Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  In their lives as well as their performances, James Brown and George Wagner went further than others would dare or care to. These strong, flawed men held nothing back, for better and often for worse. (Brown had several problematic marriages and legal, financial, and drug woes.) They had deep blues and strong demons, but created redemptive thrills, a joy they could possess only briefly themselves but passed more lastingly to others. These two American originals died more than forty years apart, and both went out in Gorgeous style. The Godfather’s coffin was reportedly made of twenty-four-karat gold, and it arrived at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for a viewing in a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons wearing plumed headdresses. Later, at his Augusta funeral, James Brown wore a black suit with sequined lapels over a fire-engine-red shirt and a black bow tie. On his feet he wore black pumps topped with more sparkling sequins.

  Chapter 10

  A “HOME MAN”

  The baby in the dresser drawer cried and cried. A little girl, less than a month old, her face was red and contorted into a grimace by her bawling. George and Betty stood near, craning over the wooden dresser with the bottom drawer pulled out. Inside the baby lay on her back on a pillow, moving her tiny arms and legs as if to generate more power for her wails. Tiny Betty was in her nightdress with a bathrobe over it; burly George wore pajamas and slippers. The new parents looked at the baby, then back at each other, baffled and helpless.

  Like their spontaneous approach to the wrestling business, their parenthood had an impromptu feel to it. Parts of it had been planned: They’d been working and living in Tulsa for a time and Betty told a doctor there, Dr. Shapiro, that she and George wanted children but hadn’t conceived. He worked with a home for unwed mothers, as those institutions were called, in nearby Ada, Oklahoma, and thought he could help the Wagners adopt. They told him they’d take a boy or a girl. When Dr. Shapiro called a few months later, at Christmas in 1944, they’d made their way back to Oregon. He told them a little girl would soon be born at the home; the mother was a sixteen-year-old and the father some since-disappeared soldier. Did they want her, and if so, could they come and get her immediately? Betty and George were more than willing to drive the two thousand miles—four thousand round-trip—on their balding tires, but there was a war on. Gas was still strictly rationed, and they were using up their allotment just going back and forth from Eugene to Portland to Salem for matches. They just didn’t see how they could get to Tulsa and create their new family. At the eleventh hour, the boys—friends and rivals who’d traded punches, bruises, and blood with George—came through. The wrestlers and their wives got out their own ration books, tore out as many gas stamps as they could possibly spare, and gave them to Betty and George.

  So now they had her, and they called her Carol Sue. But neither of them really knew much about babies and none of their parents were close by; they were winging it. The couple had rented the hotel room for a month to stay close to Dr. Shapiro, and they’d figured out how to make a crib of the dresser. But they couldn’t seem to calm the baby or stop its screaming and crying. They fretted some more, paced again. Finally, in the middle of the cold Oklahoma night, Betty went downstairs to use the hotel phone and called Dr. Shapiro. He came. A slender, dark-haired man about George’s height, he’d thrown an overcoat over his own pajamas. As the parents stood anxiously by, the young doctor examined Carol thoughtfully, asked a few questions. The last one did it.

  “How often are you feeding her?” he asked.

  “We’re giving her a bottle about every four or five hours,” Betty replied.

  “There you have it,” the doctor said evenly, without losing any of his patience. “She’s hungry. Feed her every two hours. Starting right now.”

  “Oh. Well, okay, then. Thanks.”

  Dr. Shapiro put his hat back on, buttoned up his overcoat over his sleepwear, and went back out into the cold.

  The abashed but somewhat wiser parents made the long trip back to Oregon, cradling Carol in their arms in the car or making a bed for her on the backseat. They had a wonderful trip, staying with all the wrestlers they knew along the way. When they stopped in restaurants, folks inside heated bottles and mixed formula for them, and dispensed advice. A little more than a year later, they were back for a rematch. It was April of 1946 and the war was finally over. Wrestling regrouped as many of its top workers returned from the service, including Lou Thesz. George was working in Tulsa again for promoter Sam Avey and they were renting half of a big two-story house from a woman who let her apartments to a shifting cast of wrestlers. Betty, George, and Carol had the downstairs and Antone “Ripper” Leone, “the roaring French-Canadian,” and his wife had the upstairs. One day when George was on the road, Betty was helping the landlady hang some new curtains upstairs in the Leones’ place. She was standing on a table to reach the curtain rod when she suddenly began to hemorrhage, blood pouring out from under her dress.

