Savage the Good Guy was always seemingly presented as a sort of Hogan Junior—he was slightly smaller, significantly less epic, somewhat less bald—and the constant physical juxtaposition to Hogan didn’t help change this perception. The majority of Savage’s title reign saw him feuding with midtier pseudoluminaries—Bad News Brown, anyone?—while the real main event treatment went to Savage’s tag team undertakings alongside Hogan. They battled against “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and Andre and later the porcine duo of Akeem (formerly the One Man Gang) and the Big Boss Man.
In a match against the latter pair, the soap operatic underpinnings of the Savage-Elizabeth relationship returned to the fore. When Savage was thrown outside the ring and onto Elizabeth, Hogan carried an injured Elizabeth to the back, abandoning Savage to the punishment of the Twin Towers. Upon the Hulkster’s return, Savage was apoplectic, and he assaulted Hogan backstage after the match, igniting a feud that built toward a WrestleMania V collision wherein Hogan reclaimed the belt from Savage.
It’s worth noting that the motivations at play in this storyline always seemed a few degrees off; Hogan’s actions were presented as valiant and Savage’s reactions to them unreasonable, but in part because Hogan was little more than statuary, personality-wise, and Savage came across as so deeply human (if unbalanced), their dispute never came off as cut-and-dried as the WWF of this era liked to play things. As with Savage’s earlier abusive tendencies, there were well-defined tropes at play here, so we treated the Macho Man as the villain, but in retrospect it’s hard to endorse Hogan’s as the side for good here. Hofstadter could have been looking at Hogan through Savage’s eyes when he wrote that “the enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman.” Little wonder Savage was so paranoid.
As a face and a heel, Savage saw wrestling the way so many of us viewers did. He saw that every wrestler had an ulterior motive, that everyone was out for himself—that conspiracy theory was the only reasonable lens through which to perceive WWF reality. He was a canny viewer, sussing out all the angles. His paranoia was ours.*
Regardless, Hogan was the good guy and now he was back atop the mountain. Savage was left to redefine himself in a jumble of upper-midcard villains. After Savage dispatched the lukewarm “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, who was holding the WWF’s “kingship” (passed down from Harley Race and Haku)—which, of course, demanded that the “king” at any given time wear a crown and robe, often to comical effect—Savage embraced the regality in his singularly lunatic manner, redubbing himself the “Macho King” and integrating a crown and scepter into his increasingly eclectic wardrobe: neon colors, faux leather, oversized sunglasses, and shirts heavy on the tassels. (It was, to be honest, a borderline iconic look.) Elizabeth disappeared and was replaced with the Sensational Sherri—sort of the anti-Elizabeth, an oversexualized, mascara-smeared freakshow.
Speaking of painted-up oddballs, it wasn’t long before Savage crossed paths with the up-and-comer who would take his place as the heir apparent to Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior. When Warrior and then-champion Sgt. Slaughter were scheduled to meet up at Royal Rumble 1991, Slaughter promised Savage that he would be his first competition after the Rumble, should he retain the title. When Savage tried and failed to exact the same guarantee from the Warrior, the Warrior equivocated and Savage went apoplectic, attacking him before the Rumble match. (Again, his reaction here may have been unwarranted, but his motivation seemed oddly justifiable for a man being portrayed as the heel.)
Warrior and Savage finally faced off at WrestleMania VII, where both men put their careers on the line. Savage lost, putting him into “retirement” (that word in the world of wrestling is exactly as binding as it is in present-day boxing), but he won a greater victory that night: After his loss, Sherri came into the ring and berated him but, serendipitously, Elizabeth reappeared and dispatched her insufferable rival. The crowd loved it: Through no action of his own, Savage had been reverted to a fan favorite. All it took was the abiding love of his old squeeze.
