ONE VOICE, TWIN PALMS
Hollywood Lore and E. Stewart Williams' Stamp Distinguish
the Legend of Croon King Frank Sinatra's Original Desert Digs

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

He had a voice that caressed, and caressed slowly. He could swing like mad, but he never rocked. Frank Sinatra -- 'the Voice,' the 1950s' greatest crooner, perhaps the greatest ever -- was made for Palm Springs, a town that's all about relaxing with style. Or was Palm Springs made for Frank?

Twin Palms, Frank Sinatra's first house in the desert, became a Palm Springs landmark as soon as it was completed, Christmas 1947 -- but not because it was big or spectacular.

For a house of a star, the four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot house was modest, even as a weekend home. It is, in essence, a typical postwar ranch-style house, albeit more elegant and modern than most. It is also an architecturally important house as the first home designed by E. Stewart Williams, who would go on to become one of Palm Springs' most important architects.

But what made the Sinatra house an instant landmark was the way it made use of its location, at the eastern edge of what was then a very small city, far from any other houses. A pair of Washingtonia palms alongside the pool dominated the landscape. From the air they could be spotted for miles.

"Those are the most famous palm trees in Palm Springs," says Allen Miller, longtime Palm Springs real estate broker and modern fan who represents the home's current owners. Looking for a pad while visiting town? You can rent Sinatra's former digs if you're willing to part with, say, $1,800 a night. "It's a pretty pricey rental," Miller admits.

Starting with a Christmas party that first year -- the house was constructed using round-the-clock shifts to ensure it would be ready in time -- pilots would aim for the twin palms, and deposit such guests as Bogie and Bacall, Phil Silvers, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Also by the pool stands a tall flagpole. When the flag was raised, friends in town knew they could motor out and join Frank and guests around the famous piano-shaped pool. When the flag was down they waited for it to go up.

It's not surprising that Sinatra, with his relaxed delivery, precise diction, perfect timing, and impeccable swing, should have fallen in love with desert modernism as well as with the desert. As Miller notes of Frank, "He had really good taste. He was a sharp dresser. The guy had style, no question about it."

But Sinatra wasn't a committed modernist. He asked for a design in the Georgian style. Williams did as asked -- but also showed him a modern design, which Williams favored. So did Frank, according to Palm Springs architectural historian Robert Imber, who heard this oft-told tale from Williams himself.

The house is perfect for parties, with a living area that opens through sliding doors onto pool and patio, with cabana and guest quarters beyond.

To get a sense of this scene during its heyday, watch 'The Damned Don't Cry,' a 1950 film noir in which Joan Crawford as a gal with more ambition than morals takes up with a gangster in the town of 'Desert Springs' -- and takes several dives into what the gangster brags is "the best-looking swimming pool in the west."

Of course it is. It's the Sinatra pool. "The house," architectural historian Tony Merchell says, "is all about the pool."

Williams provided some charming touches, including a sky-lighted canopy that stretches alongside the pool, and a broad soffit that hovers beneath the ceiling in much of the living area, providing an absorbing play of space, a sense of intimacy -- and marvelous, soft light effects as it absorbs the sunlight that pours in through clerestory windows.

The house, not surprisingly, has become legendary -- and not because of its architecture. Visitors are often shown a chipped sink, reportedly damaged when Frank tossed a bottle during a battle with Ava Gardner. Twin Palms was "the only house we ever really could call our own," Gardner wrote in her memoirs. It was also, she wrote, "the site of probably the most spectacular fight of our young married life -- and honey, don't think I don't know that's really saying something."

Sinatra, it must be recalled, was a young man in 1947 -- 32 years old -- and some thought a has-been. It was only nine years since Sinatra was earning $15 a week as a singing waiter in a New Jersey roadhouse, and three years after Walter Winchell pegged him as the highest paid person -- that's person, not performer -- in the world.

During Frank's heyday, girls swooned, GIs cheered, and a riot broke out at New York's Paramount Theater when fans feared they wouldn't be able to get inside. A fan once called Frank "one of the greatest things to ever happen to Teen Age America," but by 1947 Teen Age America had moved on.

Frank had lost his cuddlesome, boy-next-door image. He was accused of being a mobster after being photographed in Havana with Lucky Luciano, Senator McCarthy called him a "Communist Fellow Traveler," and Frank was denounced from America's pulpits for running around with Lana Turner despite his marriage to his hometown sweetheart, Nancy Barbato.

