Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  George, Glen, and their entourage walked down the dirt and patchy grass midway through a carnival configuration that hadn’t changed much since before the Civil War. They moved past the canvas tents with the front flaps pinned back and the close clutter of wooden booths offering games of chance, smelling the fried food and grease and hearing the barkers’ cries, until they reached a conspicuously closed tent that housed the girlie show or striptease act. Signs and more barkers out front promised all sorts of salacious sights and lurid acts, which were seldom delivered. Close by was the “ten-in-one show,” another tent or a long stall offering a combination of “geek” acts, such as a fat lady, a midget, some abnormal animals, and maybe a sword swallower. Again, the come-on was a bit misleading, as there were commonly fewer than ten acts, but the name stuck.

  At the end of the midway sat one of the biggest tents, up to forty by sixty feet, with a banner announcing the Athletic Show—the carnies called it the “AT show.” Often the outsides of these tents were painted with colorful pictures showing two boxers in their old-fashioned, bare-knuckled and fists-raised stance, as well as two wrestlers grappling. Out front stood the chest-high bally stand, a sort of podium, and behind it a barker yelling out his inducements, or ballyhoo. To further yank the strolling customers’ attention his way, the barker might have a bell he’d hit with a hammer, or set off a siren; when wrestler Johnny Buff ran his AT show in Washington State after the Second World War, they scraped a car axle over the rivets on an old metal water tank to make an ungodly noise. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, right down here, come see live professional wrestling, these are bone-crushing men who are famous all over the world…” This was the hook for the exhibition wrestling, in which two carnies took on each other. What drew in George and Glen, though, were the challenge matches.

  “Okay, you tough guys out there,” this barker shouted, “let’s see if any of you can stay in the ring with our man. It only costs a quarter to try, and if you can last for ten minutes, we’ll give you five bucks! Yeah, you, over there with the pretty girl hanging on your arm, you think you’re man enough? What about you, farm boy? You can push those cows around, why don’t you step up here and try pushing a man around? Who’ll raise their hand?” No takers meant no show, so there would always be a “stick” in the crowd, a confederate who’d take up the challenge if needed. Often the stick would win, pocketing the five dollars in front of the crowd and giving the marks ideas of victory.

  George came as close to standing idly by as he did to his advanced psychology degree. With his wrestling buddies egging him on, he stepped into the tent through the pinned-up flaps. The first thing he noticed was that the ring was smaller than usual, maybe fourteen by fourteen. “A smaller ring makes the action look faster,” Buff explained. The ring surface was lightly padded plywood, raised a foot or two off the ground on a base of two-by-fours and steel springs, and topped with a none-too-clean mat. Off to one side hung a rough canvas curtain; that was the dressing room.

  The carny wrestlers were grown men and tough; often they doubled as the strongmen, lifting, bending, and ripping things before the amazed crowds. Some of these feats were even real. Most of the yokels, the local farm boys or oil riggers, were no threat. The carny’s goal—and the true art involved here—was to beat the mark while convincing him he’d barely lost, and could win a rematch. Or to entice his friend looking on to step up with what he thought was a real shot at revenge. The crowd naturally took the side of the local, and some could even be enticed to bet their loyalties against other carnies salted in among the paying customers.

  George, who didn’t weigh more than 170 pounds at this point, was giving away size and experience. At the same time he would have been an enormous handful for anyone who took him on: young, strong, and fearless, with the wrestling know-how that most suckers lacked. There’s reason to think he won—once. According to published accounts, George beat the house in a seven-minute carnival match when he was seventeen. His YMCA wrestling coach, who happened to be in the audience, saw him pocket his pay afterward. When George went up to greet him after the match, the coach wouldn’t shake his hand. “You’re not an amateur anymore,” he told him. “You’re a professional.”

