The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  Which is why, when Vince McMahon bought out GCW on July 14, 1984, the local fans and wrestling traditionalists called it “Black Saturday.”* With WWF already airing on USA, McMahon thought that by buying the TBS show he could own the wrestling world; he was right insomuch as Turner was willing to give him the timeslot, but things quickly went awry. The fans of Georgia Championship Wrestling were unaccustomed to the bawdiness of the WWF product, and they revolted via a mass-letter-writing campaign; meanwhile, WWF was treating the TBS show as a commercial for its USA production, airing old footage instead of original material. Turner himself stepped in and put real “rasslin’” back on the schedule: Bill Watts’s Mid-South Wrestling (which ran Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana) on Sunday mornings, and the conspicuously familiar-named Championship Wrestling from Georgia on Saturday mornings.

  With his audience diminished significantly by the new competition, McMahon eventually sold the Saturday night timeslot to North Carolina promoter Jim Crockett Jr.—son of longtime area matcher Jim Sr.—and retreated back to the USA Network. He had lost the proverbial battle, but in doing so he may have won the war. Crockett bought the TBS contract for a million dollars—money that, according to wrestling lore, McMahon used to fund his first WrestleMania card, setting the stage for his dominance of the industry for a decade.

  To the bulk of wrestling fans, there wasn’t a discernible difference between the Crockett show and the Georgia shows that had preceded it; they were all Southern, antebellum, roughneck shows, all NWA-affiliated, and much of the talent was shared. Soon Crockett would buy out his regional cohorts, and thus fully entrenched, Mid-Atlantic became the flagship of the NWA, and the other regional NWA affiliates served mostly as Triple-A outposts for the big-league Crockett show on TBS. Up to the ’90s, the 6:05 Saturday night TBS show served as the counterbalance to the ever-expanding WWF empire.

  The only promoters of any significance besides Crockett and the WWF were the AWA in Minnesota and WCCW in Texas and—to a lesser extent—Bill Watts’s Georgia territory, which was rebranded as the UWF before it was sold to Crockett, and the Memphis territory run by Jerry Jarrett and Jerry “The King” Lawler.*

  Mid-Atlantic—eventually known simply as the NWA—expanded rapidly to Maryland in the north and Chicago in the west, occasionally running shows even farther away from home base. This Manifest Destiny would spell its demise. After being stonewalled out of the burgeoning pay-per-view market by McMahon, Crockett was absent a major revenue source as his expansion was overextending itself. Despite national popularity and sold-out venues, in 1988, Crockett’s attorney told him that they were over a million dollars in debt. With no other choice, he sold his assets to Ted Turner, who had a vision of building a WWF-style wrestling monopoly of his own.

  GORGEOUS GEORGE

  Perhaps the reason that many modern fans so frequently assume that pro wrestling wasn’t a fraud during its early years is that, in the Golden Age of the enterprise, the wrestlers just seemed so legitimate, so earnest—even when the matches sometimes seemed less so. If one considers Gotch as the first star of the professional wrestling world and Lewis and Thesz as his heirs, and even if one took with them the Zbyszkos and Stechers and Sonnenbergs and lined them up, one immediately notices a uniformity of type. It’s a murderer’s row of clean-cut, white-bread athletes, something closer to an Ivy League fraternity than a league of professional fighters. And each of them is almost entirely alien compared with the outsize characters that we see on our televisions these days.

  The transition from the old school to the modern model was not a steady evolution in style, as one might suspect. It was an overnight paradigm shift ushered in by an overnight sensation by the name of Gorgeous George. That he was born George Wagner in Butte, Nebraska, hardly matters, and neither does his upbringing in Arizona and Iowa and Texas, and frankly, neither do the first few semisuccessful years of his career. Before Wagner became “Gorgeous,” he was someone else entirely: He was just another clean-cut nobody. The one thing that stands out at all is his training. He learned not at the knee of Farmer Burns or some other reputable trainer but at Houston’s Sylvan Beach Park. At the time when Gotch was taking the sport to new heights of cultural significance and athletic legitimacy, distancing the enterprise from its sideshow roots, George Wagner was being broken into the biz by carnies.

