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Mondo Exotica
sounds, visions, obsessions of the cocktail generation
By Francesco Adinolfi Duke University Press
Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4156-7
Chapter One
The Tiki Hour
Tiki-ology
For Tei Tetua, the Marquesas Islands native described by Thor Heyerdahl, Tiki is the "God and chief, he who led the ancestors to the islands where we now live." Reeds' Concise Maori Dictionary is even more specific: "He is the First man, or the personification of man." Among the Maori of New Zealand, Tiki (literally, "man") was created by Tane, the Polynesian god of light, firstborn son of Papa (Mother Earth) and Rangi (Father Sky). Later, when man carved a human figure for the first time, he called his creation Tiki. In the genesis of the Society Islands (represented by Tahiti), "in the ninth and tenth Eras the scene is mainly dominated by Ki'i' (Tiki in Maori) and La'ila'i (the woman), who increased the world's population and from whom man derives his sacred right of primogeniture."
Tiki plays a fundamental role in the broad and multivalent Polynesian cosmogony. For many Westerners, his name conjures up scenes of mystery and spirituality, evoking unexplored and deeply exotic worlds. In the 1950s and 1960s, wooden or stone symbols of this anthropomorphic being began to spring up in the United States, triggering an unprecedented exotic mania. Most importantly, the tiki immediately became part of that vast family of symbols and rituals debased and then summarily annihilated by Westerners.
As if overnight, a generic and indiscriminate "tiki style" arose to embrace Ku, the warlike Hawaiian god; the Moai; the gigantic monoliths of Easter Island; and many other divinities. The more common these statues became in gardens and living rooms of thousands of American homes, the less anyone stopped to consider their distinctive or contextual meanings. Sven Kirsten, coeditor of the magazine Tiki News, notes that "in restaurants, lounges, motels, bowling alleys, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and even liquor stores, the Tiki was worshipped as [the] god of recreation."
Martin Denny, prince of exotica music, a style that swept the United States in the fifties, echoes this sentiment:
Between 1958 and 1960 many people displayed tiki in their gardens and organized Polynesian parties like luaus. They wanted to recreate a piece of Hawaii in their backyards, evoke the atmosphere of the South Seas. In a certain sense my music helped them do this. Over the years I have been asked what I thought of the tiki figure, but nothing was further from my mind. I don't know who thought up this trend, all I know is that Americans couldn't care less about the religious origins of the tiki. They welcomed it as just another novelty, and I don't believe they wanted to demean the culture that generated it. I myself, while cutting a record, would never have thought that by extracting music from its cultural roots I would be offending someone.
During the Cold War years, the tiki represented, for an army of American bachelors, housewives, and suburban commuters, a dream of escape and sexual liberation, conjuring up scenes of pagan fertility rituals and a world filled with endless sensuality. Unmistakable phallic symbols, they soared almost arrogantly in the air, highlighting an eroticism that contrasted markedly with the sexual repression of the 1950s. In other words, exotica indicated the "right" road to lust.
"To display a Tiki," explains Josh Agle, a painter and illustrator, who under the nom de surf Shag Lono, served as guitarist for the Tiki Tones, a surf and exotica group formed in 1995, "was a sign of liberation. In time, this object represented the abandonment of daily rules. People could let themselves go and enjoy themselves, returning, for one night, to their original savage states."
The physical characteristics of this divinity helped confirm its status as guarantor of sensuality. Among the Maori, in fact, the term tiki also indicates the procreative power of Tane and his sexual member. To the south of Tahiti, on the island of Raevavae, tiki-roa literally means "penis" while tiki-poto refers to the clitoris.
Unaware of the details surrounding Pollynesian erotic/spiritual mythology, Americans instinctively perceived that the South Seas represented the most accessible means by which to plunge into a world of pagan madness. Richard von Busack writes: "For the first time, our parents' generation was liberating itself from the Christian inheritance. It was as far as they dared to go. Tiki style represented an alternative way of life, like drugs and free love for the hippies. Our parents dreamed of free love in the South Seas and intoxicated themselves with strong cocktails. Their rebellion consisted in wearing a Hawaiian shirt."
