Why Scottsdale
The choice was the story. In 1957 Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner were two of the most photographed people in America, and a Los Angeles wedding would have been a siege. Scottsdale offered what the film colony had been quietly buying for a year: distance, sunshine, and discretion. The Valley Ho had opened in December 1956 and immediately become the stars’ desert address — far enough from the Hollywood press corps to breathe, comfortable enough that nobody felt exiled. A small church ceremony in a little western town, with the reception at the Ho, was the closest thing to privacy the couple could arrange.
So three days after Christmas, the nineteen-year-old star of the decade married its leading man in a town that still measured itself in the low thousands, whose main street was regulated into hitching posts and western storefronts, and whose biggest annual event was a horse-drawn parade. The reception filled the year-old hotel.
The advertisement money couldn’t buy
The town’s boosters had spent a decade engineering publicity — a slogan, a rodeo, a stadium, a modernist showpiece hotel. The wedding outdid all of it in an afternoon. Gossip columns and photo spreads carried the Scottsdale dateline to every newsstand in the country, attached to the most glamorous couple available, and the message underneath was better than any paid pitch: the stars come here to get away.
It was also the perfect portrait of what Scottsdale had become. That same year, Motorola opened its McDowell Road plant and subdivisions marched across the old farmland — yet the national image was a movie star’s wedding at a midcentury hotel in a cowboy town. Every identity the place had built sat in one frame. The Hollywood winter era eventually faded, but its high-water mark stayed fixed to this date — and its venue survived, restored in 2005 and still taking reservations. The rest of the year is at 1957.