Nathan Masters: In the 1950s and 60s, an island breeze swept across postwar America. Hawaii joined the Union, and surfers chased an endless summer across the South Seas. It was also the age of the tiki bar, where Americans could escape to exotic shores without ever setting sail, but here's where our palm tree story sways. Tiki culture, with its bamboo trappings and tropical elixirs, wasn't the Polynesian import it seemed. It was a Hollywood creation, its mastermind a rumored rum runner named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. After years of island-hopping through the Caribbean and South Pacific, Gantt landed in Tinseltown in the early thirties and reinvented himself as Don the Beachcomber, transforming a vacant tailor shop just off Hollywood Boulevard into a tropical hideaway. Pouring rum fantasies, like the Missionary's Downfall and his signature Zombie, Don made waves across the nation, and, while his famed Hollywood oasis shut its doors long ago, the legacy of the Tiki craze he ignited lives on. ♪ This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy; the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation; and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and Creative Recovery, L.A. ♪ My generation missed last call at the Hollywood Don the Beachcomber's, but that won't stop me from browsing the menu. I located a copy in the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library. Its cover is intoxicating, and it sheds light on recent critiques of tiki culture. Lounging under palm fronds, a beachcomber gazes over a seascape populated by native laborers and topless women, almost as if reigning over his domain, but open the menu, and the focus shifts to the Beachcomber's drinks, strong ones, that remain staples of the tiki trade today, and that's where the story gets even more nuanced. Many were concocted not by the Beachcomber himself, but by skilled Filipino bartenders, immigrants from the Pacific Islands. One of them, Ray Buhen, went on to start what's now one of the oldest surviving tiki bars in America-- Tiki-Ti on Sunset Boulevard. [Bicycle bell rings] ♪ Masters: This is about as close as you can get to Don the Beachcomber's in L.A. I mean, there's a direct ancestral lineage running from Don the Beachcomber's to Tiki-Ti. Man: Yep, pretty much so, yes. Ha ha! Masters: The bar is still owned and operated by Ray's son Mike, who, along with his own son, Mike Jr., keeps the torch of his father's legacy burning. Mike: My dad came to this country in 1930. His first job was at the Figueroa Hotel downtown. He was a bellhop, and from there, he went to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Prohibition was just about to end, and then the manager said, "We need a bartender, Ray," so he sent him to bartending school, and he got his degree in bartending, and then Don the Beachcomber was opening up his place in Hollywood, so my dad went over there and applied, and then he hired him. Masters: One of the first bartenders at Don the Beachcomber's. Mike: Right. There were 4 Filipino boys that actually concocted all his drinks. My dad was one of the 4. Masters: And what was one of the drinks he would have mixed there? Mike: Probably the Zombie, Navy Grog, Gold Cup. All those drinks came out of Don the Beachcomber in the thirties. Masters: We're gonna make a Zombie right now. Mike Jr.: The Zombie that they would do back then would have pineapple juice and lemon juice. We use orange and lime juice. Masters: Now, I was just looking at these menus over at the L.A. Public Library from Don the Beachcomber's, and it said, "Limit two per customer." It must have been a pretty strong drink. Mike: Well, yeah, but back in those days, they used a lot of different rums. You had one, maybe two, and that was it. Masters: I've mixed drinks at home, but I've never been behind a bar. Mike Jr.: Sure. Masters: OK, so now I saw you had the lime juice. Am I right that this is lime? Mike Jr.: Yep. Masters: OK, and you do this all sort of out of sight, down below the bar. Are there some secrets to this, or-- I've heard a story about a coded recipe book. Mike: Oh, yeah, yeah. Masters: Yeah. Mike: There were certain recipes, the code's like, you had, say, a Scorpion, you would have all your lime juice or whatever in a drink, but then you'd have to use mix number two. Well, nobody knew what mix number two was, and it wouldn't be the drink without that, so it was coded, yeah. Masters: Pour it in, passion fruit. Mike Jr.: A half-ounce of passion fruit. Yep. Masters: All right. Where did you learn to tend bar? Mike Jr.: Oh, I learned here. Masters: You learned here? OK. Mike Jr.: Yeah, 25 years ago. Half-ounce of simple syrup. Masters: Simple syrup. Mike Jr.: Just got behind the bar and started doing it. Masters: OK. Mike: At one point, there were 3 generations. My dad was here, I was here, and my sons. Masters: Wow. What was that like? Mike Jr.: It was crowded back here. Masters: Ha ha ha! Yeah. Mike Jr.: Just a dash of falernum and grab some bitters. Masters: Bitters. OK. Mike Jr.: Ounce of orange juice. Masters: This is-- In many ways, fruit juice like this is just as important to a tiki cocktail as rum, right? Mike Jr.: Sure. Masters: So your father, your grandfather, was a legend, right? I