Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Surprising History of Redheads: From Prehistoric Gingers to Ed Sheeran

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Boudica. Elizabeth I. Ed Sheeran. The history of the redhead goes back thousands of years, and it fluctuates from prejudice in medieval Europe, to the height of fashion in Protestant England.2% of the global population are redheads, so if you are one, you're one of a special few.Jacky Colliss Harvey, author of Red: A History of the Redhead, joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to explore red hair throughout the ages, debunking myths and analysing its place in society.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy, the producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXT.You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Thank you very much and on with the show. We are in the heart of the Elizabethan Court betwixters and one cannot help but notice something of a trend developing. The so-called Virgin Queen wore wigs for most of her life, yet she still chose for her hair to be red. She is a redhead, a colour that for centuries

have been associated with barbarians. And so while she was navigating life as a woman in power, being fearful of the moves her cousin Mary was making, she wasn't a redhead, and the small matter of the Spanish Armada heading her way. I don't know if they were redheads. Can we find out if the Spanish Armada were redheads as well? Cortiers on her side decided to show their allyship by dyeing their hair and beards red.

You've got to love the visual of Tudor women and possibly men hunching over a bathtub and washing the red dye through their hair. Not only was it a show of solidarity to Queen Liz, but it was also showing solidarity in faith. Pale-skinned Elizabeth and her court of super-proud Protestants wore it in defiance against the darker-haired features of Catholic Europe. So how else have Redheads left their mark throughout history? Well, I am ready to get to the bottom of this if you are. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and putting the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to betwixt the sheets. the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Throughout history, redheads have faced a lot of flack, to put it mildly. It's often dismissed as a bit of fun, a bit of a joke, but look no further than a certain South Park episode, yeah, and the result is a fair amount of social stigma, and that's

just mean. Can the colour of your hair really affect your character? What role did red hair play in the reputation of Queen Budica? And how else have redheads been depicted throughout history? Joining me today is Jackie Carlos Harvey, author of Red, A History of the Redhead to help shine some light on this. Now without further ado, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Jackie Carlis Harvey. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you. Lovely to be here. It's so lovely to have you here. Your book, I'm going to give it its full title, Red, A Natural History of the Redhead. It's so much fun.

And it's so fascinating. And I think you might be the only historian that's really working on this right now. There'll be others out there. I'll get letters about that. But what made you want to write this book? What was the moment that you thought, I need to write a history of redheads here? Well, there's two sides to the answer to that question. I'm a redhead myself. Glorious redheads. Thank you. For Twixters, you can't see this, but it is. It's beautiful red hair. And if you have red hair, your public property, all your life, all the time, people are going to share what they think of as fascinating titbits of redhead history with you, most of which are nonsense. But even the fact that people are sharing them with you is interesting. So there was that as a sort of background to it. And then I used to work in publishing and I was sitting in a sales conference watching another publisher present their list of popular science titles, history of this and the history of that. And I had this real light bulb overhead moment.

I thought, you know, why hasn't there ever been a history of the redhead? There are all these strange little factoids that get shared with you. How many of them are true? How many of them are complete nonsense? So I really wrote this book to sort out what was actual history from what was not. Do you remember when you were growing up? Was there a moment when you realized there's something unique about having red hair? Well, you can tell me if this goes across cultures, but certainly in Britain, we've got a weird thing about redheads.

Jokes about redheads. There's a whole cultural narrative around it. They're like the one acceptable form of discrimination now. You can still make jokes about redheads. But do you remember when you were growing up a kind of a creeping realization of there's something strange going on here? I do. And it wasn't even a creeping realization. It was an absolute revelation. I was about five years old. I grew up in Suffolk and I went to a tiny little village school in Suffolk. And we had a school bully. These days, I very much hope someone would have taken this poor child aside and given them some therapy

because attitudes to that have changed and it's a very good thing that they have. But we had this school bully and he picked on a girlfriend of mine as we were all, all of us kids were standing in line waiting to leave school at the end of the day. And I can't remember the event in any detail, but apparently I turned on him. I wound up my right arm like Popeye and I absolutely decked him. And, you know, we're all waiting to leave school. Everybody's mum was there outside the gate. And I knew this I do remember, even as it happened, thinking I am in the most terrible trouble here.

