by John Capouya
A two-ton truck with a velvet sheen,
Gorgeous George is the man I mean.
He has a chest like a mountain and a face like a dream
He starts the women sighing and he makes the men scream.
A powerhouse fit for any queen,
Gorgeous George is the man I mean.
Let me tell you something:
You’re not really in
If in your hair you don’t wear
A gorgeous Georgie pin.
There never was any creature who had such a physique;
The population’s clamoring for only a peek
At the man who can make them swoon or shriek,
Gor-geous, Gor-geous George.
Well-known comedians of the day, many of whose careers were also soaring thanks to television, told Gorgeous jokes. Jack Benny warned viewers that he was an ex-wrestler, known as the Body Beautiful, the predecessor of Gorgeous George, and hence not to be trifled with. On The Red Skelton Show, that radio and TV comic quipped: “If Gorgeous George had to pay taxes on what he thinks he’s worth, he’d be broke.” Bob Hope also riffed on the Gorgeous One in his syndicated newspaper column:
“George wants to join the Navy and have the world see him.”
“His favorite hold is the full-dressed Nelson.”
“George is so high class, instead of cauliflower ears, he has broccoli ears.”
“His perfume is called Surrender—or I’ll break your arm.”
Hope’s promotion of George preceded television. The former vaudevillian enjoyed wrestling, was tickled by the Gorgeous shtick, and had George on his hugely popular Pepsodent Show, a Tuesday-night radio program, quite a few times. So supportive of the wrestler was the comedian that, one night in 1948, Bob Hope went to work for the Sensation of the Nation.
Chapter 18
THE TOAST OF HOLLYWOOD
Bing Crosby was a clown. So, incongruously, was Gregory Peck, his perpetual earnestness hidden behind white pancake makeup, ludicrously big painted eyebrows, and the classic clown’s indignity: a swollen red bulb affixed to his nose. Ronald Reagan, the thirty-seven-year-old war-movie actor and Chesterfield cigarette pitchman with the brown, wavy pompadour, was very much in character as a ringmaster, shining out his genial smile. On this September Saturday night more than two hundred Hollywood actors, radio personalities, and other celebrities gave a benefit performance on the grounds of L.A.’s Pan-Pacific Auditorium, replacing the regular employees of the Ringling Brothers Circus. The event raised some $175,000 (close to $1.5 million in today’s dollars) to build a new wing at the St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.
Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was one of the principal organizers and she dressed as a toy soldier. With her blond hair tucked away underneath the earflaps of a stiff-brimmed black felt hat, she made her entrance dancing a little jig with Danny Kaye and Harpo Marx. Then Hopper banged out her next day’s Times column on a typewriter, which sat on a big wooden desk, which was in turn anchored on the back of an elephant. Dan Dailey, nominated for the Best Actor Oscar that year for his performance in the musical When My Baby Smiles at Me, was a barker of sorts, drumming up visitors to the caged circus animals. Buster Keaton did a strongman parody, while William Powell, the debonair actor who’d already made his sixth Thin Man movie, played Punch and Judy alongside his third wife, Diana Lewis. “Filmland girls,” as the next day’s paper called them, sang, danced, rode horses or elephants, or “just walked around looking pretty.” These starlets included World War II pinup queens Betty Grable and Lizabeth Scott, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Rosalind Russell. Jennifer Jones, the dark beauty who starred opposite Peck in Duel in the Sun, smoldered in a red velvet number as she was driven around the big tent in a chariot. The house band was led for the evening by trumpeter Harry James.
As Saturday evening turned into Sunday morning, cooling fog rolled in off the Pacific a few miles to the west and relieved the heat built up in the heavy canvas tents. Over the course of the event ten thousand people crammed inside. Even with three rings whirling at once, it took more than four and a half hours for all two hundred stars to be adored. In adherence to the unchanging hierarchy of show business, the biggest, top-billed star of the moment went on last. The benefit organizers’ choice for their grand finale, shown nationwide the next week in the Hearst “News of the Day” newsreel, was a certain thirty-five-year-old wrestler with bleached blond hair.
