Bittersweet Infamy - #5 - The Fabulous Moolah

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

Taylor tells Josie about the most controversial figure in the history of women's professional wrestling.

This is Taylor from the podcast you're just about to listen to. Just a heads up that this week's story includes sexual abuse, racism, and other upsetting subject matter. Take care of yourself and stay sweet. Hello and welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy, the podcast about infamous people, places, and things. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso.

My friend Taylor is going to tell me a story. I don't know what it will be about, but the only rule? The subject matter must be infamous. How are you? I'm you know, I slept all day yesterday. I don't know what happened. I did too. How long did you sleep?

I slept until maybe about 1pm and then I ate something and then I went back to bed. Back to me too. I ordered A and W, I had it, so here's what happened to me. I woke up at 11 and I was like, oh good for me, slept in, ordered some A and W, ate it, fell back asleep, woke up at 1, was like no, went back to sleep, woke up at 4.30 and was like well in for a penny and then I fell asleep and I woke back up at 7. Oh wow. Oh good for you.

I slept and I don't know and I had no idea it was coming. I had no idea. It just seized me. Yeah. That's nice though. Could you go back to sleep that evening though? I stayed up until- You had to process that one, hey? No.

I'm trying to remember. I went back to sleep at like 3.30am. I took my, because I switched off the melatonin. I've been doing melatonin but it's been giving me too many nightmares about fighting my family. So I switched to theanine and magnesium combo and I took that at like 3am and I dozed off at like 4. Okay. That was pretty good.

See I went to bed at like maybe 1am and I didn't think I'd be able to do it but I did. I was very proud. This one? Yeah. Good for you. Melatonin is not an over-the-counter drug in England, in the UK? You have to get a prescription. I get it.

I once took melatonin and had a nightmare where- Oh Jesus. So, I suggest, yeah, go talk to your pharmacist to see if it's right for you. Side effects may include very disturbing dreams. Jesus. Yeah, for real. Ugh. Okay.

Well, would it make you feel better to tell a story? It would. So I want you to take your mind back to January 2020. What were you doing in January 2020? Um, oh, you came to visit? I sure did. And that's- We saw each other in person.

We saw each other in person. We went to the Johnson Space Center. I had my picture taken on Mars, which is great. Outside smoking a sig? Yes. Outside hacking a dart. I met Batman and Mitchell in descending order of importance, and we went to what is very much my happy place, the WWE Royal Rumble.

I drank. I cried. I screamed a lot. Uh, Josie- Screamed a little more. Screamed a little more. Josie was there accompanying me every step of the way. And I've expressed this to you a million times over.

It's still so surreal to me that that was this year. Like it feels like two years ago. We were surrounded by people in this huge stadium we were packed in. So kind of in order to capture some of the magic of that time of possibility, I am doing a pro wrestling story today. But- Yes. But, um, I'm also really passionate about our podcast, Passing the Beck Dill Test.

Um, so I'm doing a story about the most controversial figure in the history of women's pro wrestling. Yes. Okay. I'm in. I'm down. Uh, we begin in, I'm gonna do, I have a whole bunch of these, where were you in blanks for you?

So we're gonna begin- Oh, okay. Where we're gonna begin in 2017. Josie, where were you in 2017? 2017. I was still living in, I was living in here in Houston, Texas, um, any, any specific date or just the year- Yeah, fucking ballpark it.

I was living in an apartment and, and breaking up from my longtime boyfriend in a slow, painful descent. Sick. Well, while you were doing that, um, here's what was happening in the world of professional wrestling. Good. Every year at WrestleMania, the men of WWE compete in the annual Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal.

Aw, RIP. RIP. That's so sweet. Yes. Of, of the Princess Bride fame. Mm-hmm. And wrestling fame, obviously. Competitors have to throw each other over the top rope and the last man standing wins.

And the reason it was named after Andre the Giant is because he was gigantic and he was famously difficult to eliminate in Battle Royale, so he often won them. Good for him. Way to go. In 2017, for the first time, the women of WWE would compete in their own Battle Royale. And it would be called the Fabulous Mula Memorial Battle Royale. So to make sense of that name, um, I'm gonna just about to give you an overview of the history of women's professional wrestling in America.

Um, as quick as I can. Okay. WWE is by far the biggest wrestling company in the world, and the first big name in WWE, which was called WWF at the time, and I might use those interchangeably, is a woman named the Fabulous Mula. Mula held the original women's championship for nearly 30 years. It's a bit more complicated than that, but the official story is she held it for 10,170 days from 1956 to 1984.

Mula Mula. Mula Mula. That's fantastic. And then in the 80s, something happens called the Rock and Wrestling Connection, where guest stars like Cindy Lauper and Liberace appear at events and participate in storylines. Liberace, really? Liberace, I remember him doing like at the first WrestleMania, he does, um, who are those, like the Rock Hats, he's got the Rock Hats with him and they do kicks together.

Aw. Yeah. Very weird. Super, super weird. Sorry, one of my favorite things about early WrestleMania's is they just, any celebrity they can get in there, they get in there to the point where I remember there's one time I'm watching one of them from the 80s, I'm like, who the fuck are they going to try out next?

And then they're like, and our special ring timer, she finally found the beef. It's Clara Peller. So they have the wears, the beef lady. The lady from the, yeah. Okay, yeah. Um, wow. So. That's beautiful.

