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Her father, befuddled about how to cheer up his only daughter after her mother's death, started taking her to the local Tuesday night wrestling matches. Ellison got one look at Mildred Burke (the most popular "lady rassler" of that era), and saw her future.
"It was like, "Wow! Women can do that?' Right then, I knew what I wanted to be. My dad just laughed -- he didn't take me seriously."
Ellison's wrestling career wasn't to begin just yet, though. There was romance in the air by way of a young man named Walter Carroll, who always let Ellison drive his shiny new Ford home from school.
"Walter kept saying, "Let's run away and get married.' I thought, well, I wouldn't have to look at all my brothers, and my dad couldn't tell me what to do anymore, so we eloped."
At the time, Ellison was just 14, Walter, 21. The marriage lasted less than two years. "It was a mistake," Ellison says. "I should have stayed at home."
Although the marriage didn't last, the young couple had a daughter, Mary. "She was more or less like my sister," Ellison says. "We basically grew up together."
Ellison began to focus once again on wrestling, despite the fact that her dad said she should stay home and take care of her baby. But Ellison couldn't help herself -- she was determined to be a star.
For awhile, she wrestled for Billy Wolfe, a notorious promoter who dominated women's wrestling at the time. Wolfe was married to Mildred Burke but played the field freely, and even suggested to some of his wrestlers that they sleep with competing promoters to get paying gigs in new towns. Ellison found Wolfe "a despicable human being," and refused to go along with his suggestions, but for a time, she was stuck fighting for a man who "treated us like pieces of meat. . .you'd get 50 dollars a week whether you wrestled once or 20 times. And it was more often 20 times."
It was Ellison's next romance -- wrestling star Johnny Long -- that really kick-started her career.
"Johnny had a natural, muscled-up body. He looked like Joe Palooka. He was really gorgeous. When he started teaching me about the wrestling business, things started happening."
Long trained Ellison -- something Wolfe never bothered to do -- and before long she began showing up as a "valet" for male wrestlers, introduced to the crowd as a "slave girl," dressed in her trademark leopard skin outfit. But the woman who got into the business for the "moolah" wouldn't remain a valet for long. She fought her first professional match in 1949 at the Boston Arena.
"I remember that night real well," she says. "I got the hell beat out of me. This girl, she was over 200 pounds, and there I was, like 120. But she knew I was there."
Ellison and Long soon became the dynamic duo of wrestling, traveling across the country and mixing it up in the ring. Soon, they opened a wrestling school for women, and began promoting many of the wrestlers they trained, including one unforgettable character named Lady Angel.
"I was in Jacksonville, Florida, and after my match there was a knock on the door," Ellison says. "I opened it and there was this huge woman standing in front of me. She was bald, had scars all over her face and her nose was missing -- she was scary looking. She had walked into an airplane propeller. She looked down at me and said "I want to be a lady wrestler.' Her name was Tommi Huckaby. I named her The Lady Angel."
Soon, The Fabulous Moolah, Lady Angel, and "The Elephant Boy," a giant Hispanic man with a massive afro, were traveling the road together. Promoters began hyping them as the "band of freaks" and, of course, their popularity grew.
The Champ And The Stars
Ellison's career may have been gaining momentum, but her marriage wasn't faring as well. The combination of her independent spirit, Long's womanizing, and his new demands that she give up her career and stay home, didn't make for a good combination, and they soon divorced.
In her autobiography, The Fabulous Moolah, she writes, "I always told Johnny, "I'm gonna pursue my profession.' In fact, I used to say that a lot, and I'd get a kick over just how uncomfortable it would make men."
By the time this proto-feminist grappler and Long divorced, The Fabulous Moolah's career was on the fast track. She won the WWF (now WWE) Women's Championship in 1956 during a 13-woman Battle Royal in Baltimore. During her reign as women's champion, she rubbed elbows with some famous and infamous celebrities, including a young truck driver named Elvis Presley.
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