“I couldn’t help thinking about Vicki. We’d had some great times in Palm Springs – making love under the clear desert sky, romantic dinners at the Biltmore, cocktails on a yacht on the Salton Sea and “Two Sleepy People” playing endlessly on the hi-fi. All those memories started getting to me. That’s the trouble with the Springs — something in the atmosphere of the place does weird things to your emotional state, and that desert voodoo was hitting me big time…”
“My platoon was catching some much-needed R & R. We were on a secluded white sand beach on a small nameless island in a chain of nameless South Sea islands. We drank beer, sprawled on the sand. splashed about in the clear, salt water and talked about women. We were six days and five hundred miles from the war.”
“I eased into the Chevy and very carefully joined the rush hour traffic heading west. The sun was in my eyes the whole trip, and by the time I reached Rodeo Drive I was in a bad way. I valet parked, nodded to the doorman and brushed past the ferns into the Luau’s air-conditioned interior. It was early and the place was virtually empty, so I chose a table over by the tropical pool at the back of the room. It was secluded, but I could still see everyone who came in and, if they were looking, they could see me. The gentle sound of the mini waterfall behind me helped soothe my nerves, but something told me they wouldn’t stay that way long…I ordered food and a Zombie cocktail. In my state the Zombie seemed appropriate. The waitress who served me seemed worried by my appearance, so, after she left I shifted my chair back so my face was more in shadow. Maybe people would think I was one of the wooden Tiki statues dotted around the place…..Half an hour later Vicki arrived. She glanced round the room, picked me out and hurried over. “Why the hell do we always have to meet here?” she said as she reached the table, “It’s always full of Hollywood phonies and hookers who think they’re Ava Gardner.”
The Luau was probably one of the most upmarket Tiki bars in Los Angeles during the 1950s and its atmospheric Polynesian decor and well crafted Rum cocktails made it a firm favorite with the Hollywood elite of the time. Opened by former actor and playboy Steve Crane in 1953, The Luau had become so famous by 1958 that Crane struck a deal with the Sheraton Hotel group to open a chain of Polynesian bars to replicate the Luau in cities across America.
Sadly, the golden age of Tiki Bars ended during the 1970s but over the last twenty years they have started to make something of a comeback thanks to the Tiki revival movement that began on the cusp of the new millennium, and to recent books like “Tiki Pop” by Sven Kirsten that show just how prevalent the Polynesian Pop phenomenon was in Mid-Century America .
“It had been a clear summer night, about a year before, and I was heading back from Vegas with a chorus girl I’d met that weekend. We were doing 70 mph on an empty stretch of road just outside of Barstow, when suddenly the darkness was blasted away by a brilliant flash of light. For a few seconds of eternity, everything was stark white with harsh black shadows. And then there was a clap of distant thunder. Carol had been almost asleep when the midnight sun struck. She grabbed my arm and screamed and then it was night again. I thought the Russians had finally done it. No four-minute warning, just BOOM! But the world hadn’t ended, it was one of our own A-bombs being detonated somewhere out in the desert. They said later, on the radio, that it was the biggest ever tested, about twenty times bigger than the Fat Boy they dropped on Hiroshima. I tried calming Carol down but she was almost hysterical. “Don’t worry, nuclear war will never happen.” I kept saying, but my heart was pounding and part of me knew I was lying. It could happen anytime. And when that time came, it would be sayonara everything. Goodbye cruel world.”
From 1951 until 1962 over one hundred Atomic weapons were detonated above ground at the US Military’s test site in the Nevada desert just outside Las Vegas. 148The mushroom clouds from the bombs could be seen at a distance of almost one hundred miles away and “bomb-watching” became something of a tourist attraction in Vegas itself. The radio-active fall-out from the tests drifted away from the city and were borne by the prevailing winds over southern Utah, where, tragically, increases in many types of cancer were reported from the mid-1950s through the 1980s.