In September 1958, Marilyn came to the Hotel Del Coronado to shoot scenes for Some Like It Hot. 66 years later ‘the Del’ is still thriving, as Ingrid Schmidt writes in the December 4 edition of The Hollywood Reporter (with Nicole Kidman on the cover.)
“In the fall of 1958, syndicated Hollywood columnist William H. Mooring needed a vacation from the hubbub of Tinseltown. He drove down the coast to the palatial Hotel Del Coronado, on the beach across the bay from San Diego. His stay proved far less peaceful than he’d hoped. ‘As the bellboy carried in my bags,’ Mooring wrote, ‘someone motioned us aside and Marilyn Monroe came tripping down the steps.’ As he was soon told, director Billy Wilder had taken over much of the property to shoot a period comedy called Some Like It Hot. Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis ‘wearing ludicrous earrings, and Marilyn in quaint, period dress, attracted neck-craning crowds.’ Morrison had sought a reprieve from Hollywood. ‘Instead of escape, I ran right into it!’
He ought not have been so surprised. The Del Coronado by then already was known as a home away from home for the industry’s elite. Capped with red turrets, the seaside Victorian resort opened its doors on the peninsula of Coronado in February of 1888, the year of the first known surviving motion picture … In the spring of 2025, the storied hotel will complete a more than five-year, $550 million renovation, restoration and expansion on its sprawling 28 acres, extending its capacity to 938 guest rooms across the original Victorian building and four newer developments.
The point of the renovation was not so much to update the edifice as to restore it to its former glory which meant undoing a lot of mistakes. ‘One of our jobs was to reverse some of the previous remodels especially in the ’40s through the 70s that were detracting from that pure Victorian feel.’ says restoration architect David Marshall of Heritage Architecture & Planning in San Diego. Over the past half decade, Marshall and his team have found ‘hidden treasures’ behind layers of drywall and fab- ric, including frescoes and a wall of windows that open onto the ballroom. ‘Our goal is to bring the building as close as possible to the way it looked when they cut the ribbon in 1888.’
In preserving the building, Marshall and his team hope to bring back the glamour as well. Over the past 136 years, countless Hollywood legends have graced the hotel’s grounds, including Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, W.C. Fields, Mary Pickford, Frank Capra, Hal Roach, Darryl Zanuck and Errol Flynn, as well as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Rita Hayworth. Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart … The Del Coronado’s ultimate claim to Hollywood fame, however, remains its role in Some Like It Hot, in which the hotel’s old-world aesthetic provided Wilder with a cost-efficient time warp to the 1920s. At one point during filming, some members of the well-heeled ‘neck-craning crowd’ Morrison described wandered into the shot. According to the hotel’s heritage manager, Gina Petrone, Wilder yelled, “Cut! OK, let’s try it again with the fake millionaires.'”
The Marilyn Report 