by John Capouya
The turple purkey ranch they bought is quite a spread, one hundred acres of what George enjoys calling “prime real estate.” When they bought it, he was as proud as Betty had ever seen him. Just outside the house, there’s Betty’s beloved cactus garden; the home itself, orchid-painted stucco, is 3,200 square feet, quite large for its day. Betty says with a laugh that she needs to pack a lunch when going from the entrance to the master-bedroom suite. A small piano sits in the roomy entrance hall, and in the kitchen all the cupboards are specially built low so Betty can easily reach them. Out back is the pool, the kids’ domain, and inside, the adults entertain in a den, formerly a back porch, that Betty had enclosed in windows, with a bar, some stools, and some rattan furniture. A few years from now Betty will hold a party there for her parents’ fiftieth anniversary.
Eve and Harold, experienced turkey farmers in Oregon, run the ranch for them, but Betty pitches in. She’s too squeamish for the killing rooms and it’s too cold in the giant freezers, so she works instead in the dressing room, as it’s called, packaging the already processed birds. Turning turkeys purple is her specialty, though. One at a time she takes the birds out into the backyard and wrestles them into an old washtub filled with warm water and purple dye. She needs to massage the dye well into them, otherwise the oil under their feathers will make the orchid color run right off like the rain. They fight her, and since they’re big birds and she’s quite small, it’s a struggle. Betty also does promotion, accompanying the driver when he makes his poultry deliveries; she puts on orchid pants, hands out Gorgeous George Broad-Breasted Turkeys decals, and pins baby orchids they have flown in from Hawaii on potential customers.
Carol, who’s in the first grade, and Don, not yet in kindergarten, now look very much alike, even though they’re not blood relatives. They have the same facial structure and both have a little gap between two upper front teeth. Those two and Sally and Nancy play with the yapping sheepdogs that herd the turkeys in and out of the fields, and they have horses, too. The menagerie doesn’t stop there; for a while the family will also tend an alligator and a kangaroo; those two may have belonged to another of Cantonwine’s managerial clients, a strongman who wrestled the gator and boxed the kangaroo in his act. At the exit of the semicircular drive sits a series of four or five raised turkey cages, a collection known as Celebrity Row. Each cage bears a metal nameplate: “Betty Grable” is in one cage, and “Tyrone Power” in another.
The orchid Packard George drove home today is a present for Betty. The surprise will be a good one, he thinks, standing in the driveway, but a swerve would be better. “Betty,” he calls out, “I had an accident, I wrecked my car. Can you come out and take a look?” His wife bustles out of the house and into the driveway in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a worried look on her face. Like the new car, Betty’s had a dye job: Her hair is bleached bright blond in solidarity with George. It’s naturally so dark that it took Frank and Joseph sixteen treatments to make the new color hold, she said. But right now that’s the last thing on her mind. “George?” she calls out as she gets near. “Are you all right?”
“Surprise, Sweetie,” he answers with a laugh and a grin, gesturing with one leopard-printed arm to the car. “I got you a little present—it’s all yours.” She bursts out laughing, then inspects the gleaming Packard outside and in. “George, I love it!” she exclaims, then gives him a hug. As he takes in the familiar feel of his wife’s body in his arms, George looks out over Betty’s head and surveys their purple realm. Life is good, he’s thinking. He’s winning. He’s defied his father’s prediction; he’s a star. Everyone knows his name. “We’re doing all right, aren’t we, cutie?” George says to his wife of more than ten years, shaking his head at the improbability of it all. “We’re riding high.”
