Out of the past
There are some addresses that you never forget. My first mother-in-law lived at
La Farigoulette, Impasse du Bois de Cythère, Le Piol, Nice.
while a French friend, studying English at Cambridge in the late 1950s, gave her address simply as
Château de Pommard, Côte d'Or.
But the most memorable of all has to be.
Miracle Manor Motel, Reposo Way, Desert Hot Springs, California.
Our good friends Linda and Lee drove us out there as a surprise weekend gift while we were staying with them in Hollywood in 1995, and this is the article I wrote about the experience when I got back home. (For some more pix go to the My Album pages).
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Miracle Manor
Head east from Los Angeles along highway 101 and within a couple of hours the signs show that you are coming up to the desert resort of Palm Springs. The billboards (featuring bronzed retired guys with younger trophy wives) start luring you from way back. But don’t feel obliged to go there; not unless you have urgent business in what the local Visitors Bureau calls “this glamorous playground of the stars” with its “restaurants that satisfy every craving” and “shopping with a European flair”.
Instead, turn off north and take the road to the nearby one-horse-town of Desert Hot Springs. OK, it doesn’t have 70 golf courses, the Lyons English Grille and a branch of Saks Fifth Avenue; but it does have a place to stay which promises (and delivers) “unparalleled pampering”: the Miracle Manor Motel.
Form the road it’s not especially prepossessing. You’re looking down the slope so you see little more than the roof-line with a raggedy hand-painted Miracle Manor sign and a smaller version saying vacancies with a no slapped on in front, clearly painted by someone in a hurry. ‘Seedy’ was the word that sprang to mind when I first arrived. But a few minutes later, standing in the central court looking over towards the San Jacinto Mountains,I began to understand why spending the odd few days at the Manor is what keeps so many of my stressed-out LA friends from going completely bananas.
The building is shaped like a horse-shoe, curving round a grassy plot full of bright flowers, tinkling water and squat, shaggy-topped palms. The office and apartment of Lois Black Hill, the owner, takes up the central part, leaving just three double rooms on each arm. We had two of them, linked by a kitchen-diner; our friends Linda and Lee in one, my wife Jane and I in the other, a yard or so away from the main attraction of the place: the hot mineral water pools.
Throughout the area, water bubbles up from underground aquifers as deep as five miles below sea level, emerging at temperatures ranging from 90 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The Manor has its own well, feeding two connected pools. The smaller, enclosed in a glass conservatory, is kept at a searing 104 degrees; the larger - long enough to swim in - is allowed to head towards the 90s in the winter months, when the temperature can fall to the 40s at night. In lat April, the time of our stay, it was a relatively frigid 85 degrees.
That first night, as a whole bunch of us were lolling naked in the hot pool, Jane - pointing out the halo round the full moon - remarked that it was a sign of rain. “Non-sense!”, one of the regulars said; “maybe in England. Out here they only get an inch or so a year”. But rain it did, the next morning, following a sudden wind which whipped away any magazines and towels that had been left out.
This seemed a good time to call on the services of Lois’s assistant, Nie Zhoing-Bin (known as Neil), an expert in Chinese therapeutic massage. He put on a tape of soothing music, I lay out on the table and had what was possibly the most pleasant physical experience of my life not involving the exchange of bodily fluids.
I didn’t try out the range of treatment, including what she describes as “psychic facials”, offered by Lois herself. In 17th century New England she would have been called a witch, with her black poodle Andre as her familiar. In 1990s California she is merely known as a “naturopath and spiritist”, a tribute to years spent learning about alternative forms of healing throughout the Americas, from Alaska to Brazil, with side-trips to study with psychic surgeons in the Philippines and gurus in India.
This would have surprised anyone who’d know her in her younger days. A professional singer since childhood, she’d tried to get into Broadway but was side-tracked into the fashion business, first as a model, then as a designer. This took her to Paris in the lats 40s where she was offered a job in a Montmartre nightclub, Le Perroquet, after sitting in with the band one quiet evening. A North African tour followed, taking her to Casablanca in 1950. Bogart and Bergman had moved on by then, of course, but the place was full of U.S. troops with money to burn and nowhere that felt like home. Lois found herself a couple of partners, hired off-duty service personnel as musicians and waiters, and opened up the Ace of Clubs. The combination of American food and jazz was a winning formula, until the general discovered what his men were up to out of hours. Lois got over that, but things turned sour with her partners and she headed back to the States, eventually landing up on the West Coast.
She first discovered Desert Hot Springs in 1974, twenty years after Miracle Manor was opened. She managed to buy it in 1981 and over the years has built up so faithful a clientele that the “no” stays firmly attached to the “vacancies” sign. Not that the Manor is permanently booked up; it’s just that she’d rather keep the rooms empty than fill them with just anybody. “Some people drive past a few times, then ask if they can look over the place,” she told me. “If I like the look of them I’ll give them a room if there’s one going.”
As we sat in her living-room - a riot of Chinese prints, North African wall hangings and samplers with messages along the lines of “May peace prevail on earth” - Lois explained the origins of Desert Hot Springs. It had first been settled just before World War One by a homesteader called Cabot Yerxa who for years was the sole inhabitant apart from a donkey called Merry Christmas. In 1941 he chose Miracle Hill, holy ground for native Americans, as the site on which to build his new home. Working mostly alone, and using second-hand lumber, ancient railroad ties and recycled nails, Yerxa produced a fantasy version of an ancient Hopi house, with 35 rooms of all shapes and sizes. The Old Indian Pueblo, as it’s now called,is where he died in 1965 at the age of 83. Just across the road from Miracle Manor, it’s open as a museum much of the year.
A bit farther up Miracle Hill you can strike off left into the desert proper. Next day, with the sky clear again, Jane and I decided to do some exploring, wearing thick boots as advised by Linda and keeping a wary eye open for rattlers. The snakes, presumably, were all curled up asleep, as were the coyotes we’d heard howling the night before. So we had to be content with spotting birds of a dozen species, from finches to buzzards, and 7 or 8 different types of cactus, many of which had flowered in the rains if the previous day.
When we got back to the Manor we toyed with the idea of getting in the car and driving some 20 miles farther north into the land of the Joshua Trees, or maybe exploring the San Bernardino National Forest or taking the mountain tram the 8000 feet up to the summit of Mount San Jacinto any of the dozens of other things the guide books suggest. But somehow it seemed easier to have 10 minutes in the hot tub, then stretch out on one of the loungers, flicking through one of the books and magazines left by previous guests, with nothing on our minds but what we’d cook on the barbecue that evening. Miracle Manor was beginning to get to us.
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postscript.
Linda tells us that, sadly, Lois died a while back. But the Manor is still going strong, with what still sounds like a lot of happy customers, as you can see from the following web link.
Miracle Manor
Saturday, 4 September 2010
