A Careful Embrace Race, Gender, and the Consumption of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific in Mid-Century Los Angeles

CHAPTER 18 A Careful Embrace Race, Gender, and the Consumption of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific in Mid-Century Los Angeles

Shawn Schwaller

Abstract

This chapter examines interconnections between race, gender, and global politics in mid-century metropolitan Los Angeles’s Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges. After opening for business in the early 1930s, Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood was the first establishment to bring a real and imagined Hawaiʻi and South Pacific into mainland American food and drink culture. This chapter argues that gendered and racialized fantasies of the South Pacific played a key role in the popularity of these establishments. They allowed patrons to experience an exotic, yet safe and predictable Hawaiʻi and South Pacific within the continental United States during World War II. Chinese, Filipino Americans and Polynesians contributed to the creation and success of these establishments as chefs, bartenders, and musicians. However, racialized and sexualized stereotypes of Chinese and Filipino American ser- vility and Polynesian hypersexuality overshadowed this influence.

Keywords

Hawaiʻi – South Pacific – Los Angeles – food and drink culture – white heterosexual masculinity – Asian American history – business – labor – architecture and interior design

“If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you,” claimed Donn Beach, owner and operator of the first South Pacific-themed restaurant and cocktail lounge in the mainland United States.1 Beach opened his establishment, Don the Beachcomber, in 1930s Hollywood, igniting a trend that came to be known as

1 Jod Kaftan, “Drink in Paradise,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, February 2010, http://www .latimesmagazine.com/2010/02/drink-in-paradise.html (accessed July 24, 2014).

“tiki” or “Polynesian pop” in late 20th-century food and drink culture. While the term tiki refers to the stylistic wood carvings found in various Polynesian cultures, which appeared as part of the décor in the businesses explored in this chapter, both this term and Polynesian pop hide the complexity of the rise of this trend in American popular culture. Tiki is a Māori and Marquesan term applied to the first man, or the creator of the first man, while usage of the term Polynesian pop hides the complex role played by both non-Polynesians and Polynesians. This chapter seeks to move the understanding of the rise and popularity of these establishments beyond simplistic labels by directing new and much-needed academic attention to the subject.2 The cultural history of the businesses explored in this chapter illustrates the way in which they linked greater Los Angeles to the broader Pacific world in both real and imagined ways. The Beachcomber started the circulation of new cultural forms in terms of restaurant and cocktail lounge interior and exterior architecture, themes, and décor, as well as new food and drink trends in the mainland United States. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, numerous establishments borrowed from Beach’s business model as the popularity of Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges spread, first across greater Los Angeles, then the nation. Beach’s version of “paradise,” however, was selective. The employ- ment of Chinese and Filipino American men in service work; the exclusion of Japanese Americans; and the ubiquitous images of nude Polynesian and Asian women in menus and other objects allayed white fears and mirrored fantasies about Asia and the Pacific, while also creating hyper-heterosexual spaces for white middlebrow clientele. As the mid-century decades progressed, Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific became more well-known across the United States. World War II and the return of veterans who had served in the Pacific Ocean and Asian theaters of war, the increase in tourism in the Pacific, Hawaiian statehood in 1959, and Cold War era U.S. expansionism brought the Pacific into a much closer rela- tionship with the United States. American popular culture depicted Asia and

2 Outside of the work of historian Sven E. Kirsten, author of several books on Tiki culture – including his latest text Tiki Pop: America Imagines Its Own Polynesian Paradise (2014) – and Adria Imada, author of Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (2012), very little academic attention has been directed at Hawaiian and South Pacific-themed restaurants and cocktail lounges in the continental U.S. Sven mentions some of the establishments explored in this chapter without exploring them in detail, while Imada’s attention to the subject is lim- ited to the hula dancers who performed at the Hawaiian Room in New York City’s Lexington Hotel.