He’d always had a taste for the finer things, George liked to say, and now he could indulge it. Actually, he had a taste for the gaudy and the garish. Ostentation, in the forms of fancy cars and custom-made clothes, became the rule. Outside the arenas he dressed with a pimp’s discretion; long before there was such a term, George was ghetto fabulous. His loud style was most likely part genuine penchant and another part calculation, as George was very aware of its impact on the marks and the press. In one of its stories on George, Newsweek said “his sartorial effects when not working at his trade are as blinding as his 80-odd robes of all hues and designs, and run to bright red jackets, yellow trousers and two-tone shoes.” When he met with writer Ted Shane for his American Mercury profile, George wore a purple lounging suit with mottled pony-skin loafers. For yet another public appearance, it was duly reported, he chose olive-green slacks and a rust sport coat with a big yellow orchid pinned on the lapel, topped with a mink bow tie. (Perhaps it was actually ermine, given George’s strong feelings about fur.) Carol couldn’t ever remember seeing her dad in jeans. When George would drive to her school to pick her up, pulling up in an orchid luxury liner and wearing, say, the leopard-print loungewear, all her classmates who watched George on Channel 5, their wrestling station, would run outside to get a look, and she’d be embarrassed.
George was spendy but he could also be generous. He continued to see that his Houston wrestling buddies got work, negotiating with the promoters to include them on his cards. When George beat Jim Mitchell, the Black Panther, at the Olympic in August of 1949, for example, the Harrisburg Rat Chesty Hayes worked, too, drawing Sven Skagland. Ali Bey, the Terrible Turk, worked with George a good deal between 1950 and ’55, sharing many a car ride up and down the California coast. He was a Greek, actually, name of Stephanides, a stubby five-foot-five man who weighed more than two hundred pounds, wore a fez, and was borne to the ring on a “flying carpet.” The Turk was very impressed with George, he told his son, Andy. On nights when the house wasn’t full (or when the promoters cheated the wrestlers more than usual), George would reach into his pocket and share his take with the lesser-paid boys on the undercard.
In his Sport magazine profile, Hannibal Coons addressed George’s spending habits and fortune making, but the otherwise astute writer’s interpretation of those patterns was diametrically wrong. “No one seems to know what George does with all the money he makes,” Coons wrote. “It is fairly well established, however, that he hurls very little of it out the window.” The wrestler’s best hold, he claimed, was the grasp George had on his money, calling him “tighter than a two-dollar pair of shoes.” The story went on to say that “George is cannily putting every nickel he makes into a big turkey ranch…Nobody will ever hold a benefit for this boy.”
Once again, after George realized his vision of home—this orchid estate—he was mostly absent from it. Even when he wasn’t on the road, he was out wrestling in California five or six nights a week, occasionally taping a TV bout in the morning and then wrestling again that same night. Like a coal miner he bent his body to the task; as his disciple James Brown would later describe himself, George was the hardest-working man in show business. Increasingly, he worked all day, too, and it was then that he may have done his best and most important digging. George assiduously, tirelessly courted the press, dazzling them into submission with good humor, good copy, and his prescient understanding of the value of publicity. (At this point it was mostly him generating the ballyhoo, as Betty, having done her part, stepped back and took care of the children.) When Jake Brown’s wife, Beulah, insisted Jake come off the road at one point, George managed to turn that into a promotable event. The Sensation called a friendly reporter, who wrote that George’s “voice flowed through the phone like syrup across a waffle.”
“It’s about that wretched Jefferies,” George told him. “I’ve had to sack the fellow. He failed to fumigate my hotel room and one of my finest scarlet caftans is a mass of wrinkles. You may give this news to the United Press and the Associated Press.” Afterward, the story continued, “the wires were hot for hours.”
During his matches he still got incendiary heat, but outside the arenas, in his myriad publ
ic appearances, fans almost always greeted him with admiration. In the light of day, no one jabbed him with hatpins or hurled lit cigarettes. When Gorgeous George got marcelled in S. W. Morrison in Portland in 1950, more than three hundred people crowded around the beauty-parlor windows, snarling traffic. The crowd was a mix of teenage and preteen girls—bobby-soxers, as they’d recently come to be called—older women, and very amused men. Five years later George and Cherie had dinner in a New York restaurant and were seated at a choice window table. A quarter hour later, though, the maître d’ asked them to move—so many gawkers were pressing and leaning against the plate glass that the staff feared they would break it.
