The Cocktail Hour

In 1956, the United States Navy published the answer to a question I would never have guessed needed an official one.

The book was called The Answer Book on Naval Social Customs, and one of its entries asked: How long do you remain at a cocktail party? The Navy didn't hedge. "You should stay for two or three drinks."

Two or three. I would love to have been in the room where somebody settled on that number, because it means somebody said two was too few, somebody said four was too many, and everybody nodded.

And think about how strange the unit is. Every other social obligation you've ever had is measured in time, or in how the room feels, or in whether the host has started stacking chairs. The Navy measured this one in drinks.

The Air Force, three years later, went with a stopwatch. In 1959, its guide told officers to stay "thirty to forty minutes at least."

So by the end of the 1950s, if you were in the American military, you could look up in writing exactly how long to stand in a stranger's living room holding a glass. And if the military had a rule, you can bet civilian society had a bigger one.

Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette, in the 1952 edition, put it this way: "Cocktail time is usually past the tea hour, from five to seven." There it is. A start time and an end time, in print, for an event that had no business being that organized. And then, a few lines later in the same chapter, she does something genuinely charming. She surrenders. "No cocktail party ever ends on schedule."

That’s Vanderbilt’s whole position: here’s exactly when it starts, and by the way, it will never end when we say.

Emily Post, on the same shelf, was more relaxed about the paperwork. By 1955, she was calling the cocktail party "the most popular way for the modern hostess to entertain more guests," and she said invitations could be "in any form." Her 1953 edition even had a subhead on how to say no to one, which tells me the invitations were arriving fast enough that declining took instruction.

And who tends the bar? In 1959, a book called Service Etiquette settled it in one blunt line: "At small cocktail parties, the host usually acts as bartender."

One more voice from that shelf, and I'm going to ask you to hold on to him, because he matters later. David Embury's Fine Art of Mixing Drinks came out in 1948. It was a book of proportions, written for the person behind the bar. And right in the middle of his advice, he tells that person who else will be in the room. "You will find," he wrote, "one or two teetotalers at practically every cocktail party."

A bartender's manual, from 1948, planned for the guest who wasn't drinking. Remember that.

By the middle of the decade, the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn can show you the paper trail of how big this had gotten. It keeps a small booklet put out by National Distillers sometime between 1955 and 1960, called Fine Cocktails Made Easy, and the museum's caption says that throwing a cocktail party, whether to impress business associates or entertain neighbors, was the "in" thing to do.

That's a lot of rules for an evening that was supposed to be casual. Nobody voted on any of it. Nobody asked whether five to seven was the right window, or two drinks the right length of stay.

So who set the clock?

The first answer is a hotel.

Historian Stephen Visakay traced the cocktail hour back to the five o'clock tea in New York's hotels. From there, he wrote, it was "a short leap to the 5 o'clock cocktail hour." By the 1950s, the whole thing had moved out to the suburbs and become, in Visakay's words, a common suburban ritual. The hour had a pedigree. It was an older habit that had traded its drink and changed its address.

Which leaves the question of what was in the glass, and who was holding it. And I think the best way to answer that is to throw a party.

So here's what we're going to do. It's a Saturday in 1955. You're the host. The party is made up, but every fact I hand you along the way is real.

First, you need a house.

In 1953, a builder in Levittown, on Long Island, ran an ad for a model called The Rancher. It cost $8,990, or $57 a month, and the price included a Bendix washer and a General Electric range. Levittown's first residents had moved in on October 1, 1947. By 1951, there were 17,447 homes. Many of the early buyers were veterans, and a veteran's way into a house like that ran through the GI Bill, which guaranteed loans that private lenders made. By 1955, four point three million home loans had gone through, with a total face value of thirty-three billion dollars.

So the house is backed by a government guarantee. The doorbell is about to ring, and you're the bartender. Service Etiquette said so.

What do you pour? If it's a martini, you're working in a tradition that changed more than you'd think.

The first American cocktail book was Jerry Thomas's, in 1862. By 1900, Harry Johnson's bartending manual had a Marguerite. By 1904, Frank Newman's book had a Dry Martini. Both were built the same way: equal parts gin and vermouth. Half and half.

Then Embury, in 1948, did the math on what people actually wanted. For the average palate, he wrote, the ratio was five parts gin to one of vermouth. His own preference was about seven to one. And for the drier crowd, he allowed, it could run as high as ten to one.

