Mary Pickford

White rum, pineapple juice, grenadine, and maraschino — created in 1920s Havana for Mary Pickford, Prohibition having made Cuba America's cocktail capital.

The Mary Pickford cocktail was created in Havana during the 1920s, named for Canadian-born actress Mary Pickford — born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto in 1892 — who was the most commercially successful movie star in the world at the peak of her fame. Pickford, who co-founded United Artists studio in 1919 alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith, visited Cuba during the Prohibition era when Havana had become a destination for American celebrities seeking legal alcohol and sophisticated entertainment. The cocktail — white Cuban rum, fresh pineapple juice, grenadine, and maraschino liqueur — was created in her honor at one of Havana's premier hotels, with both the Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore and the Hotel Nacional cited by different historical sources, making the precise bartender attribution genuinely disputed in the documentary record. The drink's pale pink color from the grenadine and pineapple juice, and its sweet, fruit-forward character, reflected the era's aesthetic in cocktail design for drinks named after female celebrities. Mary Pickford retired from acting in 1933 and lived until 1979. The cocktail named for her appeared in Prohibition-era bartending guides as an example of Cuba's cosmopolitan bar culture during the years when Havana effectively served as America's cocktail capital.