shocking, public, bad behaviour. My mum grabbed me and was hustling me away. And one of her girlfriends, laughing as she said it, said, well, what did he expect? She's a redhead. And I think I was about five years old. And that goes in at that age. You may not understand all of the implications of what an adult is saying,

but you certainly understand that for some reason or another, the colour of my hair means, have this license. It does have that association, doesn't it? They're the fiery redheads. It's always that link of fire, isn't it? And it's got to be about more than just the colour, because arguably blonde could be fire as well, like a flame. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it is a colour that has very, very strong associations for us. There is a fascinating piece of research that when we were at developing color vision for the very first time, when we really, you know, were not what you would call human yet at all, red was possibly the first color that we ever learned to distinguish

because it would have enabled us to tell ripe fruit from unripe. And then as human society progressed, it got all of these other associations of fire, yes, of the returning sun after midwinter of blood above all. And it stayed a colour that we are, we're really hardwired to react to it. So it's not surprising that it acquired all of these other cultural associations as well. There is something quite primal about the colour red. I hadn't even thought of that before. It is a link to blood, isn't it?

So when you're going back through your research, it can't be that we've always had a terrible attitude. to redheads. I'm thinking about there was that South Park episode, wasn't there, when they made a joke about redheads not having a soul. Like, that's where we can go with this. Like, my God, have we always been horrible to people with red hair? Was there, or have attitudes changed throughout history? I don't know that we've always been horrible to people with red hair, because there have been moments, certainly, in English history, when red hair was really celebrated, for example, in the time of Elizabeth I first. But one of one of the first, but one of one of the first. But one of the only of the moment. And, of the things we are really bad at dealing it with is anything that is other, anyone who looks different. And red hair is caused by a recessive gene. So it has always been in the minority and have always stood out because of that. Particularly in England, you've then got to add

on to it what for many centuries is a very unhappy history between England and Scotland and England and Ireland, where there are more redheads. So particularly this side of the Atlantic, it's a hair colour that has a lot of complicated and difficult history going along with it. Is it the rarest hair colour, red? Yes, yes. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's as a global average, about 2% of the population have red hair.

Wow. And is it more prevalent in Celtic countries, or is that another myth? No, it genuinely is, but that's because Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, the more northern parts of Europe, they're out of the great ebb and flow of the tribes of humanity, as it were. And anywhere which is that little bit isolated where people don't marry out so often, is a society that will give a recessive gene the greatest possible chance of expressing itself. This is why you also find so many redheads amongst the Jewish population. as well because again...

I don't know that. Yeah. Yeah. There's a fractional amount less marrying out and so you have many, many redheads amongst the Jewish population.

I remember a ferry trip over from Brooklyn to New York with a mum and dad, both Jewish, and five little red-headed children. They look just wonderful and there's a marvellous, marvellous, fiery red hair as well.

I've got two cousins that have got red hair and nobody knows where that came from because their mother is dark, and their father is blonde and nobody else in the family is redhead. They just like arrived and everyone was just like, yeah, where did that come from? Yeah.

There's a few side eyes being thrown at my auntie, Suzanne, but she swears down. Yeah, I had the same. Yes, yes, yes. So handsome redheaded milkman. Yeah. It was the same with me when I came along. I was the first redhead in my family within living memory. Wow.

I think that's another reason why it's regarded as being different. Yes. Because redheads just pop up. up with no warning whatsoever. There remind us that we're all part of this extraordinarily rich genetic mix and you really don't know what you've got or what it's going to produce. Let's go back to some of the earliest records. If we're looking at someone like the Greeks and the Romans, I know that the Romans loved

a blonde. There's a lot of discussion about the women trying to dye their hair blonde. I've never looked into redheads at this in the classical period. What has your research found? I was really fascinated by this. It's one of the things that happened throughout my research for the book where what seems to be a cultural association turns out to have a scientific or an historic basis. And as far as the classical world is concerned,

historians in the classical world, Herodotus in particular, they were very much aware of the existence of redheads. Around the Black Sea, in particular, He talks about how the tribes of the Scythians make gods in their own image, therefore with blue eyes and red hair. Red-headed gods. Red-headed gods, I know. What could be better? But these tribes were the complete opposite to what both Greek and Roman society regarded as acceptable forms of civilization.

They were nomadic. They were very liberated in their attitudes towards the women. in their societies, who, well, the Romans regarded them as wildly promiscuous, but we would simply say that they were exercising the same sort of freedom to choose a partner as any man might have done. They permitted sex before marriage, so there were a lot of illegitimate children. One of the ways in which these illegitimate children were dealt with was that they were sold as slaves. So you find a lot of references.

