Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) also loved the desert.
Tina Sinatra: “By the late fifties, we were spending most vacations at Dad's place in the desert, outside Palm Springs. The house was on Wonder Palm Drive (later Frank Sinatra Drive), along the seventeenth fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. It would be his home, and ours, for more than four decades.
The desert was Dad's lifelong passion, the place where he felt healthiest and most peaceful. Before the golf courses and their Rainbird sprinkler systems brought humidity into the area, and pollution swept in from the west, it was arid and smogless. Your perspiration would evaporate before you noticed. Palm Springs was heaven, and relatively unknown, but that would soon change.
Before Dad's property expanded into the Compound, it was just a small three-bedroom house. There was his own simple room, done up in orange, his favorite color; an adjacent guest room, which Mia Farrow would later decorate in pink; and a second guest room off the living room, where Jack Kennedy would stay in 1960, before it became a den-and-bar family room.
To accommodate his growing children and their friends, my father put up a four-bedroom bungalow (with eight baths!) west of the main house. We called it the Christmas Tree House, because it was cozy and traditional, like a New England A-frame: white with green shutters, and set on a thick green lawn. It had its own pool, and a living room with a fireplace and TV and a game table. It was like a private clubhouse.
The town of Palm Springs–a little village then, really—had a great movie theater and a renowned candy store, but those were reserved for evening expeditions. With the weather so predictable, we'd spend most days around the pool, with Dad joining in the races and chicken fights (“Chicken fights” are when you sit on each other’s shoulders in a pool and try to throw each other off). For a special treat, he'd strap us into an authentic Army jeep, like the ones in M*A*S*H, and drive us across the desert. We'd swerve around the tumbleweed and fly over the sand dunes like a roller coaster, which would crack us up every time. Once we got stuck in the sand and couldn't get out, and had to walk home."
From: Frank Sinatra Respectfulposting (Facebook page)
