On the Nose

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

In Hollywood, they say that it's who you know.

The right connections can give you a leg up.

For instance, director Sophia Coppola is an immense talent, but it's easier to get noticed when your dad directed The Godfather, right?

In fact, scores of our favorite celebrities, people with massive amounts of talent, come from Hollywood royalty.

Nicholas Cage, Cage, George Clooney, Emma Roberts.

The list goes on and on.

But while these artists had a leg up, their talent is what earned them job after job.

After all, it's not how you get the opportunity, it's what you do with it that counts.

And as one Hollywood starlet has proved, sometimes a foot in the door is all someone needs to break the glass ceiling.

In 1948, an up-and-coming actress arrived for her voice session at Columbia Pictures, one of the leading film studios in Hollywood.

She had a good singing voice but was untrained, so the studio had her working with a composer named Fred Carger to get her as ready as possible for the small parts in an upcoming film.

That afternoon, Fred handed the young actress a vinyl record and encouraged her to listen to it.

The singer on the record was a moderately well-known crooner by the name of Ella Fitzgerald.

and Fred thought that the young actress might be able to learn a few things about singing by listening to Ella.

And the actress did listen and found herself drawn in by Ella Fitzgerald's low, sultry voice.

She became an instant fan and bought scores of Ella's records.

As it turned out, Ella Fitzgerald wasn't just a hypnotic singer.

She was also prolific, having released dozens of records since 1935.

Over the next six years, the young actress spent countless hours listening to Ella's recordings.

She followed her career, even as her own career took off and she began to land bigger and bigger roles in Hollywood.

But much as she loved Ella Fitzgerald, she didn't get to see her perform until November of 1954 at a nightclub in Los Angeles.

After the show, the actress met Ella and introduced herself as Marilyn Monroe, one of Ella's biggest fans, and the two struck up a fast friendship.

By this time, Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous celebrities on the planet.

Ella Fitzgerald was famous in her own right, but had nowhere near Marilyn's star power.

In fact, even though Ella had been recording albums for almost 20 years and had multiple songs top the billboard charts, she was still struggling to book a lot of upscale clubs around the country.

She especially wanted to play the MoCambo, a famous LA nightclub, but the owner had so far refused to book her.

This was sadly a common problem for black performers in the 1950s.

At the time, a lot of clubs at casinos practiced segregation.

These venues flat out refused to hire black talent.

Or if they did, musicians like Ella would perform and then be ushered out the back door without being allowed to stay in the venue after their set.

But that was only part of why the MoCambo refused to book Ella.

In fact, singers like Dorothy Dandridge and Ertha Kitt had already played the MoCambo, so Ella wouldn't have been the first African-American woman to perform there.

No, the problem was that Ella was full-figured.

It seems that she didn't meet the traditional beauty standards of the time, and the club's owner worried that a heavyset woman like Ella would lack the glamour needed to draw a crowd.

And so for years, Ella had been unable to change the club owner's mind about her.

But that was before she became friends with Marilyn Monroe.

So in the spring of 1955, Marilyn placed a call to the owner of the MoCambo and made him a deal.

If he booked Ella for a run at the club, Marilyn would be there every single night, and she would make sure that the paparazzis got plenty of pictures of her sitting at the center table.

The club owner was a businessman first and foremost.

His only real issue with booking Ella was her ability to draw a crowd, and Marilyn would certainly take care of that.

With her at the performance, the Macambo would end up being in the newspapers night after night.

So he agreed and hired Ella for a couple of weeks in March of 1955.

On opening night, Marilyn Monroe kept her word.

She showed up at the Macambo dressed to the nines with a trail of reporters and photographers right behind her.

She sat at the very front of the club, so the whole audience could see her avidly supporting her friend.

Plus, two more more celebrity guests also showed up to see Ella Kroon, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.

That night, Ella put on an unforgettable show to a packed house.

The rest of her run sold out and the MoCambo decided to extend her contract for another week.

After selling out that club, Ella's entire career changed.

She was in demand at upscale clubs around the country.

In fact, there wasn't a stage she could not book.

Years later, she said in an interview that after the MoCambo, she never had to play a small jazz club again.

And even though her talent is what brought her so much success, she always credited her good friend Marilyn Monroe for using her star power to open a door that never should have been closed to begin with.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too.

Aw, really?

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital1.com slash bank.

Capital One NA member FDIC.

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There's an old saying that no press is bad press.

It doesn't matter they say what the conversation is as long as it revolves around you.

