Title: Tiki., By:
Curtis, Wayne, American Heritage, 00028738, Aug/Sep2006, Vol. 57, Issue 4
Database: Academic Search Premier
Find More Like ThisTiki
Contents
Make the king of tiki drinks at home
A Tiki Bookshelf
How sex, rum, World War II, and the brand-new state of
Hawaii ignited a fad that has never quite ended
IN DECEMBER 19.11 A SOMEWHAT ADRIFT 24-YEAR-OLD WASHED up in
Southern California, looking for something to do. A native of New Orleans, he
was named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. Curious by nature and something of a
protoheatnik 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 got to Los
Angeles, 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 doing a bit of 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 evidently were
impressed not only by his knowledge of the region but also by his collection of
South Pacific artifacts, which could be borrowed for set props.
A couple of years after he arrived in Los Angeles, Gantt
happened upon a newly vacated tailor shop just off Hollywood Boulevard. It was
small — just 13 feet by 30 — but Gantt liked the feel of it, and entered into a
five-year lease for $30 per month. He built a bar that would seat about two
dozen customers and scattered a few rabies 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
décor: with an eye toward frugality. Rum was the least expensive of the
spirits, and Gantt had sampled a variety in his travels. He devised an exotic
menu of rum-based drinks that complemented his theme and scratched the names on
a board behind the bar.
The combination of Gantt's engaging personality and the
novelty of his drinks proved irresistible to his patrons. Among those first
drinks was 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 had in years. He was a writer for the New York
Tribune, 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," Gantt told his customers.
(It didn't work for everyone; in July 1936 a wealthy businessman struck and
killed a pedestrian with his car, allegedly while driving home after a night at
Don the Beachcomber. The driver was Howard Hughes.) By 1937 the restaurant and
bar had outgrown the 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 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 30 years, would migrate from the cities to the
suburbs and beyond.
Beach's reign in Los Angeles proved relatively short-lived.
When World War [I broke out, he was commissioned and, while aboard a convoy
bound for Morocco, his ship was attacked by a U-boat. Beach was injured, and
after he recovered he spent the remainder of his enlistment doing what he did
best: serving up hospitality. The Air Force put him in charge of hotels and
restaurants where airmen could rest and recuperate — on Capri and in Venice, on
the Lido and on the French Riviera.
Beach's ex-wife, Cora Irene ("Sunny") Sund, was left
running the business hack in California. She proved as natural an entrepreneur
as her ex-husband. When Beach returned home, he found that Don the Beachcomber
had blossomed into a 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 16 locations.) Beach signed on as a consultant and then
packed his hags for Hawaii, where he opened his own unaffiliated Don the
Beachcomber in an up-and-coming resort area called Waikiki Beach.
His restaurant became an instant landmark, more Hawaiian
than most of Hawaii itself. Beach amplified the fauxtropical theme with palms
and thatch and a sweeping shingled roof, part space age, part ceremonial
Polynesian meeting-house. The popular 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 reveal,
was for sale in the restaurant's gift alcove. A myna bird presided over the
premises, trained to blurt out, "Give me a 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 HONOLULU until he died in
1989 at the age of 81. The New York Times ran a brief obituary that painted him
as a sort of Thomas Edison of the thatched-roof bar, the inventor of 84 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."
Victor Jules Bergeron was born in San Francisco in 1903, the
son of a French Canadian waiter and grocery-store operator. Before he was 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 it would likely have come and gone like
so many other 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 took a vacation to New
Orleans, Trinidad, and Havana and sampled some of the famous cocktails then in
fashion, like rum punch in Trinidad and daiquiris made at the legendary El
Floridita in Havana. Back in California, Bergeron visited a tropical-themed
restaurant called the South Seas that had recently opened in Los Angeles, then
went on to visit a place everyone was 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
coneluded 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?
Bergeron hastily spun a whole history to go with his new
name: He now told his customers that he had lost his leg to a shark. Like Donn
Beach, he filled his newly christened restaurant with South Sea detritus, 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 Sea 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.
TRADER VIC's BOTH TAPPED INTO THE ZEITGEIST and helped shape
it. South Pacific culture had a small but growing hold on the American pop
imagination in the 1930s, as the middle class began to embrace a bowdlerized
version of an old avant-garde favorite. Primitive art from the South Seas had
fascinated the cultural elite since at least the paintings by Paul Gauguin in
the late nineteenth century, and through a sort of obscure cultural alchemy,
these primitive forms became popularized and marketed in the form of the tiki
statue — an outsized carved wooden figure of a human form, often grotesquely
exaggerated. It soon took its place in the American living room.
The 1937 Bing Crosby movie Waikiki Wedding introduced more
Americans to the exotica in their back yard. Then came World War II, which
further directed America's attention to a little-considered region of the
world. When the war ended, returning servicemen brought home stories and
snapshots of Pacific lands. Soon came the short stories of a talented naval
reservist, who had spent much of his enlistment typing away in a Quonset hut in
Vanuatu. He was James Michener, and the hook he published was titled Tales of
the South Pacific. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and made it to Broadway as a
musical entitled South Pacific, with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In 1947 the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl had set off
from the coast of South America on a raft to test his theory that Polynesia had
been settled by the Incas; his account, Kon-Tiki, became a runaway bestseller.
