He was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt at the turn of the century, but by his death, all knew him as Donn Beach. He even legally changed his name to reflect the moniker.
Today, he’s best known as the grandfather of tiki — the romanticized, often escapist take on the South Pacific. It’s defined by its lively aesthetics like colorful Hawaiian shirts and fruity, rum-forward drinks like the zombie and mai tai. Beach is the subject of The Donn of Tiki, a documentary from Max Well and Alex Lamb, which serves to demystify the life behind the showman.
When Beach was young, he traveled around the world twice, hitting locales like Europe, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. He eventually, as Well puts it, washed onto the shores of prohibition-era Hollywood. There, he teamed up with his brother, who worked on silent films, and became a technical advisor on some South Pacific-oriented projects. At the same time, the duo engaged in rum-running.
“At this time in history, rum had really fallen off the palette of most Americans. They didn’t enjoy rum. Whiskey had taken over. But during Prohibition, rum was something that was accessible. And it was safe to drink because it was made in actual distilleries and smuggled to the U.S.,” Lamb says. “It [was] a little safer than bathtub gin. You knew if you were drinking rum, you weren’t going to go blind.”
During that period, Well says, Beach opened the first iteration of what would become Don The Beachcomber — the world’s first tiki bar. It officially opened on Hollywood Boulevard the day after prohibition ended in 1933.
“Which leads to the question of, ‘where do you get rum the day after Prohibition?’ It gives us evidence that he was running this bar long before Prohibition ended, because just the logistics of opening a bar the day after is nearly impossible,” Lamb points out.
What set the bar apart from others at the time were his complex drinks and the ingredients used to make them, such as fresh juices and homemade syrups.
“Donn knew how to make drinks. Because of his travels, he knew how to make daiquiris and planter’s punch. He knew how to make rum palatable to an American audience,” Well says. “And that really was the birth of the craft cocktail, of creating something that was different than anyone ever had before.”
The documentary also features Beach himself — or at least his voice.
Lamb and Well uncovered a 1986 interview in a University of Hawaii library. “We were just taken with Donn’s charisma and his personality. We felt like we really needed to have his voice in the film. And then we wanted some strong visuals to go with that,” Well says.
Interspersed throughout the film is an animated, stop-motion version of Beach — dressed in shorts and a safari hat while holding a cigar in one hand and a drink in another.
An animated, stop-motion version of Donn Beach is featured in “The Donn of Tiki.” Photo courtesy of Alex Lamb and Max Well.
“The man Donn Beach — he was born Ernest Raymond Gantt. Totally different. But he transformed into this character … and he played that part for many decades.”
Life took Beach across the globe, and he experienced the ups and downs of business ventures across the U.S., military service during World War II, and even three marriages.
He met his third wife, Phoebe, late in life. In an interview, she described her husband as having mixed feelings about his tiki culture and how it evolved over the years since his Hollywood bar opened.
“[Beach] had this incredible attention to detail and authenticity. This is a guy who was having fresh leis flown in from Hawaii to Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. He didn’t have to do that,” Lamb says. “Nobody would have known the difference. But to Donn, the details were really, really important.”
Lamb says that over the decades, tiki moved away from the authenticity and instead, “it was an umbrella in your drink and a plastic lei around your neck. That would have pained him to see. And I think we’ve come full circle now. There are a lot of new bars which care very deeply about the recipes. And they’re much, much more aware of the art and artifacts that are on display and the history of the Indigenous people.”
An archival photo of Donn Beach. Photo courtesy of Alex Lamb and Max Well.