by Wayne Curtis
Lighter Puerto Rican rum distillers wasted little time in chasing after vodka, claiming in ubiquitous ads that their spirit was “as different from dark rums as Scotch is from brandy.” Rum would go with anything: It was “a regular one-bottle bar!” the ads crooned, adding that “Puerto Rican rum mixes better with everything from coffee to cola to fruit juices.” The distillers’ efforts paid off. The island soon exported to the United States more rum than all other Caribbean producers combined. The improved quality helped, and equally helpful was the island’s tax-free status on rum exports. Puerto Rico’s Don Q retailed for just over $4 a fifth, or about 30 percent less than Myers’s from Jamaica. At a 1952 tasting in New York hosted by the Wine and Food Society, the eleven rums from Puerto Rican far outpaced the entries from other producers—six from Jamaica, and one or two each from islands like Cuba and Barbados.
But a backlash had been quietly brewing against the cult of the bland, the cult of the transparent. The beatnik and the bongo drum were first appearing in smoky clubs and urban parks. And in faux Polynesian bars, rum would find a new and unusual life.
[ MAI TAI ]
Mix in cocktail shaker one ounce good JAMAICAN STYLE RUM, one ounce good aged MARTINIQUE RUM, one-half ounce CURAÇAO, one-half ounce fresh LIME JUICE, one-half ounce ORGEAT, and one-quarter ounce simple syrup. Shake with crushed ice and pour into a tumbler. Garnish with FRUIT and FRESH MINT.
Chapter 9
[ MAI TAI ]
And then, swiftly, came the Plague and the rush of the barbarians in its wake, and all the juices of the orchard went into cocktails.
—BERNARD DE VOTO, 1948
In December 1932, a stylish if somewhat adrift twenty-four-year-old with a forehead made prominent by his receding hairline arrived in southern California, looking for something to do. A native of Texas, his name was Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. Curious by nature and something of a proto-beatnik by choice, he had spent the previous months vagabonding on the cheap through some of the globe’s more humid locales: Jamaica, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti. By the time he washed up in Los Angles, his money had run out.
Gantt made do in the Depression economy through his wits and odd jobs—working in restaurants in Chinatown, parking cars at commercial lots, and engaging in a little freelance bootlegging in the months before Prohibition ended. Sociable and charming, he befriended such Hollywood personalities as David Niven and Marlene Dietrich, and through them found occasional work as a technical adviser on films set in the South Pacific. Directors were evidently as impressed by his knowledge of the region as by his collection of South Pacific artifacts, which could be borrowed for set props.
A year after he arrived in Los Angeles, Gantt happened upon a newly vacated tailor shop just off Hollywood Boulevard and connected to the McCadden Hotel. It was small—just thirteen feet by thirty—but Gantt liked the feel of it, and signed a five-year lease for $30 per month. He built a bar that would seat about two dozen customers, and scattered a few tables in the remaining space. He decorated the place with his South Pacific gewgaws, along with old nets and parts of wrecked boats he scavenged from the oceanfront. He called his watering hole “Don the Beachcomber.”
He approached his drink menu the same way he approached his decor: with an eye toward frugality. Rum was the least expensive of the spirits, and Gantt had already sampled a variety in his travels. He devised an exotic menu of rum-based drinks that complemented the bar’s South Pacific theme, and scratched them out on a board behind the bar.
The combination of Gantt’s outgoing personality and the intrigue of his drinks proved irresistible to Los Angeles movers and shakers. Among those first drinks was one he named the Sumatra Kula, which cost a quarter. A well-dressed man named Neil Vanderbilt came in one day and ordered one, then another and another. He said it was the best drink he’d ever had. He was a freelance reporter for the New York Times, and he soon came back with friends, including Charlie Chaplin. Word of Don the Beachcomber began to spread through Hollywood and beyond. “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you,” he told his customers. (It didn’t work for everyone; in July 1936 a wealthy businessman struck and killed a pedestrian while driving home after a night at Don the Beachcomber. His name was Howard Hughes.) By 1937, the restaurant and bar had outgrown the small tailor’s shop, and Gantt moved to a larger spot in Hollywood. He added more South Pacific flotsam and imbued the place with a tropical twilight gloom. The joint became so much a part of his personality that he legally changed his name. Ernest Gantt was now Donn Beach.
