Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  Nonetheless, George stuck. Even as the self-indulgent starlet he later became, he remained a stoic in this one way: He took the bumps and the pain, accepting them as facts of wrestling life and the means to his personal ends. In Atlanta, he managed to stay relatively healthy, and to get work two or three nights a week as the promoter had promised. If only he hadn’t insisted on eating. As a “prelim boy,” George got a flat, puny fee. Even for those who earned a percentage, the payoffs were whatever the promoter decided to fork over, since there was no on-the-spot accounting or transparency in this cash-only business. George could have argued at times that a full house seemed to warrant more than his few crumpled dollar bills, but that would just have gotten him blackballed by that night’s promoter and, once the latter got on the phone or the telegraph wires, the rest of the territory. So George took what he was offered.

  Sometimes a carload of wrestlers would drive all night in dangerous weather to get the next booking only to find that the hail or floods or snow they’d just skittered through had caused the matches to be canceled. Once again, there was no pay for no work. So they were “doubly screwed,” as Thesz described it: out their time, the transportation and hotel costs, and marooned in some Nowheresville. (Triply screwed might be more accurate.) Now the “jerks” or the “jumps”—the travel times and distances between matches—were much longer than George was used to; in Houston, he’d gone home every night. Later in his career, especially after the $25 billion Federal Highway Program of 1956 created so many smooth interstates, George would ride in limousine style, but he never forgot the earlier rides, the hundreds of thousands of miles ridden on sagging shocks, trying with those early, dimmer headlights to find the right side of some dark, unmarked two-lane road. “The jumps aren’t so bad when you’ve got a good car and the roads are good,” he told a Tacoma reporter in the 1950s. “I remember the days when we’d go long distances crowded in a jalopy—and then get paid maybe $3.50 for a night’s work.”

  These were those days. “Many a time I lay hungry and broke, and wished I was home,” George said. “The only thing that kept me from hitchhiking back was what my father said to me, that I wouldn’t make it as a wrestler.” Fortunately life was still cheap, and almost sustainable. Hotel rooms ran as little as one dollar and the boys told George where to find “tourist homes,” where families took in guests for that amount or less and, for fifty cents more, would lay out a big farmer’s breakfast. Hopes of willing farmers’ daughters sprang eternal, and anecdotally, at least, they materialized.

  George was getting an education but he wasn’t exactly moving up. Most of the work he got was “out of my class,” he said, meaning that he, a light heavyweight, was matched with much bigger opponents. They’d smother him and make it tougher for him to show his stuff the way he could with a faster man. More significantly, the local promoters weren’t giving him much of a buildup. Most nights he was in the openers, and once the promoters and fans start to think of you as a prelim boy or “underneath boy” (since you were at the bottom of the cards), he knew, it’s hard to change their minds. So in September of 1936 George went to New York, where Jimmy James was already doing well, even working some main events billed as “Jesse James, outstanding light-heavyweight grappler from Hollywood.” George took the train; at least he’d moved up in class from the bus he’d rode in on.

  The city was teeming and incredibly noisy, not just with its seven million inhabitants, twice the population at the turn of the century, but also with torrents of horn-blaring cars. The great George Washington Bridge, the just-opened Triboro Bridge, and the Lincoln Tunnel, opened in 1937 with a fifty-cent toll, sent ever-increasing numbers of cars, buses, and delivery trucks swooping into Manhattan. Traffic lights had only recently come into widespread use and obeying them was not yet a habit. Actually, it’s still not…

  George wasn’t fazed by Gotham, however. He didn’t mind crowds; getting jostled was nothing to him; and he liked looking at millions of women. What’s more, George tended to move through life in a bubble of preoccupied self-interest. Things and people outside that sphere—whatever didn’t impact him directly by serving his career for good or ill, providing him pleasure or pain—faded into an innocuous background. He had a narrow focus, as do many ambitious performers and artists. Just the same, he looked before he stepped off a curb.

