Roddy returned to the abandoned set later, on a crutch with his knee in a brace and carrying a baseball bat. “It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than that if they wanna keep me down,” he growled at the crowd, before smashing “The Flower Shop” with the bat and declaring, “the war has just begun!” The crowd chanted his name as he hobbled away. The babyface turn was complete. “Piper’s Pit” was back.
First on the Pit’s agenda was seeding the drama for the WrestleMania 3 main event. One week, Roddy presented Andre the Giant with a trophy for his fifteen years without a defeat. Then Roddy hosted Hulk Hogan, with whom he had become friendly, and presented him with a trophy celebrating his three years as champion. Then Jesse Ventura appeared. Roddy called him “the Mike Wallace of professional wrestling,” because he was always on the hunt for the next big story (Roddy eventually changed it to “Gravel Gertie, the Aunt Jemima of professional wrestling” for reasons that could only have had to do with his wardrobe). Ventura pointed out that Andre’s trophy was smaller than Hogan’s. Further, Hogan’s “feels like real gold” while Andre’s feels like “rotten old lead or something.” Taking note, Andre crashed Hogan’s celebration and challenged him to a title match. The feud was established and WrestleMania 3 was set.
But even with his match scheduled in the middle of a lineup of twelve, Roddy once again threatened to steal the show. He announced in February 1987 that his showdown with Adonis would be his final match. After fifteen years in the business of professional wrestling, he was retiring.
—
WrestleMania 3 lived up to its “Bigger, Badder, Better” billing by stuffing the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, with a reported 93,000 fans. It opened with a tag-team match featuring Rick Martel, who had also found his way to the WWF. The Hart Foundation was on the card. Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat had a career-defining match against another wrestler who could mesmerize a television camera, Randy “Macho Man” Savage. Volkoff and the Iron Sheik were there. The cream of Roddy’s career had found their way to McMahon, and as a result to whatever corner of the continent McMahon wished them to go. His WWF was by then the undisputed champion of wrestling territories, and even Roddy had stopped refusing to wrestle for McMahon in the territories of promoters he respected, like Don Owen in Portland.
For a man who always wanted to leave a territory while he was still on top, 1987 was Roddy’s ideal time. With nowhere better to go, an ever–forward thinking man could only leave the business if he wanted to keep growing his career. To say goodbye, there was no one he’d rather wrestle than Adonis in a hair match.
“He thought I was his brother,” said Roddy. Adonis was an orphan and Roddy used to speak of himself in similar terms, thanks to his itinerant childhood: “I never had a home. I don’t have a place I grew up.” They’d bonded over much more than their common age and early starts in the business.
“He saved me, a couple of times,” said Roddy. “But the one time, we were in Poughkeepsie and I was having issues, I was hot. He said to me, ‘You know what’s wrong with you? You need to buy a house. Put your kids in it.’ He was right.”
Roddy and Kitty had been talking about buying a house and putting down some stable roots for their young family. McMahon had tried to talk them into a house in Connecticut. He liked his talent close.
“They were offering to move us into very nice houses,” said Kitty. “They couldn’t have been nicer. I’m sure Rod would have loved to have done that.” Kitty, though, was home alone with a small child, Anastasia, and Ariel then on the way. Roddy didn’t socialize with the other wrestlers much when they weren’t on the road, which left his wife without much of a social network on the east coast. Life at home was lonely.
“We could have a house out there and have no family and no roots, or we could buy one in Portland and have family and roots, which is something he had never had: roots,” said Kitty. “We both wanted something a little more similar to what I grew up with for our kids than what he grew up with, which was constant change.” Adonis, the orphan, opened Roddy’s eyes to the impact his transient ways were having on him and his family. Even if he couldn’t be at home for more than a few days at a time, knowing his kids were growing up in one place with extended family nearby and the spotlight far away would bring him some measure of peace.
“As nice as the houses were that they showed us,” says Kitty, “we said no thank you.”
With Adonis’s words ringing in Roddy’s ears, he and Kitty moved to a house in the countryside just west of Portland, Oregon. Roddy never forgot his friend’s wise counsel.
