Tamarisk Country Club: The Club That Offered a Different Welcome

Tamarisk Country Club began with a question that a beautiful golf course could not answer by itself: who would be welcome there? When the club opened in February 1952, it added more than another set of fairways to the desert. Its founders were creating a club around a different membership ideal.^1,12

That distinction belongs at the center of the story. So do Ben Hogan, the Hollywood friendships and the modern houses opening toward mountain views. Together they explain why Tamarisk matters to Rancho Mirage—and why it deserves its own chapter beside neighboring Thunderbird.

Before Tamarisk, there was Wonder Palms

The history does not begin with an empty desert. This is Cahuilla homeland, with a history reaching far beyond the ranches and resorts that later appeared in the valley. By 1912, Everett Knox DaVall had established Wonder Palms Ranch and planted date palms. The name would persist as the area changed from agriculture to recreation.⁴

Tamarisk was developed on land associated with the Wonder Palms Hotel and Guest Ranch. That setting supplied a natural meeting place for people imagining a new club: a desert retreat could become a community, with golf at its center and homes along its edges.³

Nearby Thunderbird followed its own path from guest ranch to golf club, opening its course in 1951. Tamarisk followed in February 1952. The two are closely connected in the history of Rancho Mirage, but Tamarisk was not a later name for Thunderbird Ranch.^11,12

What “a different welcome” meant

The Southern California Golf Association’s history describes Thunderbird’s early membership restrictions as excluding Jewish applicants and certain entertainers. Tamarisk’s founders responded by establishing another club. Religious exclusion was part of the reason this new institution existed; leaving it out would turn a consequential story into a simple tale of golf-course expansion.²

Tamarisk’s own account traces the idea to Los Angeles business investors meeting at Wonder Palms. Its founding mission called for “democracy and tolerance, with the requisite of integrity, character, love of golf and companionship with fellow men.”¹

That language gives the title of this story its meaning. It describes a deliberate rejection of particular barriers in private-club life. It should not be stretched into a claim that the club was public, inexpensive or accessible to everyone. An inclusive founding purpose and a selective private club could—and did—exist together.

Preservation Mirage identifies 65 founding investors, including George Burns, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye and members of the Marx family, alongside businessmen Lou Halper and Tom May of the May Company. The familiar names matter, but so does the coalition: entertainment, business and personal friendship helped turn the idea into a place.³

Two clubs, one changing desert

Move through the years to compare the two stories. Each stop shows a documented milestone or the club’s place in the wider chronology; it does not imply that both clubs had a major event every year.

Bell’s course, Hogan’s standard

William P. Bell designed Tamarisk’s original golf course. William F. Cody designed its original clubhouse. Those are two different design jobs, and the distinction helps untangle a history crowded with famous names.^2,6

The club’s first golf professional was Ben Hogan; Ellsworth Vines succeeded him. Vines brought an extraordinary sporting background of his own, having won at Wimbledon before building a professional golf career. Tamarisk’s early identity rested on serious golf as well as social life.⁷

Hogan’s 1953 season gives the connection its historical weight. He won the Masters, the U.S. Open and The Open at Carnoustie. The R&A records his final-round 68 in Scotland and four-stroke victory. His only appearance in The Open produced a championship.⁸

Those victories were not Tamarisk tournaments, and the club should not receive credit for achievements made elsewhere. The important connection is that one of golf’s most remarkable seasons belongs to the same period in which Hogan was helping establish Tamarisk’s golfing identity.

A fairway became a front-row view

Golf also changed what people expected from a desert house. A fairway offered a long, maintained foreground; the mountains supplied the distance. Architects could organize a home around that view, using shade, glass and carefully placed outdoor rooms to connect daily life with the landscape.³

Cody worked across Thunderbird, Tamarisk and Eldorado, and designed homes for buyers drawn to their fairways. His role places Tamarisk within a larger network of desert architecture rather than an isolated collection of striking houses.⁶

Preservation Mirage also documents Donald Wexler’s work with Cody on the Tamarisk clubhouse. At the Charney Residence, Wexler and Richard Harrison’s architecture was complemented by Arthur Elrod’s interiors and landscape work by Eckbo, Royston and Williams. The example makes a useful point: what we admire as a “modern house” was often the coordinated work of several disciplines.⁵

The story continued beyond individual custom houses. The city’s history identifies Cody Court, originally the 10th Fairway Condominiums, as eight homes completed in 1970 overlooking Tamarisk. It shows how the fairway setting could support a shared residential arrangement as well as a single estate.¹²

Sinatra’s Tamarisk chapter

In 1954, Frank Sinatra bought a Cody-designed house on Tamarisk’s 17th fairway, according to the city’s history. Wonder Palms Road later became Frank Sinatra Drive. Those place names preserve two different chapters of the same local landscape.⁴

The property grew into the Wonder Palms compound, with guest accommodations and recreation spaces. Sinatra’s association added another layer to the club’s identity: Tamarisk was a place where a public figure could build a private domestic world beside the course.²

It is easy for a roll call of stars to swallow a story like this. The more revealing connection is physical. Houses, terraces and fairways put neighbors near one another, while clubs supplied repeated occasions to meet. Celebrity helped make the place famous; the arrangement of the community helped make it social.

From club golf to a national stage

Tamarisk hosted an early official LPGA tournament in the desert in 1953. Seven years later, it joined Thunderbird, Bermuda Dunes and Indian Wells as a host of the inaugural Palm Springs Golf Classic.^2,9

Arnold Palmer won that 1960 event. The tournament took on Bob Hope’s name in 1965, tying its sporting and celebrity appeal to a charitable identity that became central to desert golf. Tamarisk participated in the tournament 18 times between 1960 and 2005.^9,2

For viewers and visitors, these events made a private-club landscape visible beyond its membership. For the valley, the courses became part of a recognizable winter image: mountains, bright fairways and well-known players sharing the same stage.

How a club story becomes a city story

By the end of 1971, representatives of Tamarisk, Thunderbird, Mission Hills and Desert Island, together with the Annenbergs’ estate manager, were backing a feasibility study for incorporation. Rancho Mirage became a city in August 1973.¹⁰

That step matters because it moves the history beyond recreation. The communities around the clubs now had shared questions about development, services and the character of the place they lived. Tamarisk helped shape the setting from which those questions emerged; it was one participant in a broader civic effort.

The city’s own history treats Thunderbird and Tamarisk as major engines of its early growth. Read alongside Rancho Mirage’s wider history, their stories explain both the appeal of the fairway neighborhood and the differences concealed by the broad label “country club.”¹²

What remains worth seeing

Tamarisk continues as a private club. Its official site presents golf, dining and a calendar of member gatherings as parts of the same community. Visiting the course or clubhouse should be arranged through the club; a historic reputation does not make private grounds a public attraction.^1,7

The history offers more than a reason to recognize a name on a sign. It gives us a way to look at Rancho Mirage: a former ranch landscape, a response to exclusion, a demanding game, a new approach to houses and views, and eventually a city. The wider story of how the Coachella Valley became a golf capital follows those changes across the desert. Tamarisk brought those strands together in a particularly revealing place.