  The home team losing was not unheard of. At times a pro wrestler who wasn’t working elsewhere that night would strip off his shirt, climb in against the strongman, and take him down before the carny crowd could react. If their man in the ring had time, he’d try to come to a hurriedly whispered accommodation with the pro. “Let’s make this last and make it look good,” he’d tell the outsider. “You win this one, and I’ll win the rematch, and we’ll take care of you afterward.” But wrestlers on the carny weren’t in the business of giving away money, and all knew some painful, effective moves they’d resort to should a challenger start to get the best of them. The next time George stepped in and created an emergency, steps would have been taken.

  When the two men locked up, standing and holding on to each other’s shoulders or arms as they tried to gain leverage, the inside man might put the kid in an innocuous-looking headlock. George’s friends and all the other spectators couldn’t see the protruding knuckle jammed into his eye and the referee, another house employee, conveniently saw nothing either. The pain was enormous, and the natural reaction—an irresistible instinct, really—would make George raise his hands to his face. As his arms began to come up, his body was exposed, and the carny man would dive underneath, reach out with both arms, and yank George’s legs out from under him, putting him on his back. The ref would quickly count George out: “One, two, three. Pin!” If George really got an advantage, the carny might go for the more drastic “sleeper hold,” also disguised as a headlock. In this variation, the holder slips one forearm down over the enemy’s neck and applies pressure to the carotid artery, cutting off the blood and oxygen supply and rendering him unconscious. When he came back to clarity, he’d be on his back, defeated.

  George didn’t stay a sucker for long; he learned the game quickly. If innocence was lost, he didn’t miss it. Like his forsaken amateur standing, purity had no payoff and thus no utility. He wanted in. Being an insider, part of a secret society, was a thrill. That carny tinge of illegitimacy, the nefarious, made it even more irresistible. He got to know some of the carny wrestlers and worked some rigged matches with them: win a few, throw a few. A rigged game? So what. George already believed, or at least suspected, that life wasn’t quite fair. The point, then, was not to be the luckless loser, not to get played. It wasn’t a moral decision, anyway, but more like a hormonal imperative. For George, carnival wrestling was an adrenaline rush, powerfully addictive. He liked winning his real, amateur matches, the thrill of suddenly summoning all your strength, and having it proved superior. But there was another kind of contest here, and winning at it meant more to him. As Thomas Hackett observes in Slaphappy, his book about twenty-first-century professional wrestling, the real competition in this game is the one for attention. That’s the battle George waged at the carnivals, and as Gorgeous George, he would reign triumphant, undefeated.

  Confined by the carnival tent, heat built in the atmosphere, intensified by the crowd. The noise fifty or sixty people made rang out like that of hundreds. And they sat so close, George could make out the young boys’ high-pitched encouragement and the adult men’s deeper shouts. “Look out!” “Get him, son!” Or: “You’re done for now, kid!” In the fast action of the smaller ring there was no room to maneuver away from the opponent, no time to look up and catch your breath. But even as he kept his eyes squarely on his partner, George could visualize the crowd’s reactions in his mind’s eye: women clutching two-handed at their dates’ biceps when the grappling turned its most violent, men shaking their fists, swearing and laughing, and both sexes loosening, unbuttoning, and rolling up their clothes in the shared heat, a simulacrum of the wrestlers’ sweaty, bare-chested immodesty. Even as part of his mind stayed with the give-and-take of the match, he could hear and sense the people all a
round him reacting to his every move. It felt, despite the presence—or at times, even the preeminence—of the other wrestler, as if all eyes were on George.

  He’d never felt anything like this, and he responded like a born performer. The crowd’s reactions fired warmth in his gut that spread through his whole body. He’d act out more, louder, throw his body around even harder. The teenage girls, young brides and mothers in their twenties, women who usually had to be dragged into the wrestling tents by their dates and husbands, seemed to scream louder when young Wagner was in the ring, the carny operators noticed. The laborers in overalls and office workers in straw hats and linen sport coats bet more heavily, both for and against.