The Pan-Pacific, on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles’s Fairfax district, had a streamlined Art Moderne facade, from which jutted four tall, white towers shaped like tail fins. For the charity circus the facing parking lots had been covered with a collection of colorful tents, and now George walked rapidly toward them with his hairdressing team, Frank and Joseph, trying to keep up. He’d just flown in from Ohio, chartering his own plane and canceling some lucrative dates to make it. Normally, losing money held no interest for Howard and Bessie’s boy, but the glory of closing this show made it irresistible to the Gorgeous ego.
Once he reached the tent serving as a dressing room, he was seated at a wooden table equipped with a good-size mirror, a white smock draped over his shoulders and chest. Elizabeth Arden did his makeup, and then Frank and Joseph applied themselves to his curls with all four hands. They were interrupted every minute, it seemed, by other stars stopping by to say hello, to pose with George for publicity pictures, and to satisfy their curiosity about the blond bombshell who was also a wrestling villain. Betty took a liking to Lucille Ball, who stopped by to introduce herself. Gary Cooper, all tanned and handsome six-foot-three of him, strolled in and loomed over George in a double-breasted suit. Gallant George stood up abruptly when Esther Williams, swimming champion and star of MGM’s “aqua musicals,” showed up, her reddish hair lustrous and her equally luxuriant figure on display in a revealing bathing suit. She laughed as George kissed her cheek, then pulled her into a mock headlock. Ray Milland came by to introduce himself, greeting the mat prima donna as George. “I don’t know who you are, sir,” he shot back jokingly at the star of The Lost Weekend and that year’s The Big Clock, “but peasants usually refer to me as ‘Gorgeous.’”
In the big top, tuxedo-clad Jimmy Lennon moved to the middle of the largest sawdust-covered ring. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned into the microphone. “It’s time for the main event—the wrestling match of the century! The Killer of the screen faces off with The Killer of the ring!” Cheers rang out for the darkly handsome Burt Lancaster, starring just then as the murderous husband in Sorry, Wrong Number. He wore brown trunks and over them a flesh-colored robe. The referee was next to be introduced: Billy Curtis, the midget actor who played a Munchkin City official in The Wizard of Oz. The top of his pomaded dark hair reached Lancaster’s lowest rib.
Then the lights went down and the tent, save the ring, was dark. “And now, here he is, ladies and gentlemen,” Lennon resumed, sweeping one arm out to point up a long aisle between the rows of folding chairs. “The Toast of the Coast…” A man emerged: Bob Hope in a long black morning coat, a white carnation on his lapel, bearing in front of him a silver tray. The comedian had already starred in five “road movies” with Bing Crosby, but tonight he was here to serve George, and the Los Angeles audience recognized the impersonation in an instant: “He’s playing Jefferies!”
Hope and Lancaster had rehearsed for two weeks, but they did so without George, who was out wrestling and earning until the last minute. So the two stars worked with Vic Holbrook, a wrestling friend of George’s and an occasional valet, as a stand-in. When showtime came Hope flawlessly ran through the spray-gun routine—including an abortive attempt to disinfect the Killer. George then made his manifestation wearing a full-length yellow satin robe, trimmed at the elbows and cuffs with rings of white ermine.
Disrobed, George and Lancaster circled each other, glaring menacingly. The actor was several inches taller, lean and muscled; it was clear right away that Lancaster, who had once made his living as an acrobat, knew how to
fall and roll. As he gained confidence and began to enjoy himself, he mugged, exaggerated, and overacted along with the master. Both men’s backs took on a splotchy covering of sawdust. At one point George lifted Lancaster high over his shoulder and slammed him down. He was about to pin him when Hope approached the two-man tangle of arms, legs, and heads, holding a black telephone out in front of him, its cord trailing behind. In those days it was still a sizable instrument, and thus a more visible prop.
“Excuse me, Master,” the valet said as the crowd chortled. “There’s a call for you.” George left off kneeling on Lancaster’s chest to take the handset. After uttering a few quick sentences, he extended the phone toward his adversary. “It’s for you.” Lancaster took it and growled, “I’m busy, now, I can’t talk!”
