Five O’Clock Somewhere

Lina Abascal explores the history of tiki culture in California.

By Lina AbascalDecember 18, 2024

• History

• Cultural Studies

WHEN ERNEST RAYMOND GANTT came to Los Angeles, he was already looking beyond it. Born in 1907, likely in Louisiana, Gantt ran boarding houses with his mother as a teenager, saving up $40,000 in wages—worth a staggering near $600,000 today. When it was time to go to college, he declined. At 19, he took a job as a supercargo on a 120-foot yacht, voyaging around the world, spending extended time in Waikiki Beach, Hawaiʻi; Papeete, French Polynesia; and Sydney, where he collected curios from the South Seas. Or at least this is what he told Alice Sinesky when she interviewed him in 1986 for the Watumull Foundation Oral History Project at the University of Hawaiʻi. The language Gantt used is convenient in its vagueness. Throughout his lifetime, the siren song double-S of the South Seas—used to refer to anywhere south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean—was enticing enough that audiences were too entertained to question it.

Despite the late scholarly interest, Gantt’s story is spotty. Even his own account varies. The US Census confirms he was living in Texas at age three; from there his own recollection has him bouncing between Louisiana, Texas, and the then-colony of Jamaica. To anyone that asked, he could recall every texture and scent of his time in the South Pacific, but some believe his travels were embellished and his early years of island-hopping were a work of fiction. According to some, he was rum-running, though he omitted this from his conversation with Sinesky. But does it matter? These inconsistencies are where lore lies, where Gantt moves from man to myth.

¤

What is clear is that in 1931, Ernest Gantt came to Hollywood. It was there he would become godfather of what would go on to be called tiki drinks, inventor of what diehards call tropical escapism.

Following the supercargo gig, Gantt traveled west to visit his brother who worked in the movie business. Gantt had the best party trick in town, suitcases of tchotchkes and stories no one had ever heard of. The only shame was that they had to be told over a glass of bathtub gin. He wooed enough Hollywood executives with his South Seas souvenirs that he was hired to consult and provide props for John Ford’s The Hurricane (1937).

After the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, Gantt opened a tiny bar on North McCadden Place, just around the corner from still-standing steakhouse Musso & Frank. Inside, he lined the walls with findings from his travels and rigged a water feature to make it feel like customers were rained in by a tropical storm. There were no martinis, Manhattans, or old-fashioneds. His drinks were gutsy rum concoctions inspired by his time in Jamaica. He called the place Don’s Beachcomber. Soon, he called himself Donn Beach.

His cocktails had equally memorable names. The most famous, the mai tai, was named after the Tahitian word for “excellent.” The zombie—a mix of four different rums, including one 150-proof—was nearly lethal. Reflecting his marketing genius, Beach’s menu, which can be seen in the Los Angeles Public Library archive, noted a strict two-zombie-per-customer rule. At the time, there was no acknowledgment of the whitewashing of Pacific Islander culture or conversation around who was best suited to craft a fantasy inspired by it, but in a blip of near self-awareness, one of Beach’s powerful punches was called the Missionary’s Downfall.

Polynesian-pop’s powerful flavors and peacocking garnishes were beloved in Hollywood. The bar moved down the road to a larger space and was renamed Don the Beachcomber one year later. In the wake of Prohibition and the Great Depression, its escapism was welcomed with open arms ready to double-fist. It was only natural that Beach expanded. As his popularity rose, so did the likelihood of a core tenet in any fantastical character development: a rival.

¤

Victor Jules Bergeron Jr. was born in a Bay Area suburb in 1902. In 1934, just one year after Beach’s original location opened, Bergeron opened a bar called Hinky Dink’s in Oakland. Quickly, the bar’s decor and menu began to lean more and more tropical. Bergeron took a hint from Hollywood and renamed himself something more apt for his adventurous watering hole. By 1937, he and the bar were Trader Vic.

According to the modern Trader Vic’s website, Bergeron invented the mai tai in 1944, though most tiki historians defend Beach as the original inventor. Mike Buhen, owner of Los Angeles bar Tiki-Ti, told PBS the recipe was certainly born at Don the Beachcomber, but whether it was the brainchild of Beach himself was impossible to know. Buhen’s father Ray was one of four Filipino bartenders who contributed, uncredited, to Beach’s recipes.

