Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  In Creswell, Eugene, and everywhere the couple went, they saw houses with red-and-white banners in the front windows, and in the center of each rectangular flag was a blue star, signifying that the family living there had a son in the service. Some of these service banners, as they were known, had two or more stars on them, and soon the gold stars began to appear, sewn onto the blue. Each of those signaled a soldier who would never return. The United States had become a nation of soldiers—sixteen million men and women would serve. Many wrestlers and other athletes enlisted, including Joe Louis, who joined a segregated army and served in the same unit as Jackie Robinson. Baseball’s Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, and Hank Greenberg served, among many others, along with golf great Sam Snead.

  George reported to Lane County induction centers many times, took his physicals (at the first one he weighed in at 185 and was measured at just five-foot-eight and a half ), and got his serial number. Yet he never served. For five years he was granted one deferment after another, including a mysterious 4-F exemption, meaning he was unfit for military service for “physical, mental or moral reasons.” George never explained this and Betty’s recollection was hazy; she thought George might have gotten out of serving by claiming he was claustrophobic. Among the surviving wrestling old-timers, the presumption is that George went down to his local draft board, showed them his effeminate routine—“acted like a fruit,” as one former colleague put it—and was dismissed as a homosexual. But during the war years, George had yet to swish.

  The wrestling game, though diminished during wartime, adapted and survived. In Eugene, Herb Owen, who was charging around fifty cents per seat and seventy-five cents for ringside, established earlier starting times so fans could get home before the blackouts began. One ten-man battle royal, a free-for-all in which the last man standing was declared the winner, was combined with an intricate bidding scheme that managed to fill the house and sell ten thousand dollars’ worth of bonds for “Uncle Sam’s war chest” in a single evening. George got to continue working when many others didn’t, but whatever momentum his career was gathering was lost in May of 1942 when he shattered an ankle in the ring. He had to sit out a few months, earning nothing. George and Betty stayed with Mother and Daddy Hanson at their turkey ranch while he convalesced and she helped out with the chores. At twenty-seven George was still filling out and he put on some more weight during his inactivity, hitting his high-water mark of 190 or so. From then on he’d be classed as a junior heavyweight. More importantly, Team Wagner had time to sit and think, to ponder their future, which soon became a brood. The couple wanted to start a family, but were barely feeding two people on George’s wrestling take, even with Betty eating like a particularly figure-conscious bird.

  “You know I’m working as hard as I can, Sweetie,” George said dejectedly one evening at the turkey ranch. “And now with this darn ankle…” (Even before he made his genteel refinement a commercial calling card, George never swore in front of ladies.) “I know, George,” Betty said, trying to reassure him. They had to do better, but how? As they fretted and schemed, they may well have thought about Danny McShain, the success he was having, and the affluent lifestyle he and Nola had shown them in L.A. After some more silent consideration Betty rendered her judgment. “You just can’t wrestle like this anymore,” she told him. “There’s not enough work and you’re not really making the big money.

  “You’re too clean a wrestler, George,” she concluded, looking right at him and pronouncing on his career—on their lives—with her customary confidence. “Let’s make it dirty.”

  From her lips, as it were, to Muhammad Ali’s ear. Twenty years later the boxer, with George urging him on, also chose a villain’s role. In the prewar years, however, when George and Betty began to create their version of the antihero, very little in American culture suggested they’d be rewarded, especially outside the wrestling world. Even there, while heels including McShain, Red Berry, Ted “King Kong” Cox, Dirty Dick Raines, and Ivan Rasputin made main-event money, the promoters knew their audiences well enough to make clean, admirable Lou Thesz the perennial champion. Remarkably, the heel Betty and George invented would triumph in the culture at large, where the square-jawed, well-intentioned, courageous, and upstanding man still ruled.

