Some like it hot?
London, in the summer of 1956, practically melted.
Because Marilyn Monroe had arrived.
And now here we are, June 1st, 2026. One hundred years since the birth of Marilyn Monroe.
A hundred years. A century.
Marilyn Monroe a hundred years old.
How can that possibly be true?
The blonde goddess is one of those people who seem permanently suspended outside time. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Elvis.
The Beatles.
They don’t feel historical. They feel present tense. Flickering neon.
Eternal close-up.
A face on the silver screen that never quite fades to black.
And yet.
A hundred years.
Which means that somewhere in London tonight, in Leicester Square, tourists are wandering past cinemas and restaurants and souvenir shops and glowing digital billboards without the faintest idea that 70 years ago this autumn, the biggest star in the world stepped out into this very square and stopped the city dead in its tracks.
Imagine it.
The flashbulbs.
The police whistles.
The taxis jammed nose to tail.
Men climbing onto lampposts.
Women craning for a glimpse.
The warm fug of cigarette smoke and perfume and wet pavement and excitement.
And then the car door opens.
And out she comes.
Breathy. Blonde. Bewitching.
Marilyn Monroe.
The walk was almost famous in itself. That little crossing from car to cinema entrance. She wore gold lamé. Every photographer in Britain seemed to go temporarily insane.
This was the Royal Command Performance of October 1956.
And waiting inside was another woman who defined an age: Queen Elizabeth II.
The Queen and Marilyn.
Now there’s a sentence.
The monarch and the movie goddess.
One representing continuity, duty, restraint.
The other pure glamour, vulnerability, sex appeal and dangerous radiance.
And here’s the extraordinary thing: they were the same age.
Both thirty years old.
But what different destinies awaited them.
One would reign for seventy years.
The other had less than six years left to live.
London, that night, did not know that.
Of course it didn’t.
To London in 1956 Marilyn Monroe looked immortal.
The city had already been in the grip of what newspapers called “Marilyn Mania” for months before she even arrived.
Britain had started losing its collective composure.
She was invited to cricket matches.
Cream teas.
Fish and chips on the seafront.
Grouse shooting in Scotland.
It’s gloriously British, isn’t it?
As if the nation had got together and decided:
Right then, let’s show Marilyn Monroe the whole kingdom by Friday teatime.
Meanwhile newspaper editors were shoving Prime Minister Anthony Eden and economic gloom down the page because readers wanted Marilyn photographs instead.
Celebrity defeating austerity.
Hollywood overwhelming postwar Britain.
Technicolor invading a grey island.
Because Britain was still grey then.
Bomb sites still scarred parts of London.
The country still carried the exhausted hangover of the war years.
And suddenly here came Marilyn Monroe looking like satin and champagne and California sunlight made flesh.
She arrived at London Airport in July 1956 with her new husband Arthur Miller. Miller later wrote that the photographers’ flashbulbs formed “a solid wall of white light.”
That’s beautiful.
Not cameras.
Not photographs.
A wall of white light.
And standing there amid the explosions of flashbulbs was Marilyn herself,
smiling that smile that somehow managed to be innocent and suggestive at exactly the same time.
The official reason for the trip was the filming of
The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier.
Again: what a pairing.
The grand knight of the English theatre and
the blonde Hollywood bombshell.
Shakespeare and sex appeal.
Except the reality turned sour almost immediately.
Olivier came from the old world:
discipline, punctuality, technique.
Marilyn arrived carrying Method acting, insecurity, insomnia, pills, self-doubt and an entourage.
And lateness.
So much lateness.
Whole film crews sitting about waiting while tempers curdled.
Olivier became sarcastic and cutting.
Marilyn felt patronised. At one point he more or less suggested that all she had to do was “be sexy.”
Which rather missed the point.
Because Marilyn Monroe was never just sex appeal.
That was the package the world wrapped her in. Underneath was intelligence, sensitivity, fragility and a desperate need to be taken seriously.
And yet the maddening thing for Olivier was this: the camera adored her.
Still does.
One actress warned Olivier that nobody would be watching him once Marilyn appeared on screen beside him.
“Her manner and timing are just too delicious,” she said.
Too delicious.
Perfect phrase.
And London agreed.
At the Savoy Hotel
crowds gasped when Marilyn appeared in a white cape coat, opera gloves and a sleeveless dress.
Outside the house where she and Miller stayed near Windsor,
people gathered
just hoping
for a glimpse of her silhouette at a window.
Fans sang beneath her bedroom window.
“What do we do?” Marilyn asked Arthur Miller.
“Maybe you put on a robe and wave down to them,” he suggested.
“Me?”
“Well, they’re not singing to me, darling.”
Even Arthur Miller, one of the great playwrights of the age, became, in the eyes of Fleet Street,
“Mr Marilyn Monroe.”
And perhaps that’s the key to the whole story.
Marilyn Monroe altered the emotional temperature of places.
Streets. Buildings.
Entire countries.
People didn’t simply admire her.
They reacted to her.
Britain in 1956 was simultaneously fascinated and scandalised.
Newspapers obsessed over the low cut of her gold lamé gown at
the Leicester Square premiere while also pretending to disapprove of it.
You can almost hear the collective intake of breath.
How could she walk in that dress?
Very carefully, probably.
And then came the moment itself. Marilyn meeting the Queen.
And suddenly, astonishingly, nervously, Marilyn Monroe became shy.
The Queen later said Marilyn seemed sweet but terribly nervous.
So nervous, in fact, that she had licked all her lipstick off while waiting in the reception line.
I love that detail.
Because for one fleeting instant the myth dissolves.
No longer the blonde bombshell.
No longer the fantasy.
Just a nervous thirty-year-old woman about to meet the Queen.
Human.
And perhaps that’s why there’s always a slight ache attached to Marilyn Monroe.
Because even at the height of the frenzy there was something fragile about her. Something lonely.
Something rain-soaked.
Near the end of the London stay Marilyn reportedly said, “It seemed to be raining the whole time… or maybe it was me.”
There it is.
The sadness beneath the shimmer.
You look at those London photographs now and they seem double-exposed. Glamour and melancholy occupying the same frame. The smile radiant.
The eyes tired.
And still London remembers her.
Even if it doesn’t quite realise it remembers her.
Because cities absorb these moments.
They linger in the paving stones and theatre foyers and hotel entrances.
Ghosts in broad daylight.
So perhaps tonight, wandering through Leicester Square,
somebody will glance up at the lights and unknowingly walk straight through the fading echo of Marilyn Monroe stepping from that limousine 70 years ago while Britain collectively lost its mind.
One hundred years old today.
Bears repeating: how can that be?
And yet somehow she remains exactly what she always was:
funny, sexy, vulnerable, radiant, impossible to forget.
Some like it hot.
London certainly did.
See you tomorrow.