So Clara Peller specifically is the storyline manager of a wrestler named Wendy Richter, who's the next big thing and she's the rival to the Fabulous Mula. This generates interest in the women's division and eventually on July 23rd, 1984, Wendy Richter wins the women's championship from the Fabulous Mula, uh, ending her 28 year ring. Oh my God. Huge shit. So women's wrestling continues into the 80s, but after the heat of the Rock and Wrestling storyline, it loses a lot of steam.

Wendy Richter leaves the company on bad terms, along with some other big names. Eventually the division peters out in, in the late 80s and is quietly retired. They briefly revive it in the early nineties, but that also ends on a sour note and a linger blaze. The three time champion and centerpiece of the women's division stormed over to rival rival company WCW and was shown on WCW TV dropping the WWF women's title belt in a trash can. Ooh.

Yeah. Like a metal one, like a, like a Oscar the Grouch. It wasn't an Oscar, it was, it was very like, um, you know. Was it a waste paper basket? Yeah. It was next, it was, you know those little like, um, Oval dealer plastic, you see them, like they, they give them to you to tuck under your desk at work. It was one of those.

Right. Yeah. It was one of those. Yeah. Wow. Just stop by each other. It was, it was her final fuck you on the way out the door. It was to bin the WWF title on the rival program.

In that bin of all bins. Another hiatus. The women's division is revived again in the late nineties and this time it's, um, basically a titty show. Oh. It's, this is WWF's attitude era where crude humor, sexual references and shock value reign supreme. They had bikini contests, pudding matches, two minute long bouts where the goal was to

strip all of your opponents clothes off. Ooh. On TV? Oh yeah. It was the nineties. It was like Jerry Springer era. Oh yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It was that kind of like Jerry Springer shock kind of TV, right? Yeah. Okay. So basically enough around this time, the fabulous Mula is back on the scene. Her and her best friend, women's wrestler Mae Young, who's got to be in her eighties at this point, were these kind of beloved comedy grandma figures. So they would indulge in like raunchy jokes and they'd wrestle matches where they took

hard hits and they'd be in like shocking storylines. Like when Mae Young gave birth to a human hand. As you do. As you do. Damn. Mula even had a little like one week novelty run with the title in 1999. So they were just like, well, let's give it to her one more time, just as like a, you know.

Yeah. These appearances continued until Mula's death at 84 in 2007 and Mae Young's death at 90 in 2014. Aw, RIP. Yet again. It goes on like this for a while, although there's always a small group of women who can wrestle solid matches and fight for the women's division to be taken seriously. But speaking broadly, the women's matches are cheap titillation and pee breaks and eventually

they re-brand it the divas division. Oh. They have like a little, their title belt is like a little pink butterfly. So it's like super regressive and embarrassing. Oh, but like kind of cute still at the same time. It's like, I would wear that. Yeah. Yeah.

Like if I found this in a thrift store, I would wear it, but in this context, no. So around 2015, a few things happened to change this. The rise of Ronda Rousey in MMA changes perception of women in combat sports. Nice. There's a crop of women's wrestlers on NXT, which is WWE's developmental brand and they're putting on these really great, lengthy, engaging matches. And because of these women and their hard work, the hashtag give divas a chance goes viral and they rebuild the women's division and since then there's a lot of like awesome

women's wrestlers working in WWE putting on fantastic matches that main event pay-per-views. Yeah. Dope. Yeah. No, it's good stuff. The women have even main evented WrestleMania the biggest show of the year. But before that main event, there was the fabulous Mula battle royal. Or there was almost the fabulous Mula battle royal.

That was supposed to be an air horn. Yeah, I know. I got that. But it sounded like a Chihuahua coyote. It sounded like a cartoon wolf flirting with a lady. Okay, continue. Because as soon as that name was announced, the internet lit up. They began reaching out to the media, emailing WWE, emailing advertisers and corporate sponsors

demanding that the name of the match be changed. In the end, WWE had to relent to public pressure and the fabulous Mula memorial battle royal became simply the WrestleMania women's battle royal. Wait, why was there such a negative reaction to the fabulous Mula? Because Josie, of the widespread accusations that the fabulous Mula was not the beloved grand dom of women's wrestling that she presented herself to be, and was in actuality a sex trafficker, a drug dealer, a con artist, an unashamed predator, and an unabashed tyrant whose power hungry machinations had kept American women's wrestling in a grim holding pattern

for decades. What? Gnarly. Okay, because one of my questions was like, how is women's wrestling like getting shit on so hard all up until 2017? That's wild. Yes. Okay.

You want to know why they were in the spot they were? Well Josie, this is the story of the fabulous Mula. Give it to me. So I'll shout out my sources in very vague terms ahead of times because I'll be like referring to them. I'll give the full list of sources in the end credits as we do. Sources are Wikipedia, Fabulous Mula, my best friend, Wikipedia, not the Fabulous Mula. Comas were everywhere in that one.

You're about to find out why. Okay. There's a great series on Weisland called The Dark Side of the Ring, and all they do is like hour long documentaries on these very weird wrestling history stories that are very much like this podcast, infamous, infamous stories. And season one episode six was about the Fabulous Mula. I also read an article called Baby of Sweet Georgia Brown by Murphy Fock in The Free Times. And then I read another article from the state, which is more minor and I'll mention it in

the end credits. So before we start turning over a bunch of rocks to find the worms underneath here, I should emphasize a few things. Number one, for pretty much every claim against Mula, you will find someone to refute it. Super infamous, man. It's super infamous. It's infamous and Mula has a lot of friends who are still alive and a lot of people who still think that none of this is true and will tell you none of this is true.