  Back in the early 1940s it was clear who the worthies were: They wore the white hats. The Lone Ranger lived only to serve, first on his radio show and then on television, from 1949 to 1957. Silver’s owner and Tonto’s employer didn’t drink or smoke, for purity’s sake and also to prepare himself “to fight when necessary for what is right.” What’s more, this leading man didn’t want any reward for his good deeds, nor, in what now seems a quaint anachronism, any recognition—he even wore a mask to prevent it. For American boys, this was the prevailing fantasy and for grown men the ideal way of being. Not incidentally, it was also the way to succeed. Like Seabiscuit, the Ranger was both an icon and a franchise, spawning movies, comics, novels, toys, and games. The Masked Man’s upright ride was a potent cultural force for almost all of George’s career—in a sense, he was what George and Betty were up against.

  For a bad man to take on a heroic good guy was clearly a losing battle: Villains were necessary as plot devices but essentially existed to be conquered. They weren’t leading men; they were put-over boys. The public could laugh along with madcap rule-breakers like the Marx Brothers and enjoy the (harmless) misanthropy of W. C. Fields, but America wasn’t yet ready to root for a true malefactor or empathize with a protagonist whose flaws ran too deep. The comic-book crime fighter Batman, who first appeared in 1939, had a vengeful streak and a following, but the preeminent hunk of rectitude was Superman. The Man of Steel, another contemporary of George’s who debuted in 1938, was the ultimate babyface. Like the Lone Ranger he was selfless; he even sacrificed love and the possibility of life with Lois Lane for the common good. Many babyface wrestlers would mimic him, pushing out their pumped-up chests and striking noble, chin-thrusting poses; one, bodybuilder Walter Podolak, took the name Golden Superman.

  The Gorgeous One and Superman were titans in juxtaposition—what a shame the two never met in the ring. Actually, they might have. In 1959 George Reeves, who played Clark Kent and his alter ego on TV, announced he was considering going into professional wrestling. He’d wrestled as an amateur at Pasadena City College as a light-heavyweight, and Reeves could see the billing already, he said: “Superman, the Man of Steel vs. Gorgeous George.”

  In their daring reinvention George and Betty would surpass the merely dirty (as would Clay/Ali). Ultimately, the couple found, it’s as one-dimensional, and thus as limiting, as “clean.” They reimagined and expanded heelishness into a villainy that was much more nuanced and complex. In so doing they redefined the role that the bad guy, the other who is always with us, gets to play, and in their hands the villain grew to the hero’s size. This gamble by two playful twentysomethings arguably changed what it means to be a star, and who gets to become one. Of course they never thought of it that way. “We were just having fun,” Betty said, adding a pet expression that dates back to her girlhood in the 1920s. “I tell you, we had more fun than a picnic.”

  ACT TWO

  “After I saw Gorgeous George, and realized he had added a special flamboyance to his matches, [that] helped to create the James Brown you see onstage.”

  —THE GODFATHER OF SOUL

  Chapter 8

  MEAN OLD GEORGE

  Dirty called. George had to unleash the beast, to transform himself from handsome cleanie to despicable thug, and he’d been a babyface his whole career. It was a leap, yet not a problem. The scowl, the sneer—and especially the strut—came quickly, naturally. He still held the Pacific Coast light-heavyweight title, but with the cooperation of the promoters and the press, he soon became known as a crybaby, whiner, and a cheat. And Georgie the bad boy began to do “little unkind things.” George lustily eye-gouged (“Foul!” the fans and writers cried), kidney-punched (“Despicable!”
), and hammered his opponents with his closed fist (“Totally uncalled for!”). A “vicious stranglehold” he invented was quickly ruled illegal, and he lost a series of matches on fouls and disqualifications. In 1942 the Register Guard doubted before one title defense “if the champion will have a backer outside of his immediate family.” By the end of that year the paper was sadly forced to announce his expulsion from the cleanie ranks.

