by John Capouya
Another prominent story that day told of a painful, career-threatening injury to one of the country’s most beloved athletes. Seabiscuit had come up lame earlier, and had just been pulled from the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap. The five-year-old had beaten War Admiral at Pimlico in their famed match race the year before, and the American public had thrilled to the Biscuit’s every bit of news, from what he was or wasn’t eating to his animal companions. There were Seabiscuit songs, hats, and board games—transcending sports, the horse became a cultural icon. Ten years later George had songs written in his honor and dolls created in his image; he also became a societal touchstone.
The proud horse and the overly proud wrestler were very different phenomena, however: Culturally as well as biologically, they belonged to different species. The Biscuit was the plucky, lovable underdog, his skills, mettle, and even his looks denigrated, before he was gloriously redeemed. In real life George’s rise from rags to riches followed a similarly heartwarming trajectory, but in his Gorgeous public persona he was the preening overdog, an arrogant winner who admitted neither struggle nor sincerity. George’s message was that nice guys should finish last; they’re suckers, and worse, they’re boring. Seabiscuit was all heart, the mute horse a variation on the strong, silent type. George was all mouth; he wouldn’t shut up.
Their paths to fame were different, too. Seabiscuit actually had to beat those other horses to the finish line, while George’s triumph had little to do with athletic competition and everything to do with the entertainer’s art. At that game, George won in a romp; it was literally and figuratively no contest. Between the Depression and the victorious muscle flexing of post–World War II America, there was a sensibility shift. Rather than embracing a gallant, galloping horse, the country was fascinated by a braying, preening man in short pants.
Chapter 7
SWERVES AND CURVES
On their way south the honeymooners stopped in Los Angeles, where Betty met Jesse James, and they stayed a night or two in his Hollywood apartment. The next couple of months were spent zooming around the Southwest: Tucson, Phoenix, Yuma, Albuquerque, then east to El Paso, then west again. They shared the driving, but often it was Betty at the wheel while George slept in the backseat. Air-conditioning in cars debuted in 1939 when Packard offered it as a $274 option—but the driver had to stop the car and disconnect the compressor belt from the engine. It didn’t matter; their heap didn’t have it. Neither of them minded, they just kept the windows down and their clothing minimal. As she zoomed along, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved top, warm air swirling around her bare legs, Betty saw and felt the high desert for the first time, and fell in love with it—the sand, the wind, and during the amazingly clear nights, the stars. Later they’d move to similar territory in Beaumont, California, which sat high in the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass, near the Mojave.
One hot afternoon the newlyweds were speeding through the desert, on a stretch of terrain so flat it seemed they could see twenty miles in front of them. At the horizon, though, it suddenly began to get dark. Peering through the top of their windshield, they couldn’t see clouds anymore, just a horizontal swath of sky where the lights had gone out. The closer they got to it, the darker the day became, and George, who was driving, slowed down. “What is it?” Betty asked. “I don’t know, Sweetie,” he answered, looking up, too. Then they saw white hail bouncing off the black road, still a good way ahead of them, but approaching fast. George braked some more, then pulled off the road altogether, stopping on the edge of the sand. Mesmerized, they watched, the car still sitting in the hot sunlight, as the dark sky and the hail kept coming closer, then closer still. George turned off the car and at first there was silence; then the sound of the stones on the pavement got louder, like a rushing waterfall, only staccato at the same time.
Moving at the same moment, George and Betty reached to roll up their windows, then waited for the onslaught to pound their hood and roof. They held hands. Will hail like that break the windshield? Betty wondered. The dark sky and the white sheet descending from it kept coming toward them—and then the hail suddenly stopped moving horizontally even as it continued to roil vertically. The hailstones skittered off the pavement just a car length in front of them, but came no closer. In a few quick minutes the storm emptied itself, and the downpour stopped. The road in front of them began to lighten and the darkness receded. Sitting silently next to each other in the front seat, they watched as the narrow shaft of sunlight they’d been sitting in expanded to the horizon.
