![]() Wearing a red ribbon in her wavy hair, the fresh-faced bride was a very popular dance partner. ![]() Striking gold: digging the best of CaliforniaĪt the Catalina Casino Norma Jeane began to morph into Marilyn.The 21 best things to do in California. ![]() It now hosts arts and cultural events, such as the annual Catalina Island Jazz Tracks music festival in October (). It had one of the world’s first cinemas with a sound system for “talkies”, and a ballroom that could accommodate more than 6,000 dancers at once. This trend only increased after the grand 12-storey Catalina Casino with its duomo-style dome was completed in 1929 - never a gambling hall as such, but a “casino” in the traditional Italian sense of the word: a place of meeting and entertainment. Wrigley turned Catalina from an anonymous smudge on Hollywood’s horizon into the film industry’s favourite retreat with stars such as Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, Betty Grable and Humphrey Bogart flocking here in the early days. ![]() (Today, the property is a luxury six-room boutique hotel of the same name, which still has the best views in town.) For his own home, he chose an ocean-front bluff overlooking Avalon, which captured the first rays of sunlight in the morning and the last at night, and built a sumptuously appointed mansion he dubbed Mt Ada, after his wife. Wrigley wanted to create an escape from Los Angeles that was accessible to everyone - a “playground for all” as he described it - and set about building roads, hotels and steamboats. The island’s arrival as a holiday destination came after it was bought in 1919 by William Wrigley Junior, the millionaire who made his fortune from chewing gum. The island, with its roaming bison and deer, mountains, canyons and inlets, is about an hour’s ferry ride from Long Beach, the coastal city in Los Angeles county, but feels like an entirely different planet to the free-for-all freeways of the Californian megapolis.ĭuring the 1930s and 1940s, this was the place for Hollywood’s biggest names to see and be seen - usually from the deck of a yacht - and now this mini-Monaco is enjoying something of an A-list renaissance with Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lorde and Demi Lovato all photographed there recently. Her short and troubled life - recently revisited in gaudy detail in Netflix’s controversial biopic, Blonde - was rarely happy but her many biographers generally agree that the time she spent on Catalina - a ruggedly beautiful island 22 miles off California’s coast - was among her most content. Norma Jeane lived on the pretty island of Santa Catalina before Marilyn existed but the year she spent here during her first marriage did much to shape her future Hollywood persona. Instead, the woman at the window would have been a newly married teenager named Norma Jeane Dougherty. From hilly Metropole Avenue, you look down across the neat harbour and east over the dawning Pacific Ocean in all its auroral glory.īut any passers-by who had happened to glance up at the second-floor window, when she lived there in 1943, wouldn’t have seen the blonde bombshell gazing back at them. In the raw light of morning, the view from Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom would have been sensational. Saturday October 15 2022, 12.01am, The Times
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