Rainbow Cocktails and Octopus Wrestling
Before Tiki had a name, there was a place in Papeete and a drink with a secret recipe. And a man no one could figure out.
Papeete, 1932
“One could be going along the street in full view of important and respectable people, and suddenly disappear.”
— Frederick O’Brien, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, 1921
The Cercle Bougainville sits at the edge of the harbor, lantern-lit, salt air coming off the water, the kind of evening that makes whatever you were supposed to do tomorrow feel negotiable. On the balcony, a young woman named Reri is drinking with friends when a German man across the room spots her and wants an introduction. He asks the host.
The host is Alex Stergios. The German is F. W. Murnau, in Papeete to make a film called Tabu. “Who is she?” he demands. “Introduce me. There is my star.” Alex obliges — which is what Alex did, and which turned out to matter enormously. Reri gets the role, Murnau gets his film, and what reaches American theaters a year later is something audiences don't have a name for yet.
Months later, Flo Ziegfeld sees Tabu in a barn outside New York and fires a cable across the Pacific — addressed simply to “Miss Reri, star of Tabu, Bora Bora, South Seas.” It finds her at the Bougainville. She doesn’t know what to do. “Before I know myself what I do,” she’ll say later, “everybody at the Bougainville ask me — will I go to Follies.” Among the friends is a local character from Chicago, known around Papeete by the nickname “Al Capone.” The kind of town where someone earns that name says something. The table debates it over Rainbow cocktails — more than one round, judging by what happened next. Eventually she says okay.
“Once Hollywood took hold of the vision of the idle, idyllic island life, reality went completely South (Seas).” Sven Kirsten Ukulele Magazine 2017
Nobody who drank it ever quite agreed on what was in it. They agreed on what it did: sweet on the surface, something botanical and faintly dangerous underneath, a warmth that spread slowly and made wherever you were feel like exactly the right place to be. That was the Rainbow. That was always the Rainbow.
What happened after that is theatrical history. What happened before it was Alex Stergios, at his bar in Papeete, making introductions. But Tabu wasn’t just a movie — it was part of a wave. South Seas films of the early 1930s did something to American audiences that no travel poster could: they made elsewhere feel real. People who would never get closer to Tahiti than a movie house in Akron or Tulsa sat in the dark and felt the pull of it anyway. That feeling needed somewhere to go. A few years later, a new kind of bar would give it an outlet. The room that started it — the lanterns, the harbor, the rainbow cocktail arriving quick — was already there.
When He Returned to San Francisco, He Came Back as Tahiti.
The press could never quite settle on what Alex Stergios was, exactly, which tells you something about him. He was born in Tahiti — a native son, not an arrival — and shipped to San Francisco aboard a French warship at the age of twelve in 1887. He spent his first years in the city working at the White House department store, learning how rooms worked from the retail side before he ever ran one. A Greek immigrant’s son navigating a new city, keeping his eyes open. Then, in 1915, he and his wife Laetitia Vecchi packed up their two young children and returned to Tahiti — the place he actually came from — and established the Tahiti Yacht Club at Papeete.
Around Papeete they called him the Galvanizer — and once you know that, everything else about him makes sense. The secret recipe, the octopus regimen, the introduction that launched a film career: these are not the moves of a bartender. They are the moves of a man who understood that a room needs a current running through it, and that he was the source. He would later claim he stayed young by drinking his own cocktail and wrestling octopuses twice a week in the South Pacific — convincing enough that nobody pushed back hard on either claim.
What everyone agreed on: he understood that in order to create “elsewhere” you needed an anchor, so he invented one. He called it the Rainbow.
Early stories out of Papeete have him inventing the Rainbow as a remedy for homesick American seamen in port during naval visits. Men far from home, needing something that could make the tropics feel familiar, or at minimum stop them thinking about how far they were from San Francisco. The drink arrived and the men found reasons to linger, and when they eventually left they took the story with them.
Papeete already had the Dr. Funk — and the drink came with a biography worth knowing. Bernard Funk was a German physician who spent 31 years practicing medicine across the South Pacific. He married the daughter of a pirate captain — Leonora, whose father was the notorious Captain Bully Hayes — and when that ended, married Senitima, the daughter of a Samoan chief. Somewhere in those years he also treated Robert Louis Stevenson near the end of Stevenson’s life. The drink he left behind matched the man: bold and tart, absinthe and grenadine and lime and soda, the kind of thing that made the heat feel like a reasonable trade. Stergios wasn’t importing a style. He was carving his own corner of one that already existed — in a place where even the cocktails had biographies.