  Much of the city’s explosive population growth had come from immigrants: Irish, Italians, Russian Jews, German Jews, and a big contingent of German gentiles. The Fatherland was frequently on page one of the Times, the Sun, the Post, the News, and certainly all the German-language papers when George arrived, a month or so after the infamous 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Not everyone thought Chancellor Hitler had been humiliated by the victories of black American Jesse Owens over the Aryans. That October, American Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage gave a German Day speech in New York, telling the audience that “Uncle Sam could learn some things from Hitler’s Germany.” After his remarks, the Post reported, “Boy Scouts of German American parentage solemnly gave the Nazi salute. Then their elders, 20,000 of them, as solemnly followed suit.”

  To appeal to the “volks” packing Yorkville and Washington Heights, George was dubbed “George Wagner of Germany.” The promoters here, including Jack Curley, who ran the most prestigious arenas—Madison Square Garden at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue and the Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue—felt the boys didn’t need elaborate gimmicks to get over. They just played the ethnic card. George’s opponents were all clearly typed: Abe Goldberg and Sammy Stein; Ali Baba the Turk; Gino Martinelli; Danno O’Mahoney; John Gudiski the Pole, “King Kong, from Abyssinia”; Henry Piers of Holland; and Tommy Nilan, the Australian Kangaroo. Chief Little Wolf, “the Navajo Indian,” didn’t have a big constituency; his appeal was as an “exotic.” Another exotic, Chief Chewchki, the Gypsy, expressed his people’s unique character and customs, the papers explained, by spitting water on himself and eating spectators’ straw hats.

  New York’s immigrant stew formed a huge and enthusiastic wrestling audience, supporting at least one card in Manhattan and another in the boroughs every night of the week. George the German got himself booked at the New York Coliseum at Tremont Ave and 177th Street in the Bronx, Ridgewood Grove in Brooklyn, in Queens, and in Irving-ton and Camden, New Jersey. By mid-1937 he was working almost nightly, in much greater demand than he’d been in his Atlanta days. Most of his dates were in the smaller arenas, but he did make it to the Hippodrome in Manhattan, where he drew Zimba Parker in the opener, in front of two thousand fans. Year later, when he came back to New York a wrestling celebrity, George “arrived in LaGuardia Field with all the pomp of a motion picture star,” as one paper put it. This time, however, he was probably living in a tenement walk-up, sharing digs with James or other wrestlers, eating poorly and showering with cold water. But here again, his focus served him; he was studying for success.

  George went home briefly—not as broke and beaten as his father had feared, but not exactly in triumph either. He may have gone to meet Poppa Wagner’s new wife, Eulah; the couple now lived with Buddy in her house on Foster Street. When he returned the front pages were consumed with the search for Amelia Earhart, the aviator who’d been lost on her attempted round-the-world flight. The sports pages, however, were given over to heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock. What a story: Down-and-out, trying to feed his wife and kids on twenty-four dollars a month in relief payments, plus whatever shifts he could beg as a longshoreman, he had taken the title from Max Baer in a ten-to-one upset. Now he was about to defend it against the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. Braddock, an Irish-American born in New York City and living right across the Hudson River in New Jersey, represented perfectly the strain of athletic heroism the American public and the pretelevision media were prepared to embrace. Braddock was stoic (he once fought with a broken hand), hardworking (“he does eight miles of roadwork every morning,” reported the Sun), and though in his interviews he showed a sardonic wit, he
was still hailed as—and may well have been—humble, self-deprecating, and sincere. This was exactly the image the arrogant Gorgeous George character would later shatter. If Braddock was the Depression’s Cinderella Man, George was the postwar era’s wicked stepmother.

  George more likely took his transformational cues from Braddock’s opponent and polar opposite, the former champion Max Baer. Just as the self-infatuated George would later do, Baer made boasts his trademark, calling himself “the world’s greatest fighter and the world’s greatest lover.” He was only champion for a year; the handsome dark-haired playboy was equally famous for his high living, free spending, and flashy dress. Baer showed up for one fight dressed like an English nobleman, accompanied by a chauffeur and a footman, in a sixteen-cylinder limousine. Sports and society pages never failed to note upon his arrival for a fight that Baer had brought ten trunks with him, filled with bespoke suits, just as they would later regale readers with tales of George’s eighty-eight sumptuous robes.