“I always used to tell Adrian, ‘I love ya.’ And I meant it. He’d say it back to me and [his wife would] say, ‘What’s wrong with you guys?’”
—
The floor of the Silverdome was so large, the wrestlers involved in WrestleMania 3 travelled on a motorized platform from the dressing rooms to the ring. It malfunctioned when Roddy was being announced, so he trotted out into the crowd and then, filled with the desire to live this moment to its fullest, broke into a run and didn’t stop until he was on the mat, arms open wide to embrace the audience’s roar. It was the same gesture he’d used to mockingly invite the fans’ disgust, welcoming their tossed drink cups and cigarette butts, their popcorn and toilet paper. But this time the smile was genuine, and so was the applause.
The ovation continued for a minute. The surprising endorsement that had welled up from the Long Island crowd a year earlier now overflowed in a deafening roar. Roddy’s tactics hadn’t really changed (he began the match by taking off his leather belt and whipping Adonis with it), but the fans had. Their hate was always a form of love refused, and now, they realized, so was his.
The match featured some spectacular flops over the ropes by Adonis, who was intent on making his friend’s farewell match a memorable one.
“In WrestleMania 3, he made sure that I got over,” said Roddy. “It’s him that did it, not me. It’s him that did it.”
They traded sleeper holds—known as the “Goodnight Irene” in Adonis’s arsenal. Brutus Beefcake snuck onto the mat, first to wake up Roddy from Adonis’s sleeper and then to shave the prone Adonis’s head after Roddy knocked him out with a sleeper of his own.
“I learned one thing,” Roddy said of all those hair matches he’d lost to Chavo Guerrero in Los Angeles. “It’s really hard to cut a man’s hair when it’s wet. So, as much as they think I was being a nice guy, I go, ‘Brutus, you cut his hair.’ And that’s how he became Brutus ‘the Barber.’”
The crowd wrapped Roddy in a blanket of noise as the clipping of Adonis wound down. Roddy had been expertly put over by a friend, but he wouldn’t get many chances to thank him.
On July 4 of the following year, Adonis was travelling in a van to a match in Gander, Newfoundland. The Trans-Canada Highway that crossed the island attracts almost as many moose as cars. Wrestler Mike Kelly was driving when one of the massive animals appeared on the road ahead. He tried to steer around it, but lost control. Mike’s brother Pat Kelly, Dave McKigney and Adonis were killed.
Adonis had once said to Roddy, “You know, Pipes, when I die, I don’t want a funeral with people crying and weeping. I want a party.” The comment stuck with Roddy, and he thought of it when he was asked to give the eulogy at Adonis’s funeral in Bakersfield, California.
“So I’m up doing the eulogy, and I’m having a bit of a tough time. But I got a pretty good game face on,” remembered Roddy. “I got up there to do the eulogy and I was nervous. Really nervous. Adrian’s family had a curtain drawn in front of them and Adrian’s casket was closed. I got around to what Adrian had told me: ‘I don’t want people feeling sorry for me—throw a party.’ This sound came out of his wife,” he said, still haunted. “I can’t mimic the sound.”
Roddy finished his eulogy and took his seat. When the funeral was over, Bea Franke, Adonis’s widow, approached him. Thinking of Roddy and her husband’s saying “I love you,” she said, “Now I know why you guys said that.’�
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A pastor had been in the ambulance that arrived at the scene of the crash. He wrote Roddy a detailed letter, explaining the accident. Nearly a year later, Roddy made the trip to the spot on the highway where Adrian had died. Roddy wasn’t thirty-five yet, but the roll call of wrestlers who had died young was growing fast: brothers David and Mike Von Erich, Bruiser Brody, Moondog Mayne, and now Adonis and the others in the car.
“That’s the last funeral I went to,” Roddy said. He couldn’t bring himself to sit through the death rites of another friend.
