Glenn Andrew Billingsley

The tiki story is usually told through its showmen — the men who invented a persona, hung their name over a door and let the legend do the rest. Glenn Billingsley did the opposite. He came from a family that already had a famous name, spent thirty years building one of the largest collections of Polynesian rooms in Southern California, and left almost no myth behind him at all.

He was a nephew of Sherman Billingsley, whose Stork Club was the most photographed nightclub in New York, and he married the actress Barbara Billingsley in 1941; they had two sons and divorced in 1947, some years before she became the most famous mother on American television. None of that is why he belongs on this chart. He belongs on it because in 1945 he bought the Hollywood Tropics — Harry Sugarman's second tropical room, at Sunset and Vine across from NBC — and never really stopped buying tropical rooms after that.

The flagship was Billingsley's Golden Bull in West Los Angeles, opened around 1946, and at his height he ran seven of them alongside three Outrigger Polynesian restaurants, Billingsley's Bocage, the Hawaiian Reef out in Chatsworth, the Golden Bull and Jamaica Inn at Corona del Mar, a Stork Club of his own in Key West, and the catering contract for Continental Airlines. The best-remembered of them opened in January 1960: the Outrigger at the Surf & Sand in Laguna Beach, a bamboo-and-blowfish room that put Cantonese dishes and steaks in front of a window with the Pacific already in it, and for a time put Popo Galsini behind the bar.

He sold the West Los Angeles room to his sons in 1974 and died in Palm Springs in February 1984, at seventy-one. There is no Billingsley cocktail, no signature mug, no book. What there is instead is a map: an operator who understood that the tropical room was a business as much as a fantasy, and who ran more of them, in more towns, than the men whose names everyone remembers.