  She was rushed to the hospital; Leone and his wife took care of Carol. Dr. Shapiro performed surgery, including a hysterectomy, and when he came to see Betty the next day, she sighed and asked, “I won’t ever have kids now, will I?” Rather than answer directly, he excused himself and came back five minutes later holding a newborn boy, just hours alive. A local married woman had gotten pregnant while her serviceman husband was away, and she couldn’t keep him. “You can have this young man, Betty,” Dr. Shapiro told her. “Would you like him?” She seems to have said yes without asking George; in any case, Don was the answer.

  George couldn’t match that surprise, but he retaliated as best he could. One day he came back to the house in Tulsa and opened his wrestling bag to show Betty and Carol the bulldog puppy inside. “They were going to get rid of her, so I brought her home,” he said. They named her Judy and George spent a good deal of time training her; the two of them clicked. Judy must have felt his special energy, too, for she learned tricks and obedience that went far beyond sitting and staying. When George told the dog, “Say your prayers,” Judy would pad over to a wooden chair, put her forelegs up on the seat, then bow her head down and rest it on her paws. George could balance a small piece of steak right on her snout and the dog wouldn’t touch it until he told her, “Okay.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Wagner bought a trailer, a good-size caravan with small windows near the tops of both sides. Not an Airstream, the silvery lozenge-shaped kind of trailer; this was closer to a brown railroad car towed behind their car. In the window set into the narrow metal door hung a white curtain. Inside it was quite ample, including a living room they stepped down into, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Pat Gray, a local girl with curly dark hair like Betty’s, became their nanny. She wasn’t even eighteen yet, working in a Tulsa dress store for fifty cents an hour, and traveling with this family seemed like a whole lot more fun to her, with room and board thrown in. Carol, around fourteen months old with blond hair that was almost white, couldn’t say Pat yet, so she called her “Tat.”

  The parents bought a canvas canopy with white piping along its scalloped edges and a folding wooden fence to corral the kids. They loaded up the car and trailer with the two adults, the nanny, two kids, the dog, plus teddy bears, potty chairs, and the like, and off they went, from one wrestling date to the next. On warm summer days they’d stop by a river, have a picnic, and let the kids play. Toward evening they’d find a trailer camp, and within thirty minutes the canopy was up and the fence was erected, making a shady place to sit and an enclosed playpen. They’d set up a small table with wooden chairs, including a high chair, outside the trailer’s door as well.

  Wearing white blouses and knee-length skirts that seem today like very formal parenting wear, Betty bathed the two little naked kids together in a big washtub on the grass. George would help sometimes, donning his wrestling trunks for this wet event. She did the cooking and George dug in; to keep his weight down he occasionally ran behind the trailer as he had on their honeymoon. With Pat to watch the children, Betty accompanied George to the arenas some nights,
and the nanny also gave the young couple the freedom to occasionally go out to dinner by themselves. Whenever they found a place to dance in the nearest town, they’d dress up, and to Pat, George, now thirty-one, and Betty, thirty-three, looked very adult, very glamorous.

  On other evenings Betty fashioned George’s robes, laying the fabric out on the floor in the trailer’s living room then shooing Carol off when she inevitably ran onto it to play. These months they spent traveling together with the trailer, Betty said, were the best times of their marriage. “That’s when George and I were the closest.” George shared those feelings, or something akin to them. To Pat, he was very much a “home man,” someone who wanted to be with his family as much as possible. When they were parked in and around Columbus, Ohio, George would drive all night after wrestling in Canada to get back to them. He was proud of his burgeoning family, and of his ability to support them. George wasn’t bossy, though, like a lot of other men, Pat noticed; he pretty much let Betty run things.