To keep in training, George did his roadwork during the heat of the day, running along the two-lane highways in his plain black trunks and wrestling shoes. (He was a smoker, but the cigarettes didn’t seem to affect his stamina.) George ran bare-chested; as Betty later reported, laughing at her husband’s vanity, “George never wore a shirt if he didn’t have to.” When he began to run, she drove ahead, parked in the shade a mile or two up the road, and waited for him to catch up. Sometimes when she saw him appear in the rearview mirror, gasping for breath with the sweat pouring off his chest, she’d wait until he was almost at the car, then gun the motor and drive off again, spraying him with red dust that clung to his soaked torso. Without turning around to look back, Betty would give him a little cheery wave with her free arm as she pulled away. George laughed, too, still panting and trying to catch his breath, and he’d wave back. She’d wait for him another half mile ahead, and this time she’d let him in.
They crossed the border into Mexico, where George’s first dates were in Monterrey. His quickness and athletic style pleased the fans of lucha libre, or free fighting, the fast, acrobatic variant of pro wrestling that still prevails there. Later, when he was Gorgeous, he’d be hailed in Mexico as “Jorge El Magnífico.” One night on their honeymoon, though, George’s pay from the previous match had gotten lost in translation, and he refused to go on. “I’m not wrestling until I get my money!” he yelled angrily, shaking off the arena workers who were hanging on his arms and trying to lead him to the ring. With the fans, the promoter, and the opposing wrestler’s camp all threatening violence, guns were drawn by the Guardia Civil soldiers patrolling the ring’s perimeter. It’s unclear whether the firearms were pointed at George or at the shouting, stomping crowd.
The nervous promoter hurriedly found Betty in her ringside seat. Go get your car, he told her, and wait by a certain exit. “As soon as George comes out that door,” he said, “get going and get out of town.” George deemed it wiser to wrestle, so Betty spent a nerve-racking half hour before he came through the doorway—still in his trunks, un-showered, and clutching his duffel bag in one hand. He jumped in and they sped off, not only blowing town but leaving Mexico and sprinting to Laredo, Texas. They escaped with their skin intact, but they did so without any payment—for either date.
In Houston, Betty finally met Poppa Wagner, Elmer, and Buddy. George didn’t take his new wife to see any of his childhood homes or haunts, and she didn’t ask. George’s dad was living with his second wife, Eulah, in her neat little white one-story house, much like the ones George had grown up in, though in a different working-class neighborhood. Betty took to Poppa Wagner immediately, but, somewhat predictably, she and Eulah did not warm to each other. In the future, when Poppa Wagner and Eulah would visit George and Betty in California, he’d stay for months but his wife would go back to Houston after a few days. And on this visit, the newlyweds stayed with friends. They stopped by to see Mr. James, Johnny and Jimmy’s father, whose fruit stand George had wrestled next to as a boy, and he welcomed them with a home-cooked Greek feast.
Mostly they drove, hustling day and night to cover the long distances between arenas and the cheap hotels the wrestlers frequented, hitting Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, and Springfield, Missouri in the later stages of this ten-month extended honeymoon. If he could get the work, George wrestled five nights a week, and at times they barely made it to the next date, George changing in the backseat while Betty drove, screeching into t
he parking lot with minutes to spare. In less hurried arrivals she prepared his wrestling bag for him, packing everything he’d need: trunks, socks, wrestling shoes, towels, and the like.
This gave her an opening for what the wrestlers called a “swerve.” Swerves were practical jokes, much prized and pulled often. The cruder the stunts, the better the boys liked them, though Betty’s were more restrained. At one of the couple’s stops she found time to shop during the day, so she went to a sewing store and picked up some frilly white lace, imported from France. While George was making arrangements with the local promoter in the afternoon, she sewed ringlets of the stuff around both legs of his wrestling trunks, then packed them away in his bag. When it was time for him to leave for the arena in the evening, she handed it to him with a smile. “Here you are, dear,” she said sweetly. “It’s all ready for you.”
