by John Capouya
Gorgeous George’s last two ideas went nowhere, but his other parting shots clearly landed. Soon afterward, Clay took his cocky rhetoric to new, dramatic heights. He’d recited some rudimentary poetry on his return from Rome, but now he added a new gimmick: He would predict, in rhyme, the outcome of his matches, including the round in which he would defeat his opponent: “Old Archie Moore will fall in four!” This earned him much attention and disapproval, primarily from boxing writers and other traditionalists who preferred their fighters silent and compliant, like Joe Louis had been. Clay told blithe and grandiose lies; he ballyhooed. When he fought Doug Jones in New York in 1963, the city was in the midst of a newspaper strike. “I’m making an appointment to talk to President Kennedy, to see if he can’t do something about it,” Clay declared. The strike was a serious problem, he explained, in terms George would have approved, because “there’s a lot of people who want to read about my fight and see my picture.” Clay had called himself “the greatest” once or twice before he met George, but when he did, he immediately qualified that claim. “It’s not ego,” he explained. He just didn’t see, in his boxing analysis, how any other fighter could beat him. Now, though, his boasts were personal, not just professional. He, Cassius Clay, the man, was the greatest, not just Clay the boxer. And others seeing him as egotistical was a gooooood thing.
Before February 1964 weigh-ins, especially for world championship fights, were relatively somber ceremonies. Then Cassius Clay stormed in before his title bout against Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, shouting that he would “kill that big, ugly bear!” He used props, too, those traditional wrestling devices: As he brayed at Liston he pounded an African walking stick loudly into the floor and Clay wore a special denim jacket that had BEAR HUNTIN’ embroidered on the back. “I’m ready to rumble now!” he screamed, and charged toward the champion with six men restraining him. He caused such an uproar that the Miami Boxing Commission fined him $2,500 on the spot. Some present were convinced he had genuinely lost his mind. During his crazed explosion, though, Clay caught the eye of Sugar Ray Robinson, the former welterweight and middleweight champ, who was trying to calm him down. And Clay winked.
After a damaging sixth round, Sonny Liston sat on his stool in the corner, spat out his mouthpiece, and refused to keep fighting. Cassius Clay, who had just turned twenty-two, was the world champion. Wearing his white trunks and white shoes, he rushed around the ring, then stood on the ropes in one corner, holding both arms over his head, and unleashed a fervent torrent. “I am the greatest,” he shouted out at the crowd as TV commentator Howard Cosell approached, microphone in hand, and tried to get in an interviewing word. “I’m the king of the world!” Clay ranted. “I am the king! I want everybody to bear witness: I shook up the world. I’m pretty! I’m a bad man! I can’t be beat! I must be the greatest. I’m the prettiest thing that ever lived! I shook up the world!”
Immediately after that fight Clay announced his conversion to Islam. After a very brief time as Cassius X, he became Muhammad Ali. As Ali the Muslim, Ali the outspoken antiracist, and Ali the Vietnam war resister, he would take the role of the antihero or heel much further than George Wagner ever did. Society would react much more severely to his kind of “villainy”—race, politics, and the boxer’s sense of his own destiny would see to that. Yet for years he gave credit to Gorgeous George, the white man, for schooling him in the liberating, self-aggrandizing swagger of the man you love to hate.
Roughly a decade after they met, though, Ali renounced his onetime mentor. “I made up my mind after seeing Gorgeous George to make people angry at me,” he told the Associated Press in 1970. “I used to shoot off my mouth. But I don’t have to speak that way anymore.” He wasn’t entirely done being Gorgeous, however: He arrived at the New Jersey publicity event in a brand-new, thirty-thousand-dollar maroon Rolls-Royce.
What George called himself, Ali truly was: A gorgeous man. Looks were tremendously important to both their public images (and no doubt, their images of themselves), as well as their success. While George played with femininity very broadly, the lethal Ali flirted a little as well. What other boxer—what other man—would boast that he “floated like a butterfly”? Ali didn’t call himself handsome, though he had every right to. No, he insisted loudly that he was “pretty.” Like George he used an adjective normally applied to scenery, objects, or women, a way of saying, in effect: “I’m so masculine that I can invoke feminine qualities and still be ultrapotent, a bad, redoubtable man.” While George first showed his vain, feminine side before the matches, then turned more macho as he wrestled, Ali was both things at once.
