Before there was Trish, before Lita, before Sasha and Charlotte and Becky stormed the gates of wrestling’s glass house in boots and bravado—there was Hollywood.
Jeanne Marie Basone. Born in Glendale in the hot-breathed summer of 1963, raised on California sun and cable reruns. She wasn’t born in the spotlight, but she damn sure found it. Not the sanitized WWE gloss of today, either. Hollywood came up in the murk and glitter of GLOW, a neon-drenched fever dream of shoulder pads, crimped hair, and suplexes under strobe lights.
It was wrestling for the MTV generation. Less about holds and more about hellraising. Fewer headlocks, more camp. And Hollywood? She was the queen of the chaos. Not a gimmick. Not a placeholder. She was one of the originals. A pilot episode prototype with enough charisma to melt TV sets and enough fight to keep the dream alive for four long, wild seasons.
Back when the business was still slapping lipstick on bruises, Jeanne Basone was bleeding for the artform on low-budget sets with bad lighting and worse insurance. She trained under Mando Guerrero and Cynthia Peretti, two names that carried credibility like a switchblade in a back pocket. Her in-ring work? Underrated. Forgotten in the haze of spandex and sketch comedy. But it was there—snapmares, dropkicks, arm drags with attitude. She wasn’t out to be the best technician. She was out to be unforgettable.
And she was.
When GLOW folded in 1989—killed by budget cuts, network politics, and the industry’s cold shoulder—most of the roster faded into the void. But Hollywood? She kept going. The ring still called her name, and she answered with blood under her fingernails and boot marks on her soul.
She wrestled everywhere. CRUSH. Beauty Slammers. Hottest Ladies of Wrestling. Promotions that ran on dreams and duct tape, but she gave them everything. She was a star in a constellation nobody charted, a pioneer in a business too busy staring at its own abs to appreciate the women tearing up bingo halls and Elks Lodges on the weekends.
In 1993, she took on Tulsa and walked away with the U.S. Championship at a PPV event most fans don’t even remember aired. She didn’t care. Gold is gold. Pain is pain. She bled for both.
But wrestling was never her only hustle. Hollywood wasn’t just a ring name—it was prophecy. She crashed into the entertainment world like a Molotov cocktail with lipstick. You’ve seen her and probably didn’t even know it. JAG, Days of Our Lives, Chuck, Married… with Children, Saved by the Bell, The Larry Sanders Show. She even did stunts on In Living Color. If a show needed someone to fly off a table or take a punch with grace, Jeanne was the one getting thrown into furniture while producers called lunch.
There’s something poetic about the fact that she played Jane in the deranged cult video game Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. That’s the kind of project her story always lent itself to—weird, forgotten, brilliant in its absurdity. She was everywhere and nowhere. A ghost in the system. A woman working twice as hard to get half as much—and still laughing about it on set.
And yes, she posed for Playboy in 1989. The pictorial was legendary, not because it titillated, but because it screamed defiance. She didn’t do it for shock. She did it because it was hers. Her body. Her power. Her brand before branding became a buzzword. Jeanne didn’t wait for the industry to tell her what she could sell. She was the product.
There’s a reason she showed up on 15 episodes of Family Feud. A reason she sat across from Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael. People wanted her. Wanted to understand the contradiction—a woman who could wrestle in fishnets one night, talk feminism the next morning, and still make it to stunt rehearsal before lunch.
But maybe her greatest reinvention came outside the ring, off the screen, in the most un-wrestling place of all: artisan soap.
Yeah. Soap.
Basone launched Hollywood Botanika, a handcrafted soap company that smells like success and reinvention. Because eventually, the ring stops calling. But the hustle? That never dies. She’s a businesswoman now, an entrepreneur with calloused hands and stories that’d make your spine shiver. She took every bump, every stiff forearm, every stunt fall, and turned it into something cleaner, gentler. Because sometimes even the toughest women need to wash off the blood.
And in 2024, she finally wrote it all down.
Hooray for Hollywood! The True Story of the Original GLOW Girl isn’t some ghostwritten fluff piece. It’s a firsthand account from a woman who’s seen the business at its gaudiest, grimiest best. It’s not about stats or belts. It’s about survival. About being a woman in a world built by carny men and maintained by corporate suits. It’s about laughter through bruises. About swinging hard when the lights are off and the cameras stopped rolling.
Jeanne Basone—Hollywood—isn’t a footnote in wrestling history. She’s the goddamn preface.
Without her, there’s no women’s revolution. No Netflix GLOW revival. No Serena Deeb, no Thunder Rosa, no Sasha Banks. She helped lay the groundwork in fishnets and fury, long before hashtags made it cool to care.
She’s 62 now, still standing, still promoting, still proving that legends don’t fade—they evolve.
Some wrestlers become icons by headlining WrestleMania. Others do it by outlasting the wreckage, by refusing to disappear, by being too bold to bury.
Hollywood never went away. She just took her fight somewhere else.
And she’s still winning.