mean, did people start coming here because of him? Mike: He had a following from other places because after he worked at Don the Beachcomber, he went to other locations, and people followed him where he went. Mike Jr.: Go ahead and throw it on the blender. Go ahead. Yeah. That's it. ♪ Float it with dark rum. Masters: It's a lot of rum, isn't it? Mike Jr.: Yes. Masters: Ha ha! Here's the garnish, and this is essentially one of Don the Beachcomber's signature drinks. Mike: Yeah, looks good. Masters: It does look good. Yeah. ♪ Mike Jr.: All right. Let's see. I didn't get some cheers. Masters: Oh, and limeade. Cheers. Mike: Yeah. Okole maluna. Masters: Yeah. Mike: OK. Ha ha ha! Masters: I've noticed that you have this scrolling menu on the TVs here. I've noticed they're references to your father's Filipino heritage. Mike: All right. Well, my dad was born in Bohol, the southern part of the Philippines, and he was raised in Cebu, and that's why we have a few drinks-- Like, we have a drink called a Bayanihan. That means in Tagalog together or togetherness. Masters: Togetherness? Mike: Yeah. Masters: Does it refer to the ingredients in the drink or the vibe that it gives off? Mike: Well, yeah, well, to be together or, you know, have a good time. Masters: You know, you don't see a lot of references to the Philippines or Filipino culture in tiki bars. Mike: It's kind of funny because when my dad first came here, I had an older sister, and he never spoke Tagalog to us in the house. I used to get angry and go, "Why didn't you ever teach us Tagalog?" and he said, "Well, why?" but then I understood why, because back in the thirties, it was very prejudiced, and if you were speaking in another language and you went out, people would say, "Hey, where are you from? Get the heck out of here. Go back to your country," so he would never speak Tagalog. People would come over, and he would speak it in the house, but outside, he always spoke English because he wanted to become so Americanized, it was always English. Masters: There was a strong incentive to blend in. Mike: Yeah. Well, you know, I'm half Filipino. I'm mestizo. People look at me, and they say, "So, Mike, you don't look Filipino." Well, I don't because he married my mom. My mom was born here, but her dad was born in Czechoslovakia, so I have Czech German on my mom's side and Filipino on my dad's side. I'll never forget, my mom used to tell me these stories. They would go out dining, and they would sit down, and the waiter would come up. He said, "I'm sorry. We can't serve you," and she said, "Well, why?" He said, "Because we don't serve mixed couples." She said, "What do you mean? This is my husband." Back in those days, very prejudiced. Mike Jr.: Filipinos don't get enough recognition when it comes to the world of tiki. Masters: Yeah. Mike Jr. You know, I think they should. Masters: You're honoring that in some of the drinks here. Mike Jr.: Sure. When people ask, I mean, you know, I definitely tell them. It's an important part of the tiki story. Mike: Well, yeah. Yeah. Masters: There's so much history wrapped up in this place. Mike: We are with the oldest tiki bar in L.A. with the original owners, yeah, about 62 years now. Masters: Tiki has had its ups and downs. Mike: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Masters: You and Tiki-Ti's seen it all. There is a huge tiki revival now. Today this is an L.A. landmark. Mike Jr.: If you're into Tiki and you're coming to the West Coast, then the Tiki-Ti is definitely on your list to stop. Masters: While many bars succumbed to a waning interest in tropical motifs and rum cocktails in the 1970s and 80s, Tiki-Ti withstood the test of time. Another survivor was the Tonga Hut in North Hollywood. Founded at the height of the tiki craze in 1958, by the nineties, it had seen better days with bartenders struggling to whip up a classic Mai Tai, yet today it stands rejuvenated. Man: It's one of the great original tiki bars still in L.A. Masters: Oldest surviving tiki bar in L.A., right? Man: I know. Yeah. Actually, it beats Tiki-Ti by, like, 3 years. Masters: I met up there with one of tiki culture's foremost chroniclers-- Sven Kirsten. Kirsten: I come from the arts scene. I'm a cinematographer by profession, so I'm a visualist, and that's what got me into tiki first, was the visuals. Masters: You still enjoy a good tiki drink. Kirsten: Yeah, but also a good tiki mug. Masters: Right. Sven turned his sharp eye onto the visual lexicon of tiki, a design esthetic embodied not just in bars and mugs, but in amusement parks, motels, even residential apartments. Kirsten: There are some other great examples of tiki art here. One of them are these poles that are holding up these booths. They were originally from the Playa del Rey Polynesian Village apartments. Masters: They were from an apartment building? Kirsten: Right, must have had over 100 different of these tiki poles lining the facade, and each one of these carvings is different, and they were carved by this Filipino carver named Andres Bumatay, and there are still some apartment buildings you know, here in Los Angeles, like the Kona Pali in Granada Hills and stuff that have his carvings on the facade. Masters: So people loved the tiki experience so much, they didn't just want to have