  Always available and eminently quotable, Baer was mostly a lovable bad boy, but to the press he was openly contemptuous of his opponents, declaring that “they aren’t fit to lick my boots.” A decade later, when the great wrestler would deign to speak about his foes, George was equally disparaging, and he heaped scorn on the fans for good measure. However, while Baer may well have made an impression on young and struggling George Wagner, he was by no means a Gorgeous template. The boxer, or his public self, was a dandy, but completely manly. George’s flirting with the effeminate would require an entirely different level of daring.

  The big-city fans, George had learned, really liked light heavies and their faster, more acrobatic style. He particularly noticed the way they took to Jesse James. George’s striking-looking Harrisburg buddy had jet-black hair parted on one side, a hawk nose, and prominent biceps. Overall, he was skinny, not chunky like George; in today’s parlance, George was buff while Jesse was cut. And James was fast. The papers all praised his “whirlwind style.” George recognized through Jesse the appeal of the handsome hunk; indeed, a few years later Wagner’s hair seems to have darkened from brown to jet black, worn in a glistening side part, which quite became him in a Rudolph Valentino sort of way. Even though he’d been called “the Houston Flash,” George recognized that he’d never be as fast as James and the other “speed merchants.” He was a canny pragmatist, candid (with himself) about his own limitations. So, just as he’d repositioned himself in relation to Glen Price’s Harrisburg charm, George took another tack. Handily, this retrofitting fit right in with what some of the more experienced boys in New York were trying to teach him.

  When they weren’t busy beating him up, the Atlanta workers had shown George how to fall as spectacularly, and as safely, as possible. In New York, he learned more about showmanship, the art that went with the wrestler’s craft: Pacing, variety, modifying the tempo for dramatic effect—what musicians call dynamics. “Slow down,” the older men told him in their workouts, after seeing him pour on one athletic move after another. “What you need to do,” they explained, “is hit your high spot,” meaning one of his showiest moves. “Then before you do the next thing, give your partner time to react and really sell the last one to the crowd. If you let him, he can do his half of the work, and the marks get a little time to absorb what you just did, too.”

  This would take a while to sink in, but in his prime George became much more of a minimalist, putting over fewer well-timed moves and reactions. Both performance wrestling in general and the Gorgeous persona in particular involved the broadest kind of acting—George and his ring opponents resembled a squawking Punch-and-Judy show—but there was undeniable subtlety in the way he played his exaggerated role: The haughty, perfectly calibrated cock of his head when the roiling crowd began to show its displeasure; the truly stricken look on his face as he reeled backward on rubber legs, absorbing a supposedly devastating blow. As the Gorgeous One, he became a withholding tease, making the fans beg, or near-riot, before he graced them with his presence. He’d send Jefferies out first for his elaborate manservant rituals, which took a good ten minutes, and then he’d have the PA announcer tell the waiting crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George refuses to enter the arena until everyone is standing, in a show of respect for the Human Orchid.” The fans’ curses and howls showed more fury than respect—but just the same, he had them.

  It’s not just what you do that gets you noticed, George was beginning to realize, it’s how you do it. The opposing narratives constructed around Jim Braddock and Max Baer may also have given him a nascent sense that who you actually are isn’t paramount—it’s who you seem to be, the image you project, that people respond to. And that’s not immutable, but something you can change and control. At this point he was still meeting expectations, giving the mat addicts what they were accustomed to. “They want a babyface German? Fine, I’m a handsome Kraut.” It would take another imaginative leap for him to understand that people didn’t just want their expectations fulfilled, that they might react even more strongly to something they’d never seen, or someone who not only defied expectations but completely violated them. To see the value of the outrageous and then to act on it—to become it—George would need more help, a different kind of push.