Yeah, no, not good. You do find references to red-headed slaves in Greek households. And if you look through Greek comedies, you will find a lot of the comic characters have names that are basically nicknames such as fiery or Goldie. And they were the characters who went out on stage doing, you know, the coarse acting, the pratfalls, the slapstick humour. I think you can probably, this is a line you can probably trace right through to the red-headed clown and Ronald McDonald today. It's a long, long line of a cultural association, but I think you can carry it through. So in the classical world, redheads were regarded as uncivilized, exactly how the English regarded the Scottish and the Irish for many, many years. They were kind of barbarian, they lived without laws, and they were regarded as being.

basically comic, not to be taken seriously. There's still shadows of that today, definitely, with redhead stereotypes. I wonder if that might be where it all started from is this association with Celtic tribes as well, with a kind of a wildness and untameability. Yes. And you also have to remember that many of the Vikings who came down from Scandinavia would have been redheads as well. So you've got this association with uncontrollable ferocity too.

which again is allied to the colour of the hair. I read some of that Alexander the Great had red hair. Is there any truth in that? I doubt it, to be honest. I mean, it's possible. One of those myths, a red-headed myth. I do know. I have a publishing colleague who came from the Punjab.

Her family came from the Punjab. And there, whenever they have a child born with reddish hair or green eyes, they still say that this is a result of Alexander the Great's troops marching through India and leaving their little genetic traces behind them. So, you know, who knows? There is a possibility that Cleopatra might have been a redhead, although it's very tenuous. It's based upon accepting the identification of a portrait as being her in a Roman fresco.

It could have been recording an actual appearance of the woman. But then again, whoever is in that portrait might perfectly well have been wearing a wig. So who knows? We've got that myth about Budica as well, though, the Icenae Celtic queen who led a rebellion against the Romans. Yes. But she apparently had lion mane of red hair. Yes. And that is recorded in accounts of her from the time or from historians who are writing about her very shortly after the revolt.

So that's possible. That's possible. And it is something that Elizabeth first used. She kind of had the Budika legend became a part of her own branding, as it were, because of course Budica was trying to get rid of an invader, and Elizabeth was trying to do exactly the same with Spanish. Right. I mean, it almost doesn't matter what colour hair Budica had,

but the fact to portray her with red hair when Elizabeth I had the first had red hair, that's really interesting because something's happening there. Elizabeth I's got to be one of the most famous red hair. head. So how was being a redhead person being viewed in Elizabeth's court? Was she just booking a trend? Was she like, no, I'm going to have red hair stand out? Or was, because her dad was Ginger as well, was. Yes, he was. And I think one of the reasons why she espoused red hair so strongly is because it's allied her to him as his legitimate daughter. If your mom has been executed for adultery, then inevitably there are going to be sort of questions raised over your

own paternity. So to have red hair, not only was a visual signal that she was indeed Henry the 8th's daughter, but Elizabeth lived in Reformation England. All of the old Catholic saints had gone, apart from one, St. George, who was St. George of England, and his colours were red and white. So you have her in the red wig with the very white face, and she's mapping herself, if you like, onto the image of England and the presentation of England. These are England's colours, red and white. These are still England's colours, red and white. She was very, very clever in her personal branding and I'm sure it was absolutely conscious. She was a natural redhead. I know later on when she was, you know, getting a bit older, that she was wearing wigs. And she still, and that's interesting as well then that she would still go for the red choice when a wig she could have done anything she wanted. And she was like, no, this is my brand will stay red. But she was a natural redhead, wasn't she? Yes, she was. All the pictures of her as a very young woman make it plain that she had red hair.