  Stories of the genesis of Gorgeous George vary, but it’s the fact of the genesis that matters. When Wagner grew out his hair into Pollyanna-ish curls, bleached blond and held up with bobby pins; when he started coming to the ring in sequined robes with a purple spotlight trailing him, “Pomp and Circumstance” blaring on the loudspeakers; when his valet (Jefferies and Woodrow were two) sprayed perfume in the ring to accompany his arrival; when he posed in the ring, addressing the booing crowd with broad arrogance, infuriating them by the simple (if rather excessive) fact of his existence—that is precisely when wrestling entered its adolescence.

  He called himself the “Toast of the Coast” and the “Sensation of the Nation” and the “Human Orchid,” which seems almost inane to the modern ear, but it was—if you’ll excuse the pun—deliberately florid. Just as with all the other parts of his shtick, the nickname was designed to repel. Just as George Hackenschmidt ushered into the American ring the era of the foreign foil—and more freakish baddies like the Terrible Turk and the French Angel signaled the advent of a more bestial, broader villainy, a sort of geopolitical commedia dell’arte, which led directly from the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff to the “Ugandan Giant” Kamala and Giant Gonzales and everyone in between—Gorgeous George invented the pompous heel. Within that archetype many subsets flourish: the scaredy-cat heel, the self-obsessed heel, and, of course, the faggot heel. To that end, a plurality of bad guys in the Modern Era owe the Human Orchid a tribute.

  His innovations were manifold: His sequined robes were elaborate costumery; his bleached hair would become a signifier of the type; his manservant paved the way for irritant managers and valets aplenty. He is widely regarded as the first wrestler to use entrance music of any kind. He would hand out his golden hairpins to audience members and named them his “Georgie Pins”—he named them, for God’s sake—which established the ur-marketplace for wrestling merchandise. As much as he revolutionized ring presence, he also reinvented the pro wrestling publicity machine. When George came into town, he would call the local sports desk and arrange an interview at an area hair salon, drolly belittling that evening’s opponent while in curlers, sitting underneath the hooded dome of a hair dryer chair. More than anything, though, the very purpose of the wrestling enterprise shifted under his watch: No longer was the heel’s defeat satisfaction enough for the fans. Now they demanded his humiliation.

  If the Gorgeous George persona was constructed to offend, it quickly became, with the advent of television, a persona built to enthrall. His debut on national TV on November 11, 1947, was determined by no less a modernity-blinkered publication than Entertainment Weekly to be one of the seminal moments of television history. “Who knew a bottle of peroxide and a trunk full of attitude would change pro wrestling—and TV—history? . . . Flamboyant George was like programming manna from heaven.”

  It perhaps goes without saying, but Gorgeous George was the first crossover superstar of pro wrestling, and a case can be made that he was the first true crossover superstar of any sport in America. He wasn’t just a television wrestling phenomenon; he was a television phenomenon. If wrestling was always a Greek morality play writ via media hype and predetermined finishes onto the American sports landscape, Gorgeous George was the first grappler to take that parallel to its logical conclusion: Through his distinct presence and his overwrought stylings, he was the first wrestler to metaphorically employ the oversized theater masks of the Greek fashion; he played to the fan in the back row, in other words. A tiny but unmistakable figure on a grainy black-and-white screen, he made wrestling comprehensible—he made it matter—to the home viewer. His
fame is often said to have been on par with that of Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, and Bob Hope, who himself was a proud fan of the Gorgeous One—as were latter-day celebrities Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and John Waters. His ridiculous presence wasn’t just a provocation; it was an invitation to be oneself loudly, or to be a very loud version of oneself.