And Donn Beach was the inventor of the tiki bar, a new kind of place that, over the next thirty years, would migrate from the cities to the suburbs and beyond.
Beach’s reign in Los Angeles proved relatively short-lived. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the military, and was in a convoy en route to Morocco when his ship was struck by a German U-boat. Wounded, although not badly, Beach spent the remainder of his enlistment doing what he did best: serving up hospitality. The military put him in charge of overseeing dozens of hotels and restaurants where airmen could rest and recuperate—on Capri, and in Venice, Lido, and the French Riviera.
Beach’s ex-wife, Cora Irene “Sunny” Sund, was left to run the business back in California. She proved as able as her ex-husband. When Beach returned home, he found that Don the Beachcomber had blossomed into a small chain with a handful of restaurants nationwide. Beach had little to do but sit at the bar and cash his checks. (The chain would eventually grow to sixteen locations, and was for a time part of J. Paul Getty’s corporate empire.) Beach signed on as a consultant and then packed his bags for Hawaii, where he opened his own unaffiliated “Don the Beachcomber” in an up-and-coming resort area called Waikiki Beach.
Hawaiian tourism boomed after the war, as passengers abandoned slow steamships for more efficient air travel. Fewer than 30,000 tourists came to Hawaii annually prior to World War II; that rose to 250,000 by 1959. (It’s 8 million today.) The flood of tourists came to bask in the South Pacific sun and style, and a growing army of entrepreneurs arrived to deliver it. Tiki style went wholesale, and restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and luau grounds that could serve pupu platters to hundreds at a seating met the demand.
Donn Beach was among those entrepreneurs. His restaurant became an instant landmark—more Hawaiian than most of Hawaii itself. Beach amplified the faux tropical theme with palms and thatch and a sweeping shingled roof, part space age, part ceremonial Polynesian meetinghouse. The noted Hawaiian arranger and composer Martin Denny played at the restaurant’s Bora-Bora Lounge for nine months straight. Beach was often at the bar, a genial host wearing a gardenia lei, that, he was quick to note, was for sale at the restaurant’s gift alcove. A myna bird presided over the premises, trained to blurt out, “Give me beer, stupid!” In the boozy intimacy of late evenings, a gentle rain would often begin to patter on the corrugated metal roof over the bar—thanks to a garden hose Beach had installed. (Always the businessman, he had observed that late-night drinkers tended to linger for another round if they thought it was raining outside.)
Donn Beach remained a fixture in Hawaii until he died in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times ran a short obituary that painted him as a sort of Thomas Edison of the thatched-roof bar, the inventor of eighty-four bar drinks, including one immensely enduring libation called the mai tai.
This was not without controversy. “There has been a lot of conversation over the beginning of the Mai Tai, and I want to get the record straight,” Victor Bergeron—better known as Trader Vic—once said. “I originated the Mai Tai. Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a stinker.”
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Victor Jules Bergeron was born in San Francisco in 1902, the son of a French Canadian waiter and grocery store operator. Before he was even six, he had survived the great earthquake of 1906 and a ravaging
bout of tuberculosis that claimed his left leg. In 1934, with $300 of his own and $800 borrowed from an aunt, he opened a small beer joint and luncheonette in Oakland. It was called Hinky Dinks, and he sold beer for a nickel and a meal for a quarter.
Hinky Dinks would likely have come and gone like so many other small and largely forgettable restaurants, but Bergeron, like Donn Beach, didn’t set low expectations for himself. Prohibition had recently ended, and Bergeron’s customers displayed an uncommon curiosity about cocktails—the more outlandish and inventive, the better. In 1937, Bergeron and his wife took a vacation to New Orleans, Trinidad, and Havana, and sampled some of the famous cocktails then in fashion. They drank hurricanes in New Orleans, rum punch in Trinidad, and daiquiris made by the legendary Constantino at El Floridita in Havana. Back in California, an idea began to germinate. He visited a tropical-themed restaurant called the South Seas that had recently opened in San Francisco, and journeyed to Los Angeles to try out a place that all the right people were talking about. It was Don the Beachcomber.
