Palm Springs makeover

It all kicks off with Show Tunes Bingo night at the Ace Hotel. In between snatches of Fly Me to the Moon and If My Friends Could See Me Now from the seventysomething restaurant hostess, my Palm Springs guide for the week, Richard Dupont, fills me in on our itinerary.

Dupont, 55, is a former intimate of Andy Warhol and an endless source of information about Truman Capote (who befriended him), Salvador Dali (who painted him) and Freddie Mercury (who dated him). Dupont prefaces many sentences with "Wait till you hear this!" and tells me he will start my Palm Springs education by showing me the motel pool where Nancy Sinatra learned to swim and then drive me over to Warm Sands, the area for A-gays (affluent gay men and women) where "clothing is optional".

Dupont tells me his friend has just bought Clark Gable's golf cart in a local sale and, ("Wait till you hear this!") he has lined up a meeting with Tedi Thurman, NBC's 1950s dominatrix weather girl, who is going to take us to "the Country Club".

Jet lag mixed with a first night in Palm Springs is an interesting combination. Even when the jet lag wears off, Palm Springs doesn't feel real. It feels like Mad Men directed by John Waters, with sets from some 1950s science fiction movie.

As the days go by, I learn that dry desert heat is Valium heat, as opposed to the salty, trippy heat of the seaside. Dupont tells me its sedative effect is called "Guacamole brain". He used to live in West Hollywood with Lou Reed muse Holly Woodlawn, but has been in Palm Springs for five years now because of what the intense desert heat does: forces you to turn your head off.

It makes you want to wander round massive air-conditioned supermarkets, occasionally stopping to gaze, Stepford Wife-like, at the liquor aisle as you work out which vodka to buy for your afternoon around the pool.

I find it blissful, although when Jackie Kennedy's younger sister, Lee Radziwill, came here in 1969 to visit her friend Capote, she said the place gave her "the creeps". Palm Springs was, she declared, "the most unreal place I had ever been in my life".

"Nobody had any idea about the desperate things that were happening in Vietnam," she moaned to writer George Plimpton, yet she admitted that you could, "slip into it very easily".

Guacamole brain got to Capote, too. This wasn't ideal as he had come here to try to finish Answered Prayers. Yet knowing Palm Springs as I now do, it is completely understandable why an affair with the air-conditioning repair man seemed a more logical way of spending his time than working on what would end up as Capote's "famously unfinished" novel.

"I don't think Ann Rice wrote anything since she moved here either …" Dupont drawls, cracking open another can of Diet Coke. (He drinks 15 cans a day since he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and spends much of his day writing scripts for the Tales from the Mick Jagger Suite salons (twindupont@yahoo.com) he holds each month at his condo, a former hotel supposedly loved by Jagger, Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball).

Of course, there are opportunities for cerebral activity in Palm Springs: check out the "Ask The Rabbi" stall at the Thursday farmers' market. And there are some amazing spas. At The Parker (4200 E. Palm Canyon Drive, theparkerpalmsprings.com) they offer you a whiskey shot before your session in the British Raj-meets-Timothy Leary treatment rooms. The We Care Spa (18000 Long Canyon Road, wecarespa.com) is famous for its shamanic healers. You could rub shoulders with stars such as Courtney Love and Ben Affleck, who come here get to skinny before big red-carpet events.

There's also great shopping – at places such as Revivals (611 S. Palm Canyon Drive, revivalsstores.com) and Angel View Thrift Mart (454 N. Indian Canyon Drive, angelview.org), where you'll fine Charlotte Perriand chairs alongside Halloween costumes and $1.50 Loulou de la Falaise earrings. The Galeria (457 N. Palm Canyon Drive, gmcb.com/galleria) offers more vintage modernism, but the best-kept secrets are the Estate Sale Company (4135 E. Palm Canyon Drive, theestatesaleco.com) and its offshoot, Misty's Consignments (67777 E. Palm Canyon Drive). This is where celebrities sell their stuff when they move house and where you can pick up anything from Old Hollywood sofas to, as Misty Davis from Misty's Consignments tells me, "swimming pool statues from Sonny Bono's old house". The late singer was once mayor of Palm Springs.

But mainly, Palm Springs is all about lying on your floatie in your pool in your so-kitsch-it's-cool motel. My favourites are the Ingleside Inn, a kind of Rat Pack Fawlty Towers that welcomed Sinatra, Brando and Liberace in its heyday; the Movie Colony, one of "desert modernist" architect Albert Frey's earliest Palm Springs buildings, where Jim Morrison once threw himself into the pool from a great height; and the cheap-and- cheerful Caliente Tropics. ("Where we bring the island ambience of Polynesia to life.")

Yet trouble is brewing, with a series of new hotels trying to give Palm Springs a facelift. Jason Dibler, general manager of the Ace Hotel and formerly of the uber-cool Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, says the town's image as a place for vaguely sophisticated dirty weekends (as Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, painted it in her novels) is about to change. Palm Springs, he tells me, is going to become "The Hamptons of the West Coast".