We'll go out of their way to tell you none of this is true. Okay. And it's also true that like in the world of professional wrestling, and this is kind of one of those weird things about it that I'm into, it's like a blurred line between fact and fiction. And there's contradicting stories about pretty much every controversial figure. All I can say ahead of this is that in my opinion, the many claims against Mula are convincing enough come from enough disparate sources and form a coherent enough pattern

of behavior that I take them to be more or less truthful. Okay. Okay. I'm glad to kind of know where you stand from the get go. That's actually, yeah. And for those listeners who are like, they can just turn it off right now. This is a story where there's no hard evidence about anything. There's just people telling stories.

There's a couple of other disclaimers. Two more. I'll give you two. These stories take place over nearly a century. So I'm doing a lot of cutting of details that aren't directly relevant to the story. Titles, career accomplishments, I cut out an entire second husband. Like anything that didn't matter. Who needs them?

Who needs them? Who needs the second husband? Who needs them? Really. And then the last warning is that this is a dark story. It's, if you couldn't tell by my intro, there's some sexual abuse in it, there's racism in it. Some kind of gnarly stuff in it.

So just, you know, practice your own best mental health. Okay. So the fabulous Mula is born Mary Lillian Ellison in 1923. Josie, what are you doing in 1923? 1923. I am glad the war is over. Yeah, fair. Concerned about the coming depression.

You knew. You saw it. You saw it coming. I, yeah. So as a, as a, as a fomite of a fetus, fomite's not the word, as a, I don't know, I was, I was nothing. So what was I? Yeah, fair.

Okay. Fabulous Mula. Mary Lillian Ellison is the youngest of five in a place called Tooky Doo, South Carolina. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Tooky Doo doesn't even have a wiki, wow. Someone can change that. I couldn't find any information on Tooky Doo. I'll go and change that right now.

Thank you very much. Her mother died and she went to live on a cotton farm with some relatives. And in order to help her get over the loss of her mother, the family would take her to go see the wrestling shows. And it was at these shows she saw the women's wrestler, Mildred Burke. And Mildred was what Mula would eventually kind of fashion herself to be. She was like the OG of American women's wrestling. She could like hold her own in a physical competition.

And it was like this was important for the times like in the carny days because obviously, and I'm really sorry to break this news to you, professional wrestling is a scripted competition with the outcomes predetermined. Why wasn't that part of like the intro trigger warning things, I really? Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. However, sometimes competitors would go into business for themselves and they would attempt to pin a champion in spite of whatever the written outcome was. Right, yeah.

So it was important that if something like that happened, a champion be able to legitimately overpower their opponent to prevent any screw jobs from happening. Okay, yeah. So there was like, it's not all script. There was, yeah, yeah, I get you. But bookmark that thought for later. In any case, Mula sees Mildred and thinks this is what I want to do with my life. At age 14, Mula gets married to a 21 year old named, yeah, named Walter Carroll and

they have a daughter together, also named Mary. And almost immediately after Mula gives birth, Walter leaves her. So she's now 15, divorced and a single mother in the 1930s. Oh, damn. Yeah, not an enviable position. So with the cards stacked against her, Mula's like fuck it, leaves Mary with a friend and pursues wrestling full time. She links up with a guy named Billy Wolf.

Not a good guy. No. How can you be a good guy? Uh, Mr. Wolf? In my head, he's like played by Richard Gere, like a very sinister Richard Gere. Mula links up with a guy named Buddy Wolf, who's the preeminent promoter for women's wrestling. And he also happens to be the husband of Mula's idol, Mildred Burke.

So true to your instinct, Wolf's whole thing was the casting couch. She would try to coerce his female trainees to have sex with either himself or other promoters in exchange for bookings. And according to Mula, this was something that she never went along with. She said, I never did that. She worked predominantly as a valet, which meant she would accompany male wrestlers to the ring who were heels or bad guys, and she would like help them rile up crowds and cheat and stuff like that.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I like that. The valet. Love a valet. Love it. Love a good evil valet.

Love Mula, which I'm sure would go over gangbusters today. Oh. Yeah. Okay. So one of the wrestlers she works with is a guy named Buddy Rogers, who's a big deal in his own right. And according to Mula, she severed the partnership because he was trying to pressure her into a sexual relationship.

So already between what went on with her and her ex-husband, who knocked her up as a teenager and then abandoned her, as well as these various men in the wrestling industry who are trying to pin her down, you can kind of get an idea of how difficult it must have been to be a female wrestler or even just like a woman interacting with men in any capacity around this time. Yeah. In 1956, Mula wins her first women's title and she starts carving out her reputation in earnest.

She gets rechristened the fabulous Mula by a promoter called Vince McMahon Sr. Vince McMahon? Sr. Senior? Senior. The Vince McMahon you know as Vince McMahon Jr., we'll get to him. I had no idea that that was a family business. Oh, it's a whole big legacy, yes.

It's also around this time that Mula and her third husband, see I told you I was going to skip that second husband. Oh yeah, fuck the second one. It's around this time that Mula and her third husband, Buddy Lee, start training other women to work as wrestlers. She acquires a sprawling compound at Mula Drive, which includes residences, a gym, a pond, and some other buildings. Sounds nice.

