page_title: The Fabulous Moolah
section_title: Training and promoting
hierarchical_section_title: The Fabulous Moolah / Training and promoting
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: The Fabulous Moolah dans le magazine de catch Wrestling Annual de juin 1975.
context_page_description: Mary Lillian Ellison was an American professional wrestler, better known by her ring name The Fabulous Moolah.
  She began her career working with promoter Billy Wolfe and his wife, wrestler and trainer Mildred Burke, as well as working alongside professional wrestler "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers. She won the NWA World Women's Championship in 1956 and was the most prominent holder of the title for 28 years. She is overall an eight-time women's world champion and to this day held the record as the longest reigning women's world champion in combination of all her reigns.
  In the 1980s, she joined the World Wrestling Federation as part of the Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection storyline, feuding with Cyndi Lauper and Wendi Richter, the latter of whom defeated her for the WWF Women's Championship in the main event of The Brawl to End It All in 1984. Moolah regained the Women's Championship on two further occasions before entering semi-retirement towards the end of the decade. She continued to make sporadic appearances for WWF/WWE until her death, often in comedic roles with longtime friend Mae Young.
context_section_description: Ellison and her second husband Johnny Long began training women to become female wrestlers, including Ella Waldek, Daisy Mae, and Katherine Simpson. Long later contacted promoter Jack Pfefer, who agreed to book some of the wrestlers at his shows. After marrying wrestler Buddy Lee, he began helping Ellison train the female wrestlers. After she left Pfeffer's promotion in the 1950s, Ellison found it difficult to book her trainees in shows due to Pfeffer's influence over other National Wrestling Alliance promoters. Ellison claimed Pfeffer would threaten to reveal the pre-planned nature of wrestling if any other promoters did not do as he liked. As a result, Ellison began selling cosmetics door-to-door and Lee opened a service station to make enough money to pay their bills. They later began to book their wrestlers, including Judy Grable in Boston, under promoter Paul Bowser.
  In the late 1950s when the once-dominant promoter of women's wrestling, Billy Wolfe, was out of business, Ellison and Lee began to book their female wrestlers for more and more shows. They began calling their promoting business Girl Wrestling Enterprises (GWE). Ellison demanded a lot from the girls of GWE, including that they had to keep their hair and make-up done, act like a lady, and not date men who were in the professional wrestling business. In addition to women, Ellison also trained midget professional wrestlers, including Katie Glass in the 1960s. Ellison founded the Ladies' International Wrestling Association, a non-profit organization to help retired professional wrestlers, in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, she spent most of her time training female wrestlers at her school in Columbia, South Carolina. She also began training men, including Del Wilkes, and in 1995 trained more men than women. She also spent time training in Los Angeles at Verne Langdon's Slammers Gym.
caption: Moolah stands at a turnbuckle in 1975
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