The La Quinta Resort and Club is located in the Coachella Valley, 140 miles southeast of Hollywood’s. In the early days of Tinseltown, it was the distance that made this desert oasis so appealing to writers, actors and directors.

Owned by Walter H. Morgan, the resort opened on February 4, 1927, and soon caught the attention of Hollywood’s elite. Of course, it helped that Morgan frequently paid the stars personal visits to talk up the resort and its Spanish-style casitas. Bette Davis, for one, was sold. While filming Jezebel, she would breeze by reporters at the end of the week, exclaiming, “I’m off to La Quinta.”

Famed director Frank Capra once said, “It was a wonderful green oasis in the middle of the desert, and it was absolutely private.” It was at La Quinta where Capra put the finishing touches on the script of It Happened One Night, which won the 1934 Oscar for best picture. Capra returned to La Quinta to work on numerous other projects, including You Can’t Take it With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Irving Berlin was inspired to write one of the most famous songs in history while celebrating the holidays at La Quinta. Seated in his casita, gazing out at a typically sunny Palm Springs day, Berlin nevertheless was moved by this un-winter-like scene to pen “White Christmas.” The first verse (cut from the famous Bing Crosby version) begins, “The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway. I’ve never seen such a day.” Because the next line had to rhyme with “day” and neither La Quinta nor Palm Springs fit that bill, Berlin substituted “In Beverly Hills L.A.”

    Palm Springs’ first golf course opened along with the resor.. Today, resort guests can play two on-site venues, Dunes and Mountain, both designed by Pete Dye but each with a distinctly different feel. Mountain is a resort-friendly layout that spreads out against the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains; Dunes has more water and is considered more of a “player’s course.”

Resort guests also have access to PGA West, located just five miles away and home to the infamous TPC Stadium course. Whether it, too, is a “player’s course” is debatable, but players certainly had plenty to say when it made its 1987 debut as a Bob Hope Desert Classic venue—“spiteful,” “awful,” “artificial” and “silly” were among the adjectives used by disgruntled tour pros who competed on the demanding target-golf design.

But as Dye argues in his book, Bury Me in a Pot Bunker, he was simply following orders from developers Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser, who wanted “the hardest damn golf course in the world.” Amateur golfers responded in droves, drawn by “the potential to hit that one great shot just like the professionals do.”

PGA West also offers two other 18s: the Jack Nicklaus Tournament course, a kinder, gentler version of the Stadium, with elevated tees and large multi-tiered greens; and the Greg Norman course, a 1999 design.

The resort itself has grown significantly and now sports 800 guest rooms, 41 swimming pools and 23 tennis courts. There’s also a 23,000-square-foot spa, which features more than 40 treatment rooms, a full-service beauty salon and 12 different types of massages. Azur by Le Bernardin is the resort’s finest restaurant, featuring the same French-style cuisine as the famous Le Bernardin in New York City.

Celebrity sightings may be less frequent these days, but La Quinta’s reputation as a “must visit” remains.