His period of retirement saw Savage working as a color commentator. He eventually proposed to Elizabeth on air (just as their real-life marriage was falling apart), and they scheduled their nuptials for SummerSlam 1991. (It was billed, rather brilliantly, as “The Match Made in Heaven.”) It’s unclear if there was more of a planned payoff for the wedding angle, but reality intervened and scuttled Savage’s honeymoon. Though Vince McMahon’s obvious intention was to retire Savage to a permanent announcing role,* when he fired the Ultimate Warrior prior to SummerSlam, Savage was called back into active duty to fill his slot as the number-two babyface. He entered into a feud with Jake “The Snake” Roberts and his buddy the Undertaker when the two crashed Macho and Liz’s wedding reception with a gift-wrapped cobra as their wedding present. (It’s often forgotten that Roberts’s beef with Savage stemmed from the fact that he was not allowed to attend the Macho Man’s bachelor party. Seriously.) After Roberts loosed a real (but, in reality, devenomized) cobra on Savage in an in-ring confrontation, the WWF formally reinstated Savage so that he could formally deal with Roberts. He did.
Savage soon found himself tied up with Ric Flair, who had migrated from the NWA/WCW to try his hand at WWF stardom. In a notorious angle that presaged the contemporary era of the celebrity sex tape and that scandalized tweens the country over, Flair claimed to have “known” Liz before Savage had met her, and he had the photos to prove it. Macho, crazed with jealousy even as a good guy, battled Flair nominally to defend Elizabeth’s honor but more realistically to defend his own lunatic ego. The payoff to the feud, in which it emerged that Flair had swiped pictures of Savage and Liz together and Photoshopped himself into them, was about as weird an ending as one could imagine. Even as a youth, I couldn’t help but ask how Savage hadn’t recognized Liz’s poses from the photos in his own album. But looking for logic was a mug’s game. The Macho Man’s jealousy belonged more to the realm of paranoia than that of observable reality. We cheered when he overcame the libelous Flair threat—and rewon the heavyweight title—but there were plain symptoms that the Macho Man was going off the deep end.
It was roughly during this period that Savage began a memorable stint as the spokesman for Slim Jim beef jerky and solidified a place for himself in pop culture history. Despite that newfound notoriety, the remainder of his WWF tenure was unspectacular. He teamed up with a returning Ultimate Warrior and later split his time between announcing and feuding with the lesser lights of the WWF’s baddie cavalry. He left the WWF in 1994 when it became clear they wanted him to transition into a permanent commentator’s role while Savage thought his wrestling career should continue. (Vince McMahon, notoriously silent about business matters, wished Macho a surprisingly sincere farewell on the first broadcast without him.)
Savage’s next stop was WCW, where Hogan had previously migrated. Their notoriously tumultuous relationship was at the core of his reappearance—in interviews, Savage had ominously promised the Hulkster that he would “either shake his hand or slap his face.” He was so unhinged—as evinced by his numerous turns over the preceding years, and by the pained efforts to make each turn more compelling than the last—that either option was viable. There was something poignant about this. His intentions were unreadable, and he now became opaque to the public that had once so thoroughly understood him. In the end, it may have been impossible to import a star of Savage’s wattage as a villain, as the crowd would be likely to cheer his arrival regardless, but it was nevertheless a letdown when he returned to save Hogan from a beatdown by the milquetoast “Faces of Fear” stable. The crowd roared, but Savage was immediately sublimated once again to the Hogan mystique.
As Hogan wrestled as a special attraction, mostly away from the championship picture, Savage won the belt in a battle royal and then renewed his rivalry with Ric Flair, who too was back in WCW, and won the Heavyweight Championship, as the two swapped the belt back and forth.