  One day Pat came into the trailer’s kitchen and saw him leaning down and reaching under the sink and behind the garbage canister with the step-on handle. He was stashing a liquor bottle. George wasn’t embarrassed at being seen; he just closed the cabinet door, looked at the nanny calmly, and said: “Don’t tell Betty.”

  Chapter 11

  THE BLOND BOMBSHELL

  As they zoomed from Little Rock to Oklahoma City, some 350 miles, there was no time to stop. Betty slid over close to George on the front seat as he drove, gazing intently at his head and hair. (They’d left the children temporarily with her mother in Oregon.) Once she decided on her approach, she reached up with both hands, grabbed little fistfuls of his mane, and twisted them clockwise around her forefingers, fixing the curls with oversize black bobby pins. Later, she’d remove the pins and brush out a froth of waves, beauty-parlor smooth. In their speeding salon, however, hairdressing could get rough. “Ow! Take it easy, Sweetie!” George would exclaim, jerking his head away if she twisted a curl too tight or inadvertently jabbed him with one of her pins. “Sit still, George!” would be her retort. Sometimes when he pulled back, the car would lurch across the two-lane blacktop, but somehow they always got back between the white lines and made it to the arenas intact. On days like this, when the two of them worked and made fun together, they felt close.

  Draping George in garish splendor—and calling him the Body Beautiful and the Gorgeous—was clearly working. Not one to stand pat, Betty wondered: How could they take things even further? By making him even prettier, she decided, adding something that would rankle the fans after George took off his robes. She talked him into letting his dark brown hair grow long, and began to fix it in elaborate pin-curled styles, creating dense layers of waves in the front, on the sides, and in the back of his oversize head. “He was very quick to catch on to any of the crazy ideas I came up with,” she said. “He’d go right along.”

  One reason George may have acquiesced so easily is that before he met Betty, he’d befriended an Irishman in Columbus, Ohio, named Wilbur Finran. This wrestler’s gimmick was impersonating a British nobleman, calling himself Lord Patrick Lansdowne. As George would later acknowledge in private, Lansdowne was an accomplished pioneer of the haughty-heel persona. Finran stopped touring for the most part around 1941, concentrating instead on running his taverns and restaurants, so he missed the postwar television exposure that made George a national figure. Or, given the agile 175-pounder’s skill and showmanship, it might be more accurate to say that TV missed him. Finran contracted ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and died in 1959 at the age of fifty-four. The Gorgeous act would incorporate several of the older man’s innovations, including the use of entrance music. Lansdowne used “God Save the King” on his haughty march, while George was partial to “Pomp and Circumstance.” The puffed-up lord also sported a monocle and wore a long, curly coif, so George had seen hair used successfully to attract attention.

  With his adventurous hair treatment, though, Lansdowne was trying to evoke the lords of yore, men of the manor in an era already past. George’s stylings, by contrast, were of the moment, and even more strikingly, they were decidedly feminine. Betty created her own versions of pin-curled styles made famous by the reigning movie sirens: Betty Grable, the blond knockout and World War II pinup; green-eyed beauty Gene Tierney (she’d just played her signature role in the 1944 film Laura); and Ginger Rogers. In Betty’s view, though, she wasn’t making George look feminine, much less playing intentionally with gender or sexuality. They just needed him to be more Gorgeous.

  George went along with her next inspiration, too, one of the few he regretted. Betty came across some tinted hair sprays, and promptly bought them in loud hues of red, green, and purple, as well as baby blue. When she explained her idea, Betty was full of excitement. “We’ll dye your hair every night to match your robe!” she told him. On this gimmick’s opening night, she went with him to the dressing room and gave him a good shellacking in baby blue, the same color as his satin outfit. The couple hadn’t quite thought through what would happen when George began to wrestle, and then to sweat. Little drops of blue bubbled up from his scalp, appeared on his forehead and neck, then ran down onto his chest, leaving blue streaks. Then he mixed it up with his opponent some more, and in the groping and grabbing, his hair and sweaty chest rubbed against the other boy. Now he was blue, too, in runny smears and blotches. And when the stuff got into either wrestler’s eyes, it stung. The fans loved it, and George took it in stride. But the straight man didn’t appreciate the gag, complaining to the promoter and telling George and Betty afterward, “Don’t do that again.” So that experiment was shelved.