In 1959 Hawaii joined the Union amid fireworks and hullabaloo, and two years
later Elvis added his own brand of fuel to the South Pacific infatuation with
his movie Blue Hawaii.
Disneyland opened in 1955, and among its first rides was a
Jungle Cruise, in which boats drifted through tropical scenes; a few years
later the park's creator presented an attraction called the Enchanted Tiki
Room, where 225 birds chattered and danced among "tiki gods" named
Kor, Maui, Pele, Kongo, Tangaroa, and Tangaroa-Ru (this was Disney's first use
of "Audio Animatronic" figures). Aloha shirts took off, driven in
part by the ukulele-playing TV host Arthur Godfrey's fondness for them. If it
had thatch and torches and colorful fabrics and little statues (which Donn
Beach liked to call his "cannibal gods"), the public wanted more of
it.
The American cult of tiki 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.
A growing number of tiki bars and restaurants emerged as
landmarks on the American cultural landscape, building and expanding on the
foundation laid by Donn Beach and Trader Vic. Here one could briefly enter an
exotic world and engage in curious rituals amid hula girls and seductively
unfamiliar music. Temples of tiki cuisine cropped up throughout the country to
meet the demands of what the tiki historian Sven Kirsten called the
"modern primitives." They offered easy escape for those who didn't
want to drop out of society and play bongo drums all day hut weren't content
with the circumscribed life of the "organization man."
Customers typically entered the tiki realm by crossing a low
bridge or passing through a damp grotto, which offered a gentle transition from
the pesky reality outside the door. It took a few moments for one's eyes to
adjust, as the restaurants were often windowless. Who wanted to see the harsh
sun, the parking lot, and the road outside? The riki restaurant existed in a
sort of perpetual twilight, tit by propane torches, the fiery eyes of tiki
statues, and golden flames licking off the pineapple-and-brown-sugar dishes
delivered by a hula girl.
If there was a cult at the tiki palaces, it was that of the
tiki drink. Few customers 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 sought to outhustle one
another in concocting the most outrageous cocktails, giving them 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.)
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), which was often available in the gift
shop.
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 observed 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.
THE TIKI RESTAURANT AND THE TIKI COCKTAIL persisted well
into the 1970s — "an unprecedented lifespan for a drink fad," writes
the tiki drink expert Jeff Berry. Still, tiki gradually became tacky. The
thatched roofs grew ratty, the hula girls passé, and the drinks too potent and
elaborate for an emerging era of white-wine spritzers. In the 1980s the branch
of Trader Vic's in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel — perhaps the most famous of them
all — was shuttered by its owner, Donald Trump, who announced that the restaurant
had "gotten tacky." Bergeron eventually turned over control of the
chain to his children and retired to pursue a quiet career as a painter and
jeweler. According to The New York Times, he liked to paint "iceskating
nuns and perky otters."
As with many trends pushed to the brink of oblivion, tiki
enjoyed a revival in the late 1990s, led by hipsters who took the so-called
loungecore movement in a more ironic direction. Tiki mugs that had languished
in Salvation Army shops were snapped up and traded on eBay, and tiki
aficionados gathered at tiki events and went on road trips to search out the
survivors of the era. A surfeit of tiki cocktail guides made their way into
print. At the trendy clothing and gew-gaw chain Urban Outfitters, shoppers
could buy plastic coconut drink mugs.
Tiki soon became a generic term for anything vaguely
tropical. The tiki historian Sven Kirsten has lamented the "Jimmy
Buffetization" of tiki. The revival became all about kitsch: the
faux-primitive statues, the blow-fish lamps, the netting, the thatch over the
home tiki bar, the scratchy albums of Martin Denny, whose jungle-rustic
instrumentais provided the soundtrack for the tiki heyday in Waikiki Beach.
Yet, beneath the gloss of kitsch, a touching sincerity
informs many of those who today seek out lost tiki culture, folks who view it
not just as a campy safari into the heart of faux-Borneo but as a search for a
genuinely lost American civilization. The tiki movement was as every bit as
real an era in American history as the House of Kamehameha was in Hawaii.
Efforts to halt our cultural memory loss are well under way.
Zines such Otto Von Stroheim's Tiki News and John Trivisonno's Mat Tai offer
information-dense updates on tiki culture. There are published guidebooks, such
as James Teitelbaum's Tiki Road Trip, and Web sites, like Tiki Central
(www.tikiroom.com) and Michelle Whiting's Critiki.com, that offer reviews and
information on some hundreds of tiki-related establishments extant today.
Then there are the tiki scholars, like Kirsten and Jeff
Berry. Berry, in particular, has been assiduously documenting and re-creating
the actual drinks, long since forgotten, in his Beachbum Berry's series of
guides, including Grog Log and Intoxica!
