La Quinta Hotel opened in 1926 in present-day La Quinta in the Coachella Valley, California, as a desert getaway favored by many celebrities from Hollywood. Perhaps one of its most famous guests was the legendary screenwriter Frank Capra (1897-1991).

His best-known film is the perennial holiday favorite It’s A Wonderful Life, released in 1946, about the troubled George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) who wants to end his life until an angel intervenes on Christmas Eve and shows him how his life has impacted others.

Capra’s love affair with the desert started in 1933 when he stayed at Nellie Coffman’s Desert Inn and wrote his first big hit Lady for a Day. It starred Claudette Colbert, another Palm Springs devotee, and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.

A superstitious person, Capra came to believe the area was lucky for him and he and his wife Lou began to go there frequently to write.

While waiting for a haircut at a barbershop in Palm Springs, Capra flipped through a story called Night Bus, published in Cosmopolitan magazine.

He optioned the rights and transformed it into It Happened One Night starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The film swept the Academy Awards, winning all five awards for which it had been nominated - including best picture and best director for Capra.

After spending many weekends at the Desert Inn, the Italian-born director who was raised in Los Angeles decided to rent a casita at the La Quinta hotel – at the time there were only 20 casitas on the 45 acre property.

‘We rented a red-tiled adobe cottage at the La Quinta Hotel, a cool-green oasis nestled between the rocky roots of Santa Rosa Mountain, where they plunge — bare and pink — under the hot white waves of the desert sand dunes. This inviting spa, near Indio, was to be our Shangri-La for script-writing in the coming years,’ he wrote in his 1971 autobiography.

In this simple adobe cottage, Capra’s worked away on his typewriter at cinematic classics such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

It’s a Wonderful Life was an adaptation of a short story called The Greatest Gift and Capra worked with other screenwriters, and the American poet Dorothy Parker who was known for her caustic wit, on the project. Chances are, at least some portions of the famous film was written at La Quinta.

Capra spent the rest of his life in La Quinta and is buried in Coachella Valley Public Cemetery. La Quinta Hotel is now the highly popular La Quinta Resort & Club.

This charming illustration was on the front cover of a La Quinta Hotel matchbook - hence the cigarette. There is therefore no menu but the item was accompanied by a map of the area at the time.