The closest genetic match between the Orchid and the Butterfly may lie in their shared insistence on self-definition, on creating new identities and fulfilling destinies that they chose for themselves, and that only they could imagine. When the boxer was grilled about his affiliation with “the Black Muslims,” which he pointed out was properly called the Nation of Islam, his response showed the younger man’s sense of himself. “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” Ali said, stating what could also have been George’s credo. “I’m free to be what I want.”
Over the years Ali and the two other most notable men influenced by George would occasionally intersect, and their auras overlap. James Brown, whom Ali had long admired, performed at the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the championship fight against George Foreman in Zaire. Eight years earlier, Ali’s draft status had just been reclassified as 1-A, meaning he’d have to decide whether to be inducted and possibly serve in Vietnam, or refuse and risk going to jail for his principles. Jack Newfield, investigative reporter and boxing writer, wrote in the Nation that during that first agonizing afternoon, Ali was humming a tune that showed what his decision might be: Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Chapter 26
SHORN BY THE DESTROYER
Later in 1961, Gorgeous withdrew, exhausted, from a “death match” with Freddie Blassie. After one last loss to the balletic Ricki Starr in Long Beach, George retired in October of that year. He’d been a professional wrestler for twenty-seven years. As many entertainers, former athletes, and alcoholics have done, he opened a bar, the Gorgeous George Ringside, at 6230 Sepulveda in the San Fernando Valley. He quickly learned how hard it is to make money one glass of beer at a time, but he willingly put in long hours. Customers wanted to see the celebrity wrestler; that was the tavern’s main draw, its gimmick. During all of those hours Jack Daniel’s was always just an arm’s length away. One night he came home loaded, and frustrated at the bar’s wan receipts. The children were asleep and Cherie was in the bedroom. The door crashed open against the wall and George lurched in, holding the pot of stew she’d made in front of him by the handles. “You call this stew?” he bellowed. Then he flipped his wrists and dumped the whole thing—thankfully, it had cooled—on her head. She sat on the edge of the bed with the gravy and meat running down onto her nightdress and cried.
Everyone in the business knew “he had gotten into the bottle and couldn’t get out,” said Nick Bockwinkel, who was still learning wrestling then from his father, Warren. None of the boys tried to help George with his drinking problem, though, or even discussed it with him; in those days that just wasn’t done. When he stopped by the Ringside to see George on his way to wrestle in Bakersfield, Don Leo Jonathan said, “I tried to cheer him up by talking about old times. I always tried to avoid bringing up his personal problems.” George tried to quit drinking many times. It was during a dry spell that he asked Betty to marry him again. He even stayed sober for nine months or so while he owned the bar. As many temporarily dry drunks find, the world taken sober was an unsettling place. When he and Cherie went out, it took all his energy not to drink, and there was none left over with which to enjoy himself. And all their friends drank. Cherie would see beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead under the tam. Soon he’d say, “Let’s get out of here.”
George had lost touch with Donnie and Carol Sue, his visits and
phone calls dwindling along with his support payments. Betty was remarried to a man she’d met while cocktail-waitressing at Pinky’s and had moved down to Brawley, California, about 120 miles inland from San Diego. Carol stayed in Beaumont to finish high school, and the week before her senior year started, she got married to a nineteen-year-old boyfriend, a marriage that lasted only a year. At this point Betty wasn’t encouraging her children to see George anymore, and Carol knew her father had failed in his responsibilities. But one day she woke up determined to reconnect with her father.