Oh yeah, fucking you just wait. I know it's not nice. It sounds nice. Josie, you don't want to be at Mula Drive, I'm just about to tell you that. Where is Mula Drive? Are we talking? I'm just imagining this in the South. South Carolina, some amount of miles outside of Tookiedere, I'm sure.

Okay. Yeah, I believe we're in South Carolina. If it's not South Carolina, it's somewhere that might as well be South Carolina. Fair enough, okay. So here's what being Mula's trainee entailed. So first you paid her a $300 to $500 training fee. No, no, you never do that, don't do that. So the reason you do that though is to get trained by Mula, who's like one of the great

names in women's wrestling at this point. But according to several of her students, Mula actually would delegate the training of new trainees to her more senior trainees. So she pyramided that ship. And so this would happen in an old barn five hours a day every day for six months. No air conditioning or heating, hard mats, and you had to work until you puked. That was the requirement? Like you're not done?

You haven't puked yet? Said Vicki Otis, who worked as Princess Victoria, quote, there were buckets strategically placed and it wasn't if you were going to throw up, it was when you were going to throw up and would you hit the bucket? Soft dude. Not only was the work grueling, but they would lock up the gates outside of Mula Drive at night and you weren't allowed to leave after any whatever amount of time PM. Oh, so it's curfew set in place and enforced and enforced curfew enforced curfew.

After you've paid after what year is this? I'm sorry. This is 19. The stories that I'm going to tell you take place from the mid fifties to the mid eighties. OK, so you're paying 300 bucks to be trained, which is like you're paying like, I don't know, five months. Yeah, you're paying like five months worth of of your earnings. If that, if you're a woman at this in this era to puke and not to go out.

OK, yeah, OK. I think it's adorable that you think this is all the money Mula is about to take from these people. Oh, yeah. You got me with Mula Drive. I was like, that sounds nice. There's barns. There's a pond. Duh.

OK, OK, keep it coming. Keep it coming. So the fabulous Mula was a heel gimmick. She was a villainous character who would do anything for money and prestige. That was when Mula was in the ring, that was Mula. She had her little like a dollar sign sunglasses on and she just love money and love being the champion. This mirrored real life in a lot of ways, quoting promoter Jim Cornette from Dark Side of the Ring. You knew right off the bat why she got in the business and why she wanted to be a star.

She loved money. In addition to the training fee, trainees were required to rent an apartment at Mula Drive. They were also required to pay rent and utilities. And on top of that, and on top of that, Mula would take a 25 to 30 percent fee off every match they booked. And then she would deduct food and travel expenses from their paycheck. And on top of all of that, she literally before she did any of this, she'd skim a little off the top for herself. And then she lied to you about what your salary was. Twenty five percent.

That's and everything else. Oh, my God. So she's like, yeah, you're making peanuts. Well, wrestlers actually would fall into debt to her. And that gave Mula latitude to control their lives. More than she already is. Yeah. OK. One trainee, Debbie Johnson, said that she worked for Mula for two years before she saw any money. And one of Mula's male trainees, Del Wilkes, said that Mula would book events and then not pay the wrestlers,

claiming that she wasn't making any money. She'd say, like, oh, this was just for exposure. And then she would just pocket your entire payment for herself. Whoa. Quote, she was good at making her money last and taking your money and making it last. Fuck. Eventually, with all that money, Mula bought the rights to her own championship belt, which means it's no longer tethered to any particular league.

And she has significant control over the booking of the women's matches. So obviously she's booking herself always to maintain the belt. And yeah, as far as who she booked against her, it depended on if she liked you or not, because she was known to hold grudges and she was legendary for just being jealous and not wanting anyone to kind of get ahead of her. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's start looking at some of the individual accusations against the fabulous Mula. Vicky Otis, better known as Princess Victoria, was notable as one of the first

Native American women's wrestlers to achieve widespread fame. Dope. She's from the Sammamish Nation. And funnily enough, this is just a weird thing that twigged me, because of course it did. Apparently she was billed as coming from Vancouver, BC, Canada, but she was actually from Portland, which is weird. That's usually the opposite. You just billed a Canadian from America.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Princess Victoria, she becomes one of Mula's favorites to the point where Mula gifts her with this very expensive ring costume that Mula makes a big show of presenting to her in front of everybody as this like kind of power trip. Like she gave them some miniscule Christmas bonus, but Princess Victoria, she gives this very expensive new ring costume. 1984, Princess Victoria is working a match.

Her opponent sits on the back of Victoria's neck, crunch, agony. Yeah. So now Victoria's out with what will end up being a career ending injury. Oh, God. And she's not bringing in any money and Mula doesn't like that. So Mula approaches Victoria with an offer. Go see this guy. He'll give you a payday. And she says the nicer you are to him, the bigger your payday will be. And you need a payday.

So Victoria goes to meet this guy. Predictably, he makes an advance on her, which she rebuffs. When she gets back, Mula is livid. And she goes to Princess Victoria. And this is now quoting Victoria, Vicky Otis. She said, look, you can't wrestle and I need my rent. I'll take that yellow outfit. I'll take the brown outfit that she gave me for Christmas.

