Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  When he was in L.A., George still went to Beaumont fairly often to see the children. He and Betty would sit down and talk over coffee. They were still concerned about each other, and maybe more. A year or two after their divorce George told her he wanted to get back together. “We’ll get married in the ring again, at the Olympic Auditorium!” he proposed, not one to overlook the publicity value of this reconciliation. She’d do it, Betty told George, if he would stay sober. He agreed, but three days later he was drunk again.

  On the road at night he’d brood, alone in the capacious backseat of the purple limo, the valet driving while the dark miles went by outside the windows. At the arenas, though, he came alive. George still loved to perform and could lose himself in it, summoning his special energy. One day he pulled into Hibbing, Minnesota, a small town about seventy-five miles north of Duluth in the iron range, where that ore was extracted, in the northeast corner of the state. He was on that day, feeling fully Gorgeous, and a struggling teenage musician there felt his charge.

  Robert Zimmerman was scuffling around his hometown, trying to find an audience along with a working identity. Not yet a folkie, he played Little Richard covers and had his own kinky hair piled high in what looked like a combination of the conk or “process” done on black hair and the pompadour worn by other singers he admired, including Elvis Presley. Hibbing High School was the home of the Blue Jackets, and during the talent-show portion of a mid-1950s Blue Jacket Jamboree, his classmates and the principal were shocked when quiet but intense Bobby Zimmerman stood up at the piano and banged out an amplified “Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Stay” at top volume.

  His father, Abe, was fairly well-off and well known in Hibbing—four hundred people attended Bobby’s bar mitzvah at the Androy Hotel—but young Zimmerman felt very much an outsider, a nobody, especially when it came to his music. Tellingly, he attributed his lack of success not to his gratingly nasal voice but to social connections (presumably WASPier ones) the other bandleaders had that he lacked. His bands, the Shadow Blasters and the Golden Chords, could play at Collier’s BBQ jam sessions, park pavilions, and store openings, “but those gigs didn’t pay except maybe for expenses and sometimes not even that.” Other singers kept stealing his backup bands, because they could pay and he couldn’t. At a loss, Bobby talked to his father about joining the military, going to West Point. Abe told him not to bother; it took connections to get in there, too. His grandfather had this helpful suggestion: “Go work in the mines.” It was a bleak time, he wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, filled with “a lot of waiting, little acknowledgment, little affirmation.”

  Then Gorgeous George came to town. In all likelihood Bobby had seen him before on television; Abe and his brothers owned Micka Electric, an appliance and furniture store on Fifth Avenue. But it was in this live encounter that the Zimmerman kid would be transfixed and transformed; as Bob Dylan describes this life-altering event that’s now half a century old, its power is still palpable. “I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby of the National Guard Armory,” he recounted. This was the venue for “livestock shows and hockey games, circuses and boxing shows, traveling preacher revivals, country-and-western jamborees.” Amid the Hibbing farmers and veterans and their wives and children milling about, he and his band played as loudly as they could. Yet, typically, “no one was paying much attention.” Suddenly the doors burst open and in came “the great wrestler,” as Dylan calls him.

  “He roared in like the storm, didn’t go through the backstage area, he came through the lobby of the building and he seemed like forty men. It was Gorgeous George, in all his magnificent glory. He had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses, wore a majestic fur-lined gold cape and his long blond curls were flowing.” Then the Gorgeous One aimed his “lightning and vitality” directly at the unformed artist in the corner. “He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced towards the sound of the music. He didn’t break stride, but he looked at me, eyes flashing with moonshine. He winked and seemed to mouth the phrase ‘You’re making it come alive.’”

  Dylan couldn’t be sure Gorgeous George really said that, or anything, to him. It made no difference. “It’s what I thought I heard him say that mattered, and I never forgot it.” It wasn’t merely the wrestler’s words, real or imagined, that electrified the singer, it was the man himself, his towering presence. A teacher at Hibbing High had asked his ninth-grade social-studies students what they hoped to become in life. Zimmerman stood up and announced, improbably, that he wanted to be “a star.” Now, for the first time, he’d encountered one. Dylan calls him “a mighty spirit.”