So let's do the math. Equal parts is half vermouth. At five to one, the vermouth is one part in six. At seven to one, one in eight. At ten to one, one in eleven. In a bit less than half a century, vermouth went from half the glass to as little as one part in eleven. It stopped being an ingredient and started being a rumor. And a matter of taste turned into a printed ratio, with a number you could cite at a party.

And if a guest asks for an Old Fashioned? You're muddling an orange slice and a cherry into the bottom of the glass, which the purists mocked. Robert Simonson, who wrote a book on the drink, puts the high point of that fruit-salad style in the 1950s and 1960s. So at your party, one drink is getting drier by the ratio, and the other has more fruit in it than a breakfast.

Now, you've got forty people coming, and one of you. Luckily, it's 1955, and the kitchen is on your side.

By 1950, four in five American households had a mechanical refrigerator, up from about forty-four percent a decade earlier. And on your counter, if you're feeling fancy, there's a blender. Waring introduced its Miracle Mixer in September of 1937 for twenty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents, and the advertising pitched it as a way to make "frozen daiquiris." The Smithsonian, which holds one, calls it a bartender's aid. A bartender's job, handed to a motor.

And on the shelf, there's the bottle with the strangest pitch of the lot. In 1939, Heublein bought the American rights to the Smirnoff name for fourteen thousand dollars. The early marketing line was "White Whiskey, No Smell, No Taste," and it started life as a mislabel. The selling point was that you wouldn't find any. American vodka sales ran about 1.3 million gallons in 1951 and 19.4 million by 1960.

Consider what the federal definition of vodka asks for: neutral spirits, without distinctive character, aroma, or taste. A category legally defined by what it lacks. A spirit you could pour into anything, in front of anybody, without anyone being able to say you'd done it wrong. For a host with forty guests and no bartender, that's less a drink than a safety net.

Okay. The doorbell rings. People are coming in. Now I want you to look around your own living room, because the numbers say something odd about it.

Gallup had been asking Americans since 1939 whether they used alcoholic beverages or were total abstainers. In 1950, sixty percent said they drank. In 1958, it was fifty-five. Across the whole decade, the average came out to fifty-nine. So in a country with a cocktail hour built into its etiquette books, roughly four adults in ten told a pollster they didn't drink at all. Fifty-five percent was the lowest Gallup had ever recorded, and it stood as the lowest until 2025\.

And the people who did drink weren't mostly drinking what you're pouring. In 1950, beer made up about half of the alcohol Americans drank. Spirits were about thirty-eight percent. For all the weight it carried in the etiquette books, your party was a minority habit in a country that mostly drank beer.

It even had an organized opposition. Historian Pamela Pennock found Gallup polls running from the 1930s into the mid-1950s in which about a third of Americans said they favored restoring national Prohibition. In the same account, a House committee received more than two hundred thousand letters from Methodists. So the guest standing at the back of your room with the empty hands might be more than a courtesy to plan for. For a good share of the country, your whole evening was a bad idea.

Which brings us back to Embury's line. One or two teetotalers at practically every cocktail party. He was counting them in.

And the glass he planned for them had a history of its own. In 1930, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union published a booklet called Prohibition Punches, and it described its recipes, in a phrase that sounds like it came from a bartender, as a cocktail that satisfies but does not inebriate. The Shirley Temple shows up in the record by 1946, and the Roy Rogers by 1950, according to Merriam-Webster's dating of first known use. Shirley Temple herself was asked about the drink on NPR, decades later, and her answer was short: "I had nothing to do with it." At least three different people have claimed they invented it.

That's a lineage. A guest who wasn't drinking got a drink with a name, a history, and several competing inventors, and I'll put that up against most cocktails of the decade.

So the party is rolling. The martinis are drier than they were in 1904, the vodka is tasteless, the blender is roaring, and your teetotaler has a drink worth having. Everything in the room was built to be easy.

Then, somewhere around drink two, somebody says, "Show us the rumpus room."

And this is where the party leaves the living room, because in more and more houses, the rumpus room had a bar that looked like it had been shipped in from the South Pacific. How it got there is a story that starts about twenty years earlier, and nowhere near a suburb.

It starts in Hollywood in 1933, with two guys who weren't entirely honest about themselves.

The first called himself Donn Beach. He was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt around 1907, in Texas or Louisiana, depending on whose account you read, and in 1933 he opened a little bar on North McCadden Place in Hollywood called Don's Beachcomber. One profile of him put it politely: he spent years embellishing the details of his extraordinary life. I'd say that's about right for a man who named himself after a beach.

