Los Angeles Holiday Goddess Editor Vicki Arkoff takes time out from writing about New York movie locations for our new book, Holiday Goddess Handbag Guide – and investigated the true story of a 1960s “Playground of the Stars”. This motel landmark in the Caliente Tropics has skeletons in its closets that only the tikis know about. Welcome to the no-tell motel…
Fun-in-the-sun Palm Springs is just a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, but if you know where to go, it can also be an express lane back in time to the town’s untamed ‘50s & ‘60s heyday when Ol’ Blue Eyes and his Rat Pack cronies played golf all day, and dug the pool-side party scene all night. Lost weekend after lost weekend.
When local “kids” like Elvis & Priscilla grew bored of the glitzy resorts, they cruised down Palm Canyon Drive – the south end of downtown’s main drag – lined with dozens of motor-court motels featuring a hallucinatory combination of “futuristic” sputnik architecture and exotic themes.
Particularly popular was Palm Springs’ warped concept of a Polynesian party paradise in the middle of the bone-dry desert. Non-native palm trees and birds-of-paradise were imported and lit at night with ice cream colors.
Pseudo tiki idols planted frozen stares on sun-worshippers baking on webbed lounge chairs surrounding ocean-sized swimming pools. Sure there were scorpions and rattlesnakes in them thar hills, the humidity was zero, and the nearest ocean was hundreds of miles away – but with mai-tais flowing and exotic lounge music the mid-‘50s music du jour, Palm Springs’ island fantasy somehow made strange sense.
At the centre of it all was the modest Hyatt Tropics motel – later, at its peak, it became the Best Western Tropics and Nancy Sinatra lived there for a while. It’s tiki and torch-flanked entrance has always been a local landmark, particularly because of its unmissable A-framed motor court entry and the central building’s popular Googie-styled coffee shop, Sambo’s soon-to-be relics.
Sambo’s is long gone, but the Tropics motel has been reborn after narrowly surviving the ‘80s as a spring break party-pad and the ‘90s with nearly as many police busts as (unsavory) guests.
