In 1789, Mate Fletcher Christian and 24 other men seize control of the HMS Bounty and set Captain William Bligh adrift in the ship’s longboat accompanied by 18 sailors still loyal to him. The mutineers then sail the Bounty back to their last port of call in Tahiti, to rejoin the women they had…um…encountered while ashore collecting breadfruit. Eight of the original mutineers remain in Tahiti, where they are eventually captured and hanged for treason, but the other 16, along with their Tahitian consorts, settle in 1790 on the previously uninhabited Pitcairn Island. There, they scuttle the Bounty, committed to begin life anew.
Granted, Christian and his mates have hardly discovered Club Med, but it must be paradise compared to life in the Navy—even if William Bligh was not entirely the tyrant that his fictional versions have suggested. Now, it is important to keep in mind that all British ships have carried rum since 1731; and because it is safe to assume that the mutineers do not give their rum to Bligh as a going-away present, what they probably do with it is make the earliest version of the Navy Grog–rum, water, lime juice, and sugar. And there we have it. These men have chosen freedom over oppression, abandoned civilization for nature, found sex more virtuous than the chastity of life at sea, and they have rum cocktails. In short, the Bounty mutineers have unwittingly invented the world’s first tiki bar nearly two centuries before the word “tiki” enters the lexicon of drinklore. (Of course, all but one of Pitcairn’s first generation die horribly, so the trend has a few bugs to work out.)
The tiki craze between the late ‘50s and early ‘70s is certainly among the more unusual phenomena in drinklore. Born during the Depression, conceived by chance, the tiki bar is probably the most blatantly escapist drinking experience in contemporary history. In contrast to the current taste for indigenous culture in our drinks (e.g. single-malts), the popularity of the tiki bar belies a taste for pure fantasy. Naturally, therefore, our story begins in the city whose primary industry is fantasy – Hollywood, California.
In 1935, the first American movie version of Mutiny on the Bounty wins the Oscar for Best Picture. Although Charles Laughton does not win the award for Best Actor, his portrayal of the infamous Bligh becomes one of the archetypal performances in movie history. While Albert Lewin is collecting his award at the Ambassador Hotel, just about a mile or two west of him, in a tiny shack of a bar called Don the Beachbcomber, a trend is about to be born that will, if you’ll excuse the expression, climax right in the middle of the sexual revolution. Vaguely Polynesian in décor, seating barely more than 20 people, Don the Beachcomber is manned by Don Beach, who actually began life as a Texan named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt. It is unclear exactly why Beaumont-Gantt adopted his tropical persona, even claiming to be from Jamaica and legally changing his name, but he is rumored to have been a bootlegger and may have acquired his alter-ego during the underground period of his career.
In the ‘30s, rum is cheap, and so is Don Beach, which is why he directs his team of young, Filipino bartenders to invent rum cocktails. Among the barmen is Ray Buhen, who first learned to mix drinks during Prohibition (when else?) while a bellboy at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After much trial and error (and after bravely drinking all of the failures), Ray and his associates finally create their first new cocktail. They name it the Zombie, which is a West African voodoo word for a spell that can wake the dead, or for a corpse that has been so revived. The name, although not Polynesian, certainly implies potency, and in fact, the Zombie is so strong that Beach puts a two-drink limit on the cocktail. Rumor has it, of course, that Don Beach used to name things at random, so the efficacious zombie, so aptly named, might have been christened on a whim.
Enter the woman – a former schoolteacher from Minnesota named Cora Irene “Sunny” Sund. When Sunny finds Beach, he is quite content with his hole in the wall, but her vision has a far more distant horizon. Seeing the popularity of Don’s exotic cocktails and island atmosphere, and drawing on her experience waiting tables in LA’s 2,000 meals a day Tick Tock Tea Room, Sunny borrows money to make improvements on the Beachcomber, becomes president of the company and Don’s wife. The marriage will not last, but the little family business she transforms will become a whole industry
In 1937, a man named Victor Bergeron visits Hollywood. He owns a place up in Oakland called Hinky Dinks, a hunting-lodge style joint once referred to by columnist Herb Caen as the worst-named bar in history. Bergeron on the other hand is something special, a gregarious, entertaining man, who is said to have loved his customers for rich or for poor. The Depression brings many a patron to Hinky Dinks with empty pockets, but Bergeron welcomes them, offering to barter food and drink for goods or services.