I left the property that day with my Chevy Malibu station wagon and 20 bucks in my pocket. She dumped me. And then after Princess Victoria left, she said that Mula explained her absence to the other trainees by telling them that she was in prison for dealing cocaine. Oh, rude. That's so rude and mean. Oh, God.

Princess Victoria is far from the only person to accuse Mula of something like this. Luna Vichon, who is fucking great. And I'll do my Luna Vichon impersonation for you sometime, said that when she was 16, she was sent out of state to take photographs with an older man. And even though she kept her clothes on, she felt taken advantage of in some way. And Luna Vichon has like, has like shaved head and she's like, like that's her vibe.

She married a real life vampire with like the teeth. Oh, good. So if Luna Vichon is like taking stock of a situation and being like, this seems creepy to me. Like, you know, the barometer of creepy. Yeah, she's like, no, no, this gives me some bad vibes. Another wrestler named Mad Maxine, who more on her later, said that Mula made money sending girls, quote, out to the sky in Arizona and pimp them out.

Yeah, this is a direct pull from Wikipedia. Penny Banner, who's another famous female wrestler. Directly described Mula as a pimp who in return for money, rented her female trainees out in bulk to wrestling promoters so that the promoters and the male wrestlers could have sex with them. Banner said the women who were sent on these tours were not told of this arrangement ahead of time and that those who refused to have sex with wrestlers and promoters were raped.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. And then there's the story of sweet Georgia Brown. This is an incredibly sad story to me. Yeah, I just, yeah, I think I don't know. There's something as well that's like really disturbing, too, because these these women are like their athletes and their bodies are already on display.

And it kind of, you know, the the the equation is already a little skewed, it seems, you know, in terms of like them breaking into men's wrestling. And like the way to do that is like through displaying their bodies. And yet they are athletes and they're actresses and they're like entertainers, you know, yeah, I yeah. I mean, there's no scenario in which it's like, oh, wow, that's a that's a bummer. But, you know, it's like it's a bummer left, right and center for anybody who's in that situation.

But I think there's something like kind of reverberating for me. The fact that like, I don't know, these women like train and understand their bodies in a very specific way. And then they're being taken advantage of physically, too, is like, yeah, it's this is shitty for any woman in this any person who's in this situation when they're being taken advantage of that way. Of course, of course. Yeah. And I just I don't know.

I think in my head, there must be some type of disconnect that you must have with your body in order to like live through that, you know, some like, you know, psychic distance that you have to have between like the reality in the body and just thinking of these women as like athletes. And I don't know what that must have been like. It's just insane, you know? No, for sure, for sure. So in 2006, a South Carolina paper called The Free Times did a story

that was the jumping off point for the modern accusations against Mula prior to the big cancellation in 2017. The article is called Baby of Sweet George Brown, and it goes into a lot more detail than I'm going to about the woman herself, her story, her children's stories. It's a really interesting read. I recommend it to anybody. Yeah, it seems like generations deep, hey? So in brief, Susie Mae McCoy, better known as Sweet George Brown,

shows up to train with Mula and her husband Buddy Lee in 1957. So that's when we are. We're 1957. Susie Mae is Mula's first black trainee and a very popular up and comer at a time where there was like a little bit of a craze starting to develop around black lady wrestlers. Here's a quote from The Free Times sampling some of the verbiage they used to promote her just so you have an idea of what she was up against. Quote, she was 145 pounds of ebony beauty who left the cotton fields of South Carolina. No more pots and pans for Georgia and no more long hours in the South's tobacco

and cotton fields. She was a credit to her race who is now enjoying the pleasures and luxuries that money earned by being a girl wrestler could bring. So the peanuts that she will earn. Yes. Okay. So even though they're ostensibly promoting her, it's still rooted in a lot of like incredibly racist rhetoric and imagery. Yeah. In the article, her son Michael, who's doing an interview with the writer,

reads the press release and says, bullshit, there were no pleasures and luxuries. She was robbed. Allegedly Mula and Buddy Lee completely controlled her finances and when led her to her own bank account, she was kept away from her family until 1972, when she arrived home as a broken shell of herself. 72. 72. Yeah, a long time.

Eventually, she divulged to her daughter Barbara Harsey that she was, quote, raped, given drugs and made an addict. Continuing, Susie May received odd knocks on the door at strange hours. Then she told Barbara she would begin taking off her dress. When she didn't comply, she was beaten often brutally. Sometimes her eyes swell shut. She had a tooth knocked out and she was threatened with worse. So there's also the issue of Susie's kids themselves who didn't know their parentage,

but were of mixed race, which led to them being mistreated by their own family, fed table scraps, locked into closets, really sad stuff. Oh, damn. Michael McCoy, the son, is born about 10 years into Susie's wrestling career. And when he's an adult, he starts digging into the identity of his father and he decides that the best place to start is to talk to Moolah. Oh, shit. He's only ever heard about her in these very hash tones as just this monster woman who ruined

Susie May's life. So he goes to Moolah Drive, knocks on the door, and Moolah couldn't be nicer or more charming. Oh, God. Probably a big ol' glass of sweet tea. Yeah, yeah. Could the butter wouldn't melt kind of thing? Or is that butter would melt? I don't know.

Something about butter is melting. Yeah. And so eventually, she gives Michael a photo with a white man in it, and the man is Buddy Lee, her ex-husband. Oh. And whatever she says, or however she acts during this exchange, it's clearly meant to signal something significant, basically implying without saying that Buddy Lee is Michael's father. Whoa, okay.

