I had Charlie Chaplin in my kitchen last night. And Hemingway and Shirley Temple. Or, at least, I did in liquid form. All three VIPs had cocktails created for them at the height of their fame and while they may be long gone, they live on in their art – and in gin, grenadine and rum.
The golden age for the A-list cocktail was between the first and second world wars – an era when cocktails were created to celebrate everything from opening nights and state occasions to the hottest movie stars. In 1920, Charlie Chaplin was honoured with a cocktail at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. There’s no proof the actor ever actually imbibed that rather sickly mix of equal parts apricot brandy, sloe gin and lime juice. But still, the drink endures. More to my taste is the favoured bar call of the sex bomb Jean Harlow: equal parts light white rum and red vermouth with a lime or lemon twist (some add a dash of orange bitters).
When child star Shirley Temple found herself forced to make do with soda pop at Hollywood parties she was not amused. So, legend has it, she commissioned the Beverly Hills restaurant Chasen’s to create her own temperance cocktail. The highball contained grenadine, lengthened with either ginger ale or lemon-and-lime soda (sources differ), with a squeeze of citrus and an all-important cocktail cherry. Black Lines’s bottled Shirley Temple wouldn’t look out of place at a grown-up cocktail party (£12 for 75cl).
Havana was a hotbed of celebrity boozing during the American prohibition – resulting in the birth of two classic drinks. The pineapple-y Mary Pickford was invented at the monolithic Hotel Nacional de Cuba when the actor was in town filming with her husband Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Comprising two-thirds pineapple juice, one-third Bacardi rum and a dash of grenadine (or, more latterly, a dash of maraschino liqueur) it can skew sweet – but at The Standard’s Double Standard bar in London they have a great “smokey” twist made with Diplomático Rum, a smoked pineapple shrub, lemon and grenadine. The rum-centric Bedford Stone Street in NYC also has a smart variation made with rowanberry eau-de-vie.
Ernest Hemingway sank so many Daiquiris at Havana’s El Floridita bar, they created one in his honour, featuring a double helping of rum, lime, grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur in place of sugar. Originally christened the Daiquiri Like Papa, then the Papa Doble, this fine cocktail is better known today as the Hemingway Daiquiri and can still be enjoyed at El Floridita (in a slightly less potent form) alongside a life-size bronze of Hemingway seated at the bar.
The Martini has spawned several A-list variations, including the pickled onion-topped Gibson Martini, thought to have been named after either the businessman Walter DK Gibson or American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the famously pneumatic Gibson Girls. “The onions represent the milky-white breasts of the women he drew,” wrote the famed British bartender Dick Bradsell in 1998, “so always give the client two.”
But why be content with a cocktail when you can lend your name to an entire bar? The Ritz in Paris was a favourite haunt of Hemingway’s – he spent many evenings there drinking Martinis and cognac with a louche gang that included F Scott Fitzgerald. And its wood-panelled lounge was duly rechristened Bar Hemingway in 1994.
Fitzgerald also has his own namesake bar at the Hôtel Belles Rives in Cap d’Antibes – the hotel he stayed at only months after publishing The Great Gatsby, a novel that celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion the Belles Rives will be hosting a variety of Gatsby-inspired events throughout 2025. Be sure to order a Gin Rickey, which features in The Great Gatsby and was reputedly Fitzgerald’s favourite drink.
New to the renovated Palm Beach Cannes is the Jean-Paul Member’s Bar, a chic cocktail lounge named after the French movie star and heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo. Drinks are inspired by the art deco-era building’s cinematic legacy as a film backdrop, with cocktails named after the 1950s character actor Lino Ventura and Pampelonne, the beach where Brigitte Bardot filmed And God Created Woman.
Celebrity drinks brands are ten-a-penny these days but the tribute cocktail has died a death. Where are the Swift Sours, the Timothée Martinis and the Eilish Daiquiris? Once considered flattery, it is now just an infringement of IP. Which just leaves us with one question: if you were a cocktail, what would it be?
@alicelascelles