Luxury Link 7

The next morning we departed for the second of the three places we had intended to spend our nights in, on Mo'orea. The first had been Tahitian, the third would be French, but this one was All-American. The Club Bali-Hai was a Southern Sea romantic legend and, poolside at 5:30 pm, every night except Wednesday, the narrative was retold by one of its original wayfarers.
“Pull up a chair.” Said the old guy with the silver crew cut. “Swing in. Swing in.” He was sporting two small airline bottles of José Cuero tequila, and a grey sweatshirt. Hammered and Happy.
“Welcome to Happy Hour with Muk.” He said, pouring the contents of one of his bottles over ice. “I’m Muk.”
In 1959, Donald ‘Muk’ McCallum was in his early ‘30s, and a salesman in his family’s Southern California sporting goods business during the day. By night, he ran a tiki bar called Miss Boo's in Costa Mesa on the side. He shared an apartment in Corona del Mar on Acacia street, with two friends. Jay had gone to Newport Harbor High School with Muk, and then to USC, and then to work as a broker at the Pacific Stock Exchange in Los Angeles, leaving every day before dawn. Hugh was an attorney, and had been a classmate of Jay’s at USC. It was the end of the Eisenhower era, and the beginning of their disenchantment. Every night, they traded their suits and slacks for Hawaiian shorts, cranked up the Tahitian music on the stereo, consumed prodigious amounts of exotic potent mixed drinks, and dreamed of different lives beyond their sunsets. They’d end up down at the harbor full of sailboats, and wished that one of them would take them away from the rat race. Then one day, Hugh signed onto a ninety-foot yacht, which had entered a race to Honolulu. It sailed on to Tahiti, and Hugh got off in paradise. The sultry scenery and opportunities for romance hooked him through the gills, and he found an elderly California couple that wanted to sell their vanilla plantation on Mo'orea. Hugh rolled the name around on his tongue, and in his head. Urufara. He returned home to willing accomplices. Muk sold Miss Boo’s, Jay sold his stock-exchange seat, and their friends bought shares in the scheme.
By June of 1960 the stockbroker, the attorney and the salesman had sailed across the Sea of the Moon on a smoky diesel freighter, vowing never to return. But it turned out that Hugh had been a better lawyer than a farmer. Only two of their nearly 400 acres could be cultivated. The price of vanilla crashed when African farmers flooded the market. French authorities, determined to prevent their islands from becoming a haven for poor foreign dreamers, would only grant them six-month visas. Their farming failures by day were more than offset by their successes with the local vahines at night, drinking and dancing and singing in the One Chicken Inn, where the barstools were overturned crates.
“I'll tell you this.” Muk winked. “Sex on the Beach wasn't just the name of a drink in those days. We lived in a beat-up old shack with coconut fronds on top, from a local politician who had four bungalows at a hotel he was desperate to get rid of. Jay and Hugh and I were desperate to stay. We made a deal.”
The hotelier got the Americans three much-coveted renewable five-year visas, and the boys got a new learning curve. They knew as much about running a hotel as about vanilla farming, but it all came together slowly. Hugh drew up the business papers, and went about making repairs and upgrading the shacks. Jay was the business brain, restricting their rampant aspirations to a strict budget. And Muk, always the jovial public salesman, greeted the freighters at the dock, and cajoled visitors to stay at the Hotel Bali Hai instead of one of the spots near the harbor.
“We used local workers to run the restaurant and do most everything. We knew them all.” Muk said, looking around. “Hell, we probably all dated their mothers.”
“Things were pretty wild in the old days.” He said. “We used to be the TV for the whole island. People would come down and watch us.”
In 1962, a Life magazine writer and photographer named Carl Mydans, returning from an atomic bomb test at Johnston Island, stumbled across their South Pacific playboy inn. There were airline stewardesses. Mydan’s plan to stay one night turned to three weeks, and the making of a myth. The boys thought they were relating a folk tale of hardship and endurance in the face of adversity, but the photos in the December issue told a different story- the trio of muscular, tanned smiling American Bali Hai boys, in swim trunks and sandals, carousing with beautiful girls in tropical pools by day, and partying deep into each Polynesian night became an overnight sensation in tens of millions of eyeballs, back in the States. Their phones ran hot with reservations, and the hotel rapidly grew from a small collection of ramshackle bungalows to a 65-unit resort, one of the largest in these most Society of islands. By the early 1970s, the boys had built new hotels on Raitea and Huahine, and introduced the first overwater bungalow, which became an icon of the quintessential tropical escape to paradise. Jay appeared on What's My Line and Muk did ads for Camel cigarettes. The Bali Hai boys started incidental families with local women, and even occasionally married. They were living the dream.
But then, gradually, the very grind they had sought to leave behind in Southern California, caught up to them. There were real estate deals and construction deadlines, ledger books, maintenance issues, labor strife, dollar-exchange fluctuations, fires, and competition from a new Club Med, and other more modern resort complexes. The very success that created their luxury link to prosperity and treasure began to unravel their pirate freedom, simplicity and happiness. Hugh and Jay are gone now, and Muk, who used to look after the plumbing, has plumbing problems of his own. And arthritis. The boys had sold off or shut all of their properties except the Club Bali Hai, where, in the last small outpost of a once far-slung enterprise, Muk had it in his will that he is ‘to be stuffed and set out here, so there will be 'Muk's Happy Hour' forever.’
For some in the plastic chairs, seated around the table by the pool in the sun setting against the magnificent mountain backdrop of Cook’s Bay, Muk’s message was a celebration of the success of the American pursuit of happiness. Cook had observed that Polynesia had been settled from the west to the east, and the unsettled had come the other way. The story that Muk told, in the same way every night for decades, had become increasingly inflexible. Whenever I tried to ask a question, his annoyance with any deviation from the gruff gospel by which he had defined his reality, would show. Muk the missionary. His Happy Hour had become less about happiness than homily, an attempt to solemnize a life of self-absorption and debauchery. Hugh Heffner may have been a hero to a lost decade of eternal adolescents but the legacies that would link luxury to decadence and dissipation, required the uncoupling from, and abandonment of, the most singular fundamental element of existence. Meaning.