George got to the locker room and innocently pulled out the bizarre garment in front of all the boys. It now resembled gym shorts that had been involved in a tragic accident with some women’s lingerie. He held the trunks out at arm’s length in front of him, staring uncomprehendingly while the wrestlers hooted and pointed, calling everyone’s attention to the frilled thing Wagner had in his hands.
“Look at Mr. Fancy Pants!”
“Hey, sweetheart, nice drawers! You free tonight?”
Then George grinned as he realized he’d been swerved. Betty’s stock immediately shot up among the boys; they knew she was pretty, but pulling off a stunt like this earned her a very different kind of esteem. This foray, as well as Betty’s leaving George in the dust while he did his roadwork, were almost certainly payback for some earlier pranks of his. Once, while they were still courting in Oregon, they went dancing at a nearby honky-tonk. At the end of one song, George dipped his partner, taking Betty in his arms and lowering her all the way down until her back touched the floor. Then, instead of lifting her back to standing in the typical finale, he simply let go and left her there, lying on the barroom floor. As he walked away back toward their table, he threw her a wink.
Their constant one-upmanship kept them laughing and gave them a mischievous bond. Betty loved being caught up in George’s special energy, especially when he brought it to bear on her alone. In it, she shone. In their quieter moments, she remembered, he was solicitous and accommodating. George craved attention, yet he knew how to give it as well. He may have transferred the intense focus he had on his mother as a boy, and sought the rapport the two of them had shared with his wife.
Toward the end of 1939 George and Betty made their way to Columbus, Ohio. They rented half of a house they shared with wrestler Cyclone Mackey (real name Corbin Massey) and his wife, Geraldine, and George went to work for promoter Al Haft. The driving got shorter and saner as they cycled between Columbus and the arenas in Lima, Marion, Fort Wayne, Zanesville, Elyria, and Toledo. Their expenses were lower, too, with fewer hotels and more home-cooked meals. But they still couldn’t quite make ends meet, much less get ahead. “The truth is,” Betty said ruefully, “we were pretty broke by the time we hit El Paso,” one of their first honeymoon stops. As happens so consistently, love failed to pay a single bill.
George thought he’d gotten his next big break when promoter Hugh Nichols agreed to book him in Los Angeles later that year at Hollywood Legion Stadium. This white-painted 1921 building on El Centro sat six thousand or more fans in pitched seats. But in two separate stints that year, George couldn’t get much traction with the fans, nor, one senses, a real push from Nichols. After one June loss in an opener, the Los Angeles Daily News dismissed Betty’s husband with this imagery: “Yukon Jake, fresh from his fishing trip in the hinterlands, threw George Wagner around as if he were a rainbow trout on the end of his line.”
During these L.A. sojourns George and Betty became good friends with Dangerous Danny McShain, a very successful heel, and his wife, Nola. McShain was a charismatic black Irishman, about seven or eight years older than George, with a barrel chest and a thin dark villain’s mustache. In the ring McShain had a great dynamism and a piratical appeal; many wrestling historians consider him one of the game’s greatest showmen. Quick to laugh and to provoke laughter over the dinners the two couples shared, he looked exceedingly dapper and seemed to be enjoying himself immensely in his double-breasted white suits. Danny’s finery made George’s neat slacks and sport shirts look a bit boyish. Though he and Betty would remain friends with Danny and Nola for a long time, their differences in status at that time were glaring.
