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

the movie business. It was actually a spectacularly well-stocked and successful store, and it was there for a long, long time. And I still remember Desmond’s department store.
    Among the other celebrities who lived in Palm Springs were Zane Grey, Sam Goldwyn, the composer Frederick Loewe, Dinah Shore, and Frank Sinatra. William Powell and his much younger wife Diana Lewis—everybody called her “Mousie”—had moved there after he retired, and I got to know him well.
    As you might expect, Bill Powell was a gentleman. He was a good drinking man, and surprisingly self-effacing. One time I complimented him on the marvelous series of movies he had made with Myrna Loy and the qualities he had brought to all of his films, but he didn’t seem to think they, or he, were all that much.

    Yours truly having a good time at a party in Palm Springs, circa 1955.

Everett Collection
    “I never really did anything different,” he said, referring to his career. I thought he was being unfair to himself, and still do.
    In the 1950s, Palm Springs began to change. When I first went there with my father, it had precisely one golf course: the O’Donnell, a little nine-holer. But soon other courses sprang up—Thunderbird, Tamarisk—and later the Eisenhower Medical Center changed the nature of the town. It became far more of a retirement community than it ever had been, and the geriatric influence shifted the natureof the town—it became less exuberant, more sedate. At the same time, it also became less seasonal and more of a year-round place.
    Frank Sinatra started out by buying a little three-bedroom tract house near the Tamarisk Country Club and began remodeling and adding on until he had a very large compound with guesthouses, a helicopter pad, and a caboose that held his huge model train layout—Frank loved his Lionel trains. Next door to his own compound, he built a house for his mother, Dolly. Down the street Walter Annenberg had a private golf course.
    For years, we would go to Frank’s for New Year’s Eve. Dean Martin would be there, as would Sammy Davis Jr., perhaps Angie Dickinson. Frank appreciated the remoteness of Palm Springs but also liked the fact that the place wasn’t so remote he’d be deprived of the amenities he wanted. By the time he was finished with the house, it had a walk-in freezer and a huge dining room that sat twenty-four people. The interior decoration made some of the place look like a luxurious modern hotel, but I always figured that was because Frank had spent so much of his life in hotels that it was the kind of environment in which he felt comfortable.
    Eventually I moved to Palm Springs, too, when I married my second wife, Marion, in the early 1960s, and my kids went to school there. We lived there for seven years—seven very happy years. My house was built out of desert rock and was Spanish in design—Herman Wouk lives there now. That house was just a bit away from the house that had been built by Zane Grey, and it was right across the street from one of King Gillette’s houses.
    My proximity to Zane Grey’s house was thrilling to me. I’d read his novels as a boy, and knew he’d been a great outdoorsman who had done a great deal to popularize deep-sea fishing. It alwaysdelighted me to think how we could have been neighbors if Grey hadn’t gone and died.

    My future wife, Jill, and Frank at the very first Frank Sinatra Golf Tournament in Palm Springs, circa 1960.
    Lester Nehamkin/mptimages.com
    When Natalie and I married for the second time, in 1972, I still had the house, and we decided to settle there. We added some rooms on, and when our daughter, Courtney, was born, we raised her there. Then we bought our house in Beverly Hills from Patti Page.

    There were other places where people went to get away, some of them pretty far afield. Gamblers often went over the border to Tijuana, Agua Caliente, and Ensenada. It’s an open question who was the biggest gambler in Hollywood, the answer