Then Lancaster got George in a near pin, and Hope flew to the rescue. He walloped the actor full in the face with a huge powder puff cached on the silver tray, and a pink cloud exploded around Lancaster’s head. He staggered back, then turned toward Hope and shot him a furious look, full of Killer menace. Hope ran terrified and jumped into George’s arms, the wrestler cradling his valet in front of his chest like a big, morning-coated baby. Then the incensed Lancaster, powder still caking his face, motioned to his corner, where two seconds had suddenly appeared. The two hulking men in double-breasted suits and fedoras—full gangster regalia—stalked toward Hope, who now cowered behind George’s back. One of the thugs pulled a revolver from his waistband and raised it in the air. Suddenly all the lights in the tent went out. Shots rang out, rat-tat-tat! (Or were they rim shots by the house band’s drummer?) The audience gasped.
Then, just as suddenly as they went out, the lights came back up and the band broke into a raucous jump tune, horns blaring. All the players, including the two gangsters, now smiling, began to dance. Hope dropped to his knees to make himself the same height as the tiny referee, and they circled the ring in a loopy waltz. George and Lancaster spun each other around in a fast-paced do-si-do, then ran up the main aisle together laughing, arm in arm.
At George’s peak, the Gorgeous persona hung so thick in the atmosphere that it could be referenced, alluded to, or parodied, without even being named. In the 1951 Bugs Bunny cartoon entitled “Bunny Hugged,” there appeared a vain wrestler who went by the alliterative name of Ravishing Ronald. Preceded to the ring by a leaping nymph, carried there on a covered silver tray by bare-chested men wearing fezzes, Ronald is finally revealed, wearing purple trunks around his tiny waist. His head is cartoonishly huge underneath his bright yellow hair and he’s eating purple grapes. A harem girl sprays perfume. Ronald is even wearing a snood. His opponent, the massively muscled and ugly Crusher (wrestler Reggie Lisowski would have a long, successful run under that name), uses the hairnet to tie Ronald up with, then begins pounding him like an unloved drum. Bugs is Ravishing Ronald’s valet, his Jefferies. “It’s a living,” he tells the camera with a shrug. When he sees his master getting thrashed, he exclaims: “Oh, bruddah, there goes my bread and buddah!” So the rabbit defeats the Crusher himself, with a strategy involving an anvil as well as the impersonation of a Jewish tailor.
Born in 1938, Bugs was a rascally brother to Gorgeous George’s cartoonish character. Transgressive tricksters both, they defied as many conventions as possible (Bugs even defied gravity, among other laws of physics), talked insolent trash to everyone—and got away with it, always. Self-assured, self-reliant, and self-absorbed, they existed in their own worlds, autonomous regions of their own creation; they insisted on seeing things their ways. Cheerfully defiant and forever, improbably, unharmed, George and Bugs were both clearly having more fun than anyone else in their respective pictures.
At the opposite end of the pop-culture spectrum from these cool cats lived one well-meaning square named Andy Hardy, the hero of a Dell comic book and more than a dozen movies starring Mickey Rooney. This all-American male teenager was eager, adolescent, and innocent—he asked his father, Judge Hardy, how to avoid getting kissed by so many girls. He, too, had an encounter with a Gorgeous George stand-in. In comic strip Number 389, published in 1952, Andy runs afoul of a scowling grappler who wears his blond hair in a net and sports a long robe with white fur trim: Glamorous Gus. When Gus parades down the aisle of a wrestling arena, Andy accidentally trips Gus and a male fan wearing a bow tie taunts the wrestler, yelling, “S’matter, cutie boy? Won’t your little footsies hold you up? Ho! Ho!”
Later, though, Gus, still wearing the hairnet outside the ring, proves himself a good egg and helps Andy reunite with his girlfriend, Polly. “If it hadn’t been for Glamorous Gus, we might never have seen each other again!” pants Andy, clasping both her hands as they sit in his convertible jalopy. “I can’t stand to even think about it, Andy!” is Polly’s impassioned reply.
G.G. wasn’t merely known; he signified. “Acting like Gorgeous George,” “pulling a Gorgeous George,” or someone “thinking he’s Gorgeous George” all entered the common parlance. George became a ready symbol of the vain, the loud, and the attention-crazed, anything or anyone over-the-top. When Ethel Barrymore saw Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, she wasn’t impressed, preferring her brother John’s more subdued portrayal. Her hissed verdict on Olivier’s rendition was: “Gorgeous George!”