It's unclear to me whether the relationship between Buddy and Susie was consensual, but Barbara Harsey tells a story about another time when her mother, like one of the very rare times that her mother was allowed to come visit her kids while she was wrestling or whatever. They pull up in this very expensive car with these two white people who end up being Moolah and Buddy Lee, and at some point they decide that it's time for Susie May to go, and they're like, shut, they push her back into the car and she hits her head on the thing. Oh, Jesus. So whatever's kind of going on here is clearly like very grim and violent and sad.

Yeah. So that's the hardest part. Take a breath. And now we're just into Moolah being a low-level asshole, okay? Okay, okay, cool. In ways that are absolutely ruinous for the entire women's wrestling industry. Oh, well, yeah. Good thing I didn't breathe too sound either.

Yeah. Okay. So Moolah in the 80s, we're now in the 80s. Okay. Moolah's clearly feeling her outs, because this is the most prolific decade for Moolah bullshit. She's in hyperdrive. In 1983, Moolah sells the rights to her title belt to Vince McMahon Jr. and the WWF.

As you observed earlier, Vince McMahon Sr. was the one who gave Moolah her ring name, so Vince Jr. is loyal to her based on this history, and she kind of has his ear. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So this is also where the rock and wrestling connection, which I mentioned earlier, starts to flower. Moolah's getting eyes. She's getting more widespread attention than ever before, and obviously she loves that.

But Moolah is, no, she's a little, she's past her prime. She's in her 60s. Right, yeah. That's no longer, you can't get in the ring. She can and she couldn't, she did. She was still in the ring at this point, but she wasn't like, on top of everything, she was never the greatest wrestler. She was a lot of hair pulls and clubbing blows and you know, whatever.

And apparently also, sorry, this is another thing, apparently she would deliberately teach her trainees a very paired back version of her own style, because she didn't want anyone getting better than her. Oh, yeah. I mean, that makes sense. She would teach them the diet, Moolah. Yeah, and Moolah, Moolah Regular wasn't all that great anyway. Moolah Regular was never the shit, no.

Yeah. And but point being, all of that is in place, but also now it's the 80s, and there's all of these like new fresh faces who are more rock, more rock and roll than a 60 year old woman. You know what I mean? Right, yeah, yeah. So one of these fresh faces is a woman named Mad Maxine, who's this sort of like giant tass with dyed hair and shaved sides and shocking makeup. Okay.

She's super distinct and she's super marketable. It's the glam rock 80s to the point where when they're developing a cartoon about WWE, called Hulk Hogan's Rock and Wrestling, they plan on including Mad Maxine as like the female villain character. Ah, okay. And she's, she didn't come up through Moolah. She did. She did come up through Moolah.

She did. She did. Oh, okay, okay. She did come up through Moolah. And perhaps because of that, this news got to Moolah before it got to Maxine. In fact, it doesn't seem to have gotten to Maxine at all until after she left the company. When the cartoon premieres, there's a new female villain character, the fabulous Moolah. Oh, shit.

1985. Do you remember Wendy Richter, the woman who took the belt off Moolah? Yeah, yeah. Rock and Wrestling. Cindy Lauper was her. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, remember how I told you she left the company on bad terms? Yes. Yeah. Buckle up. So, Wendy Richter is having a contract to speak with Vince McMahon. She's the centerpiece of the women's division, which is exploding in popularity, so she wants more money. As she should get.

As she should get. Absolutely. Specifically, she figured out how much the big men, the Hulk, Hogan's and whatever, were getting paid. And she's, you know, she's basically number two in terms of what people are interested in, but she ain't getting paid like number two because she's women's wrestling, right? Right, yeah. So, she demands what she's worth.

And on top of all that, not only has she far eclipsed Moolah as a star since taking the women's title belt off her, she's also no longer kicking back a percentage of her paycheck to Moolah. Right. Okay. So, all of a sudden, Wendy Richter finds herself booked in a match against a mysterious masked competitor named The Spider. That's boring. Okay.

Boring name. Wendy gets to the arena and she notices Moolah hanging around backstage, even though she doesn't have any obvious reason to be at the show. And when she gets to the ring, she notices The Spider looks a bit different than usual. I've literally written here, lumpier, old lady. Old lady. She looks a little old lady. We hear them usually.

So, during the match, The Spider breaks from the script and pins Wendy. The ref delivers a fast three count. Wendy kicks out at one. The ref rings the bell anyway. Oh, no! Again, that's against the rules. That's that's that's that's the rules. That's bad.

That's bad. So, that's, like, why have this system at all? A confused Wendy rips off her opponent's mask to reveal John McCain. No, Josie, it's the Fabulous Moolah with a terrible gas. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I maybe thought it was John McCain.

Maybe. I don't know. It's OK. He went with Palin. He could be there. You never know. You never know. The lumpier old lady or spider.

So it was, in fact, the Fabulous Moolah. And she is now once again champion. And you can find this match online. And if you watch it, Wendy Richter is pissed. As, yeah. She starts like, she thinks it's a mistake and starts like trying to work the rest of the match. Like, no, guys, there's still more to go.

