Party of Three: The Bennetts and Palm Springs

By Betsy Lumbye

On the cusp of the Roaring Twenties, a high-spirited California heiress ran off from Stanford University with a
World War I hero from Joplin, Missouri. Their elopement made headlines, but the bigger story came later, after they abandoned Beverly Hills for a run-down guest ranch near the dusty young village of Palm Springs, California.

<

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trotwood Books
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9798218066888

Book preview

Other Titles by Author

Beyond Luck:

The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century

The Joy of Building: My Life in Business, Community Affairs and Philanthropy (with William M. Lyles III)

PARTY OF THREE Copyright © 2019 Betsy Lumbye

Trotwood Books

Fresno, Ca.

Contact info

[e-mail]

Cover design by SW Parra

Research assistance provided by Palm Springs Historical Society

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN:

978-1-943050-89-5

979-8-218066-88-8 (e-book)

June 2019

Production Assistance by:

HBE Publishing, Clovis, CA.

Our happiness was contagious, and there was little time or reason for long faces. There was a song to meet every emergency and it was a natural reaction to laugh at catastrophe.

—Melba Berry Bennett

Contents

Introduction: Cast of Characters

PART I: MELBA AND FRANK

The Elopement

Daughter of Fortune

The War Hero

The Newlyweds

PART II: PALM SPRINGS

The Village

Deep Well Beckons

Champagne and Turkey Sandwiches

PART III: THE GOLDEN AGE

Celebrities and Snouts

Surviving the Crash

Thrills, Spills, and a Desert Circus

Travels with the Bennetts

Melba’s Hidden Life

PART IV: WAR AND PEACE

The War Years

A Different World

PART V: OLD TIMERS

Boom Town

Preserving the Past

The 1960s: a Tram and a Grande Dame

A Life’s Work Realized

Denouement

Legacy

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PHOTOGRAPHS

Image 1 — Melba Berry and family about 1904

Image 2 — Melba at Stanford.

Image 3— Private Frank Bennett, 1918

Image 4— Melba, Peter, and Deedee Bennett, about 1927

Image 5— Frank and Melba at Castle Crags, 1930

Image 6— The ranch, framed by Mount San Jacinto, about 1931

Image 7— Melba and Frank celebrate their new home, Deep Well Guest Ranch.

Image 8— The dining room at Deep Well.

Image 9— Melba’s passion for gardening transformed the ranch.

Image 10— The Bennetts’ ranch house at Deep Well.

Image 11— Melba and Frank at a Deep Well costume party in the 1930s.

Image 12— Evening in the Long Room.

Image 13— Dinner at Deep Well with Jack Benny, Don Ameche, Honore Prendergast, and Mary Livingstone.

Image 14— Children had a special place at Deep Well, as seen in Melba’s offseason card to guests.

Image 15— Breakfast with the Desert Riders.

Image 16— Melba riding Dream in a Desert Circus parade.

Image 17— Melba and Frank at a Desert Circus Ball.

Image 18— Dress rehearsal for the Village Vanities.

Image 19— William Powell, Virginia Valli, Charlie Farrell, and Mousie Powell at the Village Vanities.

Image 20— Backstage at the Insanities.

Image 21— Capt. Frank Bennett.

Image 22— Peter Bennett on leave.

Image 23— Soldiers relax in the Long Room.

Image 24— Wartime invitation to Deep Well.

Image 25— Frank on leave.

Image 26— Melba and friends model her creation, the Palm Springs Hat.

Image 27— The Palm Springs Historical Society directors in 1957, including Melba, Cornelia White, and Zaddie Bunker.

Image 28— Frank the duck hunter.

Image 29— Old-timers in the 1960s.

Image 30— The grande dame in her element.

Image 31— Melba signing The Stone Mason of Tor House at Occidental College in January 1967

Image 32— Deedee’s wedding day.

Image 33— Melba and Frank at the 1967 Bob Hope Classic Dinner Dance with co-chairs Katie and Bill Juvonen.