In 1952 Katharine Hepburn was starring in The Millionairess on Broadway. Critic Bill Henry described her as looking fragile but charging around the stage, bellowing, taking stairs three steps at a time, and decking other actors. He summed up her scenery-chewing work by dubbing her “a feminine Gorgeous George.” However, Henry added, her stage histrionics were creating a furor, and therefore interest. He concluded that “controversy must be better than talent—you can’t buy a seat for the run of the play.” A very George-ish notion.
Chapter 19
PURPLE MAJESTY
On a beautifully sharp blue-skied California afternoon, George sits smiling behind the wheel of a brand-new Packard convertible, top down. He’s heading for home on Route 99, five or six miles outside Beaumont. The car he’s steering with one meaty finger is the 1950 Packard Deluxe Coupe. He’s just picked it up from the dealer, where the roadster—so low-slung it’s said to embody “bathtub design”—has been painted a light purple, right down to the bands on the whitewall tires. George, between Cadillacs right now, owns another Packard he takes on the road with Jake Brown and his business manager Howard Cantonwine, the Hangman. That one’s the Custom 8 Club Sedan, a massive limited-run land yacht with wide running boards. It’s light purple, too—or, as he and Betty insist the color be properly called, orchid.
He turns off onto a smaller rural road, Cherry Valley Boulevard. The afternoon’s warm, but here in the high desert the breeze coming in the open windows is cooling. George wears his version of casual wear: a bright yellow-and-black leopard-print, pajama-like outfit with matching top and trouser bottoms. He’s resting his left arm on the window frame and his blond locks, sans tam today, stream behind him in the breeze. Off to his right runs a dark-railed wooden fence and George slows, then turns through its open gate into a semicircular dirt-and-gravel driveway. He’s home, at the farm George and Betty moved to in 1950.
A few moments ago George drove past a sign advertising GORGEOUS GEORGE’S BROAD-BREASTED TURKEYS, and as he turns off the car in the driveway, then steps outside, he hears the low, constant burbling of the birds they’re raising here. He can see them, too, in the huge farmyard behind the house and the fields across the road, thirty-five thousand turkeys scratching, bobbing, squawking, and teeming around the long, low wooden troughs holding their feed and water. Acres and acres are given over to—covered in—these dark-bodied, light-necked hordes. It seems an alien, gobbling planet. However, that’s not the oddest aspect of this landscape.
Sitting fairly close to the road, the sprawling one-story farmhouse with the big picture window juts up from the sandy-colored earth the same bright purple as the cars. A short distance away sits Betty’s parents’ house and farther down another one, where her
sister, Eve, and Eve’s husband, Harold, live with their daughters, Sally and Nancy. Both of those homes are painted orchid, too. All the outbuildings on both sides of the road, including the brooder houses, where the chicks are kept, and the processing plant with its killing rooms, are orchid, in lurid contrast to the scrubby brown-and-gold hills behind. It’s a bizarre Technicolor spectacle, like Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, and just as in that movie the colors in this scene are so saturated they seem in need of correction, a dialing back toward reality. But that would spoil the fun.
Inside the little store and lunch counter—among his other accomplishments, George was a turkey-burger pioneer—there’s a good chance that some of the birds, “Guaranteed Delicious and Hygienic,” are orchid, too. For special promotions, Betty dunks them in purple vegetable dye. A second billboard along Cherry Valley announces in huge letters that TURPLE PURKEYS are for sale. Betty had no real reason to have the two first letters transposed, except her usual: Why have things bland when you can put some spice into them? Nearby supermarkets like Sage’s and other customers who order birds get them delivered, in orchid-colored limousines.
It’s unclear just how George and Betty came by their orchid fixation, but when they did, it was with total commitment. This obsession took in not just that lighter shade of purple, but the flower as well. She sewed cloth orchids in various colors onto several of his robes, and George, who was introduced as the Human Orchid, would sometimes carry real ones on his march to the ring, clasping them in front of him like a bride with a bouquet, then tossing them to deserving women in the audience. Occasionally he’d invite the sweetest-looking old lady he could find in the crowd to come into the ring, where he’d offer her one of the beautiful flowers. When the poor woman reached for her gift, he’d drop the orchid to the mat and grind it to pieces under his white-shod boot. “Just for fun,” Betty explained. “You know, Mean Old George.”