  It was that look, the wink, the complicit communication from a king to an as-yet commoner, that moved him the most. From someone whose artistry had already been achieved to another who had yet to define his own, the look said: “I’m someone special. I’m not like everybody else. And I don’t just accept that, I revel in it. I’ve got it, kid. And you’ve got it, too.” That message, Dylan writes, “was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come.” A decade or so later he’d have another inspiring encounter, with singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. In both cases, Dylan said, he felt afterward “like I’d become anointed.” To him George and Belafonte were both “that rare type of character that radiates greatness and you hope that some of it rubs off on you.”

  Soon thereafter, it did. After about a year and a half at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Bobby Zimmerman got behind the wheel of a four-door ’57 Chevy and drove to New York City. There he would tell the press entertaining lies worthy of Gorgeous George’s, announcing blithely that he’d been raised by tramps and hoboes, not nice middle-class Jewish folks, and grown up riding the rails like Woody Guthrie. (To critic Greil Marcus, this Dylan, the fabulist trickster, evoked the world of carny hustlers, the place where George found his own hustler’s vocation.) Soon Zimmerman began writing his own songs—and he became Bob Dylan. Just as George Wagner home-birthed Gorgeous George, the musician summoned a doppelgänger from inside himself. He wanted to be a poet, like Dylan Thomas, so he took that name, redefining his identity. Not long afterward, Cassius Clay, another transforming son of George, declared himself a prophet, Muhammad Ali, and told the world to honor his new name. Unlike George, Ali and Dylan would continue to morph and shape-shift in their careers and adult lives, changing personae several times each. The boxer became a war resister, among other things, and Dylan a Christian.

  James Brown kept his birth name, but from an unwanted, unlovely Negro boy he also summoned someone new and more exalted: the Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother Number One. Decades later rappers changed their names and they, too, adopted theatrical personae: Curtis Jackson became 50 Cent and Marshall Mathers created the alter ego Eminem. Some acknowledged their musical and rhetorical debts to James Brown and others paid respect to Muhammad Ali, the Champ. One wonders, though, did any of them know they were also following a certain perfumed white gentleman, born in Butte, Nebraska, who wrestled and threw orchids to the ladies?

  Chapter 22

  THE COPPER-HAIRED CUTIE-PIE

  George punched his friend in the face very hard. Howard Cantonwine, his business manager and traveling companion, reeled backward, blood dripping from his cut lip, then set himself and charged at George.

  The Hangman was about George’s height but a good deal bulkier, a legitimate 235 pounds, as opposed to an announced wrestling weight of 235. A big wide man with a big wide nose and equally broad jowls, he had jet-black hair slicked back on a diagonal, and his ears protruded a little, probably from mat damage. His nickname came from his signature move: He’d pin his opponent by the neck between two ring ropes, then yank on their feet in a supposed attempt to strangle. Fifteen years older than George, the Hangman was never a top draw, but he was well known in L.A. and Hollywood, appearing in two movies: You Can’t Have Everything in 1937 and Merry Go Round of 1938 with Bert Lahr. Howard and his wife, Gertrude, lived in Laguna Be
ach and he opened and folded a series of businesses in that area, including Cantonwine’s Sport Palace, a bar/restaurant where Golden Glow beer went for fifteen cents a pop.

  The red-faced Cantonwine was quick to anger: Once, when he felt his daughter Brenda’s bed hadn’t been made properly, he threw it out the window. Another day she came home from junior high school and saw her father, George, and Black Bart (another wrestler) facedown and unconscious on the rumpus-room floor. She called the police, but it turned out they were all just passed-out drunk. The reward for her concern was a bawling out for “causing trouble.” Like George, Hangman drank the hard stuff. In their travels he sat up front with the valet, while George occupied the back. At dinnertime they’d find the best restaurant in town and devour great steaks; in keeping up with these two trenchermen, Jake put on weight, developing a paunch that outgrew George’s modest protrusion. He’d have beer with his meals while the other two put away Scotch and bourbon.