Gosh, what have I missed? Yeah. But then when she realizes what's happening, she freaks out and starts beating Moolah with the belt. OK, good. Like whipping Moolah with the belt to the point where, and I've never seen this before, even though Moolah just won the title, she ends up having to flee the ring

and leave without it. Because Wendy Richter will not let it go. Whoa. Good, good. I mean, it wasn't John McCain and it was Moolah. So it's just like, fuck this, fuck this noise. Two strikes you're out, as they say. Yeah, yeah.

After the match, Wendy gets backstage. She tries to talk to Vince. He's ghost. She exits the arena, still in her gear, leaves WWE and never speaks to Moolah again. The incident becomes known in wrestling lore as the original screw job. Oh, OK.

This basically killed Wendy's main event career and with it, the burgeoning women's division, which wouldn't recover for 30 more years. Oh, Jesus. When asked if she'd ever viewed the footage of the fateful match, Wendy responded, quote, Every night of my life. Opposite day.

OK. She responded, quote, what good would it do? The bitch is dead, OK? I don't need to see it. I was there. Fair enough. I love a Wendy. I love a pissed off Wendy.

Last one. Damn. OK. 1988. The top two women's tag teams in the WWF are the Glamour Girls and the Jumping Bomb Angels. They're feuding. Good name.

Great names. Good name. The Jumping Bomb, they're feuding for the women's tag team titles. The Jumping Bomb Angels are a pair of Japanese wrestlers who work at Dazzling Athletic Explosive Style because women's wrestling in Japan is considerably further ahead because Mula

hasn't had a chokehold on it, right? OK, yeah. And then the Glamour Girls are a pair of Mula trainees who, like Wendy Richter, have also decided that they're not kicking back their cut to Mula anymore. Right, they're cutting the ties, moving on out, getting out of Mula Drive. We don't need this shit anymore.

So WWF is doing a tour of Japan in which the hometown bomb angels are scheduled to retain the belts against the Glamour Girls. Out of nowhere, Mula gets in touch with the Japanese promoters and tells them that there's been a change of plans. The Jumping Bomb Angels are instead supposed to drop the titles. No one can get in touch with the original Booker

to confirm this, so they play it out on Mula's word. Oh, no. Thinking, oh, it's just a sweet old lady who's deep into wrestling and. They know she's nasty because, like, two of them are cut and ties with her, right? Right, yeah. They know she's nasty, but they're like, fuck what?

Sure, I don't want to not do it and get in trouble, so they do it. Right, yeah. Belts change hands, and when they get home, everybody is pissed at them for defying the original plans. They try to explain themselves, but because Vince is so loyal to Mula, no one will hear them out. The women's tag titles are phased out,

and the planned women's tag match at WrestleMania is canceled, costing the four women the biggest payday of their careers. Oh my god. That is kind of the last big public allegation of Mula being an asshole before she passed away in 2007. It's hard to tie a bow on a story like that because Mula died before she could

face any real repercussions. Yeah. In 1995, she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. She passed away a year after the sweet Georgia Brown story that ran in the free times. She denied the accusations. The article didn't really get widespread attention until the Battle Royale kerfuffle in 2017,

a decade after Mula's death. By any conceivable measure other than legacy, she got away with everything. And even then, legacy might be a little, I mean, no, I guess within those realms. It's, I don't buy, I don't buy legacy as something like, I'm someone who thinks that if someone did something shitty or shitty things on this scale,

then to hell with their legacy. True, yeah. Like, I do think that. Yeah. In the dark side of the ring, Princess Victoria said, quote, Mula needs to be remembered. She was an icon in this business. You can't take away her history because she was an asshole.

It's her prerogative to feel that way, obviously, as one of the folks Mula did wrong. But it doesn't quite wash with me because Mula didn't maintain her roughly four decades of her stranglehold on women's wrestling by excelling at her craft. Based on these accounts, she did it by destroying others. Right, by manipulating and abusing others, yeah.

So by contrast, the article about Sweet Georgia Brown really emphasizes her quest for excellence and her dreams of being the first black champion, even in the face of harassment from racist fans, the KKK and more. She's an example of a promising talent that was squandered by Mula and Buddy Lee's green cruelty. And she died in 1989 of breast cancer

without receiving her day in the sun. So I'll let her family have the last word here. Good. Says Michael McCoy, the son of Susie Mae McCoy. Regardless of the abuse she went through, regardless of if they made her use drugs, they made her use alcohol, whether they pimped her, she was still South Carolina's first black female

professional wrestler. Honor it. Woo! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah, and that's kind of the question of legacy too, is like, just because they didn't, yeah, especially because they didn't get to reach

the level that they should have, because if somebody else's shitty, horrible humanist, then you still gotta celebrate them. Can they just name the dealio after her? Like the belt and everything? I think that they, WWE is a company loves to shy away from anything they may have been complicit in, you know? Right, okay.

I mean, my personal opinion, I don't think they're, I always say they're the least ethical company that I regularly support with my money, so. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's a good way to put it, okay. Yeah, but to have like this foundational figure, just so cold it. It's very inconvenient for the mythologizing

that they like to do now, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Because how perfect if you had this like unblemished 30 year, how the title is this grand matron of women's wrestling, and as with everything, it turns out that the reality is much more complicated and seedier than the PR. Right, yeah, that is, yeah, and I could see

how they would wanna shy away from anything, anything at all with it because of that. But damn, that's fucking dark. And here I was just thinking that, you know, like wrestling just had too deep of patriarchal roots in it to allow women to do anything, but it's like, that's not even, I mean, that's part of it, but it's this specific woman doling it out.