their drinks in it. They wanted to live in it. ♪ Many credit Sven's pivotal "Book of Tiki," published in the year 2000, with sparking a resurgence of interest in tiki culture... ♪ and he's not just an author. He's also an ardent collector, and he graciously invited me into his home to explore some of his prized possessions. ♪ Sven, your house is like a shrine to Tiki. Kirsten: It's a museum... Masters: Museum. Kirsten: a tiki museum. Masters: Now wait a minute. Is this who I think it is here? Kirsten: Oh, yeah. That's Don. Masters: Don the Beachcomber. Kirsten: Himself, right. His wife Carla Beachcomber gave this to me... Masters: Oh, really? Kirsten: so it's a copy of a painting that she had commissioned in Hawaii. I'm proud to have it. I'm gonna show you some of my menu collection. Masters: Yeah, please, so it all started with menus? Kirsten: Yeah, with graphic arts, you know? For example, the fonts alone, the way they're built, here, you see, like, the interior of the place. Here's a map of the Pacific Islands. These menus had these amazing drink illustrations. Masters: I mean, look at the colors, just the color there. Kirsten: I mean, that's eye candy. Masters: It really is. ♪ The fresh mint makes a difference. Kirsten: Oh, yes. Masters: It's, like, when you put your nose up to it-- Kirsten: Exactly. Masters: Yeah. So what was it that made tiki such a craze in the 1950s? Kirsten: Mm, Hawaii was a dream destination in terms of our vacations, and then when, you know, jet planes came around in the late fifties, it was easier to reach, but also the big event was Hawaiian statehood in 1959. That's when all the developers came and started building not only the restaurants, but the apartment buildings and the hotels and the bowling alleys, and that was really Americans getting the feeling that, "Oh, this is just like in my backyard, so I can recreate it in my own backyard," and, you know, these backyard luaus were in fashion. For a while, it was, like, the recreational lifestyle of a generation, of that generation of Americans. Masters: And Hawaiian statehood played that big a role. I mean, why didn't we have, like, Alaskan-themed bars, you know? What was it about Hawaii? Kirsten: I don't know. To have icicle cocktails. Masters: Ha ha ha! Right. Kirsten: No, but it was also this opening to other cultures. Since World War II, so many Americans had come in contact with Pacific Rim cultures, you know, that there was this openness and curiosity for that, those cultures, and it was a very naive but positive emotion, you know, that was connected with it. Masters: The association between, you know, tiki, though, or that movement and returning servicemembers from World War II, it's always tripped me up a little bit because the experience of servicemembers in World War II was horrific, usually, right? Kirsten: Yes. You have to differentiate. It was glossed over on the mainland, and the myth, the Polynesian pop myth existed before World War II, so it was just continued in that vein. A lot of Americans died there. It was not all, you know, hula girls and palm trees, but when they came back, this pop culture was sort of already existing. They themselves didn't want to talk about it and embellished the fun side of things. James Michener is the perfect example, was, you know, writing the "Tales of South Pacific." He shared all these really interesting stories of encounters with these other cultures, but that all got sort of edited out in the musical. Mary: ♪ Bali Ha'i will whisper... ♪ Kirsten: The song "Bali Ha'i" was all over the radio and in every elevator and then the movie was made, and it became this total kitschfest. Masters: So there's World War II, but there's also Hollywood, and Hollywood played a big role in all this, too. Kirsten: It's like a movie. I mean, that's how it started out. Don The Beachcomber was an advisor to South Sea movies when he opened his bar in Hollywood, and consequently, all these film stars started going there. That was popularized in magazines and stuff, and so it made customers feel like they were in their own South Seas movie. ♪ It was all very romanticized and was adventurous, and it was exotic. It was a fantasy, a Hollywood fantasy. There's a big misunderstanding that tiki has really anything to do with authentic Polynesian culture. It doesn't. It's a construct. Masters: Tiki bars may be the wrong place to look for authentic Polynesian culture, but a museum is one place to start. At the Bowers Museum in Orange County, a large collection of Oceanic art tells the story of Pacific Islanders through their own material culture. The word "tiki" itself refers to a deity or ancestral figure from Maori mythology... Man: Among the Maori people, it usually means of the first man. Masters: but, as the museum's Mark Bustamante showed me in a behind-the-scenes tour, tiki decor often pulls from many different traditions. ♪ OK, so what are these? Bustamante: These are two masks which look like they represent tiki figure but really aren't. They're from a different part of the Oceanic sphere. These are both from Papua New Guinea, both from the Sepik area region, and they would kind of dress up men's houses. They're gable masks, so the large gables that kind of sit above the entrances of these men's houses, they