Can you honor someone against their will?
Let’s start with the honor: In 1931, a bartender in Cuba invented a cocktail that they called the Douglas Fairbanks. It’s rye whiskey (or possibly gin, more on that below) with lemon, a touch of apricot, and an egg white, and named, obviously, for the silent film superstar. Douglas Fairbanks was the original Hollywood action hero, a fit, handsome, daring leading man who did all his own stunts, leaping over furniture in The Mark of Zorro and jumping down the mainsail in The Black Pirate, and was, at the time, among the most famous people in the world.
Bartenders did this kind of thing all the time—there was already a Charlie Chaplin cocktail and a Mary Pickford cocktail (arguably the only two actors more famous than Fairbanks himself), so it makes perfect sense that at the celebrated Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Havana, some bartender would invent a drink and name it for the star.
Here’s the wrinkle: Not only did Douglas Fairbanks not drink cocktails, he didn’t drink at all, and was, in fact, a vocal and vociferous teetotaler. His father had been a savage drinker, and his abandonment—when young Douglas was only five—left the actor with what PBS referred to as “a lifelong hatred for alcohol.” He was married to Mary Pickford and the two would refuse to serve alcohol, even at social events (“not even one lousy drop of wine,” groused actress Miriam Cooper). Fairbanks wrote back-to-back self help books with titles Laugh and Live and Making Life Worth Living extolling the virtues of fitness and temperance, and writing things like “life is too short to hang around the loafing places with the driftwood of humanity listening to their stories of failure and drinking in with liquor some of their bitterness.” In 1930, roughly the same year the Douglas Fairbanks cocktail was created, his son wrote in Vanity Fair that his father “has never had a drink in his life.”
Fairbanks,…