He was also, not incidentally, waiting out Prohibition. Back in San Francisco that was his real home — but running a bar there was not an option from 1920 onward. Tahiti was a French protectorate. No such problem. It wasn’t a consolation prize. He turned it into a decade’s worth of credentials.
The Best Bar in the South Pacific (Ask Anyone)
Picture the Bougainville on a typical evening. The harbor sits just beyond the railing. Somewhere between nine and eleven o’clock the veranda fills up — sailors, writers, film people, locals, whoever the last ship brought in. A travel writer passing through in 1929 described it the way you’d describe picking up the mail: “Nine, ten, eleven o’clock,” she wrote, “went to the Cercle Bougainville and drank Alec’s famous Rainbow cocktails.”
Not: went and discovered. Not: tried for the first time. Just went. Past tense, habitual, completely matter-of-fact. The Bougainville wasn’t a novelty. It was a pattern — the place where the evening went when it was done being afternoon, where the Rainbow arrived without being asked, where staying until midnight felt like the obvious choice and leaving felt like a minor failure of character.
Stergios ran two rooms: the Tahiti Yacht Club — better known for Rainbow cocktails than for anything to do with yachts — and the Bougainville, which was the island’s real social center. The place where the famous and the transient showed up on the same veranda, ordered the same drink, and left on the same unsteady legs.
The Bougainville was described at the time as “famous throughout the South Seas as the rendezvous for all resident and visiting celebrities in Tahiti.” That’s not a retrospective verdict. That’s what people said about it while it was happening.
The clientele list read like a manifest for the gilded age’s last great chapter. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. William (Willie) K. Vanderbilt. The Earl of Beauchamp. These weren’t tourists passing through — they were men whose private yachts made Papeete a destination rather than a port of call, arriving in an era the obituary would later describe as “an age of great private yachts, the elite of the world.” The Bougainville was their watering hole of choice, and the Rainbow the drink they ordered there — which tells you something about both. A South Sea yacht club with a secret cocktail and clientele like that doesn’t need to explain itself. It just needs to keep the glasses full.
Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall — the authors of Mutiny on the Bounty, Tahiti residents, two of the most successful novelists of the decade — were regulars. Which is a polite way of saying they couldn’t stay away. Mutiny on the Bounty got written somewhere in the vicinity of a Rainbow cocktail. This may explain some things about the book. Stergios eventually used their photo in his San Francisco ads — the two of them on the Tahiti veranda, drinks presumably nearby, looking like men who had made excellent decisions. The caption didn’t need to say much. It said: this is where the book got written. Come find out what that felt like.
The place where the evening went when it was done being afternoon
Nobody Gets the Recipe
Here is what we know about the Rainbow Cocktail: it was layered, it was beautiful, it was extremely potent, and nobody outside of Alex Stergios knew what was in it.
That last part was not an accident.
A San Francisco reporter sat down with him once specifically to get the recipe. He left without it. The headline his paper ran afterward — with what you have to imagine was a certain editorial resignation — was: “TAHITI DRINK HAS RAINBOW.” Which is technically accurate. It is also the least useful sentence ever written about a cocktail. The reporter had gotten everything but the one thing he came for. “You can have everything but that,” Stergios told him, and the reporter accepted this the way you accept that a magician won’t explain the trick — not because you don’t want to know, but because you’ve already gotten what you paid for.
Guessing the ingredients became its own sport. Absinthe. Pernod. Gin. Goldwasser. Benedictine. Curaçao. Cointreau. At some point you’ve probably had a version of this conversation yourself — staring into a glass, trying to reverse-engineer something that doesn’t want to be reverse-engineered. Writers did it in print for years, throwing things at the wall without embarrassment, knowing they’d never land. They weren’t actually trying to crack it. They were enjoying not knowing, which was the whole point.
The potency stories were just as good. After four Rainbows you could see the rainbow. Stergios mixed the day’s supply behind closed doors. Bootleggers had chased the formula and gone home with nothing. None of this was accidental. The locked door and the secret recipe weren’t obstacles between you and the drink. They were the drink — the drink that sent you to Tahiti without a ticket.
