![]() The story has remained compelling enough for several retellings, including Bonnie Greer’s musical Marilyn and Ella and, more recently, through the hilarious unreliability of an episode of Drunk History. Though Monroe’s efforts didn’t make Fitzgerald the first black performer to take the Mocambo’s stage - Herb Jeffries, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant had played there in 19 - she did use it as a platform to ascend to unusually great career heights, comparable to the way Frank Sinatra launched his solo career there. ![]() ![]() But as luck would have it, Fitzgerald found an advocate in Monroe, who, “tired of being cast as a helpless sex symbol, took a break from Los Angeles and headed to New York to find herself,” writes the Independent‘s Ciar Byrne. But at the time, a singer of the reputedly scandalous new music known as jazz didn’t just waltz onto the stage of such a respectable venue, especially given the racial attitudes of the time. If you wanted to play to an influential crowd in Hollywood back in the 1950s, you had to play the Mocambo, the Sunset Strip nightclub frequented by the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, Bob Hope, Sophia Loren, and Howard Hughes. But before their ascension to cultural immortality, the Angeleno Monroe and the New Yorker Fitzgerald’s paths crossed down here on Earth in 1955, and, when they did, the movie star played an integral role in breaking the jazz singer into the big time. Their skills as performers, their inherent iconic qualities, the time of the mid-twentieth century in which they rose to fame, and other factors besides, have ensured that these two women still define the images of their respective crafts. Think of movie stars, and you’ll almost certainly think of Marilyn Monroe think of jazz singers, and you’ll almost certainly think of Ella Fitzgerald.
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