Beach kept his recipes (and any created by his bar staff in his name) close to his chest. According to a 1948 Saturday Evening Post article, he used “a pattern of code symbols indicating premixed ingredients.” Buhen confirmed. Whether or not Beach knew a secret code would end up being necessary, the drama certainly added to the mystique of the brand. The men’s rivalry made for good marketing. Whenever he had the chance—including in the University of Hawaiʻi interview just two years before his death—Beach called Vic an imitator.

As the United States entered World War II, Beach joined the air force. He was assigned to create rest and relaxation centers for troops around the world, another trip he’d spin into aspirational tales. During his service in the early 1940s, aspiring actress and entrepreneur Cora Irene “Sunny” Sund, who had been his first wife, corralled investors and expanded the Don the Beachcomber business across the country. Despite the fact that they had divorced in 1940, Sund and Beach remained business partners for the next five years. Sund is credited by many as the brain behind the Beachcomber operation.

By 1945, the properties were signed over to Sund with terms that Beach was not allowed to open a business under the Beachcomber name within the continental United States. Whispers swirled that the Sund-operated Don the Beachcomber in Chicago, named one of the top 50 restaurants in the US in 1947, was favored by the mob, who helped in pushing Beach out. Just rumors, but still.

¤

At first, the word “tiki” wasn’t used by Donn Beach or Trader Vic—but soon, the trend used language from actual island cultures, taken out of context. The term “tiki” refers to the Māori concept of the “first human”; they often depict this figure as a “hei-tiki,” a kind of ornamental pendant. While Beach’s cocktails weren’t authentic to anything particularly Polynesian, most Americans took his fictional paradise and amalgamation of cultures as the real thing.

After World War II, “tiki” became associated with the tropical escapism hospitality movement and associated aesthetic in part due to Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition. He and his companions crossed the Pacific by raft in a route spanning from South America to Polynesia, an adventure he recounted in his eponymous 1948 book, which was soon adapted into a film. Heyerdahl said the name of his raft and journey were inspired by Kon-Tiki, an alternate name for a pre-Columbian god of the Incan people of South America, thousands of miles from the cultures Beach claimed to reference.

Tiki historian and author Sven A. Kirsten believes that increased access to jet plane travel paired with the ratification of Hawaiʻian statehood in 1959 spurred Americans’ interest in island cultures. “It was the recreational lifestyle of that generation of Americans,” he told PBS of the emergence of white suburban at-home luaus.

After his divorce from Sund, Beach moved to Hawaiʻi, where he could legally open another property under the Beachcomber name. His Waikiki bar reportedly featured a myna bird that squawked “give me a beer, stupid” at customers. It’s also said that the bird inspired the Disneyland attraction Enchanted Tiki Room, opened in 1963, which features animatronic singing birds and serves tropical snacks. Whether the bird really existed or actually inspired Disney is unknown.

¤

While Beach focused on his new life in Hawaiʻi, the rivalry between the two men was alive on the mainland. It was the perfect time for the Beachcomber and Trader Vic empires to grow. Thanks to Sund, Don the Beachcomber expanded across the United States. Trader Vic, less of an eccentric and more of a businessman, opened dozens of restaurants, published recipe books, and sold packaged cocktail mixes. At their height, Don the Beachcomber had 16 locations while Trader Vic’s had 25.

But tropical drinks and tiki bar culture faded from popularity by the end of the Vietnam War. The drinks made famous by both men were eclipsed by cosmopolitans and appletinis—equally sugary, but branded as modern and sophisticated.

“As tiki became ubiquitous and commodified it became cheapened […] When Vietnam was burning, few needed to see palm trees and Tiki huts,” cocktail historian Angus Winchester said in an interview with Difford’s Guide.

In 1968, Sund sold Don the Beachcomber to Getty Enterprises. Over the next two decades, the brand slowly died out and the original Beachcomber location closed in 1985 after 52 years. Historian and mixologist Jeff “Beachbum” Berry called tiki’s tenure an “unprecedented lifespan for a drink fad.”

Tiki’s aesthetic and recipes, once seen as a tasteful escape to tropical paradise were cheapened to something even too tacky for Donald Trump. In 1989, Trump, then-owner of the Plaza Hotel, ordered the removal of the hotel’s 24-year-old Trader Vic’s.

Trader Vic died in 1984 at 81 following a stroke and lung-related health complications. His New York Times obituary noted that he had “introduced” (not invented) drinks like the mai tai.

Donn Beach died of liver cancer in Honolulu in 1989. He was 81 years old. In his obituary, “he is said” to have created 84 cocktails, including the mai tai.