A decade later, a man named Donn Beach would open Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood and build an empire on exactly this idea — coded ingredients, numbered bottles, bartenders who each knew only one part of the recipe. History would rightly call him the father of tiki. What Stergios represents is something different: a man already living the source material in Papeete, doing the same things, for the same reasons, before the genre had a name or an audience waiting for it.
The Square Egg (There Is No Egg)
The Rainbow was Stergios’s myth. The Square Egg was his comedy. And honestly, the Square Egg tells you more.
Wire services picked it up and ran it everywhere: a cocktail legend whose fame stretched “far… to Singapore” had a new drink. Called the Square Egg. Tourists asked what was in it. Stergios explained: no egg. Never was an egg.
No egg of any geometry, square or otherwise.
The customer, he said, must be satisfied. And they were. They ordered the Square Egg specifically to prove they were in on the joke, and in doing so proved they were in on the room. You can’t buy that kind of loyalty. You can only earn it by being funny enough that the customer feels clever for catching it.
Around this time, his daughter Iris arrived in San Francisco on a liner carrying a case of “celebrated Rainbow cocktail” — bottled, transportable, arriving as cargo alongside the luggage. The myth had become something you could ship. The man could come home.
Formerly of Papeete
Alex Stergios was back in San Francisco by 1935, and he didn’t arrive empty-handed. He had the drink, the daughter, the son-in-law, and fifteen years of Tahitian credentials that nobody else in North Beach could touch. He wasn’t the only one coming home — Repeal had sent a wave of operators back from Havana, Nassau, Tijuana, wherever the liquor had been legal — but most of them just pointed at the exotic. Stergios had lived inside it.
He opened at Francisco and Grant in North Beach. The drink list was spare and confident, the kind of menu that doesn’t explain itself: Rainbow Cocktail, Dr. Funk, Square Egg, Rhum Punch. If you needed footnotes, you hadn’t been paying attention. The Royal Tahitians played. And the ads settled on the line that said everything in three words:
Alex Stergios (Formerly of Papeete)
He wasn’t selling a themed bar. He was making a factual claim: I was there. You may have been there too. This is what that felt like, at the corner of Francisco and Grant, Douglas 0576, no cover charge, Royal Tahitians on the bandstand.
He aimed the room at ex-servicemen — sailors who’d passed through Papeete’s harbor and already knew the Rainbow in its original setting. Not nostalgia for civilians who’d never been. Recognition for men who had. You know what this is. You’ve been there. Come back.
His daughter married Nino Brambilla, who’d also spent years in Tahiti, and Nino was co-owner running the room alongside him. The staff was the proof. The room grew into the Tahiti Club: named performers, Tahitian atmosphere, the whole production. A photo ad eventually put Nordhoff and Hall on the Tahiti veranda with the text confirming it: the Rainbow and Tahitian Rum Punch “originated in the South Seas and brought to San Francisco” — available “only at the Tahiti Club.”
Among the regulars was Dick Gump — owner of the famous Gump’s department store in San Francisco, part-time Tahiti resident, and songwriter who’d composed songs about the South Pacific that Augie Gaupil and his Royal Tahitians had actually recorded. Gump had been a member of the Tahiti Yacht Club back in Papeete — his guest membership card is still out there, inscribed by Stergios in 1930, tucked into a small archive that also holds two printed labels for the “Alex Rainbow Cocktail.” He wasn’t a curiosity at the Tahiti Club. He was the proof of concept: a man who’d been there, who knew exactly what the room was remembering, and who kept coming back.
Three words in that ad — only at the Tahiti Club — and the whole game is right there. Before tiki had a name, Stergios had already figured out the move.
Twice a Week, for His Health
Eventually the Rainbow Cocktail picked up a subtitle in the ads: The Fountain of Youth. Not as a joke. Just stated, flat, as fact.
The proof, as he told it: a profile ran in the press of a man approaching 63 who looked 40. The reporter asked how. Stergios credited two things. His own cocktail. And twice-weekly octopus wrestling in the South Pacific. Not once a week. Not occasionally. Twice. Weekly. The man had a regimen.
Look. Was the octopus wrestling real? Almost certainly not, in any rigorous sense. Did the cocktail actually reverse aging? Reader, it did not. But none of that is the point. The point is that Alex Stergios was 63 years old, running a bar in North Beach, commuting to Papeete, and when a reporter asked him his secret he said: octopus wrestling, twice a week, and my own cocktail. And people wrote it down and printed it and read it and told other people. Because a man who says that is not just a bartender. He’s a reason to show up.
