by Dave Hickey
In the meantime, my parents had moved to Georgia and it turned out that my friend only wanted me in Vegas so I could look after her. Because she was having “personal” problems. They only got worse after I got here, so she dropped out of the wrestling gig, and there I was: Lady Godiva, with three squares a day and they put you up, right in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. So I’m working for this guy who used to be married to Jayne Mansfield. I’m hanging with Jackie Stallone. I’m a member of the weirdest sorority in the world. And you have to understand, I grew up in Vegas, but I’d hardly ever been in a casino. My dad was a federal agent, for Chris’sake. He was here because of all the shit that goes down—mostly the guns, but other stuff too. So, he had a pretty clear view of the darker side of things.
I mean, one night when I was a little girl, my mom and dad and I are having dinner at Tony Roma’s down on Sahara, and suddenly there is this enormous kaboom! The building shakes, and the plates bounce around on the table, and my dad just calmly gets up, puts one hand on each of our shoulders, and says, “Y’all stay right here.” Then he pulls out his gun, flips out the little deelie, checks the bullets, and flips it back in. He sticks the gun back in his holster, mutters “I’ll be right back,” and walks right out the door. My mom and I just look at one another. It turns out that some wiseguys have wired Lefty Rosenthal’s Cadillac out in the parking lot, but it wasn’t a very good bomb. It caught fire before it went off, so Lefty got out of the car before it went up, so my dad pulls Lefty away from the fire, sits him on the curb, and takes charge of the scene. After a while, my mom and I are the only people left in the restaurant, so we go outside and watch.
Anyway, that’s my dad—a take-charge guy and a very scary dude. He’s the reason girls go into therapy, because their dad is like my dad. I mean, he was always a loving and supportive parent, but he was definitely hard on me and sheltered me a lot. As did my mom, who is a sweet little southern lady with this thick, Southern Baptist background. But they didn’t make me afraid of things, you know. So here I am on the Strip in this crazy wrestling thing, and my friend has split, and I think, “Hey, I can do this.” I had been a major jock in high school. I did gymnastics, softball, volleyball, tennis. You name it. So I was better prepared for wrestling than nearly all of the other girls. A lot of them had dance backgrounds, but some of them had never done anything physical except sex. So I was okay. Gymnastics teaches you to know where you are when you’re upside-down in the air, and wrestling is like surfing in that way. It’s good to know where you are, when you’re upside-down.
Anyway, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling wasn’t your standard pro wrestling tour. First and foremost, it was a syndicated TV show invented by its producer, who was a complete lunatic. He’s the guy who used to be married to Jayne Mansfield. He created the characters, laid out the storylines, the formats, everything. I was what they called “talent” (Not!)—which meant I didn’t get paid enough money, but I loved it anyway. I was twenty-two years old and getting to do things that nobody my age was getting to do, especially not girls my age. We taped all the TV shows here in Vegas, in this old warehouse behind the Riviera. Every Saturday night we would tape matches for five or six hours. Everything out of sequence. Three or four months of shows in one night. We’d just do matches, matches, matches, matches. Sometimes I’d wrestle five times in one night, which is a bitch because not only do you have to remember what you’re doing in each match, you also have to figure out where the story is going, and where your character is in it. And, of course, you have to look gorgeous every time. You’ve had your ass kicked three times, right? But you go out there and do it again, looking fresh as a daisy.
The show also used a lot of comedy sketches. We’d tape these out of sequence too, on two other nights during the week. Which is a lot of dialogue to do in a hurry. Especially when it’s not particularly memorable dialogue. Which it wasn’t. But what’s funnier than a pie in the face, right? So we beat it to death, did it with a smile, and people loved the show. And whatever we did, however corny it was, it was all put together well, and it wasn’t snotty. Also, at the opening of each show, the girls did rap songs—and that was as about as pathetic as you can imagine. You want to see Little Miss Whitebread do a rap, right? It was lame, but that was funny too. We also got to do diatribes, where we threatened our opponents, and I’d get to write some of that. Actually, I got to write a lot of stuff as time went on. I wrote all my raps and a lot of the raps for girls who weren’t so verbally inclined.