By the time Bergeron visits Don the Beachcomber, the place has moved across the street, expanded, and transformed into a full-blown Hollywood movie set of a theme restaurant complete with island-shaped tables, carved idols and masks, coconuts, bamboo, even the sound of raindrops on the corrugated tin roof. Like many films of the era, the atmosphere comprises a motley assortment of cultural artifact. The room named the Black Hole of Calcutta, for example, not only takes the mind far from Polynesia, but also refers to a 1756 incident in which the nabob of Bengal sacked the British trading port of Calcutta and locked 146 soldiers overnight in and 18-by-14-foot guard room with virtually no ventilation: only 23 survived. Bon apetit!
Grizzly themes aside, Don the Beachcomber is a hit by 1937, especially with movie stars. The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, and Marlene Dietrich will all have their chopsticks displayed in a showcase that survives until the restaurant’s closing in 1987. Tyrone Power Sr. will have a drink invented in his honor named for his 1941 picture Blood and Sand. And Victor Bergeron, seeing the success of Don the Beachcomber, returns home to found an empire.
Hinky Dinks is transformed in one day. Antlers and other kill trophies come down; grotesque icons of ancestral worship and religious rites go up. The hunting lodge becomes an island paradise, and the bar’s new name, inspired by its owner’s history of bartering with customers, will be Trader Vic’s.
Over the next several years, Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber will not only grow in popularity, but they will add more recipes and more color to the language of drinking than any force since Jerry Thomas. Suffering Bastard, Vicious Virgin, The Colonel’s Big Opu, and in 1944, Vic Bergeron creates the most famous tiki cocktail of all time. Combining 17 year-old J. Wray Nephew rum, Dutch curacao, a dash of rock candy syrup, and a dollop of French orgeat, he gives the potion a good shaking with shaved ice and serves it to a couple of friends visiting from Tahiti. After one sip, the woman, Carrie Gould, is supposed to have uttered, “Mai tai – roa ae,” which is Tahitian for “out of this world – the best.” Meanwhile, history lays the groundwork for the tiki craze that is to come.
On December 7, 1941, Polynesia spreads through the American consciousness with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The war in the Pacific will return many men home with a nostalgia for the islands. James Michener publishes Tales of the South Pacific in 1947, and, in that same year, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl sails more than 4,300 miles in a primitive balsa raft named Kon-Tiki. Bars with the names Bali-Hi and Kon-Tiki pop up all over the place, and somewhere along the way, the word “tiki” becomes the all-purpose adjective to describe the décor, the mood, the drinks, the whole experience.
Admittedly, the native meanings of “tiki” already make it a pretty versatile bit of locution. Ascribed to the indigenous Maori of New Zealand, “tiki” means “god” in the polytheistic sense of “a god.” It also means “first man,” “image of man,” or “creator of man.” A tiki can also be an icon of ancestral worship or a phallic symbol, and it is with respect to this last connotation that the golden age of the tiki bar might prove to be an illustrative detail during a pivotal era.
As the civil rights movement overflows into the sexual revolution and the protest against the Vietnam war, the middle class becomes alienated from its children, thus alienated from its own youth. The kids have drugs, rock-and-roll, and free love, but the parents, trapped in the dichotomy of a simultaneously free and repressive society, in many ways become more escapist than the tuned-in, dropped-out students. It may be no accident that the major tiki chains are built on relationships with major hotel chains, where thousands of middle-class men will stay while travelling on business.
Imagine it’s 1968, and a man visiting Seattle for a meeting is staying at the Westin. He doesn’t have anywhere to be until 10:00 the next morning, so he disappears for a while in the Trader Vic’s conveniently located just off the lobby. He loses himself in this ersatz paradise, has a zombie to revive whatever needs reviving (maybe his youth, maybe his libido), lets the primitive sound of Martin Denny’s music seep into his subconscious, and maybe, if he gets lucky – as long as he has temporarily abandoned his life anyway – he’ll have a one-night stand. It wasn’t me; the Big Opu made me do it.
By the mid-70s, the tiki tide begins to ebb. The aftermath of Vietnam brings a new kind of sobriety to both sides of the 60s culture clash and, no doubt, dilutes the public’s taste for jungle motifs.
Today, Ray Buhen is the sole survivor of the original Beachcomber bartenders. He and his son Mike own the Tiki Ti (“God of Drink”), which Ray opened in 1961 on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard. It’s just a tiny shack of a place, about the size of the original Don the Beachcomber, and the drinks are a combination of original Beachcomber recipes and Ray’s own inventions.
If you drive too fast on Sunset, you’ll miss the bar, so keep your windows rolled down and listen for a crowd shouting “Toro! Toro!” That’ll be Ray or Mike pouring tequila through a speed-pour shaped like a bull’s head. Grab a bar stool in the glow of the blowfish lamps, order yourself a world-class tiki cocktail, and maybe you’ll wash up on the shores of paradise.