  When Wagner the “mat gangster” took on a local warrior on furlough from the army, Sergeant Babe Smallinski, and crushed him with a stomping hammerlock, some of the fans screamed at George for not serving his country. “You took a 4-F, a healthy wrestler like you? You coward! Shame!” George got a white-hot feud going with Walter Achiu, an Asian-American whose surname earned him the nickname Sneeze. “You dirty rotten half-breed so and so!” George yelled at him in the ring. “I’ll teach you to put your stinking hands on me. And behind my back, too. Just like a stinking Jap!” The heel’s appeal to the racism and suspicion aimed at the Japanese enemy—and Japanese-Americans—fell apart, though, when it was pointed out that Achiu was of Chinese descent. Undeterred, George quickly changed his tune. “I’ll either get another match with that Chink,” he vowed in the locker room afterward, “or I’ll get the hell back to Hollywood, where they know how to treat you like a white man.” One bloody grudger with Achiu in Salem was a winner-take-all event, and after the Sneeze won, the promoter counted out “$1,000 in cold but cuddlesome cash” into his hand at ringside, with George forced to watch the payoff. Such an approving roar went up at Wagner’s humiliation that “the roof tried to leave the bop hall.”

  He and Betty began distributing a new photo to the press. Instead of the poised beauty pose, this was an action shot, in which the former oiled matinee idol with bulging muscles had been replaced by an almost unrecognizable wild man, a snarling ruffian in black trunks. “Desperate George Wagner,” one caption called him. His straight black hair, once short and neat, now fell messily down over his eyes and onto the sides of his face as he crouched aggressively in a grappling stance, left arm outstretched to claw an imaginary enemy, right fist cocked. His lips curled back, baring his teeth in a fierce grimace. Suddenly he looked most unhandsome, bound to displease.

  The heel turn played. “Mean Old George,” as Betty dubbed his new incarnation, was booked solidly in Oregon arenas, and worked in front of bigger crowds. Through his strenuous efforts, good looks, and athleticism, George had carried off the babyface role, but as the offender, the depraved ne’er-do-well, he easily, instinctively, infuriated the fans. After George lost his title to Herb Parks, the Register Guard captured the new dynamic neatly, reporting that “Wagner lost some friends, but assured himself of a larger following of spectators who will pay on the line to see him licked.” This is exactly the approach that George would suggest to Cassius Clay twenty years later. At times, repentant George appeared. “I’ll admit my temper got the best of me and that I’ve turned rough at times,” he told a reporter plaintively. He longed to win his way back into the hearts of spectators, he declared, “if the fans will let me.” But by that point no one really wanted babyface George back.

  Though he intentionally provoked them, George wasn’t completely prepared for the fans’ reaction. “They really hate me,” he realized early on, seeing the men’s reddened faces at ringside and hearing their bellowed threats and insults. “Coward!” they’d scream, along with the most primal shout of all, directed at his morally superior opponent: “Kill him!” At first he laughed with Betty, even a bit scornfully, at how easily the marks’ emotions were manipulated. The next revelation didn’t amuse him a bit: “They’ll hurt me if they can.” All the fist shaking and cursing, the wadded-up programs, newspapers, pennies, and buttons thrown his way didn’t worry him, nor did the lit cigarettes. But the hurled pop bottles, which thankfully were few, could split your scalp.

  The ends of matches were the most dangerous moments, when crowds sometimes rushed to ringside to vent their fury. Once in 1943 George the sore loser was protesting his defeat by Tony Ross at Eugene’s Pearl Street Arena. To make his feelings clear, he went after the referee (Elton Owen, the promoter’s son, who also wrestled) with a few haymakers. That got one fan’s blood up—strangely enough, it was a man with a wooden hand—and he climbed into the ring. Bent over the prostrate Owen, George had his back to the enraged fan and the crowd was so loud, he didn’t hear him approach. In a matter of seconds, the man struck George several times in the head and face with his wooden prosthesis, cutting him badly. Holding both arms out in front of him as a battering ram, with blood streaming down from his hairline, George barreled his way to the dressing room, pushing aside more irate fans in his way. When they saw the blood on his face, and the anger there, they stepped aside.

  Another night at the armory in Salem, George had Tony Ross down in a corner, stomping him fiendishly, when eight or ten fans rushed the ring. Suddenly George saw a glint at the edge of his gaze—one man was brandishing a knife. After a short struggle, the ushers and off-duty policemen working security subdued the knife wielder and quelled the riot.