Then came the formation of the nWo stable, where Hogan turned to the dark side for the first time in his mainstream career. He joined in on a beating of Savage to signal his reversal and, in constructing a new malevolent self, took on a good bit of the Savage persona. Savage dropped the title to Hogan and before long joined up with the nWo himself, splitting off with several others to form the nWo Wolfpac, and, well, the less said here is probably better.* Savage maintained a credible level of celebrity during this period, despite the zaniness of WCW booking, but soon he came to embody the midlife crisis that seemed to run through the bulk of WCW storytelling. He was suddenly overmuscled, and his hair was slicked back and dyed dark black, and, echoing and one-upping his association with Elizabeth, he was accompanied at all times by a trio of blond beauties: his real-life porn-star-esque girlfriend Gorgeous George,* female wrestler Madusa, and another wrestler in a ball gown and sash who went by “Miss Madness.”*
Soon, though, WCW was near collapse and Savage’s career was more or less over. He made a brief run in TNA wrestling, but afterward he retired into a seemingly complacent post-wrestling existence: He let his beard grow white. He put on weight. He avoided the life of autograph signings and high-school-gym appearances that befall so many others of his ilk. He married a longtime friend and settled into a fairly normal, if reclusive, lifestyle. Perhaps he was occasionally guilty of indulging in anti-Hogan conspiracy mongering in interviews, but even that stopped in his last years. For all outward appearances, Savage was the pro wrestling retirement success story. If we wrestling fans are inured to the notion of our childhood heroes dying prematurely, we were nonetheless optimistic that someone like Savage would be the exception.
Sadly he wouldn’t be. On May 20, 2011, Savage suffered a massive heart attack while driving with his new wife, crashed into a tree, and died. (His wife was miraculously unharmed.) In an interview just after Savage died, Ric Flair painted Savage as a flawless performer but a man unable to ever get comfortable. And here is the marvel of Randy Savage: He was driven to greatness by the same paranoia that kept him from fully enjoying the fame that he accrued. Or to put it another way, the paranoia that made him so affecting in the ring was exactly what kept him from being relatable beyond the ropes. Hofstadter’s famous piece ends aptly: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
THE WRESTLER AS PITCHMAN
“Art thou bored?” With those three syllables, “Macho Man” Randy Savage became, for the first time, a megastar. Up to that point, Savage had spent years toiling in the shadow of Hulk Hogan, both in the ring—though they shared storylines, Savage never got to fully share the spotlight—and out of it, where Hogan had the mainstream imprimatur stretching back to the MTV crossovers of the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era, plus a string of silly but still semi-legitimate kid-friendly movies. But now, in a commercial for a brand of beef jerky, Savage was cementing his star. He crashed through the wall of a boring high school play rehearsal, offered up some snacks, and with a brief, garbled koan—“Need a little excitement? Snap into a Slim Jim!”—made himself an icon, and made Slim Jims a part of pop culture. Savage was featured in a multitude of Slim Jim spots, tearing the door off a locker, crashing through piles of pizza boxes, beating up a mouthy snowboarder, beating up a mouthy rock climber, beating up a bag of potato chips, and, most wonderfully, rappelling in through the roof of a lamp-and-lightbulb store and shattering basically everything inside. When Savage left the WWF, he was replaced in the commercials by the Ultimate Warrior and, years later, by Edge. Neither had the cultural currency of the Savage run, but nonetheless a tradition long ensconced had reached its nadir. In pro wrestlers, advertisers had found a perfect mate: cheap celebrities with a flare for the dramatic.
Savage wasn’t the first, by a long shot. In the late Territorial Era, good guys sometimes repped for local car lots and such; Texas standout “Iceman” King Parsons did a memorable (to me) commercial for Love Furniture Center in the 1980s, and the Ultimate Warrior himself—in his earlier Dingo Warrior character—did numerous commercials for Westway Ford of Irving, Texas. During the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era, Andre the Giant played a giant in a sweet, widely aired commercial for Honeycomb cereal.
Not to be outdone by Savage, Hogan appeared in a string of oddball commercials, pitching for everything from mainstream subjects like Right Guard deodorant, Arby’s, the once-significant “10-10-220” long-distance service, and Rent-A-Center, to projects of his own imprimatur like Hulk Hogan vitamins, the Hulkamania Workout Set, and Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania, a mall restaurant that obviously failed.
Most of the commercials wrestlers have starred in have been local affairs or spots specifically made to be aired during wrestling. Kurt Angle did a weird, low-budget spot for Pizza Outlet. Bret Hart did an embarrassing turn as spokesman for Humpty’s omelettes. (“You know, Humpty,” he said to the pillowy egg thing, “we should be a tag team.”) WCW legend Sting was featured in a Sprite commercial. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin did one of the ironic ESPN SportsCenter commercials. John Cena shaved heartily and tormented his boss Vince McMahon in an ad for Gillette.
