Cruises have fascinated me for years — decades, actually, ever since I first watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell play a pair of showgirls from Little Rock, Arkansas, crossing the Atlantic aboard a magnificently glamorous cruise liner. Monroe’s character, the brilliantly named Lorelei Lee — in mythology, the Lorelei is a siren that lures sailors to their death — is a class-A gold-digger with one beady eye on elderly millionaire Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman, a fellow passenger who owns a diamond mine. While Monroe tries to wangle a tiara off Piggy, Russell prowls the decks like a tiger, inspecting the finely honed physiques of the Olympics athletics team that, happily, is also on the voyage. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which ends with a double wedding, sets the bar pretty high, cruise-wise.

[Read more…]