PARTY OF THREE

INTRODUCTION: CAST OF CHARACTERS

THIS LOVE STORY has three inseparable characters. There’s Melba Berry Bennett—madcap heiress, community organizer, and writer. There’s Frank Bennett, her stalwart husband—war hero, sportsman, and hotelier, equally at home in a tuxedo or hip-waders. And, always, there’s Palm Springs, the dusty desert village that grew up to be a world-class resort.

The Bennetts arrived in Palm Springs in 1930, leaving Beverly Hills in search of a family life away from the glitter. As it turned out, glitter followed them, but they dressed it in cowboy boots. They bought a run-down dude ranch in early Palm Springs and made it a low-key retreat for the better-behaved rich and famous. Celebrities were welcome as long as they brought their jeans and flannel shirts—and they did. The Bennetts’ casual style was contagious. On a trail ride, Melba picked some wild flowers and stuck them into the band of her straw hat. Before long, everybody was copying what became known as the Palm Springs Hat.

Brimming with energy, wit and civic drive, the Bennetts influenced Palm Springs for forty years. They helped form its lasting institutions and left their stamp on its culture and philanthropy. In turn, Palm Springs shaped them. Its towering mountains, wide-open desert, and lush canyons inspired them. Its free-spirited ethos gave them room to be completely themselves.

They were entertainers in a town full of stars, whether at home or on the local stage. Los Angeles and Palm Springs society columnists adored them. They were always up to something. An invitation to a weekend at the Bennetts’ was a ticket to all sorts of shenanigans— impromptu costume parties, scavenger hunts, parades, starlit trail rides, and whatever else Frank and Melba could cook up.

In the depths of the Great Depression, they reminded people to laugh. Legendary publicist Tony Burke wrote, They put so much fun and high spirits into the operation that the gloom of the outside world was forgotten.

At the same time, they followed a higher calling: service to community and others. Frank led the group that got Palm Springs incorporated as a city. They were ringmasters for the city’s marquee events, most notably the uproarious Desert Circus and Village Insanities.

When World War II broke out, Frank rejoined the Army for his second tour of duty. Melba ran the Palm Springs USO, entertaining Gen. George S. Patton’s troops on their days off from desert training nearby. She turned her own home into a haven for exhausted soldiers.

After the war, Frank headed the effort to get Palm Springs its first hospital—now a world-class medical center. Melba served on the school board and the library board and raised money for the city’s first day care center for working mothers. When fast- growing Palm Springs seemed in danger of forgetting its roots, Melba founded the local historical society, which remains a vital force in the city’s culture and tourism today.

In their twilight years, Frank and Melba set the standard for charity fundraisers. They chaired the big ones, including Bob Hope’s Desert Classic Ball, bringing in a fortune for local causes, and Melba trained the next generation of social organizers to follow her example.

All the while, Melba led a double life—as an intellectual. She gained the confidence of iconic, reclusive California poet Robinson Jeffers in the early 1930s and labored for the rest of his life and hers to preserve his poetry and papers. She handled his correspondence in his later years, sheltering him from the world. After he died, she wrote his only authorized biography, The Stone Mason of Tor House.

The Bennetts traveled widely, but they always came home to Palm Springs. They loved it for what it was before the streets were paved, and they loved it as it grew, even while they fretted sometimes about the company it kept. They were as steadfastly devoted as if it were their own willful child. It was their town and they belonged to it.

I CAME TO this story through the Bennetts’ son, Peter Bennett, whom I’d come to admire deeply while working with him on a book about another generation in his family.

Peter was a retired oilman and cattle rancher, the quiet heir to a great fortune, who spent a good bit of his final years finding ways to give money to people in need. His health was failing, but he wanted to tell the story of his grandparents—Melba’s parents— and their siblings. It’s the goddamnedest story you ever heard, Peter told me when I first met him. He was right.

The result was a book, Beyond Luck: The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century, about his extraordinary ancestors. Poor but blessed by outrageous good fortune along with an inexhaustible capacity for hard work, they’d struck gold, kicking off the great Klondike Gold Rush. Then they struck oil in California and founded what became a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

When Peter called to request a second book, basically a sequel, I couldn’t turn him down. At 92, he was losing strength but not swagger when he left a message on my voice mail. Did I want another project? I’ve got a good one for you, he drawled. Give me a call. Any chance to talk to Peter was a treat, so I did, and he got straight to the point: he wanted me to write a book about his parents. Of course I said yes. I knew enough about them by then that I was already in.