  Against the backdrop of heavy drinking, the trio’s days and nights did not unfold in a smooth and orderly progression. Missteps, chaos, and recrimination played out at high volume. The three of them were zooming through the western desert in the middle of the night when George threw some trash out the window of the limo (if littering was considered a social sin back then, it didn’t concern him). Then he saw that a diamond ring he’d just treated himself to had gone out with the detritus. “Stop the car!” he yelled at Jake. They drove back and searched for the ring under the headlights, but couldn’t find the bauble. Cantonwine made some critical remarks; the words idiotic and goddamn ring might have been included. A drunken fury of shouting, cursing, and blaming ensued, then George threw the first punch, catching Hangman flush in the mouth. The two muscular athletes had at each other savagely, grappling, grunting, and sometimes landing punches. Jake just sat in the driver’s seat with his feet out the open door and waited for them to exhaust themselves. Soon they did, separated, and each climbed back into his designated seat, muttering.

  After his divorce, the boys noticed, George’s drinking escalated. He complained to some of them that Betty was trying to break him financially. Their misogyny was reflexive and they easily believed that “she took him to the cleaners,” as one of them put it. To others, though, George crowed, “I just gave her the ranch, so I made out great.” He got to keep his six-figure wrestling earnings while she got turkey feed. In the past the more moderate Jake Brown had helped keep George in check, dragging and wheedling him away from potential barroom brawls. Yet the quieter, younger man was so entertained, so vicariously thrilled, by his friend’s oversize aggression that he often just sat back and watched. That night in the bar, for example, when the two of them were sitting at a table with some young ladies George was attempting to charm. Toward that end, George stood up, unzipped his pants, and stirred his drink with his penis. He’d seen George do some crazy things, Jake told his wife when he returned home next, but that stunt left him stunned and silent. Apparently—unaccountably—the ladies were charmed.

  When Cantonwine came on board the orchid limo in late 1948 or early 1949, whatever balance George and Jake maintained as a two-some was lost. The Hangman usually wrestled when George did, booked somewhere on the undercards. On another night they were heading westward out of New York after they’d both worked at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens when George and Cantonwine discovered that neither of them had collected that night’s payoff. Again, the cry of “Stop the car!” rang out, and the two fought. As he drank more, with this kind of supervision in place, George began to miss dates, no-showing for some booked matches. When he did arrive on time, he might not be in any condition to perform. One night in the mid-1950s George was booked with Don Arnold in San Diego. They sat in the dressing room discussing the match beforehand, how the dance would play out. On Arnold’s turf, George asked him, “What are the people here used to, what do they like to see?” As they talked, he was sipping from a container. Arnold thought it was brandy; in any case, George finished off a pint getting ready.

  When their match got under way, George was wobbly and his reactions were off. “He was on the ropes and I was beating on him,” Arnold remembered. “He kept sinking, so I had to hold him up while I beat on him.” The match was supposed to go another twenty minutes, but Arnold leaned in close and told George, “Let’s finish.” The babyface’s signature move was the airplane spin, in which he lifted the opponent onto his shoulders, then spun both of them around, faster and faster, finally hurling the luckless loser into a corner, where he’d slam loudly into the mat. That’s what they’d agreed on in the locker room, but out of respect for the drunken legend, Arnold held off, and instead he took George down gently.