So it was really a . . . well, I shouldn’t say a grueling schedule, because there’s a lot worse schedules, but it was a real physical schedule. It wasn’t like doing a soap opera that’s on every day, but it was still a lot of work. And then, when we had about a season-and-a-half’s worth of matches in the can, we’d go out and wrestle on the road. And the live show was totally different from the TV show. The TV show was tongue-in-cheek. It didn’t have to be larger than life. It got to be smaller than life, in fact, but in the live show we’d try to do big, spectacular things. Major showbiz.
This was fun. When you went out on the road, you got to position your characters in the ongoing narrative that was being shown on television, since certain rivalries were being built up through the season. So they would put the best rivalries together for the live matches. Like my main rivals . . . well, I had quite a few since I was one of the stronger bad guys. But my main rivals were Roxy Astor, Cheyenne Cher, and Daisy. A Park Avenue snob, a cheerleader, and a big, dopey, six-foot-three giant. That was Daisy, who was my best friend on the tour, and her “back story” was great. In the first season, she was enslaved by a dwarf. For gambling debts. Her character was this sweet, shuffling, innocent girl who was very impressionable. Sometimes she was a good girl, because the good girls would sway her over, then we bad guys would get hold of her. In fact, she was the best wrestler of all of us . . . the best female wrestler I’ve ever seen.
Actually, I’ve never thought about it till now, but we bad guys always called ourselves that: “bad guys,” while the good characters were always “good girls.” I guess it's like a gender thing—because “bad girls” means something else—and we were “bad” in the way that guys are bad. Anyway, other bad guys were Hollywood, who was real good-looking and a really good wrestler, and Big Bad Momma, who weighed about 310, and Beastie, who was a great bad guy. Her character was a blend of Road Warrior and Gene Simmons of Kiss. She was so great. A lot of the time, she was my partner. I would enter the ring on this big, white horse (of course), and Beastie would lead the horse. But her character was also very stupid, so Beastie and I would get into fights after every match because she would do something to mess up my evil plans. Also, she was just as impressionable as Daisy, so all the good girls had to do was throw her a hot dog and she was theirs. Candy, hot dogs, beer, and she’s yours. And you want that, don’tcha?
Dementia was really great, too. She never said a word, carried an axe around, and wore a hockey mask. Also S&M, Sarah and Mabel. They were sort of Deliverance types, backwoods rednecks who wore bags on their heads. So we liked them. And there was Stinky, who was a Brooklyn punk with a skunk-colored mohawk. Stinky stunk. She would debilitate her opponents by exposing her armpits. And my character, of course, was this upper-crust British jet-set tramp, sort of like Fergie, but better looking. The story was that Godiva was the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Lady Godiva, the Lady of Coventry. You know her story, I’m assuming. I left Coventry because I had been kicked out of several boarding schools. I got kicked out of the last one for a public display of nudity. So I moved to New York, saw the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling on TV, and thought, “This is for me!” and started wrestling. So that was Godiva’s “back story.” She was a fun-loving girl . . . very self-serving and smart. Her philosophy in the ring was do what you have to do to win. And if you have to cheat a little, well, cheat a little. It was a great character, and I had to speak with an English accent all the time, because you were never supposed
to be out of character. Even after the show, if you went out partying, you stayed in character. So the good girls and the bad guys couldn’t go out together. And I had to keep my accent. They brought in a coach from California to teach me, so I sounded like Michael McKean in Spinal Tap, but the accent put this distance between me and Godiva. Which was okay.
On the road, though, I was always Godiva, and the road was the best, even though you get tired of girls, girls, girls. I mean, put thirty women together on a tour bus for two months and someone is always on their period. And you never get any privacy. I remember this one tour. We named it “The Piss Poor Tour,” because it was four of us to a room and totally fleabag motels, but even that one was a blast. Because when you’re doing something like this, something that’s just so weird, you really get a sense that weird is normal. And that everybody else is weird.