WrestleMania 3 felt like the end, but true to Roddy’s way, his final match was the beginning of something else. “To stay on top,” he said, “I needed to get out of the business completely, do something in another form, and walk back in the front door.” Something that wouldn’t add to the injuries, something that shouldn’t lead to so many lost friends. And if he ever decided to come back to the ring, this next stage in his career would make his fame too big for a wrestling promoter to diminish or outright ruin, should any try.
8
All Outta Bubble Gum
“There was a time in my career when I had a limousine, Learjet, red carpet going to it, suite, a dressing room catered, I swear to you,” said Roddy, looking back at the moment when he knew he needed a change from the wrestling life. “I’m in the suite, and there’s everything a guy could ever want. I was thinking to myself, ‘I can’t think of another thing to ask for. That’s not good. We’re downhill from here.’”
He laughed as he said it, but the decision was a big one. He’d chosen to retire while still on top. His renown as one of the best talkers in the wrestling business made him a potential box office draw, and Hollywood needed to sell tickets, too. Roddy had been wrestling as many as three hundred days a year since he was nineteen years old. He knew every day where his pay was coming from, even if he had to scream at someone to get it. Now, in Hollywood and aiming to shift into acting he had to learn a whole new set of rules.
During that short break after WrestleMania 2, Roddy had taken on the role of fictional wrestler “Quick” Rick Roberts in a comedy called Body Slam, about a music manager (Dirk Benedict of The A-Team) who accidentally finds himself managing a professional wrestler (Roddy). The film is a bit of silly fun, but Roddy is surprisingly at ease delivering his lines. Then, the following year, after WrestleMania 3, Roddy acted in a low-budget movie that finally took him out of the wrestlers-playing-wrestlers casting ghetto: Hell Comes to Frogtown.
“Unfortunately, the movie really got a lot of attention,” he said. “I guess some people have actually bought it. I try to tell them, ‘Listen, you’re wasting your money.’ But the more I try to talk them out of it, the more they buy it.” Cyndi Lauper’s manager, Dave Wolff, the man Roddy had thrown around the ring to set up The War to Settle the Score, was trying his hand at managing Roddy, and persuaded some producers to let him read for the lead in a sci-fi movie.
“I walked in there and it was horrible. I can’t read…there was no inflection, nothing. Basically, Dave looks at the casting director, ‘What do you say? Let’s go?’ They just got pressured into giving me the part. At the same time, I had a name, so they were getting something.”
In the film, Roddy’s character, Sam Hell, is the last potent male left after a nuclear holocaust. The authorities—composed of a group of tough nurses—capture him to breed with their collection of fertile virgins (how they know the virgins are fertile is anyone’s guess). When frog-headed mutants, led by the evil Commander Toty, capture the women, the nurses—led by six-foot-tall dancer Sandahl Bergman, who had starred with Arnold Schwarzenegger six years earlier in Conan the Barbarian—put Sam Hell to work helping track the women and save them.
Just thinking about the film got Roddy wondering again why he’d ever agreed to take the role. “It was ridiculous. Out in the desert. I had this chastity belt on. If I tried to run away, they’d hit a button and it would zap my nuts and drop me to my knees,” he said. “There was a frog I needed to breed with. She had a crush on me. So I put a bag over her head before I bred with her. Baby Jesus…”
The memory annoyed Roddy for reasons other than just the film’s substance. He didn’t get along well with the creator and initial director, Donald G. Jackson (he was eventually replaced by R.J. Kizer). Jackson died in 2003, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the whole story, but from the outset, he was bitter about having his lead actors foisted on him. Jackson had other actors in mind until the production company came in with a significantly increased budget and gave the roles to Roddy and Bergman for their added star power.
“The director hated me,” said Roddy. “And I hated him, actually. There was one time when I was tied up, and somebody was worried about me being comfortable. The director says, ‘He’s getting enough money.’ I said, ‘Listen, I could kick your ass from here.’ That was the temperature on that movie.”
At one point in the story, Bergman is forced to do the “Dance of the Three Snakes” for the mutant leader. The dance, like the rest of her role, required the statuesque actress to wear a number of skimpy outfits. Bergman had a little fun with one of those outfits when the wrestler’s wife paid a visit to the set.