  His putative career highlight came when he won the American Wrestling Association (of Boston) “world” title in 1950, but that was secondary to the spectacle of his many losses, and none was more grand than his defeat later that year at the hands of Lou Thesz in Chicago on June 27. Thesz claimed the title and so unified the AWA and NWA championships, but the very presence of a fully modern celebrity competing against a stalwart of the old school was evidence of the sea change George’s career had only to that point suggested. Thesz may have won the match, but just by climbing into the ring with the Human Orchid, he was admitting defeat.*

  Gorgeous George’s most famous match wasn’t even a title match—but it was, of course, a losing effort. At Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens in March 1959, he was felled by “Whipper” Billy Watson and, per stipulation, shaved bald in the center of the ring. The 20,000 fans there cheered in ecstasy, but their satisfaction was really secondary. There were millions of viewers watching at home on television sets, millions of people caring about professional wrestling, the country united in satisfaction at George’s ceremonial humiliation.

  Gorgeous George lived hard, both in and out of the ring. He was an alcoholic and a womanizer, purportedly a connoisseur of strippers and prostitutes and the father of illegitimate children the country over. By the time of the Watson match, George was already in his forties. When he was forced to retire a few years later—his liver pummeled by his drinking—he was a haggard shell of his old self, and even his blond curls couldn’t hide that fact.

  Less than two years after he retired back to his California chicken farm, he died of a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. It’s probably true that Americans didn’t mourn his loss like they would mourn Lucille Ball. The fad of wrestling on national television had passed for the time being, and George himself had been removed from the wrestling spotlight by a younger generation of stars largely built in his image. He built the stage; he wrote the role; he made the character a star. And America changed the channel, and Gorgeous George was gone.

  THE FABULOUS MOOLAH

  “For the money. I want to wrestle for the moolah.” That’s what a twenty-something Lillian Ellison told promoter Jack Pfefer* when he asked her why a small Southern girl like her was in the business. Pfefer, impresario of the wrestling backwater, probably laughed his oddball laugh and decided then and there that Moolah would be her new name.

  Despite her moniker, though, Pfefer would make Ellison earn her check, and he started her out in servitude as “Slave Girl” Moolah, putting her in a risqué jungle dress and sending her out as a valet. Her name was a portentous label for her career and the path that she would forge in the industry—she was half capitalism and half subservient eroticism. If male professional wrestling would be blood for bucks, its female counterpart was similarly fraught, a tangle of sex and money.

  As a valet, Moolah worked first with the infamous “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers—with whom, according to Moolah, she cut ties after Rogers began pushing her for a sexual relationship—and then for a wrestler known as Elephant Boy, who later said that he might have married Moolah if Pfefer hadn’t been so protective. Elephant Boy was a dark-skinned, Afro-sporting prince of some uncertain province. Sometimes he was referred to as Indian; sometimes it was said his skin was darkened by the sun on his elephant-hunting safaris; always the crowd was to infer that he was a haughty emissary from a duskier race. (A fan, apparently offended by the miscegenation afoot, once tried to stab Moolah for the infraction of kissing Elephant Boy’s cheek before the match, as she always did.) Moolah was his arm candy and his enforcer, riling the crowd by assaulting her master’s opponents when the referee was distracted. As an Ohio paper reported in 1952, “Elephant Boy, with the help of Moolah, won the first fall from Carlos Mendoza in seven minutes. The bushy haired ‘South African’ used various choke holds to soften up his opponent and Moolah administered a few blows and held the Mexican on occasion while Elephant Boy pummeled him.”

  Ellison wasn’t just in the game to be a valet, though, and getting illegal licks in on Elephant Boy’s foes wasn’t her goal. She’d been trained, after all, by Billy Wolfe, the biggest name in lady wrestling (this is a term of art) in the world. To say Wolfe had a sketchy reputation is an understatement. He had been a wrestler himself, but he married the statuesque lady wrestler Mildred Burke and became her manager, and eventually he entrenched himself as the official NWA promoter of lady wrestling. Whereas the other NWA promoters had territories, Wolfe managed a troupe of women nationwide and sent them out all over the country into all the NWA cities, to spice up shows—or, sometimes, to star in them. In the documentary Lipstick and Dynamite, Ella Waldek complains that they were demeaned by the promoters even as they were in high demand. Though they were usually brought in to be midcard special attractions, they would often end up in the main event slot when it became clear that most of the fans were there on account of the stars of the fairer sex.