would be right there greeting all who are entering them. Masters: But this would be considered, what, Melanesia? Is that right? Bustamante: Yeah. This is Melanesia, so if you think about the way in which the Pacific Ocean was peopled, Melanesia was kind of a first stopping point, and then Polynesians kept going island-hopping outwards from there. Masters: Quite a ways, too. I mean, the Polynesian Triangle's massive. It goes from, what, the subantarctic all the way up to almost the Tropic of Cancer. Bustamante: Something like 12 million square miles of seawater. It's a very big area. Masters: So then this is where the migrations started, then. Bustamante: Mm-hmm, yeah, and you can certainly see some references in Polynesian art to, you know, Melanesian art. Masters: But there are also huge distinctions, and those distinctions were elided over when tiki bars opened, and basically, just any iconography that looked exotic, they'd make do with it. Bustamante: Right, so in the grand scheme of things, things that are coming from Melanesia are pretty close, but a lot of tiki bars, yes, to your point, there really is an appropriation of cultural art and artifacts from all around the world. ♪ Let's head back here, take a look at some of these objects. Masters: Oh, wow. Bustamante: Yeah. Masters: So what's this here? Bustamante: So these are some pieces here that we pulled out because these are the kinds of things that you really could just take right off the wall of a tiki bar... Masters: Yeah, totally. Bustamante: but when you look at this, this isn't Polynesian, right? This isn't even Oceanic. This is an African mask that we're looking at. Masters: From Africa? Bustamante: Yes. Masters: Completely different part of the world. Bustamante: Totally different part of the world, yeah. It's from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is a Biyombo mask, and it'd worn at different ceremonies and ritual events, and you can actually see it's got some raffia here, as well, which I think, again, you see raffia appearing all the time in tiki bars, but-- Masters: And what is raffia, exactly? Bustamante: Raffia is this fibrous material. It's fiber taken, I think, usually from different types of palm and then turned into this kind of loose decoration. You can see, actually, there's some body masks just behind me here which-- Masters: Oh, yeah, right here. Bustamante: yeah, which have more of this raffia, which is used to kind of disguise the body of the person acting in this mask. Masters: And, yeah, I've definitely seen this in tiki bars before, and--you're right--this could be right off the wall of, you know, the Tonga Hut, for instance or-- Bustamante: What's really interesting is that you kind of started with this focus in Polynesia. You know, the idea is that tiki bars are very much just a Polynesian thing, but they're pulling from everywhere. You know, they're pulling from South America, from Africa. This is another example of a magic bag from Papua New Guinea, and if you look at the figure here, again, this is very much something that somebody might conflate as being a tiki figure... Masters: Yeah. Bustamante: but it isn't. Masters: It looks like almost, like, a miniature version of the Easter Island figures. Bustamante: Yeah, like a moai, and the face is very similar, and, again, there are some connections here. Masters: Now, we were talking about cultural appropriation, and I guess just another term for that would be, you know, cultural imperialism. A lot of museum collections have been acquired by, you know, shady means. How do you wrestle with that here? Bustamante: You know, it's a great, tough question. Museums all over the world have had to deal with this kind of historical baggage, right, which is that a lot of their collections were not collected ethically. With early collections, you know, the big thing that we can do is just kind of revisit where they came from and do that research, that provenance research, to try and figure out whether the acquisition was ethical. What we can do going forward is that we're doing things the right way now. Anything that we move forward with collecting is thoroughly researched to ensure that it has all the proper exports and things like that. When talking about our Oceanic collection, for the most part, it was collected within the past 30 or so years. Masters: After standards had already been established. Bustamante: Yes. Masters: OK. Bustamante: Yeah, so a lot of work went into making sure that all this was was collected in an appropriate way. We're always trying to do things better, you know, because what we're doing is so important. We're sharing the cultural heritage of the whole of human history. ♪ Masters: A short drive up the 5 from Bowers is where the tiki craze found its ultimate expression. When Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room opened in 1963, It was nothing short of an animatronic wonder. 