Most of the WWF/WWE-related campaigns have been results of corporate synergy; thus the several Slim Jim endorsers, and similarly with different series of spots for companies like 7-Eleven and Subway. There were also series of spots for Chef Boyardee (Big Show, Kane, the Rock, Mick Foley, and Booker T in separate spots), energy drink YJ Stinger (Cena, Triple H, the Undertaker, Eddie Guerrero), and nutritional supplement Stacker 2 (Cena, Kane).
It’s a stunning thing to watch them all in sequence. The wrestlers are obviously better actors than the pro athletes that get these jobs more commonly on a national scale, more comfortable in front of the camera, and yet there’s a disconnect. Perhaps it’s the notion of fake people endorsing real products? The ignobility of these proud warriors shilling for pizza and omelettes? The reduction of a product always on the cusp of self-mockery to a laughable low-level consumerism?
Art thou bored? No, not really. Just confused.
MISS ELIZABETH
When the lovely Miss Elizabeth debuted on WWF television on the arm of her beau, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, she was serenaded with effusive praise from the commentators as she slowly made her way to the ring. Oh my goodness . . . Is this a movie star? Who is this? . . . My goodness . . . Take a look . . . What a surprise . . . I can’t believe . . . Look at this . . . What a beautiful woman . . . My goodness, she is absolutely gorgeous . . . That is a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. It was almost as if they were trying to talk themselves into it, into believing in her beauty. Certainly they were trying to talk the audience into it. Because while Elizabeth Ann Hulette was indeed a looker, she wasn’t exactly Helen of Troy—and that was the role for which she had been cast, the part she would play in WWF storylines in the coming years: the face that launched a thousand dropkicks.
Miss Elizabeth arrived in the WWF as the manager (with benefits, one assumes) of Savage, who himself came to the WWF to much acclaim. There began not just one love story for the ages but two: Savage and Liz’s, of course, but also the love between Elizabeth and the WWF audience, as every male between the ages of five and seventy-five fell head over heels for this woman—or, at least, for the idea of her. We had been talked into it.
Despite her being within the provenance of the (then) dastardly Savage, soon every WWF viewer longed to be near Elizabeth, so they were given a surrogate in the form of an affable Neanderthal named George “The Animal” Steele. Adhering to the behavioral norms of premodern cartoon heroism, Steele didn’t so much lust after Liz as he doted on her. And of course, this attention infuriated Savage to no end. Liz’s tentative, fluctuating affection for the oafish Steele, though rather grotesque in retrospect, was as important for its symbolism as it was for storyline purposes. (Once, when confronted with video of Savage attacking “The Animal” af
ter he gave a bouquet to Liz, Savage said, “We don’t want to be associated with anything second class, ain’t that right, Elizabeth? Right? Did you cause that? Yeah, by taking the flowers, didn’t you? But that’s all straightened out.”) Sure, it cast Liz as a damsel in distress in the possession of a controlling Macho Man (he made her hold the ropes open for him as he entered the ring, for goodness’ sake), but it also gave us a rooting interest in Liz’s well-being and gave us a lens through which to imagine ourselves rescuing her.
Every fan was in love with her because, above all, Miss Elizabeth wasn’t a woman. She was a symbol—a signifier of ideal beauty, of the perfect woman. Pro wrestling has long been a stage for Joseph Campbell–style heroics and for the telegraphic acting out of the oversized emotions of teenage boys, but now, in a new twist for the WrestleMania Era WWF, the standard Good vs. Evil morality plays could be balanced with archetypal love stories. There had been women in wrestling before her, and these roles had been previously explored, but there had never been a woman like Miss Elizabeth, a vessel into which viewers could pour their emotions. Little wonder that she was so uniquely popular or that her tenure coincided with such a high point in WWF history.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 17