![]() ![]() She was living in New York then and did not return for Ella’s shows.Įlla Fitzgerald had been performing on the club circuit for 20 years by then. Marilyn made sure the club was packed with Hollywood A-listers for Ella’s debut, but she was not among them. She wasn’t even in Los Angeles in March 1955. Ella had forgotten that Marilyn was not there when she played Mocambo. ![]() The press went overboard… After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”īased on this quote, you can see how someone might assume that the photo was taken at Mocambo. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. “It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Ella said. Magazine in 1972 has contributed to the confusion today. It was Marilyn’s first night out since the operation and one of her rare public appearances since she and Joe DiMaggio separated.”īut was the “Hollywood nightclub” Mocambo? A quote from Ella Fitzgerald herself in an interview with Ms. 18, at a Hollywood nightclub where Miss Fitzgerald is appearing. ![]() Fully recovered from minor surgery performed recently at a Hollywood hospital, actress Marilyn Monroe is pictured with singer Ella Fitzgerald, Nov. The photo ran in newspapers nationwide the next day with the caption, “MARILYN IN GOOD SHAPE AGAIN. This story falsely claims that the photo was taken at Mocambo, an A-list nightclub on the Sunset Strip, that the club had a policy against booking black performers, and that Marilyn made a personal appeal to the club owner to rescind the racist policy and book her friend. But in the photo’s spin around the Interwebs, a back story has been invented about it that is untrue. As Avedon might put it, the image is accurate. She had apparently let the press know she’d be at the club in order to publicize Ella’s appearance at the club. The camera’s flash caught Ella and Marilyn sitting side by side, dressed to the nines and elegantly coiffed – Ella in an embroidered, light-colored silk cocktail dress Marilyn in a low-cut, little black dress with a fur coat draped casually across her shoulder. Wherever she went, reporters and photographers followed. Marilyn was at the height of her popularity then. “None of them is the truth.” Case in point, a photograph of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe in a nightclub in the 1950s that has gone viral recently. “All photographs are accurate,” wrote the celebrated photographer Richard Avedon. ![]()
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