It's, I don't, and I don't attribute that just to her because you heard stories about like who this guy, who Wolf, whatever his name was, Billy Wolf, you heard about her like linking up with him and him being a casting coach guy, and you hear about like even things like the fact that I was telling you that as recently as six, seven years ago, the women's match was just the P break

and it was, they would bring out models who they had kind of trained to wrestle a bit in little skirts and they would kind of slap at each other and the boys would hoot and holler. So there is still that patriarchal component to it for sure. Yeah, but it just, it seems like that could have been addressed so much earlier if there had been room to do so, if there had been, you know, female wrestlers

who were properly supported and fostered. We were given the tools that they needed to succeed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's always, it's a really sad thing when you see every now and then they'll bring back wrestlers from as recently, women's wrestlers from as recently as like 10, 15, 20 years ago, for little guest spots here and there.

Like there were a couple in that like Beth Phoenix was in that Royal Rumble that we were and she's retired but she came back for the night or whatever. And you just, you look at them and working in a system that while still very imperfect is more supportive to them. You're just like, I weep for the potential of a Beth Phoenix who was stuck trying to do her best with other women who were legitimately doing their best and scraping it out

and ruining the buck and just giving poor training and substandard direction. And you know, it's a shame. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a rough one for sure. And to just think that like this part, like Mula could have been like such a pioneer too. Or maybe it's not Mula, but like somebody else could have

like been such like a grandmother to this, you know? And to like not have that there is just, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, but then, you know, now she's on Bittersweet Infamy podcast and she is a, you know, shithead. That's true, that's true. It's also hard because you hear the stories about Mula when she was younger and the type of shit

that she was asked to indulge in the place that she came from. And I never think that having been traumatized is an excuse to visit trauma upon other people. But at the same time, it's easy for me to feel empathy to someone who was just working in this very maladjusted 1940s and 50s Carney-ass professional wrestling world who fucking internalized a lot of really shitty lessons

about how you're supposed to treat other people. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. No, that's part of the equation too. It's not like she came out of a vacuum, you know? Like there was a lot influencing her. Man, so do you know the state of Mula Drive? What is that?

Mula Drive has been sold in fact by coincidence. One of the articles that I pulled from it was to get that quote from Del Wilkes about how she liked to take your money and make it last. One of those is actually about the sale of Mula Drive. I believe that it has been, I wanna say it's been repurposed into something professional or industrial,

but I can't swear to that and I don't know. Yeah, dang. It sounded so nice. I cut out so much stuff from this. Josie, you have no idea. I know, you're right. There's a hundred years in there and there's just like so much going on.

So much going on, yeah. So Josie, what would you say is the moral of the story? Yeah, what is the moral of the story? I feel like don't be an asshole is a good one, but I'm also thinking like, I think I'm thinking of the kind of the environment too, in which all of this was happening, like especially like once we get to like the 80s and 90s

and people are just being like, well, she's, you know, she's a part of this. Lula is, you know, she's like the foundation of da da da da so just listen and do it and I think that maybe might be where my moral lands is like, just because someone is in a revered position, it doesn't mean that you should listen to them uncritically. So you're basically pitching the tower, tarot cards,

all your institutions crumble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with that. I think that it's hard when we are having power enacted upon us not to respond to it. So I like obviously tremendous sympathy to everyone in that kind of situation. For me, I think that there is another wrestler,

Jake the Snake Roberts, who's his own fucking bowl of cherries and we could do a whole one of these about him. I've seen that 30 for 30 about him. There you go. So you know all about Jake the Snake. He once said, and I say this all the time, wrestling is real, people are fake.

I love that. I think that's the moral of the story. Fabulous Mooloo was fake. The shit she put people through, quite real. Cheer me up. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, but if you go to bittersweetinfamy.com, we got the da cam, not the dot org.

I have to say my way back when I was like, yeah, I'm gonna get an author website and I got JosephineMixell.org. I don't know what was that one. No, I love it. That's so good. That's peak irony. That's fucking great.

You cracked the code. Right, did I? That's the hippest shit I've ever heard, getting a dot org for your personal website. Ah, fuck, I wish I was like, cool. I was like, I like organizations. That's cool. Me too, me too.

Oh, dot org. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah. So, don't go to the dot org, go to the dot com. Yes. Go to bittersweetinfamy.com. You can find us there. Thanks to Taylor for that story

and to all of you for listening in. If you want more infamy, we release episodes every other Sunday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at bittersweetinfamy.com. Stay sweet. The sources that I used included The Fabulous Mula on Wikipedia

and specifically sections that I quoted included information from a book called Sisterhood of the Squared Circle, The History and Rise of Women's Wrestling by Pat LaPard and Dan Murphy. I also got a lot of information from The Dark Side of the Ring on Vice Land, Season One, Episode Six,

The Fabulous Mula. The information about Sweet Georgia Brown primarily came from an article called Baby of Sweet Georgia Brown by Murphy Falk in the Free Times, December 20th, 2006. I also consulted an article called Pro Female Wrestler Fabulous Mula,

Live Trained at Columbia Compound. Now it's been sold by Jeff Wilson for the state. That article is from January 12th, 2017. The song you're listening to is called Two Street by Brian Steele. Thanks for listening.