George wrestled McShain at the armory in Eugene that June, and the two were billed, naturally, as “bitter enemies.” The Register Guard, an ever-reliable cheerleader, predicted beforehand that promoter Owen could expect “the largest crowd since Hector was a pup.” George the cleanie won, or rather he “battered the villain from one side of the ring to the other,” and the dastardly McShain even got a “lusty dropkick from a ringside spectator” in the process. To keep the feud going afterward George proclaimed himself unsatisfied with the victory, saying that McShain had deprived him of a title match he deserved back in L.A. On one level this was just the usual ballyhoo, yet there was a current of real envy in his lament. “Who wouldn’t be mad?” George told the reporters at his locker after the match. “The guy built a $20,000 home in Los Angeles and has three new cars. I’d like to get a chance at that kind of money.”
Six months in Hawaii put the struggling couple in a much better frame of mind. In this idyll George wrestled often, the promoter found them cheap lodgings right near the beach, and they lived on fresh fish. Best of all there was no travel, as all the matches were in Honolulu. That left plenty of time for George and Betty to try to out-tan each other; she won, turning a nut brown. Wearing a fairly modest one-piece with her hair tied back, Betty stood on George’s stomach as he did sit-ups on a towel. Together they charmed the local press. For one beach photo shoot Betty added high heels to her bathing costume and let her curls down. She struck a model’s pose, standing with the front leg slightly bent, and hung on George’s arm with both hands. Squinting toward the camera in the sun, his hair wet and slicked back, George wore what looked like an early version of a white Speedo, and his thigh muscles bulged.
Betty found some white satin in a fabric shop and made herself a knee-length skirt, a blouse, and a short jacket, on the back of which she sewed WAGNER in black letters. She put white bows in her hair and wore low-heeled white boots to match—for some reason, in later years she’d be adamant that they weren’t cowgirl boots, but some other, nonwestern style. She became George’s “second” or aide-de-camp at the matches, adding considerable visual appeal and a novelty twist for the appreciative fans. Relaxed and loose, the two experimented, giving an out-of-town tryout to some of the tomfoolery that would later become the Gorgeous act. “I fixed a tray with perfumes and powders and some other goop on it, and there was a tiny spray bottle, too,” Betty said. “And I wore that white outfit. I’d walk up to the ring with the tray and sit on the edge and hand him those things and he’d take them and use them. We just did it three or four times for laughs.”
It went over: George frequently got top billing and set a local attendance record of six thousand for a match with Hawaiian Ben Pilar. After a good long run, they came back to Oregon. The press there heralded the coming of “Betty the Second” to the matches, but she never appeared. “I just didn’t feel like it,” she said, citing a reason that to her always seemed more than sufficient. Without his attractive second George went back to relying on his athleticism and stunts to get heat. Against Taro Ito, a “pudgy Japanese matman,” George used those powerful thighs to leap straight up and over Ito’s head as he stood in the middle of the ring, then grabbed him from behind for a press and the fall. In July he crawled under the ring, then came up from the other side to surprise and flatten Bulldog Jackson. In September of 1941 George won the Pacific Coast light-heavyweight title from Jack Kiser, which soon got him elevated to “world’s champion” in promoters’ parlance. Fans
turned out reliably, if in modest numbers, to see good-looking good guy Wagner perform at the Oregon arenas—though now they had to drive there on rationed gasoline.
The Japanese Imperial Navy had just bombed Pearl Harbor, little more than ten miles from where George and Betty stayed on Oahu, and the country was at war. The next attack, it was feared, could come anywhere at any time, so nighttime blackouts immediately went into effect all the way up the West Coast, even in Eugene, sixty miles inland. Within months George and Betty had their first ration books, issued by the national Office of Price Administration. They could only buy allotted amounts of gasoline, sugar, butter, meat, coffee, and other staples by tearing stamps out of their books. That is, if those things were available at all. Chicken-wire fencing, an Oregon farm essential, was rationed, too, and rubber tires—crucial in the itinerant wrestling business—were especially tough to come by. Manufactured cigarettes were mostly reserved for the troops, so George’s Chesterfields were scarce and he, like millions of other Americans, learned to roll his own.