Bergeron headed back to Oakland and set about reinventing his restaurant and himself. He got rid of the name Hinky Dinks (which he concluded was “junky”) and cast around for a new one. His wife pointed out that he was always involved in some deal or trade. Why not Trader Vic’s?
Why not? He liked it, and the name stuck. Bergeron hastily spun a whole backstory to go with his new name. He now told his customers that he had lost his real leg in a shark attack—and then would grab an ice pick and ram it into his leg. Like Don the Beachcomber, he filled his newly christened restaurant with South Seas flotsam, lined the walls with dried grass mats, used palm tree trunks as columns, and hung fisherman’s floats, masks, and spears—all things that brought to mind the mysterious South Seas islands, none of which he’d ever visited. Bergeron would take the idea launched by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt and upon it build an empire.
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Trader Vic’s both tapped into the zeitgeist and helped shape it. The Pacific theater in World War II drew America’s attention to a region of the world they hadn’t previously given much thought to. When the war ended, returning servicemen carried home stories and snapshots of exotic Pacific lands and people they met in transit and on leave. The public’s imagination was further captured by the tales spun by a talented and evidently underemployed naval reservist, who had spent much of his enlistment typing out stories in a tent in Vanuatu. His name was James Michener, and the book he published was called Tales of the South Pacific. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, and made it to Broadway as a musical called South Pacific, with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The musical became a movie sensation in 1958; a year later, Hawaii joined the union amid fireworks and hullabaloo, and two years after that Elvis added his own brand of fuel to the South Pacific mania with his movie Blue Hawaii. If it had thatch and tiki torches and little statues (which Donn Beach liked to call his “cannibal gods”), the public would come.
Tiki began in the cities, but it was too powerful to remain confined there. It moved into the suburbs and beyond. Apartment buildings, bowling alleys, trailer parks, laundromats, and corner restaurants were dressed up with tiki heads and masks, rattan walls, dried blowfish, and electric tiki torches. Plans were even made for a tiki-themed fast-food chain, to be called Tonga Pup, although this regrettably failed to graduate from drawing board to street corner.
The tiki movement was in large part a reaction to the times. It was the era of the Organization Man, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the vodka drinker. Ornament had been buried by a generation of architects and interior designers. Streets were lined with lean glass buildings, and the suburbs sprouted ranch houses with floor-to-ceiling sliders and sleek, tubular steel furniture. It was all frightfully austere. The tiki restaurant, in contrast, was nothing but ornament; without it, a tiki bar would collapse. Those coming of age after the end of the war were eager to make up for lost time and happy to be entertained. Disneyland opened in 1955, and among its first rides was an ersatz Jungle Cruise, in which boats drifted through a sort of tiki-inspired, animatronic wonderland. At tiki restaurants, you could enter an exotic world and engage in curious rituals amid hula girls and seductively unfamiliar music. Tiki historian Sven Kirsten calls those who succumbed the “modern primitives.” The tiki bar offered escape for those who didn’t want to drop out of society and play bongo drums all day, but weren’t content with a circumscribed life. “Warning,” wrote the authors of the 1957 Esquire cocktail guide in offering advice to aspiring hosts. “Do not make up chicken salad, tuna fish salad, mixed-cream-cheese-olive-sawdust-combination salad, spread on bread, cut off the crust, and then slice them into little oblongs or triangles. Your guests will hate you forever, and quite rightly.”
Grand tiki temples cropped up throughout the country to meet the demands of the modern primitives—the Mai-Kai in Florida, the Kahiki in Ohio, the Kowloon in Massachusetts, the Tiki Ti and the Tonga Room in California, and a dozen or more places competing with Don the Beachcomber in Honolulu. Customers typically entered the tiki realm by passing over a low bridge or through a damp grotto, which offered a gentle transition from the harsh and unfortunate reality outside the door. It took a few moments for one’s eyes to adjust, as the restaurants were invariably windowless. Who wanted to see the harsh sun, the parking lot, and the road outside? The tiki restaurant existed in a sort of perpetual twilight, lit by propane torches, the fiery eyes of tiki statues, and golden flames licking off the pineapple-and-brown-sugar entrées delivered by a hula girl. There was always the possibility that one might witness an elaborate cult ritual involving cannibalism or sex or both.