The World’s Fair exposition came to him with an actual offer: wrestle octopuses in a tank, in public, every day, as a ticketed attraction. He said no. Which is the right answer. The whole thing worked because it was a story you half-believed. Put him in a tank at a fairground and it’s a sideshow. Keep it in Papeete where nobody can verify it and it’s a legend.
The Sign Changed. The Phone Number Didn’t.
In 1938, the Tahiti Club became Le Bistro.
Same address: 142 Francisco, corner Grant. Same phone: Douglas 0576, a number that had been in so many ads for so many years it had practically become part of the furniture. New sign. The ads called it “The Mystery Nite Club, Formerly ‘Tahiti Club’” — seductive, strange, original, interesting. The room changed its name and kept everything else.
This happens in pre-tiki nightlife more than you’d think. The Tropic Café on Third Avenue in San Diego becomes the Hula Hut. The Hawaiian Hut burns down and reopens six weeks later during wartime rationing because the show must go on. Rooms don’t die. They rebrand. The fantasy survives because it lives in the walls, not the sign.
Le Bistro was a holding pattern. By early 1939, the sign had changed again:
Alex Stergios’ Beachcomber Club. 142 Francisco Street. Francisco and Grant. Douglas 0576.
“Tahitian cocktails in Tahitian atmosphere.” Try Alex’s Octopus or Rainbow Cocktails, “just brought back from Tahiti.”
By 1939, “Beachcomber” is not a casual word. Don the Beachcomber had been open in Hollywood since 1934. Tiki was arriving as a real genre with a vocabulary and an audience. When Stergios put that name on the door — with the Rainbow on the menu, the octopus now its own cocktail, and Tahiti still the founding credential — he wasn’t borrowing someone else’s concept. He’d been living the source material for fifteen years before anyone called it tiki. The golden age was coming — the bamboo, the rum drinks, the whole South Seas fantasy packaged for a mainland audience — but the man at Douglas 0576 wasn’t waiting for it. He’d already built the real thing. Tiki would spend the next two decades trying to recreate a feeling Alex Stergios had simply walked into.
A story about a man wrestling sea creatures twice a week for his health becomes a bar legend becomes a running joke becomes a drink you can order. You can have the octopus. It arrives in a glass along with the story.
On his 63rd birthday a column called him “Tahiti’s grand old man” — not San Francisco’s, not North Beach’s, but Tahiti’s. That same season someone tried to buy the Rainbow recipe. The answer was two sips and a declined conversation. Some things were not for sale.
The sign changed one more time before the end: Stergios’ Rendezvous. Same corner. Same phone number. Still his name on the door, even as the current began to fade.
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The End of an Era
The story keeps going, but it gets quieter — the Galvanizer running out of current. Alex steps back, his daughter and Nino take over the room, and eventually new owners arrive with different energy and no Rainbow on the menu. Some drinks only survive when the person who invented them is still in the room to mix them. The Stergios name faded from the door and the address moved on without it, the way addresses do. His son Maurice ran a Palace Pigalle. Nino and his daughter operated La Strada. The family stayed in the business. Alex didn’t.
He died on January 15, 1963, at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco after a brief illness. He was 88. The San Francisco Chronicle ran his obituary two days later — twelve column inches, the headline reading: ALEX STERGIOS DIES — RAN TAHITI CLUB. The piece remembered the Yacht Club, the elite clientele, the Rainbow Cocktail with its secret ingredients. It did not print the recipe. Of course it didn’t. Some things were not for sale, and they weren’t for sale even after he was gone.
But from the mid-1920s to 1939 — from a harbor bar in Papeete to a wire-service folk tale to a Beachcomber Club in North Beach with an Octopus on the menu — Alex Stergios pulled off something most themed rooms only dream about. He made the fantasy real by making the provenance real. The Bougainville veranda existed. The Tahiti Yacht Club existed. The Rainbow was famous up and down the Pacific before a single tiki bar had opened on the American mainland. He wasn’t pretending to have been somewhere. He’d been there for fifteen years, mixing drinks, making introductions, and waiting for Prohibition to end.
When he opened at Francisco and Grant and called it Tahiti, it wasn’t a theme. It was a resumé.