The second was Victor Bergeron, born in San Francisco around 1902 or 1903 and raised in Oakland. When he was six, tuberculosis cost him a leg. For years afterward, he told customers it was a shark.

Think about that, because it's the founding energy of an entire American genre. One of them invented a name, the other one invented a shark, and these were the men who gave the country its idea of paradise.

Bergeron opened a place called Hinky Dinks in Oakland in 1934. Around 1937, he made a trip south and walked into Don the Beachcomber. By one account, he waited about ninety minutes for a seat. Picture the man with the shark story, standing at the door of the man with the beach name, politely waiting his turn. He bought decor, he went home, and he renamed his bar Trader Vic's. What he didn't walk out with was Donn's recipes, and the reason is the best part of the story.

See, Donn's recipes weren't written the way recipes were written. His bartenders worked from numbered bottles. A drink was built from something called Don's Mix, or Spices Number Four, instead of from ingredients with names on them. If you were another bartender looking over the bar, you could watch the whole performance and learn almost nothing.

It stayed that way for decades. Then a writer named Jeff Berry went looking for what was in those bottles, and he worked from a notebook that had belonged to a bartender named Dick Santiago. It was written in code. Don's Mix turned out to be two parts white grapefruit juice to one part Spices Number Four, and a bartender named Bob Esmino was the one who identified that last ingredient. "It was a cinnamon syrup." Berry published the reconstruction in a book called Sippin' Safari, in 2007.

So the legendary secret, guarded for decades behind numbered bottles, was grapefruit and cinnamon. But guarding it was the entire point. A recipe nobody can read is a recipe nobody can copy, and a drink nobody can copy has to be bought at the bar.

And buying it came with rules. The Zombie, for instance. Donn said he invented it in 1934. The first mention in print is dated June 1, 1938. Then, on December 29, 1939, Women's Wear Daily reported the limit: "Unless you prove that you can take it, all you are allowed is two Zombies."

Two. At a bar. I'd like to meet the person who got turned away from a third and took it personally.

Then there's the Mai Tai, which people still argue about. Donn's claim goes back to a drink called the Mai Tai Swizzle, in 1933. Bergeron's is the drink he made in 1944. Berry wrote that equally strong evidence suggests Vic was aware of Donn's. The seventeen-year-old Wray rum Bergeron said he used is gone from the market, and the drink isn't in either of his books, the one from 1946 or the one from 1947. By 1953, it had reached Hawaii, by way of the Matson line.

So a drink with two claimants and a disappearing key ingredient was on its way to the islands it was named for, and the recipe was changing at every stop.

Still, a cult bar in Hollywood and another in Oakland don't put a hut in your rumpus room. For that, you need a war.

Sixteen point four million Americans served in the Second World War, and the Pacific was one of its two great theaters. In 1948, James Michener won the Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific. The musical built on it, South Pacific, opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, and the film came out on March 19, 1958.

In between, a Norwegian named Thor Heyerdahl put a balsa raft called Kon-Tiki onto the Pacific on April 28, 1947. It took a hundred and one days to cross about forty-three hundred miles, and the documentary about it won an Academy Award on March 20, 1952.

In 1957, a bartender in Honolulu named Harry Yee made a drink called the Blue Hawaii. In 1959, Hawaii became a state: the Admission Act was signed on March 18, and the proclamation came on August 21. That same year, a bandleader named Martin Denny, who had started playing at a bar in Honolulu called the Shell Bar in 1956, watched his album Exotica reach number one, on June 22.

So the Pacific was on Broadway, in the movie theaters, on a record chart, and on the map. And what a tiki bar gave an American was a way to bring all of it home. Sven Kirsten, who wrote the Book of Tiki, describes it moving into the backyard and the rumpus room. The cocktail hour had its hours and its ratios. Tiki gave it a costume, and the costume was easy to buy.

Now look around your rumpus room, and here's the catch with the costume. The place it was copied from didn't make the drinks. A Smithsonian piece on tiki makes the point bluntly: there was no rum in the South Pacific. The look was borrowed from the islands, and the drinks were put together in Hollywood and Oakland.

So who actually made them? Go back to those numbered bottles. Somebody had to pour from them.

In 1934, a man named Ray Buhen went to work for Don the Beachcomber. He was Filipino, one of a group of Filipino bartenders known as the Four Boys. Berry has said that if there was any new tropical drink invented here, it was invented by a Filipino. And the legend that survived is about the owners.

So here's what I think the 1950s actually did.