Of course, she also had smallpox, and her hair may have thinned out as a result of that. But when you look at those extraordinarily elaborate hairstyles she had dripping with jewels, it would be impossible to put all that onto real hair. That's true. Even if you could do it, you would have spent the entire day sitting under the hands of your hairdresser as opposed to ruling the kingdom much more sensible to have a, good, sturdy, red wig that you could deck with diamonds and pearls as you wished and just put that on as needed. Did she start a bit of a trend? I mean, if the Queen's got red hair,

people must have thought, well, I'm going to have red hair too. Oh, goodness. Yes, she did. Yes. There are so many possible portraits of Elizabeth I, because practically every woman in her court adopted red hair and looks like Elizabeth. So there are, in any number of portraits of anonymous women in the Elizabethan period that have at one time or another been identified as being Elizabeth the first. Do we know what hair dye they were using? Like beauty treatments in the past always fascinate me because I read them and I go, my God, what were you doing? How would you dye your hair red to fit in with Elizabeth? You would use Hena. Hena has been used for thousands and thousands of years and of course it does turn hair red. If you wanted to change your colour, natural hair dye being the only one

that was available, Hena and the red that comes from using Hena would really have been about the only choice that you had. I suspect that this may be another reason why there has been this long-standing association between red hair and sexiness too, because if you were a sex worker, it helped if you stood out and dyeing your hair with Hena would be one of the ways in which you could make yourself stand out. I'll be back with Jackie after this short break.

I'm trying to remember now from a portrait. was James the first who came down from Scotland after Elizabeth? Was he a redhead? Red-ish. Red-ish. Red-ish, yes. And his wife, Anne of Denmark, Scandinavian, very likely she was carrying the gene as well.

Okay. So I'm asking that is because he had a bit of a thing about witches. And he got into a right muddle, didn't he? Like writing his little witch books and, you know, trying to find it and all that stuff. It should have just been off being a king. But they're mastering people. Quite.

It must have been people in his court just being like, can we do less of the witches and more of the internal politics. But this might be a myth that you can disabuse me of. But I've definitely heard people say more redheads were executed as witches. That might just be a myth. Yeah, me too, me too. And it is a myth. If you go back into the social history of witch trials, which you can do in a good deal of detail. because of course these were official documents.

Then you can see that nearly all of the women who suffered and were accused of witchcraft were elderly. They were in their 60s or 70s or even older, so their hair would have been white or grey. It was the fact that they were old and widowed and on their own that made them such easy victims. There's very little likelihood of red-headed women ever having been hauled off to be hung or burned at the stake because of witchcraft. but it is an extraordinarily persistent myth. I've kind of given up trying to disabuse people of this one. I'm wearing another of my hats.

I write historical fiction, and I have a red-headed character in the book I'm working on at the moment, and there are some witchy things about her, and I thought, I know what I'm doing here. Go with it. No, red hair and this, but yes, exactly. You know, I'm just going to have to go with it. That's just how it is.

I think that it's interesting because when myths like that, crop up, even though, like, you can, as a historian, go, well, it's not actually true. The very fact that it exists does tell us something, doesn't it? It does tell us that there is a link that we have made somehow between red-headed women in particular and witchcraft. Yeah, you're so right. And I think in this case, it has to do with the fact that Eve in Western art is always represented as a blonde.

Oh, yes. Whereas Adam's first wife, Lilith, the one who is having nine. of it and went off into the wilderness on her own rather than be obedient and subservient to Adam. She's always been represented as being a redhead. I think you also have to remember that artists have a great liking for representing nubile naked, young redheaded women acting as witches. Especially by the time you get to the 19th century and the pre-Ratholites are getting going, they've got a real thing about redhead, don't they?

Yeah. Yeah, Rosetti, was absolutely obsessed. I have a phenomenon I describe in my book as the man with a thing for redheads. And he was absolutely one of those. One of his most favoured models, Alexa Wilding, he pursued her in the street twice. She was only a teenager. He saw her from his carriage and ran after her. Wow. And Lizzie Siddell as well. She was another redhead, wasn't she? That he tracked down. What do you think he was, I was going to say, what do you think he'd doing redheads? I think we can guess. But what do you think in his art, what does the redhead represent to Rosetti? Why does he seek out this particular look?

I think it's partly because, as we've said, the eye is drawn to red as a colour. You can see to lose Ltrecht using red hair in his paintings. In exactly the same way, there'll be this spot of red somewhere on some woman's head in a crowd. Artists do enjoy depicting red hair as well. I worked as a life model way back when and artists were always very, very keen on having the hair because of the bounce of light off it and the variety of colours. But the other thing that artists really, really enjoy

if they have a red-headed model is the pale skin because of the way the light bounces off that. It's an artist's thing, what can we say? That's true. I hadn't even thought about that. We've been spending so long talking about hair colour, but part of the red-haired myth. mythology is the paleness as well. It's like the ongoing joke that, you know, like a redhead

can't open their fridge without getting sunburners. Yes, exactly. Like, I know the fairer people burn more or is that, is that another, you do. Okay. Yes. We do. We really do. And any redheads and any and every redhead listening to this, put on the factor 50. Use it 24-7, 365 days a year. Don't mess. We have so little natural protection in our skin compared to anyone who has a darker skin in color. The flip side to that, pale skin does mean that under cloudy northern skies, and oh, how long have we all been waiting for those cloudy northern skies to clear this year, you can synthesize vitamin D much more effectively from whatever sunlight is out there.