  One night some carnies who’d gotten to know him asked the nineteen-year-old George to referee. He wasn’t supposed to do much, just create the impression by his presence that the night’s matches were regulated and thus “fair.” But the carnies didn’t realize that the role of neutral third party was one George was constitutionally incapable of playing. When “Texas Red” Allen took on an off-duty policeman who happened to be a friend of George’s, the guest ref didn’t stick to the script. At one point the wrestlers locked up in a corner with George’s buddy pushed backward into the turnbuckle, the metal coupling that joins the ropes. George approached and instructed Red to break the hold. When he didn’t comply, George leaned in and tried to pry him away. Instead of cooperating, the older man got annoyed with this punk who was overplaying his part, and threw an elbow that just whizzed by George’s nose and would have broken it had it struck.

  Angry—but also delighted that his role was becoming more important—George found the talent for improvisation that would help make his career. He bent down, his longish hair falling in strands in front of his eyes, and grabbed Texas Red with both arms. George then lifted him up off the mat and slung him across his broad back like a sack of cotton, then hurled him—his limbs splaying outward like a cartoon character’s in flight—over the ropes and out of the ring, where he landed on spectators’ laps in the front row. Their bench cracked in half at the impact, spilling fans, popcorn, and drinks onto the dirt floor in a tangle with the stunned wrestler. George grinned his cocky grin and strutted just a little, quick-wittedly announcing that “Texas Red has been disqualified for leaving the ring,” and raising his friend’s hand as the winner. The crowd, at least the part that hadn’t been struck by the flying grappler, roared and laughed in delight. How Red felt was not recorded.

  God, he loved it. George began to wonder about wrestling professionally. Some guys made real money at it, he knew; why not him? His ability and antics, including the Red-tossing episode, got him noticed and he soon gained entrée to the small-time Houston promoters. They offered him work wrestling opening matches—the first and shortest one on each night’s card—in small towns within driving distance of the city. This was the professional game’s lowest echelon but the pros nonetheless, so George jumped at the chance (while keeping his day job at the Typewriter Exchange). He may have wrestled some under the name of Elmer Schmitt, either to increase his appeal to pockets of German-Americans, or simply to avoid being confused with another grappler named Wagner. After a one-fall, fifteen-minute tussle with some other wild-eyed rookie, George would leave the Legion hall, school auditorium, or makeshift arena with three to five dollars, minus his expenses. All the boys, including the headliners or “main eventers,” paid for their own travel, gear, and professional licenses. Luckily the travel wasn’t far and life’s essentials were cheap, with prices still depressed along with the economy. Gas was ten cents a gallon, and five or six of the strapping wrestlers would share a cramped car ride, reimbursing the owner a penny a mile. Sometimes the gang was all there, when one or more of the Rats were booked on the same small-time cards.

  One Texas summer night George was standing just inside the door to the wrestlers’ dressing room, a term that promises more than the real room delivered: A couple of wooden benches and a collection of nails driven into the wall serving as lockers. This might have been in Conroe or Brenham. He was pleased; in his opening match George had pinned his opponent’s shoulders to the mat for the requisite three seconds and the win. (In the preliminary bouts, one pin or fall carried the day; the semifinal and headline matches generally required a wrestler to win two out of a possible three falls. If a wrestler couldn’t continue due to injury or exhaustion, his opponent was awarded a fall as well, and referees could also award falls to the victims of especially egregious fouls.) After their matches he and the other Rats would stay to watch the older, more experienced boys work the rest of the card. Still excited, George was chatting eagerly with one of his buddies about their next booking while a local newspaper reporter stood nearby, waiting to interview one of the headliners still in the shower. Just then an older wrestler who was passing by on his way out heard something he didn’t like. “Kayfabe, kayfabe,” he hissed at George under his breath. Crestfallen, George quickly shut his trap.