Carol and her young husband, a mechanic, drove their dark blue ’57 Chevy to L.A. from Beaumont. The Ringside had two doors that opened outward, saloon style, and just inside them stood two life-size mannequins of G.G. with robes on. The walls were covered with photos of George with Hollywood celebrities. It was quite dark in the bar; there were few windows in the long, narrow room and the paneling was a dark brown shade. There he was, standing among the tables in the middle of the room, his hair still dyed blond because that’s what the clientele expected. When she remembered this visit years later, Carol thought her father was wearing something orchid.
George was surprised, and delighted. She hadn’t told him she was getting married, and that upset him, but he was gracious with her and warm to her new husband. He asked them to come to the house on Amigo Avenue in Reseda, about a half-hour drive, and have dinner with him, Cherie, Bobbette, Shari, and Gary. Carol hadn’t met Cherie before, but it wasn’t awkward at all; George’s new wife was kind, she thought. The next morning they all had breakfast together at a bowling alley down the street. Carol recognized one of her pop idols there—not Elvis, her greatest heartthrob, but singer Jimmie Rodgers, whose hits included “Honeycomb” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” She told her dad and George asked, “Would you like to meet him?” Carol was shy but nodded yes. George promptly went over and chatted him up, and Rodgers came over gladly. Whatever George’s parental blunders had been, that morning he made his daughter happy. Soon thereafter, George, Cherie, and their family came to visit Carol and her husband in Beaumont. That was the last time Carol saw George alive.
Six months after he met Cassius Clay, George’s liver began to fail. In January 1962 he was hospitalized for more than ten days. He lost a great deal of weight during his stay but began to feel considerably better, due in part to his inability to drink and smoke there. He gave an upbeat interview to sports columnist Sid Ziff of the L.A. Times, who wrote that even a year after retiring, the occupant of Room 601-A might still be one of the most famous men in America. George held court, wearing an orchid robe with four hand-painted flowers on the front, greeting a steady stream of visitors and even handing out Georgie pins. Being the center of attention again, albeit for less than desirable reasons, cheered him considerably.
In retrospect this interview seems a final, fond declaration by the Gorgeous One. “I wouldn’t trade my career for anything in the world,” George said. “I’ve shaken hands with two Presidents. I am a celebrity. I have found the life to be very satisfying.” For the first time George allowed himself a tiny breach of kayfabe, a hint that wrestling was not the cutthroat competition he’d always insisted it was. “As a host in his tavern,” Ziff wrote, “he is often asked whether wrestling isn’t completely phony and all his matches faked. ‘I think you have phony and fake misconstrued with showmanship,’ he tells them sweetly.”
George was working on a memoir, The Loves and Lives of the Human Orchid, collaborating with an actor named Joe DuVal. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news on its front page that producer Fred Gebhardt was set to film George’s life story, based on the book, for the Four Crown production company. For some unfathomable reason, the work was to be retitled The Eternal Nymph. This movie went into eternal turnaround and the book manuscript, if there ever was one, has never come to light. At his release from the hospital, doctors gave George several medications and a strict dietary regimen to follow: no fatty food, no carbonated beverages, and above all, no alcohol. Failing to adhere, they warned him, could be fatal. George kept to it for a month or two until one night, out to dinner alone, he heard himself order a double Jack Daniel’s and a big juicy steak. Rare.
Cherie divorced George in June of 1962, soon after the stew incident. The first marriage had lasted almost fourteen years and this one only three and a half. In her filing she alleged “that defendant has struck plaintiff and has stated on many occasions that he would kill plaintiff.” She asked for a restraining order. In court their landlady, a Mrs. Evelyn Wengler, testified about the night she heard shouting at 7015 Amigo, then saw Mrs. George emerge from the house with her face bruised and two black eyes. Judge Leonard A. Deither decreed that all three children should remain with Cherie, though George got legal joint custody of his two-year-old son, Gary, and was directed to pay seventy-five dollars a week for his support. Cherie waived alimony, telling the judge that George was struggling in his new tavern business. “I don’t want to be rough on him, even though it’s been rough on me,” she said charitably.
