October 2, 2025 • 11 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
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, George Clooney,
(00:56):
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 nineteen forty eight, an up
(01:17):
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.
(01:40):
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 scool of Ella's records. As it turned out, Ella
(02:02):
Fitzgerald wasn't just a hypnotic singer, she was also prolific,
having released dozens of records since nineteen thirty five. 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
(02:25):
loved Ella Fitzgerald, she didn't get to see her perform
until November of nineteen fifty four 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
(02:46):
the planet. Ella Fitzgerald was famous in her own right,
but had nowhere near Marylyn's star power. In fact, even
though Ella had been recording albums for almost twenty years
and had multiple songs topped 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
(03:09):
to book her. This was sadly a common problem for
black performers in the nineteen fifties. At the time, a
lot of clubs at Casino's practice 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
(03:31):
why the Mcambo refused to book Ella. In fact, singers
like Dorothy Dandridge and Eartha Kit 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 heavy set woman like Ella would lack the
(03:53):
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 nineteen fifty five,
Marilyn placed a call to the owner of the Mcambo
and made him a deal. If he booked Ella for
a run at the club, Marilyn would be there every
(04:13):
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 nights after night, so he
(04:34):
agreed and hired Ella for a couple of weeks in
March of nineteen fifty five. On opening night, Marilyn Monroe
kept her word. She showed up at the Mcambo dressed
to the nines, with the 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 celebrity guests also showed
(04:57):
up to see Ella, Crune, 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 Macambo 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,
(05:19):
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. There's an old saying
(05:54):
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,
(06:15):
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 as a fan of Formula
one racing or has at least heard of the hit
TV show Drive to Survive. But back in two thousand
and four, F one was a niche sport. It was
(06:38):
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 F one
teams to show off their auto making prowess. Only first
place teams like Ferrari ever made the newspapers. Seventh place
teams like Jaguar may as well have been invisible. But
(06:59):
that this was a big problem for Jaguar's parent company,
Ford Motors. Going into the two thousand and four season,
the Ford executives were beginning to feel like investing in
an F one 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
(07:20):
to win first place and make the papers, but they
wanted to save their team regardless, so Nov 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 Monco races
were usually crawling with celebrities, and nav wanted to make
(07:40):
this year's race all about Jaguar, so he called up
the producers of a movie about to hit the theaters,
Oceans Twelve. 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 twelve logos and after finishing touch Sadu
(08:01):
called the Steinmetz Group eight 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,
(08:22):
Mark Weber and Christian Clean 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.
(08:45):
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, lending him right next to Christian Clean, 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
(09:07):
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. Clean 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.
(09:27):
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
(09:48):
raced to clear the car off of the track, and
by the time they got Clean's car to safety, one
of the crew noticed that the two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars diamond attached to the nose cone was missing.
The 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,
(10:10):
and suddenly it seemed like the pr stunt had turned
into a plotline 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
(10:30):
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, Navsidu accomplished his mission. The
incident got Jaguar a ton of press, but it didn't
stop Forward from selling the team at the end of
(10:51):
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 bever 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
(11:11):
because they're arguably the best racing team in the world.
You'd almost certainly recognize their name and their bright red logo.
F One fans know them today as Red Bull.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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 Curiosities podcast dot com.
The 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,
(11:48):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
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, George Clooney,
(00:56):
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 nineteen forty eight, an up
(01:17):
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.
(01:40):
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 scool of Ella's records. As it turned out, Ella
(02:02):
Fitzgerald wasn't just a hypnotic singer, she was also prolific,
having released dozens of records since nineteen thirty five. 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
(02:25):
loved Ella Fitzgerald, she didn't get to see her perform
until November of nineteen fifty four 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
(02:46):
the planet. Ella Fitzgerald was famous in her own right,
but had nowhere near Marylyn's star power. In fact, even
though Ella had been recording albums for almost twenty years
and had multiple songs topped 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
(03:09):
to book her. This was sadly a common problem for
black performers in the nineteen fifties. At the time, a
lot of clubs at Casino's practice 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
(03:31):
why the Mcambo refused to book Ella. In fact, singers
like Dorothy Dandridge and Eartha Kit 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 heavy set woman like Ella would lack the
(03:53):
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 nineteen fifty five,
Marilyn placed a call to the owner of the Mcambo
and made him a deal. If he booked Ella for
a run at the club, Marilyn would be there every
(04:13):
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 nights after night, so he
(04:34):
agreed and hired Ella for a couple of weeks in
March of nineteen fifty five. On opening night, Marilyn Monroe
kept her word. She showed up at the Mcambo dressed
to the nines, with the 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 celebrity guests also showed
(04:57):
up to see Ella, Crune, 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 Macambo 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,
(05:19):
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. There's an old saying
(05:54):
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,
(06:15):
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 as a fan of Formula
one racing or has at least heard of the hit
TV show Drive to Survive. But back in two thousand
and four, F one was a niche sport. It was
(06:38):
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 F one
teams to show off their auto making prowess. Only first
place teams like Ferrari ever made the newspapers. Seventh place
teams like Jaguar may as well have been invisible. But
(06:59):
that this was a big problem for Jaguar's parent company,
Ford Motors. Going into the two thousand and four season,
the Ford executives were beginning to feel like investing in
an F one 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
(07:20):
to win first place and make the papers, but they
wanted to save their team regardless, so Nov 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 Monco races
were usually crawling with celebrities, and nav wanted to make
(07:40):
this year's race all about Jaguar, so he called up
the producers of a movie about to hit the theaters,
Oceans Twelve. 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 twelve logos and after finishing touch Sadu
(08:01):
called the Steinmetz Group eight 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,
(08:22):
Mark Weber and Christian Clean 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.
(08:45):
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, lending him right next to Christian Clean, 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
(09:07):
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. Clean 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.
(09:27):
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
(09:48):
raced to clear the car off of the track, and
by the time they got Clean's car to safety, one
of the crew noticed that the two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars diamond attached to the nose cone was missing.
The 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,
(10:10):
and suddenly it seemed like the pr stunt had turned
into a plotline 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
(10:30):
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, Navsidu accomplished his mission. The
incident got Jaguar a ton of press, but it didn't
stop Forward from selling the team at the end of
(10:51):
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 bever 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
(11:11):
because they're arguably the best racing team in the world.
You'd almost certainly recognize their name and their bright red logo.
F One fans know them today as Red Bull.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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 Curiosities podcast dot com.
The 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,
(11:48):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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