  Chapter 6

  HIS GORGEOUS MUSE

  They were married in a wrestling ring, in Eugene, Oregon, on February 23, 1939. As George intended, the local paper, the Register Guard, was entranced by this stunt and began excitedly covering the Thursday-night nuptials at the National Guard armory weeks in advance. One story hailed the ring wedding as a combined society and sports event for the area’s wrestling partisans and “Lane County’s 400”—meaning the families whose lumber wealth qualified them as prominent. A combined wedding announcement and wrestling card the paper published read:

  WEDDING BELLS, GRUNTS AND GROANS

  Feature Wrestling Card at Armory Thursday

  Main Event: Bulldog Jackson and Tony Garibaldi vs. George Wagner and Harry Elliott, team match

  Wedding Ceremony: Geo. Wagner and Betty Hanson

  Opener: Jack Kaiser vs. Jimmy Londes

  Referee: Vern Clark

  The bride, Elizabeth Hanson, was born in Kelso, Washington, in 1913, the younger daughter of Clyde and Elsie Hanson. Betty grew up in rural Oregon, for the most part in Creswell, with her sister, Eve, who was five years older. Their mother was short and plump, with beautiful dark curly hair she passed on to Betty. Clyde, who drove logging trains and raised turkeys on a small farm—called a ranch in this part of the country—was also quite short. The “bioengineered” result: Betty was tiny. Though in later years she’d claim “five feet, almost,” her true altitude was more like four-foot-nine or -ten. When she met George, she weighed ninety-five pounds. Coincidentally or not, the next woman George would marry, Cherie Dupre, was also tiny, well under five feet. In what was clearly not a coincidence, both were lookers.

  Betty’s parents were low-key, warm, and peaceable people. Mother, as her daughters always called her (Betty’s children would call their mother that, too, never “Mom” or “Ma”), was especially patient. Betty could not remember being spanked or Elsie even raising her voice. Through some combination or aberration of nature and nurture, however, Betty was sharp and fast, impatient with constraint, eager to get places and do things—just like George. A handful from the beginning, Betty had no use for school. What she would later remember about the little building that held the elementary grades through high school in Central Point, Oregon, was her feeling of irritation. She’d try to sit still and do what she was told, but not too hard. “I was bratty,” Betty said in later years, “because I hated every minute of it.”

  Her father was gone a lot, driving trains laden with cut timber from the logging camps to Butte Falls, Medford, and other nearby towns. Despite his absences or because of them, Betty was crazy about Daddy. “I thought an awful lot of him, and he thought an awful lot of me,” is how she put it. By the time sh
e was in seventh grade or so, Betty would sit in school, bored to death but alert for the sound of the train. Her father would blow a special pattern on the train whistle to let her know he was coming. As soon as she heard it, she’d simply get up and leave class, cut across a field, and go home to put on her blue jeans (girls had to wear dresses to school in those days). From there she’d hurl herself down a steep hill, sliding on her backside, the stiff denim slick on the grass, down to the railroad tracks where her father had stopped his train to take on water.

  The firemen, who kept the engine stoked with wood, all knew her and they’d wave when they saw her coming. When she came inside the cab, Clyde would get up out of his engineer’s seat and stand next to her while she ran the engine the way he’d taught her, pulling the ten or twelve cars loaded high with logs. She knew how to go forward and reverse, skills that very few girls in the early 1920s would have asked to learn, or been allowed to. After high school Betty went to a business college in nearby Medford and learned bookkeeping, typing, and shorthand, what young women who wanted careers did in those days. She got a car, a little two-door Chevrolet coupé, and left Mother and Daddy on the turkey ranch, moving into Eugene, the biggest nearby city. Betty worked as a store cashier for a while, dated a few young men but didn’t get too serious, and still saw a lot of her parents. A few years later she got a job at the State Theater down the street from her rented room, where she was both cashier and “usherette.” She liked the job and the movies but not the uniforms she and the other girls had to wear. Echoing George when he saw the suits in the windows of Houston department stores, Betty thought she could do better.