Stergios didn’t sell “South Seas style.” He sold Formerly of Papeete. The difference is everything. Style is atmosphere you can approximate. Provenance is something you either have or you’re borrowing from someone who does. The man that answered the phone at Douglas 0576 had spent decades in Tahiti earning his — one rainbow cocktail, one secret recipe, one very confused octopus at a time. He wasn’t decorating a room with someone else’s mythology. He was the mythology.
And for a while, at the corner of Francisco and Grant, that was enough to make the whole thing real.
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ARTIFACT NOTES
Primary sources: Tampa Tribune (Oct 23, 1925); Honolulu Star-Advertiser (Mar 31, 1929); The Chico Enterprise (Dec 3, 1932); Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (May 6, 1933); Roanoke Times (May 14, 1933); Los Angeles Times (May 6, 1934); Cincinnati Post (Oct 30, 1934); Ogden Standard-Examiner (Oct 26, 1934); San Francisco Chronicle (Oct 11, 1935; Sep 8, 1938; Jan 17, 1963 [obituary]); San Francisco Call-Bulletin (Nov 11, 1935; Dec 31, 1936; Jul 14 & Sep 16, 1937; Jun 29, 1938; Jun 10 & Jun 13, 1939; May 3 & Nov 8, 1940; Feb 12 & Feb 14, 1941); San Francisco News (Mar 11 & Mar 24, 1938; Feb 15, 1939; Jan 17, 1941; Feb 20 & Feb 27, 1942; Dec 16, 1942; Feb 12, 1944). The “Al Capone” detail appears in the 1932 Chico Enterprise feature as a Papeete nickname, not the Chicago gangster — treated here accordingly. Cercle Bougainville entrance description: Frederick O’Brien, Mystic Isles of the South Seas (1921), available at Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org/files/11400).
Obituary: “Alex Stergios Dies — Ran Tahiti Club,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 17, 1963, p. 24. Confirms: born in Tahiti; arrived San Francisco via French warship, 1887; worked at White House department store; returned to Tahiti 1915 with wife Laetitia Vecchi; established Tahiti Yacht Club at Papeete; clientele included Douglas Fairbanks Sr., William K. Vanderbilt, and the Earl of Beauchamp; operated Alex’ Tahitian Club in San Francisco until retirement; died January 15, 1963, Children’s Hospital, San Francisco, age 88. The obituary describes the Rainbow Cocktail as having ingredients that “remained a secret” — confirming the locked recipe as a documented fact, not retrospective legend. Survivors: wife Irene; son Maurice Stergios (owner, Palace Pigalle); daughter Mrs. Nino Brambilla (who with husband Nino operated La Strada).
Cocktail documentation — Rainbow: No authenticated, period recipe for Alex Stergios’ Rainbow Cocktail has surfaced in primary-source form (no surviving menu with measurements, recipe card, bar manual, or printed formula attributed to Stergios). Period coverage and advertising consistently emphasize that the formula was deliberately withheld. Later “Rainbow Cocktail” recipes appearing in general cocktail literature are not documented as Stergios’ version and likely refer to unrelated drinks sharing the name; modern reconstructions remain speculative absent a contemporaneous Stergios specification.
Cocktail documentation — Octopus: Period San Francisco advertising documents that Alex Stergios served an “Octopus Cocktail” by early 1939 at his Beachcomber Club (listed alongside the Rainbow), but no authenticated Stergios recipe for the drink has yet surfaced in primary-source form. A mid-century “Octopus” associated with Waikiki Trader Vic’s appears later in the documented tiki canon; regardless of whether the drinks are related, the shared name is documented earlier in Stergios’ 1939 print advertising than in later Trader Vic’s sources. No evidentiary claim is made here that the formulas are the same absent a dated, measured Stergios recipe.
Ephemera archive: A small archive of Stergios-related items — a photograph inscribed to Dick Gump in Tahiti, 1930; Gump’s guest membership card in the Tahiti Yacht Club; two printed labels for the “Alex Rainbow Cocktail”; and a handbill for Stergios’ Rendezvous featuring Augie Gaupil and his Royal Tahitians — was catalogued and offered by Rabelais: Fine Books on Food & Drink (rabelaisbooks.com). This archive represents some of the only known surviving Stergios ephemera in documented circulation and provides primary material confirmation of the bottled Rainbow, the Tahiti Yacht Club membership program, and the Rendezvous address.