Palm Springs

I’ve been a bit obsessed with Audrey Saunders ever since she opened the Pegu Club in SoHo five years ago. Saunders took the name of her bar from the original Pegu Club, a famous British Colonial Officers’ club in Burma that, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “was always filled with lots of people either on their way up or on their way down.” Perhaps what the club was most famous for was their house cocktail which, not too surprisingly, was called the Pegu Club Cocktail, a marvelous libation that pretty much disappeared from the scene along with the British in Burma (and Burma itself, for that matter). Until Audrey Saunders revived it.

Now before Saunders opened The Pegu Club she was working at The Carlyle Hotel where she fine-tuned a number of vintage cocktails for the legendary Bemelmans Bar. I mention all this because Morgan’s in the Desert, where I had dinner Saturday, has “borrowed” the recipes for many of the vintage cocktails from Bemelmans, including the Pegu Club and an Audrey Saunders original called the Gin-Gin Mule which I am convinced will one day join the pantheon of such classic cocktails as the Manhattan and Negroni. Thanks to my discovery of Saunders’ libation, the Gin-Gin Mule is my new summer drink (summer, for me, officially begins the day we move our clocks ahead an hour, which was last Sunday).

The other thing I love about Audrey Saunders is that, like me, she’s a big fan of Charles H. Baker, author of the 1939 cocktail guide called The Gentleman’s Companion, Vol. II (to read more about Mr. Baker, go here). She often talks about how she takes Baker to bed with her (not literally, of course) and just flips through the pages until she finds a section heading that just jumps off the page and grabs her. Like this one: “FIVE DELICIOUS CHAMPAGNE OPPORTUNITIES, which Are not to be Ignored.”

“When you read that, how can you not dive in?” Saunders says. “And when you see the first one is called the Maharaja’s Burra-Peg, that’s like putting cheese in front of a mouse.”

It does sound rather enticing, doesn’t it? But let’s save that story (and recipe) for another Friday. For now, let’s stick with Audrey Saunders’ Gin-Gin Mule as mixed in the bar at Morgan’s in the Desert at La Quinta Resort.

Jimmy Schmidt at Morgan's. Photo by David Lansing.

God I get distracted easily. One minute I’m telling you about this dinner I had last Saturday night (or, at least, that’s what I meant to do) and the next I’m going on and on about Frank Capra. How’d that happen? I think I know. I was talking about the guy that built La Quinta, Walter Morgan, and that somehow led to Frank Capra.

Anyway, the reason I was talking about Walter Morgan is because I had dinner in La Quinta’s new restaurant, Morgan’s in the Desert, which is named, of course, after the founder of the resort. (And not to get distracted again, but just to tidy up some business: I mentioned that Walter Morgan opened La Quinta in December 1926 but I never told you what happened to him. It wasn’t good. After the stock market crashed in 1929, business went south. In April of 1931, Morgan committed suicide. His ashes were spread over the date groves and flower gardens, and the hotel was closed.)

So back to Morgan’s in the Desert (not Morgan’s ashes in the desert). I was walking around Saturday afternoon, looking for Frank Capra’s old casita, and ended up at Morgan’s. They weren’t really open but the front door was unlocked so I decided to have a peek inside. I hadn’t got three feet inside the dining room when this guy comes out of nowhere wondering if he can help me. I explained to him that I was going to have dinner that evening and just wanted a quick look around, sorry for the intrusion, etc., etc.

“Not a problem,” he says. “Let me give you a tour.”

Well, the guy turns out to be the executive chef, Jimmy Schmidt and I have to say he’s got to be one of the most personable chefs I’ve ever met (frankly, my observation is that most chefs don’t have much personality, although there are exceptions).

He told me how the old La Quinta restaurant, Azure, was closed in 2008 after a kitchen fire (“Just as well; the place needed a major overhaul”) and how he was brought over from the Rattlesnake restaurant at the Classic Club in Palm Desert “to do things right.”

Later that night, I came back for dinner. The place was jumping. So much so that I had to elbow my way in at the bar to get a drink while waiting for my table. But, man, what a meal. I told my waiter to just bring me whatever Jimmy thought was best and I was not disappointed.

Schmidt, who is a big proponent of using local products whenever possible, served me a series of small plates beginning with some wedges of heirloom tomatoes from the Coachella Valley (yes, tomatoes are in season; at least they are out here in the desert) served with baby arugula and sweet basil, also local, followed by an ahi tuna and tangerine salad whose signature is a dressing made with Aleppo chile pepper sea salt and a cold-pressed citrus-infused olive oil made locally. The olive oil was amazing. So much so that I popped for the $20 to buy a 12-oz. bottle of the stuff in the gift shop the next day. It’ll be worth it, I’m sure.

The ahi tartare was followed by a roasted spiny Santa Barbara lobster and a porcini crusted Angus filet (I know I didn’t need both, but I wanted to sample them, so what the hell). And then an artisan cheese plate with some yummy California goodies like Mt Tam, a buttery triple cream from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, and Humboldt Fog, a tangy goat cheese with a flat line of blue through the middle, from Cypress Grove Chevre.

As I was finishing up the cheese, Jimmy came out from the kitchen and asked me what I thought. I had to tell him the truth: It was the best damn meal I’ve ever had in the desert.

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?