On the two-hour Season 4 premiere of the CBS reality game show Tough as Nails, host Phil Keoghan welcomes 12 new crew members to Catalina Island to kick off the new year. The rocky island off the coast of Southern California is just 22 miles long and 8 miles across at its widest. Perfect for ‘Tough as Nails’ challenges.
Catalina Island (population 4,096) has a long history of Native American and European settlement. In the beginning of the 20th century, it was developed as a tourist destination by American chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr. (photo above).
Wrigley invested millions into the island, opened the Catalina Casino in 1929 (still the largest building on the island, photo below), and also used the island for his baseball team’s (the Chicago Cubs) spring training.
When Wrigley, Jr. died in 1932, his son, Philip K. Wrigley, took over. In 1975, Philip Wrigley deeded 42,135 acres of the island to the Catalina Island Conservancy, which gave the Conservancy control of nearly 90 percent of the island.
Another fun fact about Catalina: When Marilyn Monroe (then Norma Jeane Baker) was 17 she lived on the island with her first husband, James Dougherty, in 1943. Dougherty, a Merchant Marine, was assigned to Catalina, which had been taken over by the U.S. military during World War II. Neither their stay on the island nor their marriage lasted very long.
In 1944, after leaving Catalina and her husband, the “blonde bombshell” was discovered by a photographer, changed her name, and rest is entertainment history.
In 2011, the Catalina Island Museum curated and showed ‘Before She was Marilyn,’ an exhibition of photographs of Norma Jeane taken on the island accompanied by letters she wrote while living there. (Video of exhibition above; Casino ballroom photo below.)
Monroe/Baker wrote about Catalina Island to her half sister, Bernice, in 1943: “My mother brought me here for the summer when I was about seven years old. I remember going to the Casino to dance with her, of course. I didn’t dance, but she let me sit on the side and watch her, and I remember it was way after my bedtime too. But anyway, what I’m getting at is that at Christmas time, the Maritime Service held a big dance at the same Casino and Jimmie and I went. It was the funniest feeling to be dancing on that same floor ten years later, I mean being old enough and everything. Oh it’s hard to explain the feeling I had.”
Tough as Nails premiers on Wednesday, January 4 at 9 pm ET on CBS, right after The Price Is Right at Night at 8 pm with host Drew Carey.