Record sales were plummeting and reviews turned sour. Worse, at a concert in 1950 Frank opened his mouth and, in his own words, what came out was 'dust.' His vocal cords had hemorrhaged. His record label dropped him in 1952, his talent agency too.

By 1948, Frank and Ava Gardner were necking in Los Angeles. By 1949, in Palm Springs, Ava recalled, "He told me, under the stars, that his marriage was through. Then he sang to me under a palm tree." Later that year Frank and Ava cruised the desert in his Cadillac convertible, shooting streetlights with .38s until the law caught up to them.

Following a Nevada divorce Frank and Ava married, commencing what Lana Turner, who remained Frank's friend, called "a dreadful farce." "We never fought in bed," Ava said.

Sinatra was besotted. Arranger Skitch Henderson said Ava was Frank's "Svengali," and compared her to a panther. She was by far the more successful star -- though, surprisingly enough, that fact contributed to what marital happiness they shared.

"When he was down and out, he was sweet," Ava later said. "But now that he's successful again, he's become his old arrogant self." Both were intensely jealous, and apparently had reason to be.

They separated 11 months after marrying. By 1953, thanks to 'From Here to Eternity,' a movie that gave Sinatra an Oscar for best supporting actor, he was a star again.

With money in his pocket, Sinatra moved out of the house in 1954 to much larger desert digs alongside the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage. "The Compound," as this home became known, was originally designed by another famed desert modern, William ('Wild Bill') Cody. Over the years the house grew and grew. Today, according to Donald Wexler, yet another Palm Springs architectural great, "I don't think you could find the original house, it's been added onto so much."

A worse fate almost befell Twin Palms. By the mid-1990s, Merchell recalls, the pool was an empty hole, the lot overgrown, and a contractor hoped to bulldoze it. Palm Springs was at its nadir and Sinatra's wasn't the only abandoned house in the neighborhood. "It was sold as a teardown," Merchell says.

The Sinatra house!? Really!?

"I think it was totally forgotten," Miller says of Twin Palms. "Most of the Sinatra interest focused on his house in Rancho Mirage where he lived for 40 years."

Along came Marc Sanders, a landscape designer who had been buying and restoring homes in the neighborhood for several years, including the house Don Wexler designed for himself. "Bit by bit he helped fix up the whole neighborhood," Merchell says.

Sanders, intrigued by what little he could see of the overgrown Sinatra house, visited when it came on the market in 1997 and bought it for $137,000. "I kind of fell in love with the house because of its architecture," he says. He had no idea Sinatra had owned it -- until he checked its original building permit while the house was in escrow.

Sanders wanted to find out who designed the house, which wasn't recorded. But the name of the owner was. "Oh God, that's kind of a fun story," was his reaction on seeing the name Sinatra. "But I wanted to find out who the architect was."

He found that out when a friend saw a photo of the house in an exhibit by Julius Shulman.

Sanders, who has restored 27 houses in his career, including Stew Williams' own house, spent $400,000 to renovate the Sinatra house, though he'd been warned off. "Friends told me, there's no way you can do anything with this house." Sanders sold it in 2000 for $1.3 million.

Merchell, an architectural purist, has his qualms about one change Sanders made to the Sinatra house, replacing the rustic board-and-batten siding with stucco. "But he saved the house. The house would have been bulldozed if he hadn't bought it."

Sanders defends his stucco siding. "I talked about it with Stew when I did it, and Stew loved it. He said he'd made a mistake with the wood siding, that it didn't work in the desert."

The home has lost its original furnishings, as Ron Oliver, a movie director who lives in a Palm Springs Alexander home, can attest. A few years ago he got an excited call from a friend who was in a local consignment shop staring at a compact rattan bar plus three stools that came from the Sinatra house. Whose lovely backsides must have graced those fortunate stools?

"You have to get back here and buy it," his friend successfully urged. What did the bar cost, Ron? "$600. Nothing."

Despite this fire sale, Sinatra is far from forgotten in Palm Springs. Oliver's is not the only mid-century modern house, or restaurant, with Sinatra's 'Swing Easy' album in regular rotation on the sound system.

Twin Palms, again a star, hosted the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation's 'retro martini party' during Modernism Week earlier this year. "Where would the classic martini party be?" asked Barbara Marshall, a local preservationist. "Where else but the Frank Sinatra house?"

Photos: Joseph S. Pickett III, Tom Brewster Photography, Dave Weinstein; and courtesy sinatrahouse.com, Capitol Records, Inc.

• Twin Palms can be spotted from 1148 Alejo Road or 1145 E. Via Colusa, Palm Springs. For additional information, including rentals, visit sinatrahouse.com.

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