MARILYN MONROE, by all accounts, didn’t much enjoy her sojourn to England in 1956. She was here to film the risible box-office turkey The Prince And The Showgirl with an irascible Laurence Olivier, who earned Monroe’s permanent opprobrium by demanding that she ‘try and be sexy’. The film, by many accounts, aged the already hardly Hebe-esque looks of Olivier by 15 years.
Norma Jean (1926–1962) did find respite from the diurnal rigours of filming in a bar whose name alone would have been a tonic for her homesickness. Not that The Savoy’s American Bar had ever approved much of tonic, or anything so otiose when it came to the making of cocktails.
The increasingly bibulous in 1930 and it is still in print now.
