Stephen Crane

The other tiki barons arrived by way of the sea, or at least by way of a good story about it. Joseph Stephenson Crane arrived from a cigar store in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his family sold tobacco on South Washington Street and he did drama and debate at the high school. He took a business degree from Wabash College in 1937, married, briefly ran the family store, and went to Hollywood in 1939. What he found there was a Columbia contract, three pictures, and a marriage to Lana Turner in July 1942 that had to be annulled because his first divorce was not yet final — they remarried the following March and were divorced again by August 1944. Their daughter Cheryl was born in 1943. A quarter century later, asked about the film career, he told an Associated Press reporter what everybody already knew: “To be honest, I was a very poor actor.”

He turned out to be a superb host. In 1953 Crane and a silent partner — Al Mathes, a former professional boxer with restaurants of his own — bought the Beverly Hills business of Harry “Sugie” Sugarman, whose Tropics had been pouring star-named cocktails at 421 North Rodeo Drive since the mid-1930s. The two men incorporated as Macrane Enterprises, using halves of both surnames, and on July 25, 1953 — his daughter's tenth birthday — Crane reopened the gutted room as The Luau. A lava-rock waterfall and a bamboo bridge over a stocked stream stood between Rodeo Drive and the door; inside were two dining rooms, an indoor lagoon sailed by miniature ships, and on the front bar Ray Buhen, one of Don the Beachcomber's original Filipino barmen. Crane signed the menus “STEFOOMA, High-Talking Chief of the Luau,” which was a joke at the expense of Donn Beach and Trader Vic and also an announcement that he intended to be counted with them. For the 1961 remodel and the rooms that followed he hired the decorator Florian Gabriel and the architect George Nakashima — not the studio furniture maker of the same name — the team that also dressed the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale and the Mauna Loa in Detroit.

Then he did the thing neither rival thought to do. Trader Vic's rooms were already inside Hilton hotels; in 1958 Crane made the answering deal with Sheraton, and Stephen Crane Associates began building Polynesia into other people's lobbies. The first Kon-Tiki opened that year in Montreal's Sheraton-Mount Royal — a windowless room on Peel Street with lagoons and colored light, where the weather could not reach it — and the formula traveled: Portland, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, and at last Waikiki in 1971. The grandest versions dispensed with the single room altogether. At Kon-Tiki Ports in Chicago and Boston, and at Ports o' Call thirty-seven floors above Dallas, a diner was walked through Macao, Saigon, Papeete and Singapore over the course of an evening — a tiki bar rebuilt as a package tour. At its height, Martin Cate told a Tales of the Cocktail audience in 2012, the company was turning over ten million dollars a year.

Nothing of it survives. Crane read the tide as well at the end as at the beginning: with Polynesian dining out of fashion he sold The Luau in 1978 for more than four million dollars and retired at sixty-two, and the building came down the following year for the Rodeo Collection. Sheraton let the rooms go one by one. He died on February 6, 1985 at the Pauma Valley house he shared with Helen Demaree Crane, of a rare anemia he had lived with for years, one day short of his sixty-ninth birthday — and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Crawfordsville, a few streets from where the cigar store had stood. Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic left names that outlived them. Crane left no bar and no brand at all — only the crockery, which is the most collected in tiki, and the idea that a man could sell the South Seas by the hotel lobby.