¤

Alliterative nicknames like the “Wild West” and “final frontier” first drew the adventurous toward California. The promise of a clean slate, reinvention, the possibility of becoming something brought the rest. California-born tiki culture was never imported from foreign lands, but a homegrown fantasy drawing vaguely from overseas practices; like much of Los Angeles’s exports, it was concocted mostly from the minds of entrepreneurs and entertainers.

Even death couldn’t cement the facts around Trader Vic and Donn Beach and end the evolution of the men’s lore. That’s because lore isn’t the same as history. There’s a reason the word “lore” is often associated with fantasy—chain mail and swords or tertiary comic book characters. Lore describes a level of detail attractive to the fan but inscrutable to those who are merely familiar: stories passed down orally and changed along the way, notes assembled in vast catalogs. Lore argues chronology, debates origin, and competes for primacy.

After the death of both Beach and Vic, a tiki renaissance started in the late 1990s thanks to the resurgence of elaborate mixology and the work of Beachbum Berry and Martin Cate, an author, historian, bartender, and the owner of San Francisco bar Smuggler’s Cove. Original recipes were revived and revised, but the conversation changed. Sven Kirsten’s The Book of Tiki, published by Taschen in 2000, investigated the aesthetics of bars like Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s while providing historical context to the real cultures behind their Polynesian-inspired art and architecture. Some modern bars began rejecting the word “tiki” to refocus on giving credit to the island cultures that influenced the appropriative American aesthetic and recipes. Strong Water in Anaheim, co-owned by an Asian American bartender, calls itself a nautical and tropical bar, not a tiki bar.

Small businesses like San Diego’s False Idol or San Francisco’s Pagan Idol have created Beachcomber-inspired immersive environments with faux thunderstorms and animatronic statues. In basements across the world, men with extensive Hawaiʻian shirt collections show off home bars in the r/Tiki subreddit, which boasts over 60,000 followers.

In 2018, the last standing Don the Beachcomber closed. It was in Huntington Beach, just an hour from the original Hollywood location that shuttered 35 years prior.

There are currently 17 operating Trader Vic’s locations—most of which opened in the 1990s and 2000s. Their original appeal, a temporary escape from the United States to the tropics via paper umbrella, is mostly lost. Many of the remaining Trader Vic’s are located in sterile, newly built hotels in the UAE, where they appeal to tourists not because of their distance from America but because of their distinct Americanness.

If Beach’s legacy couldn’t stay afloat in its home state and Trader Vic’s peak popularity was overseas in chain restaurants that recall Rainforest Cafe, it’s fair to wonder if tiki died with its inventor, or its loaded and complicated history died in favor of a modern, if sometimes soulless, approach.

In February 2024, a new Don the Beachcomber opened in a hotel in Madeira Beach, Florida, the only restaurant by its name on earth. On the announcement post on a local news website, anonymous commenter Simplesyrup8877 defended Trader Vic as the real inventor of the mai tai.

¤

For many, Los Angeles is the escape. A place to reinvent yourself. To transform from Gantt to Beach. But being from the city, it’s easy to feel jaded. When even the palm trees aren’t enough to woo me, I temporarily venture, not to a faraway place, but to an entirely fictional one—through Beach’s (or just maybe Vic’s) creations. I revel in the brilliance of crafting a world so well built that generations believed it belonged to one singular place. I know what it feels like to want an escape from the escape. To be in the center of Hollywood wishing it was anywhere else. I revel in the novelty of finding adventure without leaving home. Like the zombie’s first victims, I don’t ask questions.

Now I head straight to the third floor at Clifton’s Cafeteria. I pound the table for the “Toro!” chant at Tiki-Ti. I take inspiration from the Tommy Bahama dads on Reddit and restore a rattan tiki bar from Facebook Marketplace. I find the fantasyland wherever I go, through a two-foot straw at Tonga Room in San Francisco and in a bar full of suits in Dubai where I’m the only one who clocks the menu’s reference to “Donn’s Mix.”

Beach’s catchphrase was purportedly “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you.” Like most things attributed to him, it’s hard to corroborate. Mentioned in tiki history everywhere with no clear origin, it’s absent from the 36-page interview conducted just before his death. It doesn’t matter whether Beach said it, a mocking parrot squawked it, or it was cooked up in a century-long game of telephone. When I sip a mai tai, I lose nothing by believing it.

¤

Featured image: Back exterior of building at Disneyland by User101001 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Image has been cropped.