So it was a gas. And people loved us. In the South, we were like Michael Jackson. They chased us down the street. One night in Biloxi, our tour bus had to have a police escort because there were so many fans around the back entrance of the coliseum. Also, we had to go and eat after every show. One night, we had to drive ninety miles because carloads of fans kept following the bus, pulling alongside and waving. Which sounds great unless you haven’t eaten all day, and you’ve just had your butt kicked and you’ve sweated every ounce of nutrient out of your body.
But that’s wrestling fans. They are like no other. I remember one woman. She was ringside, big as a house and with very few teeth. And she was screaming at me so loud it was almost distracting. Screaming at me. Screaming obscenities. Telling me how horrible I was. How fat and ugly I was. How fucking this, how fucking that. Screaming. And afterwards, what does she do? She comes running up to get my autograph. “Did you see me out there?” she says, and I’m saying, “Lady, you were breaking my heart!”
Thinking back, there were a lot of lost souls in that group, a lot of very confused girls. The girls I hung around with were like me, middle-class kids out to have a good time, rock-and-roll chicks. Then there was a lesbian clique, and then there were the degenerates and delinquents, who were sort of on their way to stuff even weirder than the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. One of them is now a major porn star. But once we’d been together for a while, we were sort of like one big family, and it was like any other family. You got your fucked-up family members and your shit-together family members. But you could pretty much deal with everybody, because you pretty much had to, having a physical job where your safety depends on the girl who’s your opponent.
But we were having fun. Partying, you know, having a good time out there in the night. And we were cool, because we could take care of ourselves. Guys always ask me, “Did you have bodyguards?” and I go, “Come on, guys!” Because people didn’t fuck with us. Or if they did, they wished they hadn’t. Actually, though, the bars and clubs were a lot more dangerous than the ring. We knew what we were doing in the ring, and, also, it wasn’t all that serious. What the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball, we were to wrestling. The Globetrotters are great basketball players, right? But they’re goofing on you, and so were we. We weren’t out there sweating and bleeding. We were out there being campy and being girls. But, even though it was a goof, we had our fucking standards. I think the audience got that. They’d really get into it, shouting and screaming, but at some level they knew. I know they did, although the only proof I have is the one time I saw a girl get hurt in the ring. Real bad. Her elbow came out and went up to here. Prior to that, the whole audience had been screaming “Kill her! Kill her! Break her arm! Break her arm!” Then, when her arm came out . . . dead silence. Dead silence. So people aren’t stupid. They get in there and they want to believe it and have fun believing it, but I don’t think they really want to see someone’s elbow come loose.
Or even want to see a naked woman, not there, not really, and, you know, people always ask me if I felt exploited as a woman when I was wrestling, and I’ve thought about it. Because I have felt exploited in other contexts, but if you asked me about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, I’d have to say, not really. It was a goof, but we were always shown as strong and capable women. We may have been sleazy, but we were not wimps. Nobody ever cried as a part of the show. Nobody would reduce their character to that. I threw plenty of temper-tantrums, naturally. Every time I lost, I threw a tantrum. So, I was pretty bratty and the cheerleaders were pretty bratty, too, but nobody ever cried. Also, there was no male image in the show. The only guys were the referees and the ring announcers, all of whom were weenies—little, wimpy guys. So we would terrorize them. We’d pull their pants down and make fun of their boxer shorts. We’d tie them up and throw them out of the ring. So, actually, it was kind of therapeutic. We stood pretty much on our own out there. And it was a sexy show, but it wasn’t a sex show, and I don’t have a problem with sexy. I’m sexy, live with it.
Actually, you want to know where I felt exploited? After I had done Playboy and Donahue and Family Feud and all that, I began getting some chances to do Hollywood stuff. So I did this pay-per-view thing in Hollywood, and I hated that. Hated the people. Hated the whole thing. The women all acted really stupid or really bitchy—and maybe they were. And these guys just moved you around like a sack of grain and dictated every tiny move you made. And, I’m not saying that being a Gorgeous Lady of Wrestling was major-league creative or anything, but it was better than that. First, we always had an audience, and, within the context of the show, we got to do our thing and contribute enough to keep us awake.
