Of All the Gin Joints

BING CROSBY

1903–1977
SINGER AND ACTOR

“When you can drink champagne from a cooler in your dressing room in the middle of the day, you’ve reached the pinnacle.”

Considered one of the original “crooners” for his intimate, conversational singing style, Bing Crosby is rivaled only by Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles as the most successful pop singer of the twentieth century. He had an unprecedented run of forty-one chart-topping songs, including “White Christmas” (1942), which was for more than fifty years the best-selling single of all time. Crosby was the biggest box-office draw in the world from 1944 to 1948 and seventh highest-grossing movie star ever. He won four Academy Awards for Best Song and one for Best Actor (Going My Way, 1944; also nominated for its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, the following year). The star or featured player of ten different radio series from 1929 to 1958, Crosby’s desire to prerecord his weekly Philco Radio Time series for ABC led to the development of reel-to-reel tape machines, revolutionizing the entertainment industry. (He was also indirectly responsible for the invention of the laugh track, about which the less said, the better.) Crosby gracefully adopted the role of elder statesman as television and rock and roll rose to prominence in the sixties and even won a Peabody Award for television contributions in 1970. His unlikely duet with David Bowie (“Little Drummer Boy”) aired on a Christmas special months after his death.

THERE WAS A LOT riding on this, and Bing Crosby knew it. He’d just had a long, fruitless summer in Los Angeles. It was 1929, and Crosby and the other members of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra—twenty-four men in all—had lived comfortably in a specially built lodge on the back lot of Universal Studios, waiting to shoot a musical called The King of Jazz. Whiteman had even secured a fleet of Fords for the entire band, each with a spare tire cover emblazoned with the orchestra’s logo. Crosby picked a convertible.

The summer was fun, but the script was taking forever, so everyone split in August, having done exactly nothing. Now it was November 16, the Saturday after the first week of principal photography. Crosby went to the UCLA–St. Mary’s football game at the Coliseum, which UCLA lost 24–0. But Crosby was a St. Mary’s fan, so when the studio threw a party at the lodge that night, nobody had more to celebrate than he did.

Everyone knew Crosby had been drinking too much. He always did; Binge Crosby, they’d call him. Like clockwork, he’d be the most plastered guy after every show.

It wasn’t just the game, either; it was the movie, his career, everything. In addition to the numbers he was playing with his trio, the Rhythm Boys, he’d been given a solo vocal by Whiteman—the tune “Song of the Dawn.” His big break had finally come. All the twenty-six-year-old singer had to do was wake up Monday morning and grab the bull by the horns. And since he still had Sunday to recuperate, after the party, he volunteered to take a female guest back to her room at the Roosevelt Hotel.

Everyone knew Crosby had been drinking too much. He always did; “Binge” Crosby, they’d call him. Like clockwork, he’d be the most plastered guy after every show. Later, after he became a household name, his ability to drink in moderation—or abstain altogether—led most to believe he didn’t have an alcohol problem. And likely he didn’t. But in the late twenties, everybody seemed certain of the opposite.

Crosby and his unknown charge made it to the Roosevelt Hotel, but turning into the driveway, Crosby smashed into another car. Both he and his companion flew over the convertible’s windshield and onto the pavement. Crosby emerged shaken but unscathed. Later, he said that the girl just had cuts and scrapes, but several biographers claim that she was actually knocked unconscious. When the cops arrived, Crosby told them that another car had bumped him from behind. The only problem being, there was no other car. He spent the night in jail.

The following week, Crosby arrived in court for a hearing. He had come straight from the golf course, sporting green pants and a loud orange sweater, and the judge was not amused. When Crosby admitted he’d had a couple of drinks prior to the wreck, the judge asked the arrogant kid if he was aware of this thing called the Eighteenth Amendment—the part of the Bill of Rights that enacted Prohibition?

“Yes,” Crosby replied. “But no one pays much attention to it.”

Crosby was sentenced to sixty days in jail, of which he served forty. By then Whiteman had long since replaced him on “Song of the Dawn” and, citing an unpaid bootlegger’s bill and the DUI incident, the bandleader would fire him a few weeks after his release.

Years later, when Crosby told the DUI story himself, he spun the disappointment as a blessing. “My crooning style wouldn’t have been very good” for the song in the film, he said. “I might have flopped. I might have been cut out of the picture. I might never have been given another crack at a song in any picture.” The fact that he gave up heavy drinking soon thereafter argues that he actually may have felt otherwise.

DON THE BEACHCOMBER

1722 N. MCCADDEN PL.

IF EMPEROR MICHAEL ROMANOFF had it right, the more fun the proprietor, the more fun the venue. And, if nothing else, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt sounds like he was fun. As a young man, Gantt spent years knocking around Australia, Papua New Guina, Jamaica, and Tahiti. During his travels he gathered experience, collected cool artifacts and developed a strong taste for rum.

Gantt drifted back to the States at the tail end of Prohibition. In 1934 he rented an old tailor shop just north of Hollywood Boulevard and opened a bar. Calling it Don’s Beachcomber Café, the place was fairly simple: about two dozen seats, Gantt’s artifacts scattered about, and the names of cocktails carved into a plank above the bar. It would be America’s very first Tiki bar. And if the décor was simple, the cocktails were not.

At the time, everyone pretty much drank gin or whiskey; it was a martini or Manhattan world. Gantt would introduce rum (dark rum, light rum, gold rum, spiced rum) or at least bring it into vogue. In doing so, he would go down in history as the inventor of the tropical drink. Not a bad credit to your name, but then Gantt’s name, along with his bar’s, was changing. So popular was the tiki craze that in 1937 Don’s moved across the street. There, Gantt renamed it Don the Beachcomber and renamed himself Donn Beach. Now you can tell that this guy was fun.

Gantt famously said, “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you.” The expanded new location resembled an island getaway with palm fronds and Polynesian masks; there were Philipino waiters serving “exotic” dishes (really just standard Chinese fare) in dimly lit rooms with names such as the Cannibal Room and the Black Hole of Calcutta. Of course, there were also the wildly inventive tiki drinks, with equally inventive names: Zombie, Missionary’s Downfall, Cobra’s Fang, and the PiYi, delivered in a miniature pinapple. They were fruity but strong: The Zombie featured three shots of different rums and could make you feel like “the walking dead.” So much so, Gantt was soon forced to impose a two-Zombie limit per customer.

Don the Beachcomber fast became a celebrity hotspot, with patrons like Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, David Niven, Buster Keaton, and Frank Sinatra. Stars were even given personalized ivory chopsticks stored in a special case. The tiki craze would sweep the nation, inspiring hordes of imitators. In 1937, Victor Bergeron returned to the San Francisco Bay area from travels in the South Seas to open the first Trader Vic’s. And while Gantt would invent the Zombie, Vic would lay claim to the Mai Tai. It was the beginning of a friendly rivalry.

With the onset of World War II, Gantt went off to fight in Europe. During his time away, his ex-wife Sunny expanded Don the Beachcomber into a chain of Beachcombers. And while none of the original restaurants remain today, at one time there were sixteen. Upon Gantt’s return, the couple split up assets, Sunny keeping the mainland U.S. locations and Gantt moving to Hawaii. There he would start over again on the burgeoning Waikiki Beach with his own unaffiliated Don the Beachcomber. For the remainder of his life, Gantt would serve delicious rum concoctions to bikiniclad customers thirsty from the sun. How fun is that? He died with eighty-four cocktail recipes to his name.