Explore history's interlocking lives and events. Turn back the clock, one story at a time. Discover how various strands are woven together to create a historic figure, a big idea or an unthinkable tragedy. From OZY Media. History. Unwound.
SUBSCRIBE NOWA writer, activist and co-founder of Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem has played a pivotal role in the women's movement. But she first garnered national attention in 1963 when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny and wrote a damning expose about her experiences inside the famous men's club.
Riding the wave of the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Hugh Hefner created a male fantasy world in the pages of his Playboy magazine, one that would have lasting consequences for American life and culture. Behind closed doors, however, Hefner's life in the celebrated Playboy mansion was rather different than the sophisticated one portrayed in his magazine.
Marilyn Monroe was larger than life. But beneath the soft-spoken movie star and sex goddess was another woman, one far bolder than most people realize. Monroe was an actress ahead of her time, one who was not afraid to stand up to some of the most powerful men in Hollywood — the men she called the "wolves."
In 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Nevada legislature passed two bills: one to legalize gambling, the other to legalize a six-week waiting period for a divorce. Over the next few decades, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, would journey to the desert state for a quickie divorce, a chance to forget their problems and a shot at reinvention.
The film legend Clark Gable was a key figure at the heart of the glamour and excess of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But his rise and scandal-buried reign at the top of the movie world reveal a great deal about a young industry both obsessed with adhering to morality codes, and incapable of being moral.
The Hollywood casting couch existed long before Harvey Weinstein. In this final episode of the season, we explore some of Weinstein's antecedents in the industry, the scandals and crimes they covered up and how a new generation of Gloria Steinem-inspired women is starting to put an end to the old practices of Hollywood and other male-dominated industries.