George’s doings still made news, in Los Angeles and across the country, and the published reports surrounding his divorce employed a dry wit regarding wife beating that only men of that era could appreciate. One said Cherie “charged her grappler-husband with failing to see the difference between his wedding ring and the wrestling ring.” Another noted that “the wife of Gorgeous George, the wrestler with the curly blond hair, was granted an interlocutory divorce decree yesterday on testimony that George used her as a sparring partner. They were married in 1958.”
George moved back into the House of Serfas; there was always a room there for him. He let his hair go back to dark brown, dyeing it only for the occasional promotional appearance. John Hall, the sportswriter, had the motel room next door to George’s. The walls were thin and late at night he could hear George hacking and retching from his smoking and other ills. These fits would go on for five or ten minutes at a time, and then he’d be quiet for a while.
The Ringside continued to lose money, despite its owner’s celebrity. He missed support payments for Gary as well as the monthly $100 due to Betty for Don’s support. Pleading poverty, he had his payments to Cherie reduced to $50 a week and then to $25. In yet another filing he admitted that he had missed the last seven payments to her. “My personal expenses were $611 [per month] and my personal debts amount to $7,795 and my business debts amount to $3,888. I cannot afford to continue to pay the child support. Otherwise, I will be forced out of business and lose my investment entirely.” Based on that, his payments were reduced to $12.50 a week.
Nick Serfas, his friend and occasional valet, offered to lend him two thousand dollars. George was talking about going into the painting business—the very thing Poppa Wagner had urged his son to join him in a quarter century ago, the drab workaday existence George had spurned his entire life. In the end George rebelled again. “I can’t do it,” he told himself. “I won’t.” Besides his aversion to that kind of work, George realized that he didn’t really know anything about the painting business, anyway. Bars he understood well, but only from the paying side. George called Dick Beyer, wrestling as the masked heel the Destroyer, and asked him to stop by the Ringside. Beyer took Sepulveda to get to the arena in Bakersfield, so he drove up the next afternoon. As he walked through the double doors he saw the Gorgeous George mannequins and the walls plastered with photos of G.G. with the glitterati. The first thing that struck him, though, was that there was nobody in the place but George. “Where are your customers?” he asked, with his usual bluntness. “It’s three in the afternoon, Dick, it’s a slow time,” George replied. “Come back anytime after five and it’ll be packed.” Beyer came back after he wrestled that night, around eleven, and there was still no one there.
On his first visit that afternoon the two men sat down at one of the tables. George wasn’t drinking, Beyer noticed. “Dick, I want to have a match with you,” he said. “We put up my hair versus your mask.” In other words,
whoever lost would have their identifying totem torn off, like a disgraced officer’s epaulets. Beyer was sixteen years younger, fitter, and on the way up. He was the one in demand, and he knew he had the upper hand. “Well, that’s fine, but you’re gonna have to shave your head,” he told George. “I know, I know,” George replied. “That’s all right. I need a payday. You gotta go sell this to Jules,” meaning Jules Strongbow, the booker at the Olympic. Beyer, who grew up in the Gorgeous era (he began his career in 1954, as a babyface), was never a sentimentalist, yet even he was struck by the circumstances. “In the fifties George was the king,” he said. “In the sixties he’d lost all his money, and he was asking me to get him a match. He was humbled, you would say, like a whipped dog.” That assessment was accurate, if harsh, yet George’s proposal was also pragmatic and shrewd. He wasn’t a big draw anymore; Beyer was. George’s hair wasn’t putting any steaks on the table; losing it would.
Once decided, George was newly energized. He ballyhooed the match for two weeks beforehand, appearing with hairdressers Frank and Joseph. He’d also known in suggesting this match that the Destroyer was quite a good publicity hand, too. Beyer gave dozens of shouted—and masked, naturally—interviews in which he’d hold up a photo of an ugly bald man and yell, “See this, George? That’s what you’re gonna look like!” George’s return got plenty of attention. The L.A. papers alerted fans that “The masked Destroyer risks his world heavyweight mat title against the famed Orchid of wrestling.” Referee magazine, which covered wrestling and boxing, put the upcoming match on the cover, along with two photos of George (and none of Beyer).