  On better nights, though, George could still command an arena crowd, and his showman’s instincts remained sharp. Booked against Lou Thesz, the reigning world champion, in Las Vegas, George somehow convinced the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee to briefly become part of the act. (This was still George’s stripper period, but there’s no evidence the two had any other kind of relationship.) Lee, real name Rose Louise Hovick, was in her forties at this point, but like George she could still get heat. Just after Thesz and George entered the ring and were introduced, Lee—an unannounced guest—sashayed down the same aisle in a low-cut, open-backed, tight-fitting red gown. With her dark hair, high forehead, and wide-set eyes, she looked a little like Mary Astor of Maltese Falcon fame, but with a lusher body and thicker lips. As she swayed she carried a single long-stemmed rose. Entering the brightly lit ring, Lee headed directly for George. She gave a little curtsy, presented her fellow Gorgeous One the rose, then kissed him on the cheek. George accepted the tribute, nodding his appreciation, and strolled around the ring, bringing the flower to his nose for the occasional sniff, lost in a reverie of self-regard.

  Lee waited a moment or two to let George work the crowd, then strutted over to Thesz’s corner. When she reached the dark-haired, ruggedly good-looking wrestler, she kissed him, too—but this smooch was on the lips, a long, steamy version that made the one she’d given George seem perfunctory and chaste. Thesz cooperated and then some, bending her backward in a Hollywood clinch. George did an equally broad double take when he spied the kiss, then flew into a rage. “Stop it! That’s disgusting!” he yelled at the lip-lockers. He threw his rose to the mat and ground it to shreds under his boot, then stormed around the ring, shaking his head and gesturing wildly with his arms. This, his actions said, was simply too much. Finally he could take no more and he ran at Lee, drawing back his open hand as if to slap her face. Thesz, the gallant stalwart, jumped in front, protecting her, so George struck him instead, and the pitched battle was on. Thesz later gave George all the credit for driving the crowd wild; the fans were on their feet the entire match.

  In the early 1950s Beulah Brown insisted that Jake come off the road and stay home, and he complied. He became a milkman for Alden Farms and barely missed a day of work in thirty years. But he mourned. Jake would come home by one in the afternoon and just sit on the back steps of the house in Culver City, doing nothing, looking out at no place in particular. He missed George, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, and he missed performing. It was easy to overlook, given his supporting role, but every time the Gorgeous One was in a main event or on television, his man Jefferies was in the bright lights, too. Some afternoons he’d drive the milk truck over to the Cantonwines’ in Laguna Beach to visit with Gertie and her young girls. Or he’d go see Betty, Donnie, and Carol Sue all the way up in Beaumont. After he retired, he took trips by himself in a Winnebago. Sometimes he’d take his daughter Elizabeth, whom he called Beeb. After he’d had a few beers he’d start telling his stories, which invariably began, “When I was with George…”

  After Jake, George worked some with Nick Serfas, the L.A. bar owner, as his gentleman’s gentleman, including on a trip to Australia in 1956. There, the Gorgeous One drew traffic-stopping crowds upon his arrival at the Wynyard train station in Sydney. Nick, who’d been an amateur
boxer, also came in handy in warding off that country’s crunch customers, who were even more aggressive in rushing the ring than their U.S. counterparts. Thomas Ross, whose deadpan was hailed at Madison Square Garden, also came back from time to time to brandish the spray gun. A year or so after that Australia jaunt, though, George found his second wife and a different dimension to the Gorgeous act, both incarnated in Cherie Dupre.

  She was twenty-nine at the time, working as a showgirl at the Silver Slipper lounge, George’s Las Vegas den, which was part of the New Frontier Casino. Cherie was tiny, four-foot-nine or so, with striking green eyes and lustrous red-brown hair. Her face was oval with a prominent expanse of forehead; she looked a good deal like Loretta Young, with whom she and G.G. would later become friends. Brief but not abbreviated, she still managed to be long-legged at her height and showed off those shapely gams, her entrée to a show-business career, and the rest of her with a forthright sexiness. One publicity photo from her show-dancer days pictured her in an extremely low-cut dress, open to just above the navel. “That was the come-hither look,” Cherie said later. “The coquette.”