History · Legends · 8 min read · August 2026

The Man Who Invented an Island

Tiki bars have a single founding father, and he built the first one out of driftwood, theatre props and rum nobody wanted. This is the story of Donn Beach — and why one page of our menu belongs to him.

In 1933, just as Prohibition collapsed, a 26-year-old from New Orleans named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt opened a tiny bar off Hollywood Boulevard. He had spent his youth on boats around the Caribbean and the South Pacific — some of it, the legend says, running rum — and he decorated the room with what he had collected: fishing nets, worn oars, carved figures, palm thatch. He called it Don's Beachcomber, and soon enough he was calling himself Don, too. The name stuck so well he eventually made it legal: Donn Beach.

What he served was as invented as he was. American rum drinking meant rough daiquiris and rougher punches; Donn instead layered two, three, four rums in one glass — a light Cuban for brightness, a dark Jamaican for weight, a demerara for smoke — and wrapped them in fresh lime, exotic syrups and spice blends he made himself. He called them Rhum Rhapsodies. Hollywood called them irresistible. Chaplin drank there. So did Sinatra, Gable, Dietrich.

Cover of the 1943 Don the Beachcomber menu: an illustrated map of the Pacific — **The menu, Hollywood, 1943** Donn sold the Pacific before he sold a drink. The cover of his wartime menu is a hand-painted chart of the ocean — Honolulu to Tahiti to the Marquesas, flight routes ticked off in miles — with the man himself sketched in the corner, ashore at last. California menu collection, courtesy California Historical Society, CHS2014.1476.

The coded bottles

Success bred imitators, and Donn answered with secrecy that bordered on espionage. His syrups and spice mixes went into bottles labelled only with codes — Donn's Mix #1, Spices #2, Gardenia Mix — so that even his own bartenders could not carry the recipes out the door. Some drinks died with their maker and stayed dead for decades, until drink historians (above all Jeff "Beachbum" Berry) spent years decoding old notebooks to bring them back. The Vault chapter of our menu — Zombie 1934, Jet Pilot, Pearl Diver, Cobra's Fang — is poured from those recovered codes.

"If you can't get to paradise, I'll bring it to you." — Donn Beach

His most famous invention nearly outgrew him. The Zombie — a tower of three rums and secret mixes built in 1934, allegedly to get a hungover businessman through a flight — became a national phenomenon at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where Donn's stand served it with a now-famous warning: limit two per customer. We keep the limit. It is not marketing.

1945 newspaper column naming Don the Beachcomber as the originator of the Zombie — **Monitor-Leader, 14 August 1945** Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, talking about his visit to Hollywood — and the paper noting that the originator of the Zombie was by then Maj. Don Beachcomber, running a US Army rest camp in Venice, Italy. The parenthesis is the house rule, printed as fact: *only one to a person*. Mount Clemens, Michigan, V-J Edition, page 36. Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

The war, the wife, the island

The Second World War split Donn's life in half. He served in the Army Air Forces; his ex-wife and business partner, the formidable Cora Irene "Sunny" Sund, ran the company while he was gone — and when the marriage ended, she kept the mainland restaurants. The chain grew to more than a dozen Don the Beachcombers without him. Donn took his name, his notebooks and his restlessness to Hawaii, where he built a treehouse bar in Waikiki's International Market Place and spent the rest of his life doing what he always did: inventing paradise slightly ahead of schedule. He died in Honolulu in 1989.

Every tiki bar since — every carved mug, every flaming garnish, every rum too interesting for its own good — is quoting him, knowingly or not. We prefer to quote him knowingly. Raise a Zombie to the man who invented the island we are all still visiting.