Behind a low wall on North Indian Canyon Drive, the Colony Palms Hotel has sheltered people who wanted to be somewhere else since 1936. This hotel is the place to explain the two-hour rule. Studio contracts of the golden era bound actors to stay within two hours of Los Angeles so they could be recalled to a set on short notice, and Palm Springs sat just inside that radius.
What the desert offered was never distance — it was deniability: close enough to obey the contract, far enough that nobody from the studio publicity office was watching. Hotels like this one filled with people doing exactly that, which is why a town of a few thousand acquired a nightlife out of all proportion to its size. A renovation in 2007 reopened the property, and its Winner's Circle Suite is named for former owners Robert S. and Andrea Leeds Howard, who owned the racehorse Seabiscuit.
The arithmetic still holds: Los Angeles is about a hundred miles west, and the drive has never taken much longer than the contracts allowed. Under those palms, three generations kept their distance from Los Angeles.