Kitty was having lunch with Roddy in his trailer when the door opened. It was Bergman with one of her tiny outfits on. “Barely on,” Roddy said. “She looks over and goes, ‘Oh, Rod, I didn’t know you had company today,’ and walks out. She had never been in my trailer before. Never. “
Bergman’s swerve didn’t help make the night of the film’s premier any more comfortable.
Before the screening started, a producer addressed the crowd. “He stood up in a Quaker hat and a jacket with a kind of a Nehru collar to it. The place was packed. He said, ‘You’re going to love this movie. It wouldn’t have been possible without Roddy.’” In reality, Roddy had bickered with the director and had his marriage pranked by his co-star, all for the sake of a movie he didn’t even like. Now the producer was thanking him for making it happen. Hollywood really was a complicated place.
The situation was going to get better before it got worse. And better started with an introduction to director John Carpenter.
—
“In Hell Comes to Frogtown, there was a scene that was cut—I don’t know how John Carpenter saw it—and he saw the director saying, ‘Roddy could you do this? Roddy, could you do that?’ John determined, ‘Yeah, he’s directable. I’ll go with him.’”
John Carpenter was coming off a successful run at the box office directing films like Escape from New York, Halloween, Big Trouble in Little China and his remake of The Thing. On his new film, to be called They Live, Carpenter asked a Juilliard-trained actor named Keith David, who’d had a key role in The Thing, to co-star with Roddy.
David was a big man who wouldn’t look physically out of place on screen beside a pro wrestler. Roddy was barely experienced as a screen actor. Pairing them would help Carpenter coach Roddy on set. In turn, Roddy could help David with the rough stuff, which the director knew was going to be a big part of his film. In Roddy, Carpenter knew exactly who he was dealing with. Roddy, on the other hand: “I’d never heard of John Carpenter. I didn’t know who he was. I was still watching Leave It to Beaver!”
The night before WrestleMania 3 in 1987, John Carpenter had travelled to Michigan with an executive from Warner Bros. to have dinner with Roddy. Roddy brought along his friend Mitch Ackerman, the producer from Los Angeles, showing the filmmakers that he wasn’t completely adrift in their world.
Ackerman had been mulling over the idea of a dramatic wrestling movie, and also a comedic one about a group of pro wrestlers going to college. Neither idea had gone anywhere, and Roddy’s invitation to have dinner with Carpenter was very appealing.
Carpenter had grown up a serious wrestling fan, even wrote a column for The Ring’s Wrestling magazine while growing up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. According to Ackerman, Carpenter and the executive were also fans of the annual Jerry Lewis Teleth
on for muscular dystrophy. They would watch it for the whole twenty-four hours each Labour Day. When the subject came up at the table, Ackerman told them he’d worked on the telethon during college. “That drove them nuts,” he said. “It was a great icebreaker.”
Though congenial, the dinner didn’t seem particularly focussed on asking Roddy to try out for a role.
“Not a lot happened,” Roddy said. “Someone passed me a bottle of Cristal and I poured orange juice into it. John asked me to pass the rolls and butter, and at some point asked me to be in a movie. Simple as that.”
Carpenter wanted to make a film that was both a political statement and an action-filled sci-fi thriller. He was inspired by a 1963 short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by sci-fi writer Ray Nelson, the main character of which is named George Nada. Under Reaganomics—shorthand for the economic policies of president Ronald Reagan—Carpenter felt America was leaving too many people out in the cold to the benefit of a wealthy and powerful few. Roddy fit the idea Carpenter had for his protagonist, a drifter with no past and little future looking for construction work in the poorest corner of Los Angeles, with the gleaming towers of wealth and privilege looming in the distant background.
Carpenter had considered making his character a television executive but figured the drifter who sees America changing from the perspective of its lowest strata was a better fit—a science fiction Grapes of Wrath. Being a fan of folk singer Woody Guthrie, Roddy understood exactly what he was going for.
“He wanted an actor who actually might have worked with his hands in his life,” said Roddy, “but also a guy who, when he saw something strange was happening, he’d figure it out and kick some ass. That was me.”
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