You got to write your diatribes and your rap songs if you wanted to. And you and your opponent got to plot your own matches. The storyline was planned out by the writers, of course. We were given a basic storyline and an outcome, but other than that, the two girls who were wrestling worked it out together. So it was like improvising on a song or a dance or something.
Actually, it was a lot like rock-and-roll. All of it. It was the same world: the coliseums, the arenas, the clubs, the Denny’s in the middle of the night. And it was a gas to be weird and famous in that world, which is a guy world. It put you on a stronger footing as a woman. These dudes were getting our autographs, you know. So I got to teach some wrestling holds to Flea, who plays bass for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My friend Hollywood and I dated these two guys from Mötley Crüe for a while, which was major L.A. glamour stuff back then. And the best thing, I’ll tell you about. I was going on the Jerry Lewis Telethon in New York to introduce Sammy Davis, Jr., right? And I hear this voice behind me saying, “Jeeeesus, it’s Lady Godiva!” So I turn around, and it’s Joey Ramone! Right there! Now, is that cool or what?
FRIVOLITY AND UNCTION
The darker side of channel surfing: I was ensconced in a motel in the heartland on a Sunday evening. Abandoned by my keepers at the local university, I was propped up on the bed, eating a burrito and swooping through the channels, when I realized that I had just flipped past a rather bizarre primetime option. Reversing my board into the curl, I flipped back a couple of channels, and, by jiminy, there it was: the auction room at Sotheby’s, in the teaser for 60 Minutes. I was teased, naturally, so I “stayed tuned” for what turned out to be a televised essay on the fatuity and pretentiousness of the art world. Morley Safer played Gulliver in this essay. Various art personalities appeared in the role of Houyhnhnms. I just sat there frozen, like a deer in the headlights. Then I caught the drift, relaxed, and tried to get into it. No one was being savaged about whom I cared that much. Nothing very shocking was being revealed. It was just the same old fatuous, pretentious art world, and nothing confirms me more strongly in my choice of professions than a good healthy dose of sturdy, know-nothing, middle-American outrage at the caprices of this world.
Over the years, I have become something of a connoisseur of mid-cult portrayals of the art world. Among my favorites are the six or seven “art episodes” of Perry Mason, with their egregious fakes and heartless frauds, their felonious art dealers, patronizing critics, vain artis
ts, and gullible collectors. I also keep a warm place in my heart for Waldo Lydecker, the psychopathic art critic and connoisseur played by Clifton Webb in Laura. For a kid like me, stranded out in the big bland, beguiled by glamour and hungry for some stylish action, the image of the effete Waldo in his posh Manhattan digs, reclining in his perfumed bath, shattering reputations with a whisk of his poison pen, was a deftly alluring one—and remains so, in fact.
No more alluring, however, than the rough, improvisational world that I inferred from Luce Publications’ sneering coverage of Jackson Pollock’s unruly triumph and Andy Warhol’s apocalyptic opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia—where they took down the paintings to make room for the party. For myself, and for many of my friends, these news magazine stories provided our first fleeting glimpse of something other—of something braver and stranger. We recognized the smirky, condescending tone of these stories, but kids are expert in decoding this tone, which invariably means: This may look like fun, but don’t do it. But it still looked like fun, and thus, far from retarding the progress of peculiar art and eccentric behavior, poor Hank Luce inadvertently propagated it, seeding the heartland with rugged little paint-splashers and frail, alien children with silver hair.
The world portrayed in Morley Safer’s essay on 60 Minutes did not look like fun. No matter how artfully decoded, the piece was not going to lure any children out of the roller-rink in Las Cruces. It was obsessed with money, virtue, and class-hatred—issues ill-designed to put your thumb out in the wind. Safer’s piece did, however, fulfill the conditions of satire: It was unrepresentative, ungenerous, and ruthlessly unfair—but it was not wrong. It was wrong-headed, ignorant, and ill-informed about art, as well, but if these afflictions disqualified folks from commentary, half of the art community itself would be stricken mute. So I was cool with Safer’s jibes. It’s a free country and all like that, and who the hell watches 60 Minutes, anyway, unless they’re stranded in a motel out by the highway in the middle of America?