In the 1920s, the ethnographic explorations of Bronislaw Malinowski introduced colleagues and university students to the annual orgiastic feast of Milamala, typical of the Melanesian farmers of the Trobriand Islands. In 1928, anthropologist Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa, a lengthy and impassioned study of the uninhibited relationships between adolescents in a primitive society. The book was reprinted in 1955 and 1961, and it became a classic of the exotica generation. It is no accident that the book is often referenced in the CD booklets of recent exotica rereleases. An irrepressible sensuality seemed to gush forth from the pages that placed sacred Western concepts like celibacy into question:
The Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to a long absent wife and mistress, believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another.... Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa. Our attitude is a compound, the final result of many converging lines of development in Western civilization, of the institution of monogamy, of the ideas of the age of chivalry, of the ethics of Christianity.
The book had an astounding impact, bringing anthropology into the realm of mass culture. Mead contributed to a general acceptance of the idea that all "primitive societies" behaved in a similar manner, and that in contrast with Americans, "savages" did not sublimate their urges. In fact, they acted them out promiscuously under the benevolent aegis of the tiki.
Gods of the Lounge
Spurred on by exotic films, a swarm of architects and designers emerged from the grayness of the Depression, specializing in tiki style. In 1934, the first tiki bar, Don the Beachcomber, opened in Los Angeles. It was a favorite haunt of Clark Gable. Fishing nets, life jackets, and pieces of wreckage decorated the walls, evoking the Pacific. Later, Vic Bergeron was inspired to open Trader Vic's, the first in a series of exotic restaurants with the same name, frequented by Richard Nixon, among other illustrious patrons.
But it was only in the 1950s that the tiki restaurant became a genuine fad. According to Otto von Stroheim, coeditor of Tiki News, soldiers back from the Pacific brought fond memories of their life overseas, turning into entrepreneurs and opening restaurants that "reproduced" the places they visited during the war. But this isn't really the case. If we consider William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness (1979) or similar dramatic stories of war in the South Seas, it becomes very difficult to imagine these "exotic businessmen" were motivated solely by nostalgia. Rather, the Pacific represented a vast, unexplored space to be mined. Ex-soldiers dedicated themselves to its commercialization while disavowing their traumatic wartime memories. Who was better equipped to do so? Large amounts of capital were invested in promoting tourism to the Pacific (particularly Hawaii), and this helped stimulate exotic curiosity.
Naturally, travelers and tourists returned from the islands with souvenirs and memories of an uncontaminated paradise, hoping to relive those very experiences in their own cities. Architects needed no convincing, especially Lloyd Lovegren, who designed many restaurants for the Victor Bergeron chain: in Denver (1954), Chicago (1957), and most significantly, inside the Hilton Hotel of Havana (1958).
At the New York branch of Trader Vic's, built in 1965 at the Plaza Hotel, customers were drawn to the enormous canoe taken directly from the set of Mutiny on the Bounty, the 1962 film starring Marlon Brando. Against a backdrop of Polynesiana and lilting music, customers savored unusual dishes and sipped fiery rum-based or simple fruit-juice cocktails. The most famous drink of the cocktail generation was the mai tai, invented in 1944 by Bergeron at his Oakland restaurant, Hinky Dink's. The recipe called for fresh-squeezed lime juice, barley syrup, orange curaçao, light rum, and Jamaican rum to be shaken and served in a tall glass filled with crushed ice. It was topped with a slice of pineapple, a cherry, and a mint sprig. Bergeron had served the concoction to two friends from Tahiti, and after their first sip, one of them exclaimed "Mai tai-Roa ae," that is "Out of this world-the best" in Tahitian! The barman promptly exported the mai tai to Hawaiian hotels like the Royal Hawaiian, the Surfsider, and the Mauna. The drink appeared on the cocktail menu of the American President Lines, and it crossed the Atlantic, landing in the sophisticated lounges of the Via Veneto in Rome. Mauro Lotti, barman of Rome's Grand Hotel, recalls:
I was the first person to serve the mai tai in Italy. I wrote to Vic Bergeron in 1966, asking him for the recipe. He sent me the ingredients and some helpful hints. For example, always use fresh lime. He was an incredible character. I also asked him for the recipe for the Scorpion, another cocktail that was a big success in his bars, and here he outdid himself. He said that I should use Puerto Rican rum, but if I couldn't find any, I should substitute African rum! Imagine finding African rum in Italy!