Like other celebrities, George developed tactics to cope with the conditions of fame. When he flew from California to New York to perform, for instance, he’d take an overnight TWA Constellation. The “Connie” made the trek in something like nine hours. Glad-hander and extrovert though he was, he still needed to get some sleep en route, so George launched a preemptive first strike. As soon as he boarded and began making his way down the aisle to first class, he’d stop and greet the other passengers—men and women all dressed up to fly—signing autographs, shooting the breeze, and posing for pictures. Once he’d given the public the encounters and souvenirs they craved, he could relax uninterrupted.
In Los Angeles, showing off the great show-off at your charity event made it stand out, and gracing it kept George in the gossip and society columns. At the Toys for Tots giveaway at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, George appeared with George Jessell, Broderick Crawford, Anne Baxter, and Gregory Peck. His marcelled locks shining, with a huge orchid pinned to his lapel, he posed for pictures while bussing brunette Private First Class Ramona Claypool of the Marine Corps Reserve on the cheek. As they grinned at the camera both held his donation to the tots, Gorgeous George dolls. Fittingly, the dolls, a fair overall likeness and accurate down to the dark eyebrows, had huge heads and relatively tiny robe-draped bodies. The miniature Georges also had white gloves on their tiny hands, an embellishment George didn’t use in his act and might have done well with. Besides the dolls, George was also marketing a Gorgeous George strength belt for weight lifters, a G.G. replica bathrobe, and, on a chivalrous note, a self-defense book for women with his imprimatur.
The United States was at war again, in Korea, and George donated Christmas turkeys to L.A.’s navy and Marine Corps reservists. A crew of six GIs had just written to George from Korea, telling him they’d named their Sherman tank after him. “We have watched you wrestle on television and you pack a big wallop,” the letter said. “We intend to pack a big wallop, too.” With the American military bogged down in that conflict, Commander in Chief Truman decided not to run for reelection. Dwight Eisenhower, the dead ringer for George’s dad, won the Republican nomination, while Truman threw his support behind Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. Then, in March of 1952, George declared, announcing at a series of well-attended press conferences that he was running for president. “There’s nothing novel in U.S. Presidents being wrestlers,” he explained. “Washington went in for combat wrestling, Buchanan was a judo expert, Teddy Roosevelt wrestled hand-to-hand with William Muldoon before and after he got to the White House and Taft—why Taft was a wrestling champion at Yale. Abe Lincoln was a professional; he once earned $10 for a match.” (There was even some truth scattered in among these claims.)
As he saw it, George was clearly the most qualified candidate. “Both Adlai and Ike are bald,” he explained. “I firmly believe the head of our country should have hair on it.” Surely the people would recognize this disparity, and vote accordingly. For his first act as president, George said, he would make over the Supreme Court justices, whose black robes struck him as unnecessarily grim and plain. Curiously, he is not found on record making what seems the most logical campaign promise: a turkey in every pot.
On yet another beautifully sunny California afternoon George, Betty, and their attorney appeared in an L.A. courthouse before Judge W. Turney Fox. For an occasion such as this, the leopard-print pajamas wouldn’t do. The husband and wife spent time choosing his outfit and he shone in a dark violet single-breasted silk suit with a bold yellow shirt, a matching pocket hankie, and a gray silk tie painted with the image of an orchid. Georgie pins glinted gold from an especially intricate marcel. Oddly, for a ceremony that affected his legal, family, and marital status, he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. George the person would completely merge with his invented public persona: He was legally changing his name to Gorgeous George.
Betty, too, was elegant, very dressy in an orchid suit, white gloves, and a hat with a circular brim. Her hair shone newly blond along with her husband’s. After some discussion of how changing their last name would affect Carol Sue and Donnie, the judge granted their petition. Before they went outside to pose for the throng of photographers, Betty stopped to reapply her red lipstick and redrape an ermine stole across her shoulders. Then George stood on the courthouse steps regaling the press with his arm around her. Betty leaned into him, half turned away from the cameras and gazing up at Mr. George. She reached up now and then to straighten a blond curl. Looking at him, touching him, smiling, the newly christened Mrs. George looked both glamorous and utterly devoted.