  Good guys never had these days at the office, George thought to himself. Once again, though, he would take the pain; he was willing to risk his scalp and sacrifice his body to get ahead. After the Pearl Street bloodletting, Team Wagner told the press that George was demanding police protection to and from the dressing room before his next match, a “grudger” against Elton Owen. As George and Betty intended, this special treatment only infuriated the fans further. “Thousands of fans will flock miles” to see Wagner get his comeuppance, the Register Guard declared.

  George and Betty were renting a tiny ranch, complete with a few turkeys, outside of Eugene and Poppa Wagner came up and stayed with them for a time. Then, one wet and chilly wartime winter, they moved to Portland, living on Northwest Fifteenth Avenue, not far from the Willamette River. George was working the docks by day and wrestling at night in Portland, Salem, Medford, and Eugene. (His jobs there and across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, were considered national defense work and earned him at least one of his deferments.) Betty punched the clock in the shipyards, too, though not particularly hard. She sat high on her perch in the nice warm chart house, handing out nautical maps and other papers. George and his buddies, including some fellow wrestlers, would come in and eat their bag lunches with her, then head back out into the freezing rain. In the afternoons she’d wave merrily to him as he’d pass by her window, bundled up, breath steaming from his nose and mouth. His ears turned pink and those beautiful soft hands were getting red and raw through his soaked work gloves. Meanwhile, Betty purred by the heater. “I never even went out there to see what George was doing,” she reported. “Why go out in the cold?”

  By this time George was often at the top of the cards and earning up to fifty dollars for a main-event match—pretty rich, he thought, for a couple hours’ work. He and Betty were each making another forty a week or so in their defense jobs, and for a short time the young couple was flush. But the true luxury the war afforded them was the time and space to invent, to create. The pure heel routine would pale eventually, they knew. Newly mean George gave a terrific rendition, but the fans had seen eye gouging before. What could get the fans even more worked up; how to better bring the heat? Maybe it wasn’t something else he could do, they thought, but what he could become. Toward the end of 1943 they took their first Gorgeous step.

  Betty’s white satin outfit had caused quite a stir in Hawaii, she reminded George. True, that reaction had a lot to do with the way she filled the fabric, but now they wondered: What if they dressed up George? Wouldn’t a working-class audience, making do on wartime rations, resent anyone who made a display of luxury, who clearly had the goods? Why, they’d hate George even before he threw his first kidney punch! George and his wife weren’t sociologists or pollsters, and their calculations weren’t all that fine. The provocations they devised were based on a shared love of mischief and a keen,
intuitive sense of what the market wouldn’t bear. Wittingly or no, they chose a sensitive area in which to experiment. Clothing, always a powerful and emotional symbol, was scarce and the restrictions on it severe. The heels on women’s shoes were limited to one inch to save material, and due to fabric shortages, men’s suits now came with a vest and only one pair of pants instead of two. Suits hanging unworn in absent servicemen’s closets were tailored into women’s outfits, some with the shoulder pads still inside, and those reconstituted suits became a signature 1940s style.

  They never acknowledged it, but Danny McShain may have been an early influence here, too. The strutting Irishman was known for his gaudy outer wear, though he favored short jackets instead of robes. They were often quite hideous: One shiny jacket had high, padded shoulders and puffy, paisley-patterned sleeves, with DANNY inscribed in gold letters running down one side of his chest and MCSHAIN down the other. The robes Betty made for George would far surpass their friend’s outfits, but it seems likely that the two young image makers began in part by following his garish lead.

  Betty and Elsie, her seamstress mother, bought yards of a shimmering deep blue satin fabric and fashioned a long capelike raiment with a wide, circular skirt as its lower half, festooned across the chest and shoulders with silver sequins. To hear the Gorgeous One tell it later, the Portland promoter refused at first to let him wear this feminine frippery at the Labor Temple, a union hall that also hosted sporting events. “Wear that in my place of business?” he roared. “Certainly not! You’re a wrestling dame!” George also maintained that unruly fans grabbed his new robe and tore it to shreds, costing him $250. Of course the promoter would have been in on the stunt from the outset, and the homemade robe cost nothing like that sum. What actually took place at the unveiling of the first Gorgeous robe was more likely this: