Zombie Variations From the Zombie’s Creator

• Not many people saw One Night Only, the recent sci-fi rom-com with a premise that’s basically The Purge but for sex. And based on the tenor of the reviews, even fewer seemed to like it. But I saw it! And, like my fellow movie-pod cohosts, I mostly enjoyed it. Part of what I enjoyed was simply that it felt like it was set in a real place, rather than a windowless warehouse with a bunch of LED screens. The movie was shot in New York, using actual locations from the city, like Dante, an excellent aperitivo bar and cafe that has garnered attention for its dedicated Negroni menu. I’ve been to Dante a few times, so it was nice to see it on film. But of course it can be complicated to turn an actual working bar into a film set. Punch has a look at what’s involved.

• A new poll from Gallup shows a fairly large swing away from beer and toward spirits. Preferences for spirits are up 12 points since 2016, while beer is down seven.

• “Today, great options for cocktails abound across Europe, and yet you’ll still find questions about the difficulty of finding a good Martini…” Vinepair on why it’s still so difficult to find a good Martini on the continent. I suspect this is less true in the United Kingdom, where they seem to take Martinis very seriously.

From the outset, there were a lot of Zombie Copycats. Some were good drinks on their own, but many were poor imitations, since the drink’s creator, tiki godfather Donn Beach, kept the recipe secret, even from his own bartenders.

But you have to wonder: What, exactly, was Donn Beach protecting?

It was clear he had a popular drink. For a sense of how quickly and how thoroughly the Zombie took America by storm, consider that there was a bar called Zombie at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beach had only invented the drink in 1934, making it a star attraction at his Don the Beachcomber outpost in Hollywood.

But within just a few years, the Zombie had spread to the East Coast. And it was sufficiently popular and well-known that it could serve as the name for a Midway bar at one of the biggest attractions on the planet. How many drinks have that kind of cultural currency? That shelf life? There is an argument to be made that the Zombie was the most popular drink of its era.

The World’s Fair Zombie bar was owned by a fellow named Monte Proser, a fixture in the New York nightlife scene. He later ran the Copacabana, as well as another bar that would cement his entrepreneurial interest in the Zombie: a tiki joint called Beachcomber. Yes, just like Donn Beach’s standard-setting Polynesian bar across the country.

Proser’s Beachcomber opened in 1939 and it, too, specialized in Zombies. Like Donn Beach’s Polynesian getaway, Proser’s Beachcomber put strict limits on how many a customer could purchase in one visit. Like Beach, Proser understood the allure of making a drink sound dangerous. The limit turned it into a challenge. And Beach’s most famous marketing gimmick worked for Proser, too. In a three-week period in 1940, his bar sold 25,000 Zombies, according to a citation quoting a New York Herald Tribune report from the time. Proser eventually opened Beachcomber locations in Boston, Miami Beach, and other locations, turning the Beachcomber into a chain.

Beach wasn’t happy with Proser’s copycat bar. The tiki maestro was famously secretive about his recipes, numbering bottles and creating coded mixes, like Don’s Mix, a key ingredient in his original 1934 Zombie formula, so that even his own bartenders didn’t always know what they were pouring. But while he couldn’t copyright the recipe, since collections of ingredients and simple instructions are generally considered facts that cannot be intellectual property, he could protect the name of his bar via trademark.

Beach sued Proser over Proser’s Beachcomber. The details are somewhat fuzzy, and I’m not aware of any specific record of the legal filing, but the best information I know of comes from this Tiki Central reconstruction of the legal battle between Beach and Proser.

Tellingly, it starts with Beach calling East Coast newspaper gossip columnists to complain about Proser ripping off his ideas; ever the marketer, Beach knew that he was waging a battle for minds as well as court judgments. And for those who don’t remember the age before mobile phones and internet videoconferencing, this was back when long-distance calls were extraordinarily expensive.1 Beach was serious about defending his work.

What’s known is that by 1942, Beach had won the suit. The New York outpost of Proser’s Beachcomber shut down, although Proser continued to liberally borrow Beach’s ideas in various enterprises along the East Coast, as Jeff “Beachbum” Berry writes, thousands of miles from Beach and his lawyers. The world was bigger then, and just as long-distance calls were more costly, so, one imagines, was long-distance law.

It’s a fascinating episode given the profusion of Zombie copycats, the dozens if not hundreds of Zombie-inspired cocktails that still carry the name today, often with little to no relationship to the original, several of which we looked at last week. Today, there’s an entire Greek Island of Zombie riffs, at least one of which apparently uses jam, which is definitely not on the list of original, authentic, Beach-approved ingredients.

But it’s especially intriguing given that Donn Beach himself appears to have made multiple versions of his most famous creation, tinkering with the formula for decades after releasing the original out into the world. When he took Proser to court, it wasn’t really the specific recipe he was trying to protect. It was the concept, the aura, the hedonic Beachcomber lifestyle.

And, well, okay, probably the specific bar name too.

But it tells you something about the difficult-to-pin-down, ever-changing nature of one of the most famous tiki drinks of all time: The Zombie was a vibe, not a recipe. Like a hit song, everyone wanted to make a remix. Including the drink’s own creator.

So this week, as our month of Zombies continues, I want to look at a pair of Zombie iterations that, as best as anyone can tell, come from Donn Beach himself.

Both of these drinks date to the 1950s, and while both depart from the original specifications (a bit lighter and juicier in one case and somewhat differently tuned in the other) they are both exceptional examples of the form. They are (probably) Donn Beach drinks. And they taste like it.

Notably, both have somewhat less rum than the 1934 original. They are not exactly low-ABV. But if you’re looking for relatively less boozy, yet still authentic, Zombies, these are both worth checking out.

The first of these variations dates to 1950. It’s lighter than the 1934 original, and juicier, with some lemon juice that makes it a bit suspect.

Was this really a Donn Beach creation? Probably. Most likely. If you had to bet. But we don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that it’s delicious.