We didn’t get much time to talk after that. His health worsened and about five weeks later I got another message, the one I’d been dreading. Peter had died the night before. Since then, I’ve attempted to carry out Peter’s wish, though along the way, I’ve encountered gaps that only he could fill. Time and again, I’ve longed for even one more conversation.

Fortunately there are records. Melba pasted hundreds of newspaper articles, party invitations, book reviews, and photographs in scrapbooks. She kept journals, wrote and received reams of letters, and even penned a memoir that she never published. She called it Laughter Plus Four, a reference to her family of four—husband and two children.

Peter’s father, Frank, on the other hand, did none of those things. Modest, wry, and self-effacing, he wasn’t much for talking about himself. He didn’t speak, for example, of the Croix de Guerre the French government awarded him for heroism as an ambulance driver during World War I. Throughout his life, his hidden talents would emerge at the precise moment when they were needed. In one hilarious incident abroad, Melba only found out after more than twenty years of marriage that Frank could speak German. He’d never mentioned it; he just pulled it out of his hat when a sticky situation called for it.

Sometimes the gaps in Frank’s story were maddening. In one of her journals, written in 1937, Melba mentioned a casual conversation she’d just had with the actor Spencer Tracy. Then she wrote this: Frank is going with a circus this summer for three weeks—Tracy with him. Clark Gable wants to go along. Tracy will be a clown. I’d love to go along.

She never followed up and I never determined whether the circus trip took place, with or without Tracy or Gable. What I do know is that people who knew Frank, some still alive, spoke of him with obvious affection as an all-around great guy. It’s easy to see why.

Los Angeles Times columnist Joan Winchell once called Frank a cross between Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn. He served in two world wars. He kept local theater audiences in stitches with his portrayals of the town drunk or a raucous takeoff of Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. It’s said he could fire a rifle at a golf ball and keep the poor ball bouncing in the air until he killed it with one last shot. He hunted ducks, shot clay pigeons, and fished the great trout streams of the United States and Europe, and he kept the impulsive Melba out of trouble while applauding her accomplishments.

In later years, Melba came to be known in headlines and around town as a grande dame and an iron orchid. Frank was the kind of grandfather most children can only dream about. He made sure his grandchildren knew the life skills he’d found essential, like fly fishing, card playing, and winning and losing gracefully.

Melba and Frank are gone now, but their legacy lives in ways big and small. It’s been an honor and a delight getting to know them, and their other true love, one that most definitely loved them back - Palm Springs.

PART I: MELBA AND FRANK

THE ELOPEMENT

ONE SPRING MORNING in 1921, Stanford University students awoke to a juicy bit of campus news: Melba Berry had run off with Frank Bennett. Because of who Melba was, the story made headlines:

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Stanford Girl Elopes in Auto and Weds Here; Two Students Get License at Night and Marry After Motor Flight

And the Daily Palo Altan:

Girl is elected to both club and marriage; Stanford co-ed weds while College Friends make her member of Campus Honor Society

Much of the ink in both papers went to Melba, the lively, redheaded nineteen-year-old heiress to a gold and oil fortune. Mrs. Bennett was one of the most popular young women at Stanford, the Palo Altan gushed. Last year she appeared as the queen of a carnival given by college students. Only a few evenings ago, she appeared in the Junior Opera and proved one of the hits of the show.

The Chronicle focused on her family connections: The bride is the daughter of William Henry Berry, former owner of the Los Angeles baseball club and once the owner of the San Francisco baseball club. She gave her residence as Los Angeles.

Less was said about the twenty-three-year-old groom, even though he, too, had been a Stanford student. Bennett is said to have entered the oil business in Texas immediately after graduation and to have later gone to Joplin (Missouri), where he purchased an interest in a large mercantile establishment, the Palo Altan reported. The Chronicle said only that Frank was a resident of Joplin.

What Melba knew that the papers didn’t was there was more to Frank than met the eye. He was tall, handsome, and understated, except in campus stage productions, where he excelled in slapstick comedy. The stories didn’t mention—maybe because Frank never did—that