And if you're a girly and have lots of vitamin D in your system, that's going to give you a nice strong skeleton and above all it's going to give you a nice strong pelvis for carrying and bearing children as well. So again, there may be an association there between this notion of red-headed women being particularly sexy. That may, I think, go back to a realization thousands of years ago that if you chose a red-headed as a mate, it would increase your chances of breeding successfully. You'll make a nice strong pelvis and she could produce lots of babies. The pale skin is interesting as well, because for most of our collective history in the West, pale skin has been the ideal. That's been the beauty. It's only within the last hundred years or so. I think it was Coco Chanel who brought back the tan. Do you think that maybe that was part of the beauty of the redhead was the paleness? I think it was part of the desirability of the redhead. If you're a redheaded woman, for sure, it's a different story for redheaded men. But if your skin is pale, then obviously you were. weren't laboring out in the fields. And there's this rather unhealthy association with seclusion and

secrecy and the harem and all the rest of it. What about redheaded men? We've touched on them there because we've just been talking and mostly about women. Have men faced the same stigma? Because there's definitely that thing, a redheaded woman is a goer and that she's feisty and she's all of these things. As a redheaded guy, what stigmas do they face? What's been their history? Well, this is again another reason why I found the subject so fascinating because, yes, we're dealing in stereotypes here, but this is a stereotype where the woman really gets a much better deal of it than the man. Red-headed women are regarded as sexy. Red-headed men are regarded as either as weaklings or as complete berserkers. You know, there'll be the drunken Scotsman in the, you know, sitting in the tartan beret. That or it's the guy who can't go out in sunlight. the guy who is manifesting this pale skin, which is a quality that we associate with women. It's extraordinary, how unsophisticated we all still are in our thinking, where the difference between male and female is concerned, but there we are.

When you actually like stop and unpack it a little bit, oh God, we are still doing this nonsense. I'm trying to think back through famous paintings and representations and trying to think of a man with red hair. It's just because of me, Mary Magdalene is often depicted with red hair. Yes, she is. Obviously, but that just popped in there. No, Mary Magdalene, no, the character in art, who is nearly always depicted with red hair, is Judas. So that's another issue. But that's not even subtle. No, not at all.

Is there a link between red-headed men and the devil? Sorry, that's right out there, because I'm just trying to think of, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Miller is described as having red hair, which really, really, really red. and it has been linked to a kind of almost a devil-like appearance. Is that something that you've come across? That's interesting. I haven't come across that. I thought...

Might just made it up. I thought the Miller had his red hair because that was a sort of a sign to Chaucer's readers that this was a guy with a bad temper and a peasant, basically. It's somewhere in the lower end of the social scale. His beard is red and it's described as being like a bush, and he's got bagpipes and he's loud and gobby. Yeah, he's the C.U. Jimmy type of redhead stereotype.

So what happens then? Because we've got Elizabeth I've got, Elizabeth I'm proudly redhead. We've got James I and his wife, red-headed ish. And then centuries later, Rosetti and the pre-Raphylites, these ginger red-headed people are beautiful. They're extraordinary. How the hell did we get to the 21st century in South Park? making jokes about ginger's not having souls. What happened? Well, I'm a big fan of South Park, and I think what they were trying to do in that particular program has been misunderstood and misrepresented, but as I say in the book, this is the

problem. Don't try and make sophisticated jokes about the stupidity of racism to the stupid, you know. You're meant to be laughing at Cartman, not going out and immediately kicking a redhead. But it is part of the business of how, as a society, we try to deal with. with otherness, I think. Attitudes towards red hair are changing along with attitudes towards prejudice and bullying in general. Certainly, for redheaded men and for redheaded children, there's been a real change in the sort of behaviour that is no longer regarded as being acceptable. The idea of redheaded women as being somehow super sexy is taking a little bit longer to shift.

