Cora Irene "Sunny" Sund

A 1948 magazine profile of Don the Beachcomber put it about as plainly as the era allowed: Hollywood had discovered Donn, his Zombie, and his Cantonese kitchen, but they failed to discover Sunny Sund. She was the one who signed for the money, hired the cooks, and — after 1940 — owned the name outright. Her road there was nobody's idea of a hospitality career: born Cora Irene Sund in Espelie, a speck in northwestern Minnesota, in December 1909, she taught school before following a Russian-émigré antiques dealer to New York as his secretary. The engagement went badly and publicly; in 1935 she sued him for breach of promise, a six-figure "love balm" suit that made national papers and that she lost after conceding she had been the one to call it off. She turned up next in Los Angeles, waiting tables at the Tick-Tock Tea Room.

There she met Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, a Hollywood Hotel bartender with a room full of flotsam and a gift for rum. They married; she borrowed the money. By the accounts that survive, the division of labor was set almost immediately and never really changed — Donn greeted the trade and made it rain on the roof, and Sunny ran the business. It was her decision in 1937 to move the operation across McCadden Place into a far larger room, and hers to build the thing that actually kept the tables turning: a serious Chinese chef, oyster sauce and plum sauce and lychee nuts imported direct, portholes cut into the kitchen wall so guests could watch the wok work, a full-time menu adviser to walk them through it, coats required on the men, and no cigarette girls. The South Seas were his. The house rules were hers.

The marriage ended in 1940 — reported variously as an annulment and as a divorce — and she came out of it holding the restaurants and the trademark, with Donn barred from opening a Don the Beachcomber anywhere in the United States. That same year she opened the Chicago branch, choosing a young Filipino bartender named Mariano Licudine to build its bar; he would spend sixteen years there before Florida poached him for the Mai-Kai. When Donn went into the Army Air Corps in 1942, Sunny ran the whole thing alone and expanded it anyway. He came home in 1945, signed the mainland restaurants over to her for good, kept a consultant's title and a figurehead's name, and sailed for Waikiki. She stayed in Burbank and built out the chain — some sixteen locations at its height, from Palm Springs to Las Vegas to Chicago — while remaining, to most of the people drinking in her rooms, entirely invisible. To the staff she was Mamma C. I.

She sold the company in 1968, reportedly to Getty Enterprises, and died on January 8, 1974, at sixty-four; she is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. Donn Beach is fairly credited with inventing the tiki bar. Sunny Sund is the reason there was ever more than one — the manager who turned a twenty-four-seat gimmick into an industry other people would spend forty years imitating. Nearly every Beachcomber pin on this chart, ghost or otherwise, was opened on her signature. Her daughter Karen published a memoir of her in 2023, which is, astonishingly, the first book-length account of the woman who owned the whole thing.