"With sense of wonder intact," writes Kirsten in
his Book of Tiki, "the Urban Archeologist realizes that one does not
always have to search far to explore the mysteries of forgotten ancient
traditions, but that strange treasures can lie right in your own neighborhood,
hidden under the layers of progress and development."
Donn Beach and Trader Vic, it turns out, were the Stanley
and Livingstone of the mid-century American jungle, blazing a trail deep into
the world of pop fantasy and artifice from which America has yet to fully
emerge.
Donn Beach was the inventor of the tiki bar, which in the
next 30 years spread across the country.
The restaurants existed in a perpetual twilight, lit by
propane torches and the fiery eyes of island gods.
Make the king of tiki drinks at home
The mai tai is the quintessential tiki drink. The classic
Trader Vic's version, upon which this recipe is based, is complex,
sophisticated, and a far cry from the overly sweet, cherry-red pre-mix variants
that lesser establishments fob off on their customers.
It is relatively simple: It starts with rum blended with
those two building blocks of most outstanding rum drinks, lime and sugar. To
this is added curaçao (an orange-flavored liqueur) and orgeat (pronounced
or-ZHA), an almond-flavored syrup now often found in upscale coffee shops. As
in any good cocktail, the quality of the spirit should not be underestimated:
Better rums make a better mai tai. Don't stint.
Mix in a cocktail shaker with ice:
1 ounce heavy rum
1 ounce medium-bodied rum
¾ ounce fresh lime juice
¼ ounce simple syrup
¾ ounce curaçao
¼ ounce orgeat
Strain into tumbler half-filled with crushed ice. Garnish
with fruit and mint. — W.C.
A Tiki Bookshelf
The tiki civilization has a surprisingly broad literature.
Much of it is still in print, but perhaps it's best to start with the
pioneering Trader Vic, whose Trader Vic's Book of Food and Drink sold so well
when it was published in 1946 that it is still available (from, among other
places, Abebooks, whose anniversary we marked on page 10 of this issue). Trader
Vic's predecessor is handsomely represented by Hawai'i: Tropical Rum Drinks
& Cuisine by Don the Beachcomber, which was actually written by his widow,
Phoebe Beach, and Arnold Bitner and published in 2001; it contains dozens of
the potions that made him famous. High among Don's and Vic's acolytes is Duke
Carter, whose Tiki Quest: Collecting the Exotic Past is a lavish compendium of
the ceramic skulls and grimacing gods in which the drinks were served. His
fellow aficionado Sven A. Kirsten has produced an extremely handsome miscellany
titled The Book of Tiki (Taschen Books), which also features the barroom
hardware, as well as matchbooks and menus from scores of restaurants, among
them the not very imaginatively named Trader Dick's. Jeff Berry has made a
thorough study of everything that crossed bar or table in a tiki restaurant and
reveals the results in three books, the most recent being Beach bum Berry's
Taboo Table: Tiki Cuisine From Polynesian Restaurants of Yore. Here you will
find the key to making "Chicken of the Gods" (you'll need half a
pound of water chestnut flour) and that sadly neglected delicacy rumaki
(chicken livers or oysters wrapped in bacon, secured with a toothpick, and
broiled or fried; it was invented by Don the Beachcomber). Finally, if you have
read James Teitelbaum's rundown of the greatest surviving tiki restaurants that
accompanies this article, you will know that he is the best possible guide to
these imperiled shrines. He'll help you find the way to the one nearest you in his
2003 Tiki Road Trip: A Guide to Tiki Culture in North America.
PHOTO (COLOR): In San Francisco's Tonga Room — the Rome of
surviving tiki bars — a tropical rainstorm regularly stirs up the pool.
PHOTO (COLOR): Donn Beach concocts one of his culture-changing
rum delicacies — and a matchbook suggests the range of his clientele. Below, a
Trader Vic's sling; "Sloe gin. dry gin, lime with subtle flavorings …
persuasive ammunition for toppling giants."
PHOTO (COLOR): A grinning god in the gardens of the amazing
Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale (see page 44).
PHOTO (COLOR): The hula bowl bore a table's worth of drinks
lapping against the slopes of a flaming volcano.
PHOTO (COLOR): One well-made mat tai is almost never enough.
PHOTO (COLOR): Tiki revival: the pupu platter at Waikiki
Wally's in New York City.
PHOTO (COLOR): A trio of tiki swizzle sticks.
PHOTO (COLOR): Victor Bergeron pours a drink at Hinky Dinks,
before he became Trader Vic and built his chain of restaurants (one of their
menus appears at left).
PHOTO (COLOR): Top: The Kamaaina came in a ceramic coconut
which "is yours to take home." Below, the mug god is angry.
PHOTO (COLOR): A Iuau from the Hawaii Kai in Manhattan. The
actual meal almost certainly didn't include the whole roast pig.
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
~~~~~~~~
By Wayne Curtis
Wayne Curtis is author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails (just published by Crown, a division of Random House), from which this article is adapted