  Kayfabe is carnival slang, part of the coded language hucksters, con men, and wrestlers used among themselves to work their subterfuge and exclude the clueless marks. In this lingo, resembling pig latin, kayfabe referred both to the game’s professional secrets and to the code of silence surrounding them; like the Mafia’s omerta. “If someone on the inside said ‘Kayfabe, kayfabe,’ to you, it meant ‘Hey, there’s an outsider around,’” said Don Arnold, a Southern California babyface who wrestled with George in the 1950s. “‘Don’t talk about our business in front of others, don’t give out information that could blow our cover. Wrestling’s always on the up-and-up. Isn’t it?’”

  Well, no. American professional wrestling matches hadn’t been legitimate contests since the 1880s, perhaps since the Civil War. Perversely, for decades after the fix was in and wrestling became an entertainment, the matches were nonetheless long and boring. Before 1910 or so promoters usually offered just a main event and one “prelim” with local boys. To create a full evening’s amusement, they needed the main event to last two hours or more, and a truly contested match ran the risk of ending in minutes. In one infamous encounter between Ed “Strangler” Lewis and Joe Stecher, the first fall took two hours and the third went four, the whole match lasting longer than a baseball doubleheader. Worse, in entertainment terms, for much of that time the two wrestlers were lying around, inert, with one in the other’s headlock. The promoters had fans convinced that a long contest signaled competitiveness and skilled, “scientific wrestling,” but only true aficionados could appreciate this drawn-out exchange of sweat. Much of the interest in these matches lay in the heavy betting that accompanied them.

  Then wrestling looked again to the carnivals, where matches with fixed outcomes began, and saw anew how taking the competition out of things there allowed acrobatics and dramatics to flourish. Feigned violence, in which both “opponents” know what’s coming, can be much more high-flying and spectacular than the real, unpredictable—and therefore dangerous—thing. Promoters also put time limits on matches and hired more wrestlers to fill their bills. Afterward legitimate bouts existed only to settle personal scores and these happened in private. They were called “shooting” matches, or just “shoots,” and the ones with predetermined outcomes were “working” matches or “works.” The boys were also called workers, and being called a good worker was high industry praise. Don Arnold made his name in a pair of dynamic matches with the great champion Lou Thesz. In the early going of each one the older Thesz tested the 230-pound Arnold with some real grappling moves to see if he had the skill to respond. Then, after five or ten minutes, Thesz would lean in and say, “Okay, let’s work.” That meant: “Let’s play. It’s time to start acting, and get this match’s prearranged scenario under way.”

  Controlling the results enabled promoters to give certain wrestlers a “push,” building career momentum and an audience by ensuring a string of victories. Crowd-drawing rivalries were created the same way: A heavy favorite would unexpectedly lose, for example, o
r an especially controversial, “unfair” outcome produced, both of which would inevitably lead to a lucrative rematch. To help professionalize the look of the sport the promoters also looked to boxing—hard to imagine as a source of legitimacy today—borrowing the rope-enclosed ring and the striped-shirted referee, neither of which exists in amateur wrestling.

  As George Wagner found when he entered the business in the 1930s, show-business wrestling presents a unique quandary to its athletes. In every other sport you can advance by beating the competition, but not here. Instead of winning, the currency is “getting heat,” drawing a reaction from the fans, performing in a way that will get more of them to come out next time—to see you, whether you’re the heroic babyface or the despicable heel. If you draw better, your percentage of the gate receipts translates into more dollars, and if you sustain it, the promoters will raise your percentage. (Usually only the featured performers or headliners got a split, while those on the undercard, lower on the bill, were paid a minimal, fixed amount.)

  But the marks couldn’t know where the real competition lay, and no one in the grunt-and-groan game was about to tell. Vigilance had to be maintained. (Kayfabe was finally blown for good in 1989 when Linda McMahon, the wife of World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon, testified to the New Jersey legislature that wrestling wasn’t a sport but “sports entertainment.” Their purpose was to avoid taxes and regulation that apply to real athletic contests.) To keep up appearances the boys, who often drove from town to town with the colleagues they supposedly hated and would try to kill in the ring that night, stopped a mile or so from the arenas and dropped some wrestlers off where they could get a taxi. That way, the “bitter rivals” wouldn’t be seen arriving together.