A few days later, though, when she heard him invoke his new name, Betty was heartsick. They were at home, on the turkey ranch in Beaumont, and her face fell as she overheard her husband talking to the children in the next room. “Don’t call me Daddy anymore,” he told them. “Call me Gorgeous.”
ACT THREE
“I saw fifteen thousand people comin’ to see this man get beat.
And his talking did it. I said this is a gooood idea!”
—MUHAMMAD ALI
Chapter 20
“YOU’VE CHANGED ENOUGH”
Bring me another Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, will ya, honey?” George was sitting at a blackjack table in the Silver Slipper, his favorite Las Vegas haunt. (A few years later he would ply his nightclub act there in the lounge.) It was three o’clock in the morning when he asked the waitress for his refill, or thereabouts; casinos famously have no clocks on their walls. This was a high-limit table, naturally. The wrestling celebrity was wearing a white open-neck sport shirt with black starbursts on it, lime-green slacks, and soft black loafers. In the way he did most everything these days—prodigiously—he was drinking, sweating, and losing.
He, along with Jake Brown and Hangman Cantonwine, were on their way home from a road trip; his two companions had already called it a night. They tried to get George to stop, Jake wheedling and Cantonwine making a more blustery argument to at least try another game, goddamn it! But their boss refused to quit while he was behind. The next morning, after another attempt to persuade him, they checked out from their rooms and flew home to L.A., leaving him behind. George was adamant: He’d stay and win his money back, then drive the purple land yacht home. He looked like he hadn’t slept, droplets beading up on his meaty face.
A day or two later Betty was surprised and none too pleased to run into Jeff, as she always thought of him, by himself. “Where’s George?” she demanded. The valet was evasive at first, but he could never withstand the force of her personality any better than he could George’s. They’d left him in Vegas, he admitted, adding that he was worried, too. The last thing he’d seen that night was George, desperately trying to recoup, betting twenty thousand dollars on a single hand.
The next summer day was hot, with lots of sunshine, and Betty was wearing shorts. She was standing in the kitchen at the purple turkey ranch when she saw the Cadillac limo pull into the drive. She walked out the back door to meet George as he parked in front of the garage. He wore slacks and a T-shirt, with one of his tams covering his hair. He said hi, when he saw her approach, and that was all he had time for. George was still sitting in the driver’s seat when Betty walked up to him and said, “I want a divorce.”
He just looked at her. Betty turned around and walked back in the house,
went to get the nanny, then drove her home. Then she and George sat down and tried to talk it over. They didn’t get very far. “I’ve had it,” Betty said. “I don’t want any more. You can’t do this kind of thing with two kids and a ranch to run.” George said he’d do better; he would change. Betty’s response just shot right out of her; she hadn’t thought it through, yet it summed up all she was feeling when she told her husband: “You’ve changed enough.”
Gambling was a young, if burgeoning, vice of George’s, but he had others that were more fully matured. He’d always drunk a lot, for as long as Betty had known him. After Betty objected, in a series of conversations that strung out over years, George drank less at home (or drank in secret), and mostly saved his excess for the road. But as their lot improved so spectacularly, his drinking increased, both in frequency and volume. Most of the time he held his Jack Daniel’s well. “Everyone knew he had a drinking problem, but he never got falling down,” said John Hall, then an L.A. Times sportswriter who frequented the L.A. bar where George held court in the mid-1950s. He wasn’t abusive to his wife or children when he drank, he simply became preoccupied, busy drinking. Like many serious drinkers, once his imbibing got under way and the alcohol took its chemical hold, that’s where his attention went and his commitment truly lay. George was already an absentee father and husband; when he drank around his family, he was elsewhere at home, too.