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If there was a cult at the tiki palaces, it was that of the tiki drink.
Few came to the restaurants solely because of the food. (Noting the flaming entrées, the Columbus Dispatch once wrote of the Kahiki that it “is one of the few restaurants in Columbus in which food can injure you.”) The lure was the drinks. Restaurants raced to outhustle one another in concocting the most outrageous cocktails, giving them fanciful names like “Pele’s Bucket of Fire,” “Sidewinder’s Fang,” “Molucca Fireball,” “Tonga Surfrider,” and the “Aku-Aku Lapu.” (Not all bars showed imagination; many saw fit to name their specialty simply “the Mystery Drink.”) These South Seas–styled cocktails, first concocted in the 1930s, were a cultural phenomenon that lasted well into the 1970s—“an unprecedented life span for a drink fad,” writes tiki drink expert Jeff “Beachbum” Berry.
Tiki bars marshaled whole stockrooms of custom-made ceramic skulls, pineapples, barrels, Easter Island heads, and statues in which to serve their potions. Specific drinks were reserved for specific vessels—the “Deep Six,” for instance, was always to be consumed “from the horn of a water buffalo” (or a ceramic facsimile thereof), which was often available in the gift shop for a small consideration.
Tiki bars encouraged the shared consumption of drink, which enhanced the effect of ritual. “The Kava Bowl” was a specialty of Trader Vic’s in the 1940s; it consisted of vast amounts of various rums and other mixings, and was limited to three per party of four. “The Volcano” at Don the Beachcomber had a central cone filled with flaming overproof rum. Communal drinks came to the table wrapped in ceremony, offering fleeting celebrity to those bold enough to order them. At the Kahiki, an exotic “mystery girl” would bring out a flaming drink for four amid the reverberation of gongs. (“This ritual symbolizes an ancient sacrifice, which reportedly stopped volcanoes from erupting,” the menu claimed.)
The competition for the most elaborate drinks led to CIA-level secrecy, chiefly out of fear that a bartender might leave and take prized recipes with him. A 1948 Saturday Evening Post story noted that the bottles at Don the Beachcomber lacked the original labels and had been replaced by new ones with cryptic letters and numbers. Bartenders used coded recipes to mix these anonymous ingredients
. “Infinite pains are taken to see to it that the service bar help cannot memorize Don’s various occult ingredients and proportions,” the Post reported.
Tropical juices and rums had intermingled long before the rise of the tiki bar, of course. Pineapple-flavored rum—made by infusing sliced pineapple in a puncheon of rum—was not an uncommon drink in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Early sailors enjoying shore leave would smuggle rum back aboard by drilling a hole in a coconut, draining the milk, then filling it with rum and sealing it back up. Surreptitiously sipping from the shell was called “sucking the monkey.”
During Prohibition, the corner soda fountains had assumed some of the social role of saloons and trafficked in nonalcoholic exotica. Drinks available legally in the late 1920s included the Hawaiian Special and the Mandalay Delight. When Repeal was passed, bartenders were quick to add alcohol to the fruity potions. A bartender at New York’s Hotel Biltmore took top prize at the 1934 International Beer, Wine and Liquor exposition with his Fresco Cocktail: lime, pineapple, sugar, and Bacardi, shaken and strained into a cocktail glass. Parched soldiers in the Pacific during World War II were singularly inventive when it came to drink. A GI would turn brewer by punching in the three eyes at the end of a coconut, then adding sugar and raisins; a week later one of the plugs would pop, signaling that it was ready to consume. Servicemen in search of the harder stuff rigged up stills made of fuel drums and scavenged copper coils, distilling spirits from whatever they could swipe from the mess hall. It was “considered aged by the time it had cooled,” wrote one soldier, Malcolm Anderson, in 1945, and “made you feel as if the top of your head had been jerked up by several inches, or even yards.” Tropical juices would make it slide down easier.