6 decades later, its singing birds and crooning flowers remain a crowd pleaser, and yet, like that iconic Don the Beachcomber menu, it's plainly a product of its time, out of step with modern sensibilities, so how do tiki bars keep up with today's world? Just down Harbor Boulevard from that enchanted room lies Anaheim's historic downtown, where Strong Water opened its doors in 2019. Man: So, as you can see on our right, these are our booths. They're made of old king-sized beds. Masters: These are beds? Man: These are beds, and then over here, we've got our zombie grotto. Masters: And then what's this? Man: The Vortex of Doom. Masters: Vortex of Doom? Man: Of Doom. Masters: Hey, what happens if I, you know-- Man: Good luck. Good-bye. Masters: Yeah. In the best tradition of Don the Beachcomber, Strong Water offers its patrons an immersive escape from the outside world, but, as we'll see, this nautical-themed bar charts a course away from some of tiki culture's more controversial undertones. So tiki bars are traditionally irreverent, right? Also, they incorporate a lot of iconography that has deep cultural meaning to Pacific Islanders, and that makes some people a little uncomfortable. I mean, how did you negotiate that concern when you were planning this bar, putting it together? Woman: I think our focus was more on the nautical, tropical escapism rather than direct tiki itself, so we are serving tropical cocktails, Asian fusion-style food. The automatic category that we fall into is tiki. Man: We went to one of Sven's lectures, and he was explaining-- Masters: Sven Kirsten? Man: Yeah, yeah, Sven Kirsten, yeah, and he's like, "Let me just explain how tiki bars work. If it is all bamboo and there are no tikis, it's a bamboo bar." Don the Beachcomber's bar when it first opened was a bamboo bar. It was not a tiki bar. There used to be a really beautiful bar in Hollywood called Lono, and Lono was named after the god of agriculture in Hawaii. Lono was a fern bar. It was not a tiki bar. Because we are a tropical, nautical bar, we saw this as treasures acquired instead of appropriated. Some of these things are things from my travels when I was all over the world. There's masks that I got when I was in Mexico or Puerto Vallarta when I was in the Navy and things from when I was in the Gulf War, and we would bring things back, so there's little things throughout, like the teacups from my grandmother's house. Masters: So there's a lot of artifice to the collection here, but there's some authenticity, too. Man: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Masters: You're actually displaying some of your own selected-- Man: Yeah, well, things that my wife didn't want in the house, so it worked out. Masters: This is a completely immersive experience. There's embellishment everywhere here. I mean, just bathroom, you have, what, like, 13 locks on the door, right, so every detail. Man: The immersion was the most important part of it, and the storytelling drove the design. We were taking the idea of the history of Anaheim and saying, "Well, what if when the wine vines died, they built a ship?" because originally, what they were trying to do was build Anaheim all the way to the water so that they could export their wine, and so we had, like, a painting of the waves, and we were gonna say that's where the port was originally planned, and then they built this boat, but they built it inland, and they were trying to get it out, and when they did get it out, it got lost at sea. It traveled around the world, and it came back as a ghost ship, and nobody knows how it got to where it's at, and they didn't find it until they excavated this area in the nineties to build this apartment, and they were like, "Holy cow, where did this come from?" and we raised the ship. It was laid across these lava rock wall caves to keep shelter because we didn't know where we were or what was going on, and we explained, like, this Robinson Crusoe/ Swiss Family Robinson situation where we took everything that was on the ship and we repurposed it for our comfort, and then every time, if you get a little too intoxicated and you get lost, you can always just look up and see the stars and find your way home again. Masters: Yeah. I didn't notice that. That's pretty cool. Man: Detail everywhere. Woman: And the seahorse handles, once you open them, you know, all the way to the captain's quarters, all the way in the back, we really wanted to make sure people didn't even feel like they were in California. We always say that Strong Water is our love letter to tiki, what we think Don would have really enjoyed in terms of that full escapism, right? He brought back all of his travels, wanted to share it with so many people. That's kind of what we wanted to do here. ♪ Man: This one's from Tonga Hut. Masters: Ah, this is Big Mo? Man: Big Mo. Masters: Nearly a century after a purveyor of rum invited his customers to become beachcombers, too, tiki bars still guide us to the distant shores of imagination... From Tiki-Ti, this is Ray. Masters: but, like any Hollywood creation, there are deeper channels to explore. Whose story does this tell? Whose is left out? How does it comment on the world? Venturing further, we recognize these tropical hideaways for what they are. More than just sheltered coves of escapism, they're crossroads where the winds of Oceanic traditions meet the currents of California culture. ♪ This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy; the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation; and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and Creative Recovery, L.A.