The decade had a fixed hour, five to seven, a fixed length of stay, two or three drinks, and a fixed ratio for the martini, printed and citable. It even had a fixed look for every drink that was supposed to feel like somewhere else. All of it got written down and sold, in books, in booklets, in bottles, in appliances, and it held. That's the part we remember.

What it didn't hold on to were the people. The bartenders who worked out the drinks. The islands the look was taken from.

That's my reading of it. The decade fixed the form and lost the people. I don't think anyone set out to do that. But look at what got written down and what didn't, and the record is exact about the hour, the ratio, and the length of the stay, and very quiet about who made the drinks.

Now, there was one thing in all of this that people kept trying to rewrite: the bill.

On April 20, 1961, President Kennedy sent Congress a message on taxation, and in the middle of it was a sentence aimed straight at the expense-account deduction. "The slogan, 'It's deductible,' should pass from our scene."

It did not pass from the scene. Congress answered with the Revenue Act of 1962, which tightened the rules, including a requirement that an expense be directly related to the business, and then kept the deduction. Kennedy wasn't even the first to try. A bill in 1952 and another in 1960 had gone after the same ground. Three swings, and it was still standing.

The critics kept coming, though. In the 1976 presidential debate, Jimmy Carter named the business deductions as a target: "jet airplanes, first-class travel, the fifty-dollar martini lunch." Two years later, as president, he put it this way, in February of 1978: "As for the famous three-martini lunch, I don't care how many martinis anyone has with lunch, but I am concerned about who picks up the check."

I love that line. His complaint wasn’t the martinis themselves, but the check.

And the culture he was aiming at was real. Jerry Della Femina, who ran an advertising agency in the 1960s, described it to NPR in 2010. At a typical lunch, he said, "the bartender would be shaking the martinis as we walked in."

The deduction did get smaller by law. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 cut the deduction for business meals to eighty percent. A 1993 act cut it to fifty, effective January 1, 1994. Nobody abolished the lunch. They just kept putting a smaller number on it.

Here's the funny part. While Washington spent decades fighting over the lunch, the glass in front of it was quietly changing.

By the mid-1970s, the numbers were turning. Per person of drinking age, American wine consumption rose about twenty-four percent between 1975 and 1982, while spirits fell from about 2.6 gallons to about 2.4. Gallup's share of adults who drank hit its peak, seventy-one percent, in 1976 through 1978, higher than any year in the 1950s. A light beer from Miller went national in 1975. And in the early 1980s, wine coolers went from about 7.7 million gallons in 1983 to 36.7 million in 1984. One year. That's nearly a fivefold jump.

Now, I'd love to hand you the reason for all of that, but I can't. The numbers show what changed, but they don't tell me why. People have offered reasons, and some of them may be right, but a measured number and a proposed reason are different things, and the evidence stops at the first one.

What I can tell you is what happened to the old drinks. Somebody went back for them.

Starting in the late 1990s, people began writing them down again. Jeff Berry published his Grog Log in 1998. Sven Kirsten's Book of Tiki came out in September of 2000. Smuggler's Cove opened in San Francisco in 2009. And Berry's own bar, Latitude 29, opened in New Orleans in November of 2014.

The old rooms had a harder time of it. Kahiki, the supper club in Columbus, Ohio, that opened in early 1961, closed on August 25, 2000\. The Mai-Kai, in Fort Lauderdale, had opened in 1956, joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, shut down in October of 2020 after a roof collapse, and reopened on November 21, 2024, after a restoration that cost more than twenty million dollars. And then there's the Tonga Room, which has the best origin of any of them: a hotel swimming pool built in 1929 that became a make-believe ship called the S.S. Tonga in 1945.

But the survivor I keep coming back to is a good deal smaller.

On April 28, 1961, eight days after the President said the slogan should pass, a bartender opened a bar at 4427 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The bartender was Ray Buhen, the same Filipino bartender who had joined Don the Beachcomber in 1934. The bar was called Tiki-Ti.

It's still owned and run by the Buhen family. It has twelve bar stools, a handful of small corner tables, and a little standing room. Roughly forty people fit, and it's tight and frequently crowded. In May of 2015, it abruptly announced that it was closing indefinitely. It reopened after some routine maintenance and reconstruction, and it's still open today.

So look at those two things, eight days apart, in the same spring. One was a tax rule, argued over by presidents. The other was a bar with twelve stools.

The deduction has been rewritten more than once. The bar still has its twelve stools.

The 1950s fixed the hour, and the ratio, and the look. What's still standing is a bar run by the family of one of the men who made the drinks.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.