You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner Read Free Book Online

accident, and I enjoyed cheering her up by doing impressions of movie stars. I didn’t know then that Stanley was one of the founders of the Beverly Hills Hotel and had great connections in the movie industry. His stepdaughter liked me, and so Stanley would invite me on his boat. And later, he put in a good word for me with various directors and casting directors.
    Stanley sent me to Solly Baiano, the casting director at Warner Bros. I did all my impressions for Solly—Cagney, Bogart, etc.—and he responded by saying, “That’s all very well, but we’ve already got Cagney and we’ve already got Bogart. What about doing you ?”
    I was totally stumped. “I can’t do me,” I said. “I don’t know who me is.”
    It took a few years, but I eventually figured out who I was. By that time I wasn’t under contract to Warner’s, but to Fox.
    Natalie and I spent a lot of time when we were courting on my first boat, a twenty-six-foot twin-screw Chris-Craft I had named My Lady . Natalie had never been to Catalina before I took her there, and it became one of her favorite places. After we got married the first time, we bought a thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft that we called My Other Lady .
    In 1975 Phil Wrigley, the son of Bill Jr., deeded his family’s shares in the island over to the Catalina Island Conservatory, which controls 88 percent of the island. The island’s natural resources include six species of plants that are found only there. Other species unique to Catalina include the island fox, which was nearly wiped out by a strain of distemper; the population, which was down to less than one hundred animals in the 1990s, has now been restored to a level of over a thousand.
    Then there are the buffalo. Yes, buffalo. How, you ask, did buffalo end up on this island? As with so much else, blame it on the movies. In 1924 Paramount brought fourteen buffalo to the island for a scene in their epic western The Vanishing American . When it was through shooting the scenes, the company decided to just leave the buffalo instead of going to the trouble of shipping them back to the mainland.
    If you’ve seen The Vanishing American , you’re probably scratching your head—there are no buffalo in the movie. That’s because Paramount cut the scenes shot on Catalina. Ah, the wonders of the movie business!
    But those fourteen buffalo flourished. The herd has grown over the years to about 150, and their numbers remain at that self-sustaining level. What the Wrigley family did for Catalina meant that the island remains one of the few unspoiled places in Southern California . . . and indeed the world.

    As the movie industry expanded, the population needed more vacation destinations, which inexorably led to Palm Springs. The Springs got going in 1934, when Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy bought up fifty-two acres of desert for thirty-five hundred dollars and started the Racquet Club as a way to defray some of their costs. Much to their surprise, it became a popular gathering spot for Hollywood actors who wanted to get out of town for a long weekend. Before the Racquet Club, there had been only the Desert Inn, which had been there since 1909 and was patronized mostly by victims of tuberculosis, who took bubbling mud baths at twenty-five cents a dip under the supervision of local Indians. A few years after the Racquet Club came the Palm Springs Tennis Club, but for the movie people the Racquet Club was always the main destination. Soon, the Racquet Club and all of Palm Springs had become a very posh resort. At that point, the main activities were tennis and horseback riding.

    Here I am doing the publicity thing at Palm Springs Racquet Club.

Everett Collection
    The attraction of Palm Springs was its hot, dry climate and complete seclusion, far from the studios and the gossip columnists. For years Palm Springs was one of the places you went if you were playing around on your spouse, or wanted to. The combination of a resort culture with