Back in the United States, the more prestigious hotels were competing for exotic ideas and architects. Particularly sought after was Florian Gabriel, known for his exuberant tiki style. Gabriel decorated the Luau of Beverly Hills and other splendid Polynesian temples managed by Steven Crane, the owner of Kon Tiki, an exotic chain of Sheratons. "It was an escape. People wanted to get away from whatever was humdrum," says Gabriel. "It was all-encompassing, drinks and flowers and music, it was the sum total of wonderful, and it was available to anybody if they had the money. It was a great package, a pre-Disney world for the price of a drink."
It is not by chance that on June 23, 1963, Disneyland inaugurated the Enchanted Tiki Room, the first Disney attraction to feature sophisticated audio-animatronic figures. Greeting the spectators were Fritz, Michael, Pierre, and José, four parrot emcees presiding over a seventeen-minute musical extravaganza of flora, fauna, and tiki. At the end, the public was asked to join singing flowers in a round of "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing." The original plans also called for a tiki restaurant, which was never built due to lack of space. The fact that this tropical paradise was sponsored by United Airlines from 1964 to 1973 is evidence of the great rise in tourism to the South Seas. But those who could not afford to travel might choose to visit any number of "theme" chain restaurants-Kon Tiki, Kona Kei, Don the Beachcomber, or Trader Vic's. "Because," as we have seen, "if exotica was a sound, it was also a place."
Oceanic Feelings
Most of the tikis were carved at Oceanic Arts, a firm specializing in Polynesian and tropical furnishings. The company still operates and continues to be an important source for Hollywood studios, theater companies, set designers, and surf businesses. The interior of the Aku Aku, the club seen in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), was, for example, entirely created by the designers of Oceanic, as were sets for various music videos produced by neo-exotica and surf groups. Oceanic is so famous that works by the Californian firm are on permanent exhibit at the Temple of Luxor in Las Vegas. Their premises in the L.A. suburb of Whittier occupy 4,000 square feet. Oceanic is brimming with tikis, masks made from palm trees, surfboards, carved tropical birds, and above all torches, the same ones that in the 1950s burned away in the American nights, marking off an area for a Polynesian party or the entrance to a tiki restaurant.
Leroy Schmaltz (his real name!), the company's president, has been carving tikis and wooden masks since 1956. In college he met Bob Van Oosting, his future partner with whom he would embark in the building of modern furniture. Later, he had a formative encounter with a tiki importer who lived in Samoa and who proposed that Schmaltz touch up steamer trunks to make them look "more authentic."
In the 1950s and 1960s, Oceanic Arts served as the "official exotic supplier" of American suburbia, especially in California, where there are still condominiums with such emblematic names as the Palms or Moana Lei. At the height of their popularity, these complexes contained rows of palm trees and swimming pools shaped like tropical lagoons. Tiki statues were illuminated by multicolored lights; arrays of anthropomorphic divinities presided over wild cocktail parties.
But once again, the authenticity of the tikis was the least of the developers' concerns. After all, musicals like South Pacific had paved the way for Polynesian fiction. It was as if the gods of the Pacific accepted, for a night or so, being part of the great American exotic dream. Schmaltz recalls: "We were kind of in between real Polynesian art and what Hollywood dreamt up. But ideas come from anywhere. And there were lots of carvers who showed up on the scene, a lot of them with real bizarre ideas."
The Bachelors Come Out at Night
In the tiki restaurants, the lights were low and the atmosphere deeply sensual (and kitschy). Decor included palm trees, bamboo, rattan, miniature volcanoes, artificial waterfalls, wooden masks, and of course enormous tikis. Patrons of Trader Vic's in San Francisco sat around a barbecue in a straw hut. A glass showcase displayed reproductions of Jivaro shrunken heads. Visitors to Waikiki's Don the Beachcomber crossed a wooden bridge over a "tropical" stream. Inside, some of the most famous exotica musicians entertained. One of them was Arthur Lyman, also a guest musician at such Southern California landmarks as the Bali Hai of San Diego, Latitude 20 of Torrance, and Don the Beachcomber of Marina del Rey.
Martin Denny also played in an apparently infinite number of Polynesian-themed lounges. His shows were so exotic and "wild" that the owners often had to ask the musicians to restrain themselves. At the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, the lounge personnel even begged Denny to limit his trademark birdcall imitations, convinced that he would distract gamblers in the nearby casino. Denny was a frequent guest of the Trader Vic's chain, and he appears in a number of scenes from The Forbidden Island (dir. Charles B. Griffith, 1959) shot inside the Hawaiian branch.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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