ACE HOTEL AND SWIM CLUB- PALM SPRINGS
By THE ACTRESS
Recently I made a pilgrimage to the Ace Hotel properties in Palm Springs, Portland, and New York City. This is the first in my series of reviews.
Once Hollywood’s playground for the rich and fabulous, Palm Springs has devolved into a playground for screaming Northern European brats, B-listers from Los Angeles and men in gold lame shorts. Why was I not warned? Instead of promised glamor, gaiety, tropical inspired cocktails, I found myself at the Ace Hotel and Swim Club, surrounded by tattooed, bearded hoi polloi with their pregnant women precariously close to labor, screaming children and dogs, all sullying the pool with their toxic lotions and urine. And, as if it couldn’t possibly get any worse, I had to constantly fight off packs of rabid homosexuals for my poolside chair. It was like being at the wrap party for Caligula.
Don’t get me started on the food, which was not fit for the dogs ringing the pool, served by waiters – judging by the plethora of tacky tattoos from elbow to knuckle – most likely infected with Hep-C. King’s Highway Restaurant fare is best consumed drunk, or, frankly not at all. The slop they called a mezze platter was the color, consistency and flavor of the foul effluence from one of the poolside brat’s soiled diapers. The spirits were stale and bottom shelf.
After a disappointing meal, I made my way to my “hotel suite.” Sweet Jesus! Was this room designed by Ahab? I half expected to find Alan Hale Jr. fornicating with a mermaid on my bed. The walls were covered with sailor sheets, used bathrobes and a bindlestiff’s staff. The bed took up 99% of the room’s real estate and was so low to the ground that I practically needed a shovel to get under the covers. Don’t they know that after a certain age one’s knees begin to weaken? I ended up sleeping upright in the shower.
Stiff and sore, I treated myself to a massage in the poolside yurt, only to find out as a large woman lead me up a flight of stairs in the opposite direction, that the yurt was closed due to some “fabulous model shoot.” Really! So I plopped down on the pool deck as camera flashes went off. Not one to sell my image for free, I asked an emaciated teenager for a release and payment…after all I’m in the union. Rolling his eyes and mumbling “whatever,” he pointed to a large sign that read some nonsense to the effect of “by being here you agree to release your image for any use in all media, in perpetuity on earth the universe and multi-verse.”
Disgusted I threw the sign in the pool, climbed into my Cadillac and drove to the nearest casino in Palm Desert where they happily pay for my image and the drinks are free.
701 East Palm Canyon Drive Palm Springs, CA 92264
LAST MEALS 