If you were a professional wrestling fan from roughly the mid-Fifties through the mid-Eighties, you would have encountered only one female world champion. That would have been The Fabulous Moolah, real name Mary Lillian Ellison. This episode of the Dark Side series looks at the legacy of Moolah, recently tainted by allegations of nefarious activities involving the female wrestlers she took under her wing to train and promote. Accusations of prostitution are part of the mix, hiring out women to various wrestling promotions with that sort of condition understood.
Appearing in the program to present opposing points of view are Moolah's daughter Mary Austin, promoter and booker Jim Cornette, former wrestlers Wendi Richter and 'Princess' Victoria Otis, and the son and daughter of former wrestler Sweet Georgia Brown, one of Moolah's proteges. It's probably fair to say the Moolah did take advantage in some respects with the women who sought her out for training and entering the profession. She provided a training facility and place to live in exchange for rent, and took as much as a twenty five percent commission out of the purses of the girls' matches. Interestingly, while the daughter of Sweet Georgia Brown, Barbara Harsey, condemns Moolah for making her mother drink, pop pills and have sex with other men, her brother Michael McCoy contradicts that narrative by saying that Moolah did nothing but help his mother in her career.
Somewhere in the middle is probably some semblance of the truth, though the 'sport's' history of kayfabe, or maintaining secrecy about anything to do behind the scenes, will continue to obscure the reality. Vickie Otis, who wrestled as Princess Victoria, offers a somewhat twisted summary of how she felt about Moolah. "If I choose not to like her because of what she did to me, that's fine," Otis says. "But Moolah needs to be remembered. She was an icon in this business. You can't take away her history because she was an a--hole!" Like a number of the situations presented in "Dark Side of the Ring", much is left up to the judgment of the viewer, and this one was no exception.
