Post #531749 by Dustycajun on Sat, May 22, 2010 5:09 PM

Did not know about Donn suing Monte.

Found this tidbit on the web about Proser and the Zombie:

Beach had good reason to protect his secret formula. "Trader Vic" was just plain Victor Bergeron until he saw Donn's joint in Hollywood. He promptly remade his own Oakland restaurant -- a hunting lodge-themed place called Hinky Dink's -- into a South Seas idyll. Trader Vic served Zombies, and in 1940 Stetson offered a straw hat it named the Zombie, "with a bow to Trader Vic." But the most egregious usurper was a Broadway publicist, producer and nightclub impresario named Monte Proser, who promoted himself as "the father of the Zombie."

Proser is best remembered as the man behind New York's Copacabana nightspot, where he hired headliners such as Frank Sinatra and Martin & Lewis. But before opening the Copa, he got a taste for exotically themed boîtes with a 1940 World's Fair bar called Monte Proser's Zombie, and then a string of East Coast restaurants called "The Beachcomber." Naturally, he featured Zombies, and even hewed to the well-worn vow that no more than two would be sold to a customer. Even aside from his theft of the Beachcomber concept, there is no doubt that Proser was the greatest fraud in the history of the Tiki craze: He didn't even like rum -- he was a Scotch-and-water man.

Syndicated columnist Lucius Beebe seemed to think the New York Beachcomber was an extension of the original California club, which he described as "a gloomy grotto of strong waters specializing in rum toddies of paralyzing dimensions." In a 1940 article headlined "Rash of Tropical Saloons Spreads Across Nation," Beebe wrote that it would soon "be possible to cross the continent without ever emerging from a Zombie swoon."

He was not thrilled by the prospect, and predicted the Tiki fad would soon fizzle, He was only off by about 30 or 40 years, which was how long it took for the deluge of faux-Polynesia finally to dry up.

Good stuff!

DC