Whether it's Humphrey Bogart's French 75 in Casablanca, Audrey Hepburn's Mississippi Punch in Breakfast at Tiffany's or James Bond's martini (shaken not stirred, of course), old Hollywood movies had a way of making cocktails look like the apex of leisure and sophistication. Historian Hadley Meares looks at how Hollywood sips cocktails on the big screen.
Evan Kleiman: So much of my enjoyment of watching old movies involve moments of people making and sipping drinks. There's something about the whole process, how people hold their glasses, hold the shaker, how they add the ingredients. It adds this whole other layer to the reality that's being created.
Hadley Meares: Absolutely. I think it's really stuck in a lot of the American psyche, particularly the old movies where they drank all the time. There was a lot of drinking of cocktails to watch.
People always think of old movies as promoting smoking but they also promoted drinking cocktails. When did cocktails show up on the screen?
It's really interesting. There's this really cool lady named Cheryl Charming, who owns this blog called Miss Charming. She charts the evolution of cocktails and alcohol throughout the movies. According to her, one of the earliest examples she could find is in 1917. It's an early film called The Adventurer. Charlie Chaplin makes what seems to be a whiskey and soda. That is probably one of the earliest examples of someone drinking an actual mixed drink on the screen.
Then, during the 1920s, it's the height of Prohibition. One of the ways people could escape and dream of a time when they could have fun again was to go see flappers like Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford, and Clara Bow drinking with abandon, drinking martinis, drinking all these wonderful drinks in speakeasies and nightclubs. It really promoted the idea that adults should be able to drink, that this is something we can enjoy.
Actor David Niven drank his way through Hollywood's Golden Age in films such as "My Man Godfrey" (1957). Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Then you get into the 1930s and there's the repeal of Prohibition, which many people feel the movies helped happen because they glamorized drinking to such an extent. The 1930s is absolutely my favorite era of cocktail drinking. You see stars in screwball comedies and musicals like The Awful Truth and My Man Godfrey, having these lovely, elegant drinks at all times of the day. It's just so evocative of this kind of person we all secretly wish we could be, right?
That's my favorite era too. Nick and Nora Charles, William Powell and Myrna Loy in anything.
They're my favorite onscreen duo of all time.
William Powell and Myrna Loy co-starred in several Thin Man movies in which they drank cocktails with abandon.
After this interview, I'm going to have to go watch one of those movies. The way that drinking was portrayed in these older movies tells us a lot about class and social status in America. Those William Powell and Myrna Loy movies were light years away from a Western where a bottle of rocket whiskey would be plunked on the bar.
Absolutely. It told us a lot about class, class signifiers, and cocktails. If you saw a character holding a cocktail, you could instantly place them in the social hierarchy of the day, especially during the Depression, when people were probably drinking whatever cheap beer or cheap liquor they could find. The fact that people had these mixed drinks that were exotic and took time to make was really appealing and exciting. Nick and Nora Charles are the ultimate power couple in movies in the 1930s. The Thin Man series is one of my personal favorites, with William Powell and Myrna Loy playing Nick and Nora Charles, who are, if we think about it, functional alcoholics.
They drink all day. They're this ultimate fantasy couple. They're independently wealthy. They're madly in love. They're witty and they solve murders (that don't really seem to impact anybody) for fun. And they would, in particular, drink martinis and Manhattans and highballs. One of my favorite scenes in any movie is in the first Thin Man, in 1934, when Nora meets Nick at a bar and she says, "How many drinks have you had?" He says, "Well, this will make six martinis." Nora goes to the bartender, "All right, will you bring me five more martinis and line them up right here?," which to me is such a signifier of women's liberation. She can give [as good as she gets] and she can drink as good as the guy can. They're true equals.
Let's get specific, starting with Mary Pickford. One of the most popular drinks during Prohibition was named after her. What's in it? Tell us a bit about who she was and how this particular drink came to be named after her.