  Beyond the robes, the curls, and the various forms of goop, there was another element crucial to George’s success that neither he nor Betty could take full credit for. They did anyway, naturally. When George became famous, press accounts usually attributed his mellifluous moniker to a smitten female fan in Oregon, who gasped upon seeing him, then dreamily breathed her flattering description. Betty maintained that this fan-ette, as a woman attending the matches was sometimes referred to, was her. She was sitting ringside at the armory in Eugene one night with her mother when George entered the ring in one of his new resplendent robes, found Betty in the stands, and gave her a wink. Then he twirled completely around to give everyone in the arena a good look at him and the ice-blue satin vestment he was wearing, raising his arms to show the white satin lining. As he did Betty, impressed with both her creations on display, said, “Oh, look, Mother, he’s gorgeous!” Then, she said, it hit her: “That’s it—Gorgeous George!”

  George also claimed at various points to have thought up the sobriquet himself; others say the handle was first applied to him by Register Guard sports editor Dick Strite. The first print reference to him as George “Gorgeous” Wagner came in 1940; by ’42 or ’43 the given name and the adjective were reversed, and over time the last name was dropped. Whoever coined it, the name was kismet. It rolls off the tongue; there’s an irresistibly catchy ring to it. Other Georges before and since profited from this stickiness, including French boxer Georges Carpentier, heavyweight world champion in 1914; George Sisler, 1920s baseball star for the St. Louis Browns, George Cafego, 1930s college football star; and George Senesky, a high-scoring basketball player in the 1940s. More recently Gorgeous has been applied to actor George Clooney and, a bit ironically, to balding, left-wing British MP George Galloway. If George Wagner had called himself Handsome George or Wagner the Great, would he ever have become the Toast of the Coast, the Human Orchid, the Sensation of the Nation? One doubts it.

  After the blue-hair debacle, George and Betty quickly regained their creative stride. Within a year or so after adopting Carol and Don, they invented the rest of the Gorgeous act, each gimmick building on the previous ones as the two dared and egged each other on. Their next innovation was perhaps the most potent image maker of all. His soigné hairdo’s had prettified George, and signaled the requisite vanity. Yet with
his dark hair, the effect remained somewhat subdued. The shockingly bright blond color the couple went to next was transformative—it made George a bombshell. It sounds very simple in retrospect, but at the time the Gorgeous hair was a shocking novelty, causing a coiffure furor that may have been surpassed only by the Beatles’ 1960s moptops.

  Men weren’t bombshells in George’s era, they simply weren’t. Female tresses could be remarked on, but male hair was supposed to be innocuous and irrelevant. President Truman’s, like every other male’s, was short, neat, side-parted. Yes, it was thinning and graying a bit, but the idea that he might take remedial steps had not yet been born. Clairol would not release its first coloring product for men—Great Day, it was called—for another twenty years, and there were no hair weaves or scalp plugs, no Rogaine or Propecia. Some Hollywood leading men dyed their hair or wore toupées, but they would never have wanted those facts to emerge. George’s hair emerged.

  It was blatant, it shrieked. In the black-and-white photos the newspapers ran of George, his dark hair sometimes faded into a muddy blur, but the blond locks popped off the page. His new do called attention to its own artificiality as it invited onlookers in on the joke. George and Betty didn’t lighten his dark eyebrows, and the contrast between them and his newly light hair also had a subtly jarring effect. The results were triumphant in their ridiculousness. Ted Lewin, one of three wrestling brothers from New York, was putting himself through art school, and he later became an illustrator of children’s books. So he had an eye for faces. He remembered coming into the locker room in Reading, Pennsylvania, one night and seeing George “sitting there with his blond curls, and his big, rugged face. He had a tough face, a square jaw, a very manly face with all these silly curls around it. The whole thing was really very funny.”