I'm pornhood that redheaded women. God, more than one. Honestly, when I was researching this book, I really learned very early on. Don't just put in redhead plus whatever. God alone knows what will come up. It's a whole thing, isn't it? It's a whole fetishized thing, the redhead. There might be a little bit of science behind that because one of the oddities of redheaded skin is that it has a different pH to the skin of brunettes or brownies. blondes. So it might be that subconsciously there's something going on with the pheromones that a redhead can well or an association, subconscious association with the pheromones that a redhead is

giving off too. What do you think is changing? Because it is, it is changing. And I've got a completely unsubstantiated theory as to what helped change attitudes to redheads. Here it is, Game of Thrones. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, It all taps in, doesn't it? Culturally, it all makes a difference. There's a brilliant scene in it. Tomon is a warrior. He's a wildling, so he's got that Celtic thing going on. But he's got this beautiful red hair and he has this whole big speech about how redheads are beautiful. And I've often wondered if just, oh, that's interesting. But something's shifted, hasn't it? And I'm not sure it probably isn't just Game of Thrones. But what is it that you think that's shifted, so redhead appreciation? I think I hope that the world is getting better at celebrating difference rather than being afraid of it. There are any number of initiatives out there. Bullying in schools is something that is now nipped in the bud wherever it occurs and jolly world should be. There are other initiatives out there like Thomas Knight's Red Hot Project, which where he set out to rebrand

the ginger mail with photographs of these absolutely gorgeous red-headed guys, which is a very, very good thing. There are a number of initiatives over in the States as well as the Redhead Project, for one, which was featured in The Guardian recently. And there are these festivals of Redheads, too, used to be in Breeder, got so big a out, grew Breeder in Holland and is now in Tilburg in Holland in August. I think all of this makes a difference. It all helps. Yeah, definitely. And the other thing I've seen is there's a lot of, we're not Dock-Dogholm influences anymore, or content creators across social media of people with really beautiful red hair. I think that's all feeding into the shift in it.

So let me ask you, as a final question, I'm so glad that people are changing their attitudes because red hair is just, it's just stunning. Is there any in-house fighting in the redhead community? Does that happen? Do you go to like redhead festivals and there's somebody there that's perhaps strawberry blonde and then sort of the more lighter gingers? just going, no, you're not allowed in, you're not nearly, or is there solidarity across the field? There is a certain amount of quiet cocking of snooks.

You know, my hair is redder than yours. There's also enormous controversy as to whether dyed red hair counts. I think that it does, because it's still celebrating the colour and using the colour for exactly the same reasons that all. Redheads celebrated use it. And some of the most famous redheads, one of the most famous red, no, two of the most famous redhead women you can think of were not redheads originally. Rita Hayworth wasn't originally a redhead. She was very, very dark brown.

And Lucille Ball wasn't originally a redhead either. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. It was a brunette. But her stylist said that her soul was fiery, was a redhead soul. So therefore he gave her red hair. And you know, the rest is history.

oddly one of the biggest Hollywood stars of all who became famous for being a blonde was born a redhead and that was Marilyn Monroe wow yeah I'm thinking back about early photographs of her and yeah she is strawberry blonde but with the wonderful ringless so yes absolutely she was in fact she you know you know the story of this the tragic upbringing tragic disjointed upbringing that she had for many many years she didn't know that her mother was her mother her mother was just a visitor. And Marilyn used to refer to her as the lady with red hair whenever she came. Didn't know that. Wow. Obviously Marilyn's father must have been, whoever he was, must have been carrying the red-headed gene too. You have been wonderful to talk to. I've had so much fun talking to about redheads. It's so much fun for me too. People want to know more about you and your work. And if they want to email you to go, do I count as a redhead? Is my head reddened? Where can you find you? Don't do that, please. Just leave Jackie alone. But where can you?

people find you. If they go on to Facebook, Red, a history of the Redhead has its own Facebook page and they can contact me there and I will very happily answer any questions they may have and they can join Redheaded community as well, which would be lovely. Thank you so much. You have been wonderful. My great pleasure. My great pleasure. It was lovely to meet you, Kate. And thank you for inviting me to come on the podcast. Anytime.

Thank you for listening. so much to Jackie for joining me and if you like what you heard please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts if you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com we've got episodes on everything from the history of bearded ladies to flagellation brothels all coming your way this podcast was edited by tom delagi and produced by stuart beckworth the senior producer was charlotte long join me again betwixt the sheet to the history of sex scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.