Mary Pickford was the biggest star in the world during the 1910s and '20s. She was America's sweetheart. She was the girl with the golden curls. She played a lot of child characters long after she was a child. But she was also an incredibly savvy businesswoman. She helped direct and write and produce so many of her works. So it's really appropriate that the Mary Pickford Cocktail is a sweet pink drink with a real kick. It's white rum, pineapple juice, grenadine, and maraschino liqueur.
What I love about it is that during the 1920s, drinking was becoming more popular for women. Speakeasies were actually much more mixed between men and women than bars had been. So it was very appropriate that they started targeting cocktails specifically towards women. And who better to target them with then America's #1 female at the time, who was Mary Pickford?
The Shirley Temple, made with soda, grenadine syrup and a cherry, remains a popular non-alcoholic drink, especially among children. Photo via Shutterstock.
On the non-alcoholic side, there's the Shirley Temple. As a child, I couldn't wait to be mature enough to drink a Shirley Temple. How did this cocktail come to be? And what did its namesake think of it?
As someone who no longer drinks, I have drunk a lot of Shirley Temples for the past 11 years. I also like a Roy Rogers, which is a variation named after another star. Legend has it that Shirley Temple was always having to go to these fancy Hollywood restaurants with her parents. One day, she was whining about how her parents were getting to drink these delicious looking Old Fashioneds and she wanted one. So the waitstaff, to appease her, mixed a version that had no alcohol in it. It was ginger ale and grenadine with a maraschino cherry on top, just like an Old Fashioned.
So the Shirley Temple became this universal thing that children got on special occasions. You were so excited to drink this drink named after the greatest child star in the world. What's so funny is Shirley would say she was often served it as a joke when she'd go places, and she absolutely came to hate it. She said it was way too sweet. Then, in 1988, there was an attempt to make a bottled version of the Shirley Temple, and she actually brought a civil suit against it, saying all a celebrity has is their name. I think she got quite annoyed with her name being associated with a drink that she didn't even like.
In Casablanca, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) orders a French 75, an act of resistance to the Nazis.
Tell us about Humphrey Bogart and that French 75 in Casablanca. Why do you think the screenwriters or the director, Michael Curtiz, picked this particular drink for that particular scene?
Casablanca is really the ultimate, to me, bar movie. "Of all the gin joints in all the world." At one point, someone asks Rick, "What is your nationality?" And he says, "I'm a drunkard." I think why he orders that French 75, which is champagne with gin, lemon, and simple syrup, is because at that point in the movie, his ex-girlfriend, Yvonne, shows up with a new guy who happens to be a Nazi. Then, he orders a French 75. What was a French 75 named after? It was named after a field cannon used by the French against the Germans in World War I. So drinking a French 75 is an act of subtle resistance on Rick's part, which you see him doing throughout the movie in his own cynical, laconic way, trying to get up the courage to fight the good fight and beat the Nazis.
Do you think there are any downsides to these depictions of drinking and movies?
Well, of course. You can't drink like Nick and Nora Charles all day and be a functional human being. It was totally unreal to assume that people could drink at the level that these folks did in movies and have a productive life. You do start to see, in the 1940s, as Alcoholics Anonymous becomes more popular, a spate of anti-drinking movies showing what can go wrong — The Lost Weekend, The Days of Wine and Roses. They did start to slowly say, hey, there's also a bad side to having 10 cocktails a day. But it was just too much fun to watch these people drinking, so it took a long time for things to change.
Dean Martin was famous for having a drink in his hand when he was on stage but it may have been a prop. Here, Martin (far right) and his wife, Jeanne, celebrate the upcoming marriage of Nancy Davis (left) to Ronald Reagan in 1952. They're at Ciro's Nightclub on the Sunset Strip with, presumably, real cocktails. Photo courtesy of the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection.
There were so many movie stars who made drinking throughout the day their entire identity. One thinks of Humphrey Bogart, Dean Martin, Bette Davis. How did that play out for them in real life?
Not so well. A lot of times, drinking too much can lead to dependence on alcohol. Bogey reportedly said, "The whole world is three drinks behind and I'd like them to catch up." But a lot of people said even though he was known to be a very heavy drinker and that he'd get into a lot of fights (he was a person who loved to needle people anyway), so add alcohol into that, and it was explosive, they actually say he didn't drink quite as much as he pretended to.
