Donn Beach

There are two stories about where the father of tiki was born, and he told the losing one. The paper record is consistent and dull: a Texas birth certificate for Ernest Gantt dated February 22, 1907, a draft card, induction papers, and census entries putting the family in Limestone County. The other version is his. Sitting in his own market place in Waikiki in 1986, seventy-nine years old, he opened the story of his life with Mandeville, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans — schooling there, and in Jamaica, and then Texas when the family followed the oil rush. When he died three years later his widow gave Louisiana to the death certificate and the obituary called him a New Orleans man. He was, by the judgment of every historian who has worked on him, a fabulist; the useful thing to understand about Donn Beach is that he was the first and most thorough customer of the fantasy he sold. In that same 1986 telling he was nineteen years old in 1929, which a 1907 birth does not permit. He knew what year he was born. He preferred the story.

The verifiable part begins in a room thirteen feet wide and thirty feet long in the McCadden Hotel, a half block off Hollywood Boulevard, hung with flotsam he had genuinely collected island-hopping the South Pacific after crewing a yacht to Sydney in 1929. He had rented those curios to the studios and worked as a South Seas technical adviser on their hurricane pictures; now he emptied the collection onto the walls of a bar. California had not yet legalized spirits by the glass, which is why the first appearance of the first tiki bar in any newspaper is a vice-squad raid, on September 1, 1934. Nobody had tasted rum built like this — layered rums, fresh juice, and spice mixes he wrote down as numbers so that his own bartenders could not read them. The Zombie was rationed at two. When the room filled past bearing he moved it across the street in 1937, added a Cantonese kitchen he described as South Seas food, and let the persona finish the job: Ernest Gantt legally became Donn Beach. By his own count a hundred and fifteen places copied him. He was not wrong about the order of magnitude, and all of them are downstream of a garden hose he ran over a corrugated roof so that it could rain on cue.

He did not get to keep it. The business had always been half Cora Irene "Sunny" Sund's — she borrowed the money, hired the cooks, and set the house rules — and when the marriage ended in 1940 she came out holding the restaurants and the trademark, with Donn barred from opening a Don the Beachcomber anywhere in the United States. He went to war instead, and this is the stretch of his life where the paperwork outruns the legend: commissioned into the Army Air Forces, torpedoed in convoy short of Casablanca, hospitalized, and then handed the job of building rest camps for the bomber crews of the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces on Jimmy Doolittle's orders. By his own account he requisitioned a villa on Capri with the German commander's dinner still warm on the table, took Amalfi and Sorrento in behind Mark Clark's army, ran the Riviera camps out of Cannes and Nice, and lived at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo trading Nescafé for wine with a principality that had champagne and no food. He came home a lieutenant colonel with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, signed the mainland restaurants over to Sunny for good, and sailed for the Territory of Hawaiʻi — the one place his settlement did not reach.

He opened in Waikiki in 1947 and spent the rest of his life inventing places rather than running them. In 1955 he took a lease on Queen Emma Estate land off Kalākaua Avenue and did not so much put a bar in a shopping center as build the shopping center around his bar: the International Market Place opened in 1957 with his Dagger Bar at its heart and his office up in the branches of the banyan — a treehouse that served by turns as a two-seat dining room, a live radio studio, and the perch from which he watched the whole thing work. On September 1, 1961 he handed the keys of that room to Duke Kahanamoku and moved on. He held the old Pioneer Inn at Lahaina and rented room six to James Michener, who sat six months in front of that harbor writing; then he and the architect Pete Wimberly went to the legislature, came away with an appropriation, and had the preservation controls drawn that made the Lahaina Historic District — the town that burned in August 2023. At the end he had Herb Kāne draw the hull of a thatched Polynesian houseboat, shipped it to Tahiti on the deck of a Matson liner, and moored it in a lagoon at Moorea. He called her the Marama. The man who spent fifty years selling Americans an island they could not get to had, by then, simply gone and lived on one. He died in Honolulu on June 7, 1989, and is buried at Punchbowl.