There’s Mud in Your Eye at Glen Ivy

There’s a green cleft in a gentle canyon near here where the disconnected AT&T; executive and the overtaxed accountant come to play hooky.

“We have one successful businesswoman who visits regularly, once a month, without telling anyone,” Mike Baim said. “She calls it her mental health day.”

Esther Olney added: “I know businessmen who sneak up here and then whisper about us to their colleagues. Then their colleagues start sneaking up here.”

Or, depending on your sense of direction, down here . . . to Glen Ivy Hot Springs as it was founded 103 years ago; to Club Mud as it has evolved since 1977 when a syndicate bought the decayed Glen Ivy spa and turned it into a verdurous antidote for all that stresses and distresses.

The mud hole, of course, is still here. So are the faithful who have been driving in since W. C. Fields (now there was an advertisement for high health) to wallow like hippos in red clay and then sun-dry themselves in much the same way the Chinese bake beggar’s chicken.

Glen Ivy’s hot springs continue to bubble and parboil the wrinkled and willing in whirled, sulfurous mineral water. In an unspoken testimony to the potability of such stuff, bottles of Evian are sold at the lunch counter.

And Wimpy, an Amazon parrot, still growls and curses (can this be W. C. Fields?) just a gooey splatter from the mud puddle.

But the rest of the place has become a mini Montecatini with its Italian-tiled pools for swimming and dunking surrounding a stage for nocturnal and liquid listening to live concerts alternating the extremes of reggae and Vivaldi.

There are chaise lounges and mineral-water showers at the famed fango (Italian for mud) pit where President McKinley and Dan Aykroyd daubed themselves (although several years apart) in clay and did themselves 15 minutes a side and declared themselves the fitter for it.

“What we have now,” vice president Baim said, “is a brand-new spa in old surrounds.”

What they also have is the greatest corporate therapy and escape since olives marinated in Boodles gin. Hughes Aircraft chose Glen Ivy for a daylong retreat. Conventions have found this to be the perfect environment for seminars on stress management and marketing psychology.

But the heaviest traffic is in working women and hassled homemakers (78%, Baim noted, of last year’s 85,000 visitors) and corporate sneak-ins.

“For them, we are a day spa, a resort hotel without the hotel,” Baim continued. “We fill a niche for people who are very busy, have the means and desire to take a vacation but not the time.

“But they can always find a day for Glen Ivy, a place apart with only one phone and where you can sunbathe, get your hair done, have a facial, a pedicure or manicure, mud bath, massage . . . all in one day.”

Admission to Glen Ivy-Club-Mud-Balm Springs costs $14.75 on weekends, $12.50 on weekdays, including all the mud and mineral baths you can stand before turning into a prune.

But does any of it work?

Those married to Mrs. Gooch and all things cracked and whole, strained and unadulterated, believe that clay and mineral baths may be a key to life and longevity. After all, they ask, wasn’t clay once used to clear up burns, ulcers and Cleopatra’s acne?

Physicians, on the other hand, say we should look for no further benefits to mud and minerals than the spiritual cleansing of relaxation. Clay, they point out, didn’t do much for Cleopatra’s mental health and she died before she was 40.

One thing, however, is undisputed. Nothing but a baby’s baldness is smoother than skin scrubbed by the velvet sandpaper of powdered clay. Mineral baths smell so bad they’ve got to be good for you. An hour beneath the fingers and lotions of masseuse Esther Olney has been known to reduce a grown man to Gumby.

And if you’re feeling good, that ain’t bad.

Until you leave Glen Ivy and hit Interstate 5 to joust with a swaying semi in the fast lane while downtown is poking through smog, and the Angels are going down 4-2 against the Yankees . . .

Glen Ivy Hot Springs, eight miles south of Corona, open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Telephone: (714) 737-4723.