Dean Martin is the same. A lot of people say when Dean Martin was drinking his Scotch on the rocks, a lot of times it was apple juice with ice on stage. Shirley MacLaine, who was a co-star and good friend of his makes a really good point in her autobiography that she felt that the drunk persona for Dean was a way to free himself up, to be able to be crazy and silly and not a traditional, stoic Italian male on stage. So even if he wasn't drunk, getting to pretend he was drunk was liberating for him.
That's so interesting. I'm a martini gal, and there may be no one who made a single drink more iconic than James Bond with the martini and the very specific way he liked it to be prepared. How did 007 impact cocktail culture?
Enormously. In the '60s, when the first Bond movie, Dr. No, comes out, Americans don't really drink vodka. They see him with this vodka martini, "shaken, not stirred," and it becomes all the rage. People start drinking this drink that had before been associated with Russia and the cold and not at all with the apex of daring and sophistication.
A martini made with Kina Lillet was the drink Ian Fleming invented for superspy James Bond. Photo by Ambitious Studio, Rick Barrett/Unsplash.
Then, in Casino Royale, Bond orders a Vesper Martini, which I've read is his actual drink. What is the Vesper Martini and why do you think he deviated from a standard martini?
Actually, the Vesper Martini is the drink that is originally written about in the Ian Fleming books. It's claimed Ian Fleming made the drink up. A Vesper Martini is three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, and half a measure of the liqueur Kina Lillet. Kina Lillet is not made anymore. It was a liqueur made with white wine mixed with fruit liqueurs and flavored with quinine. So I think Ian Fleming created this specific, intriguing drink to match the man himself. Now, if you want to have a Vesper Martini, you have to improvise a little bit because Kina Lillet isn't made anymore. So you have to use Lillet Blanc or something else to take the place of Kina Lillet.
And a splash of tonic water.
Yes, with a little splash of tonic.
If we move forward in cinema history, in the late '80s, Cocktail comes out starring Tom Cruise as this super flashy bartender. The most famous drink in that movie is the Red Eye, a hangover cure. How well do you think Cocktail depicts what was going on in that moment with cocktails?
I think it actually depicts them very well. Cocktails in the 1980s, you think Margaritaville, right? You think syrupy, bright blue, and in these huge, obnoxious goblets. It's the ultimate opposite of 1930s refinement and class and little Nick and Nora highball glasses. It's completely different. I think it captured how cocktails, which had once been this quite sophisticated thing, became more of an emblem of young party culture, spring break, tropical vacations. It became totally different and had a totally different reason for being considered fun than what it was in the '20s and '30s.
Now, all of these different cocktail cultures live side by side.
It's really fascinating. Everybody picks their niche of which time period of cocktails they want to emulate. It's still a class symbol. It's still a way of showing that you take time to prepare things and that you enjoy the finer things in life or that you're a good time party girl who just wants a giant Pina Colada.
Exactly. I have to ask you about what was, to me, one of the weirdest synergies of movie character and drink — the White Russian in The Big Lebowski. Tell us a little bit about that drink and what it tells us about the character of the Dude.
I used to love a White Russian, which is vodka, Kahlua, and cream, which the Dude refers to in the movie as the Caucasian. Apparently the reason they chose that for the Dude as his signature drink was partially because the character of the Dude was based on a guy named Jeff Dowd, who's a producer and a political activist. He had this brief, very intense obsession with the White Russian. So that's why they chose the White Russian. I think it's perfect because at the time the movie was made, it was not a cool drink. It's very heavy. It's kind of gross with all of that heavy cream. So it's the perfect iconoclastic weird thing for such a specific character to love. He couldn't drink a martini or a beer. Both of those are too basic.
No way. Thank you so much, Hadley. I have loved this conversation.
I had so much fun. I guess I'll have a Shirley Temple, now.
And I'm gonna go watch The Thin Man.