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock classic Psycho, dress in women’s clothing when he murders Janet Leigh in the shower). But the whole was-he-or-wasn’t-he guessing game about Donahue’s sexuality was a little more complicated. Not that the marriage to Pleschette proved anything since it lasted only a few months. He wed another actress, Valerie Allen, in 1966, but that didn’t last long either. After that, his life kind of went in the dumpster. Heavy drinking, drugs—the usual. When he died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 65, he was engaged to the mezzo-soprano opera singer Zheng Cao. It would have been his fourth marriage.

The Orchid Tree Inn is also where, on another occasion, my mother met William Holden. According to her he was “hiding out” (she never said from what or from whom) in one of the Spanish-style bungalows that ringed a desert garden courtyard. Once or twice she was invited to join “Bill” (as she said he insisted on being called) for a round or two of well-chilled martinis. This was after my father had left and my mother was alone. I don’t remember my mother telling any particular stories about “Bill” Holden and maybe it’s just as well. Some things should remain secret. Towards the end of her life, primed by a couple of cocktails, she did reveal that once, after a long night of drinking with Holden, the two of them ended up in the pool late one night, drunk, floating on their backs, looking for shooting stars. “God, I was so young then,” she’d say wistfully. “We were both so young.”

Holden was 63 when he died in 1981; my mother, who died a few years later, was all of 55.

The keyhole entrance to the Korakia lobby.

I don’t think I’ve ever stayed at the same place twice out here in the desert. Well, that’s not true. I’ve hung out at the La Quinta Resort, where I’m currently holed up, many a time, but that doesn’t count. I consider La Quinta my desert home-away-from-home. There are just too many interesting places to stay out here to make a habit of this place or that place (with the exception of La Quinta).

One place I’ll never forget is a little pensione (I know, right?—a pensione out in the desert?) in Palm Springs where I spent a memorable week shortly after it opened some twenty years ago. Built in 1924 by Scottish artist Gordon Courts to resemble a Moorish castle, Dar Morroc—as the place was originally known—was an artists’ retreat in the ‘20s and ‘30s. For decades afterwards it languished as a run-down apartment complex, Then an architect, G. Douglas Smith, bought the property, which was a total mess at the time, in 1989, and gutted it, discovering, as he did so, things like Korakia’s distinct keyhole-shaped grand entrance housing a set of ornately carved Moorish wooden double doors, all of which had been covered up by stucco for years.

One of the things Smith wanted to do with the Korakia was attract an eclectic, offbeat crowd. Which he did. The week I stayed there guests included rocker Gregg Allman, the English film director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella (who was sitting around the pool in Bermuda shorts and dark socks working on something that turned out to be the screenplay for The English Patient), and a Canadian opera star who sang arias every morning outside her room before breakfast.

The Korakia in the '20s.

A couple of times during the week, Smith would cook up some simple family meal—like pasta marinara—and invited anyone who was interested and didn’t have anything else going on to sit at a long table next to the pool and join him for dinner. What I remember is that Minghella always brought the wine and Allman was always stoned. What I don’t remember—unfortunately—is any of the conversation. Too much of that good wine, I fear. Or perhaps it was the Allman herb. Ah, well.