  Which is to say that Wolfe’s borderless fiefdom was a boon to the NWA, and the job made Wolfe a rich man; he drove nice cars and wore extravagant jewelry even as his wrestlers grumbled about being underpaid. Although Burke lived a luxurious life during their marriage, Wolfe collected the bulk of the profits for himself and kept his wife in the dark on business matters; when they eventually divorced, his draconian management contract with her and the absence of a prenup left Burke in rough financial shape despite her being one of the era’s biggest stars.

  Ellison didn’t last long under Wolfe’s tutelage, though. Burke once said that Ellison couldn’t make the cut because of her odd-shaped body (this sort of cattiness-as-factual-analysis is rampant in much of the history of the era), but Ellison insisted her time there ended after Wolfe tried to force her to sleep with him—which I hesitate to mention except for the fact that Wolfe was a truly legendary chauvinist. Some reports claim that it was merely the intimation of Wolfe’s sexism that sent Moolah packing. Even if so, walking away was sensible; Wolfe ran a tight, egocentric ship and fined his lady wrestlers $50 if they were caught in the men’s locker room. Regardless, Ellison soon struck out on her own and ended up in Pfefer’s camp.

  When she turned to wrestling full-time, she forsook “Slave Girl” in favor of “Fabulous”—a moniker befitting a champion, said Northeast promoter Vincent J. McMahon, who purportedly gave her the new name. And he was right: On September 18, 1956, Moolah defeated twelve other women in a battle royal to win the World Women’s Championship. According to Ellison, McMahon said, “‘We’re gonna keep the name Moolah, but I think that anybody who would win a thirteen-girl tournament in one night deserves to be called fabulous,’” to which she replied, “Whatever you say. Just write my checks and don’t let ’em bounce.”

  Moolah wasn’t initially recognized as the NWA champion, despite the fact that June Byers, who had supplanted Mildred Burke as champ after Burke and Wolfe divorced,* had retired that year. But because Moolah’s old foe Billy Wolfe still held the reins of the women’s division, he brought June Byers out of retirement to take Moolah on—and presumably to reclaim legitimacy for the NWA crown. When they met, Moolah beat her roughly. The historical accounts are vague on the script for that evening, but they all seem to emphasize Moolah’s aggressiveness in a way that implies she was wrestling for real, in conflict with the script, and to be sure, it would have made little sense for Wolfe and Byers to agree to lose that match given their rivalry with Moolah. Nonetheless, there persisted enough enmity to keep the NWA title in “dispute.”

  By the time Wolfe died in 1963, his pull in the NWA had been negligible for five or six years. Byers finally re-retired in 1964, a
nd Moolah—who had been defending her championship far and wide and was largely recognized as the sport’s top female performer—was retroactively recognized as the NWA champ.

  During her reign, Moolah set up her own wrestling school and started promoting matches—in opposition to Wolfe’s outfit—along with her third husband, Buddy Lee.* It’s around this time that rumors of Moolah’s transgressions as a businesswoman start to surface; if the rumors are to be believed, she apparently had learned well from Wolfe’s example in everything from underpaying talent to sexual indiscretion.* Just as with the shows she herself put on, sex and money were inextricably linked to the business. She ran a tight ship, just as Wolfe had: Her ladies were expected to conduct themselves in ladylike fashion (surely a stretch for some of the brawlers she trained), to always appear in public with immaculate hair and makeup, and, of course, to not date the male wrestlers. Moolah and her girls toured the country, with Moolah playing the nefarious champion and one of her wards—usually a beautiful, curvy blonde like Judy Grable—playing the scrappy heroine.

  As popular as the women were all through the Territorial Era, their road was a much rockier one than that of the men. The very notion of women engaging in a contact sport was widely considered distasteful, and any in-ring injury was seen in some conservative quarters as proof that women weren’t cut out for the fighting game. Over the years, lady wrestling was banned in many markets, but the laws were eventually relaxed starting in the late ’60s as wrestling was increasingly seen as more entertainment than sport and, in a broader sense, the country began unclutching its collective purse.