And that's why so many celebrities and big-name brands rely on PR stunts to generate publicity.

If you're outrageous, you can get people talking.

So, when Nav took a job as director of communications for a racing team, he wanted his race car drivers in the papers, and he would succeed, but only after learning how quickly a publicity stunt can become a PR nightmare.

Now these days, it seems like almost everyone is a fan of Formula One racing, or has at least heard of the hit TV show Drive to Survive.

But back in 2004, F1 was a niche sport.

It was hard for any team to garner attention from the wider world, which for the owners of the teams was largely the point.

Car companies like Ferrari, Toyota, and Honda bought F1 teams to show off their automaking prowess.

Only first-place teams like Ferrari ever made the newspapers.

Seventh-place teams like Jaguar may as well have been invisible.

But that was a big problem for Jaguar's parent company, Ford Motors.

Going into the 2004 season, the Ford executives were beginning to feel like investing in an F1 team was a major waste of money.

There was a rumor that if Jaguar didn't garner some major publicity, Ford would sell the team at the end of the season.

Jaguar knew that they weren't good enough to win first place and make the papers, but they wanted to save their team regardless.

So Nav Sadu, the director of communications, devised a different way of garnering attention.

The Monaco Grand Prix was coming up, a race that always got more publicity than the rest, because Monaco races were usually crawling with celebrities.

And Nav wanted to make this year's race all about Jaguar.

So he called up the producers of a movie about to hit the theaters, Ocean's 12.

He proposed that they send George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt to the Monaco Grand Prix as a publicity stunt.

The Jaguar team would deck out their cars in Ocean's 12 logos.

And after a finishing touch, Sadu called the Steinmetz group a high-end jeweler, and he asked to borrow two diamonds that would be fixed to the front of the Jaguar race cars for the Grand Prix.

He thought that it would play up the jewel-heist nature of the Ocean's films.

The jewelers agreed, since it would be great publicity for them as well.

So, On the day of the race, both the drivers for Jaguar, Mark Weber and Christian Kleen, took photos with Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney.

The press went wild for their race cars, which had huge diamonds affixed to their nose cones, the front end of the cars.

Each diamond, by the way, was worth about a quarter of a million dollars.

But while everything was running smooth for the Jaguar team, the Grand Prix got off to a rocky start.

When it was time for the race, all of the cars got into their starting boxes on the track.

But one of the Toyota drivers pulled up short of his grid box, landing him right next to Christian Kleene, the Jaguar driver.

A rush of mechanics poured into the track, swarming the Toyota to change its tires, do a mechanical check, and position it correctly in place.

And when they finally cleared out, the race began.

And right from the start, it was chaos.

A pack of cars thundered around hairpin turns at breakneck speed.

Kleene wove through the track alongside the other drivers, screeching around corners and fighting to overtake the cars ahead of him.

And at one point, he realized that the right wing of his car was missing.

He wasn't sure what had happened if another car had knocked it off or if he had tapped it on a barrier when he was zooming around a turn, but he didn't need it to control the car and so he pushed the pedal to the floor.

Then, six turns into the race, he came up to a hairpin turn and lost traction and ended up smashing nose first into the barrier on the side of the track.

Crew members raced to clear the car off of the track, and by the time they got Kleene's car to safety, one of the crew noticed that the $250,000 diamond attached to the nose cone was missing.

The entire Jaguar team jumped into action, canvassing the area for the diamond.

They searched the track and watched the security footage but there was no sign of the diamond and suddenly it seemed like the PR stunt had turned into a plot line from an ocean's movie.

The problem was that a ton of unexpected people came in contact with the car, the mechanics at the beginning of the race, the crew members who pulled the car off the track.

If the diamond broke off during the race, a lucky bystander might have been able to reach through the barrier and grab it.

There was no way of knowing who took the diamond.

And to this day, it's never been found.

So was this an unfortunate accident or a well-planned high-stakes heist?

Either way, Nav Sudu accomplished his mission.

The incident got Jaguar a ton of press, but it didn't stop Ford from selling the team at the end of the season anyway.

At first, the sale seemed like a death knell for Jaguar.

After all, the new owners were not even automakers, they were a beverage company.

But they poured a ton of money and resources into Jaguar and renamed the team after the beverage company's Energy Drink.

Today, they still make the papers.

Not for missing diamonds, but because they're arguably the best racing team in the world.

You'd almost certainly recognize their name and their bright red logo.

F1 fans know them today as Red Bull.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Oh, really?

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital One.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA member FDIC.

This is an iHeart podcast.