The Ace is very "Hoxton in the Desert" and since opening in 2009 has been attracting a growing clientele of skinny people in black clothes, as well as Tom Ford, Russell Brand, geek-trendy photographer Terry Richardson and bands playing at the Coachella music festival (13-15 April and 20-22 April, coachella.com) in Indio. The line-up this year includes Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead and Snoop Dogg. Music lovers could stop here on their way to the Joshua Tree Musical Festival (18-20 May, joshuatreemusicfestival.com), 45 miles north of here.

The Ace is not alone. In February, the New York group that developed the Ace – it specialises in "lifestyle- oriented hotels" – unleashed another of its concepts on Palm Springs, in the form of the Saguaro. Painted in David Hockney colours, with an angular pool and recherché tequilas, it attracts the kind of urban sophisticates who don't want kitsch on their holidays.

The "boutique hotel" phrase is coming up a lot more, too. Thirteen Palms has pricey flatlets in contemporary colours, and the Bearfoot Inn, which opens in May (another "clothing-optional resort" although "pet-friendly" this time) stresses its "chic urban sensibility".

Renaissance is the Palm Springs buzz word right now. Yet whether that rebirth will be more Rat Pack than refined has still to be decided. A new wine and cake restaurant, Crave (390 N. Palm Canyon Drive, craveps.com), on one of the main drags, calls itself "a yoga class for your taste buds".

But next door is a much more old-school venture from Linda Gerard, who runs Show Tunes Bingo at the Ace. Called Encore (encorepalmsprings.com), it opened last month and offers specialities including Kentucky Derby Cobb salad, Cajun-themed cocktails and cabaret turns by the likes of Holly Woodlawn. It turns out Gerard was an understudy for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl on Broadway in the 1960s. (Why am I not surprised when Dupont tells me this?)

Another shot in the arm for fans of old-school Palm Springs is the opening to the public of Sunnylands, the former estate of philanthropist publisher Walter Annenberg (37977 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, sunnylands.org, $35pp). Sunnylands hosted lavish weekends for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and the Reagans.

Many locals are confident that the modern world will never take off in Palm Springs. Brian James, manager of the Caliente Tropics – a David to the Goliath that is the Ace next door – says his hotel has several aces up its sleeve. At under $70 a night, rooms are less than half the price of those at the Ace. He adds that clients also appreciate his knowledge of dive bars and cheap golf in the area: "There's a golf place called Taquitz Creek where you pay $15, and that includes two beers."

You don't have to worry about hip clothes at the Caliente either. "If it looks like you just got done playing golf, you can get in," says Brian.

The Caliente has an interesting history of its own. It was built in 1964 by motel mogul Ken Kimes, best known for being married to Sante Kimes, murderer and Elizabeth Taylor impersonator. Justin Timberlake shot druggie kidnap movie Alpha Dog here, Anna Nicole Smith's handprints are immortalised in concrete, right by the pool in which Nancy Sinatra learned to swim.

It will be interesting to see whether Palm Springs ever does become trendy. The so-called Palm Springs Matriarchs, the surviving daughters of failed 19th-century fruit farmers, kickstarted the city's development in the 1920s by investing in Spanish colonial-style property. This was a time when silent movie stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Theda Bara were coming out to shoot in the desert and wanted lavish places to stay.

But Palm Springs didn't hit the big time until the late 1940s and 1950s, when stars such as Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Jack Warner and Bob Hope bought hideaways here. In the light of what Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were doing architecturally at the time, the Spanish style felt distinctly provincial, and America was feeling distinctly confident. What came to be known as Palm Springs mid-century modernism – steel, glass and concrete against a backdrop of stark nature, by architects such as Frey and John Lautner – felt fresh and triumphantly futuristic.

Palm Springs modernism was much more fun and baroque than the Bauhaus version. Take the Lautner-designed Elrod House, used as the Bond villain lair in 1971's Diamonds are Forever (and the set for Tom Ford's new perfume shoot when I was there). Yet by the 1980s, the 1950s seemed suburban. People with money wanted to display it more flamboyantly, and Palm Springs became unfashionable once more.

But now that America hankers for comfort in depressed times, for the can-do confidence of its post-war belle époque, those glass- and light-filled buildings are objects of desire once again. Modernism week (modernismweek.com), started in 2006 and held every February, has become one of the city's most popular international events.

At the Rendezvous motel, where the sounds of Dean Martin and Elvis waft around the pool, John-Michael Cooper, the enthusiastic general manager, is not a fan of the Ace; he's more into "kitsch retro". Cooper used to work in hotels in New York and says the point about Palm Springs is that "it's a haven from that trendy, fast life".

And Brooklyn-born Mel Haber, the charismatic owner of the Ingleside Inn, who made money from a fluffy dice business in the 1960s, says he's not worried about the onslaught of hip. "When I lived in New York," he says, "I was always thinking, 'Maybe I should be somewhere else'. The beauty in Palm Springs is that there's nothing happening. You never say, 'I should be there' or 'I could be there', because in Palm Springs you're not going to miss a damn thing."