by John Capouya
When the promoters told them who the winners were to be that night, each pair of dance partners would put their heads together in the locker room to choreograph. The designated loser was known as the “jobber” or “put-over guy”—he’d do the job, which was putting the other guy over. He might ask the chosen winner, “What’s your finishing move?” meaning: What crowd-pleasing maneuver do you want to use to end this match? If one of the pair hadn’t worked in the area before, he might ask, “What do they like here?” or, “What haven’t these people seen?”
Once the ending and a few maneuvers were agreed upon, much of what happened in the ring was improvised. Usually the heel was the lead dancer, as his heinous deeds and the excruciating retribution he suffered dictated the flow. Cooperation made the dance. “If you are going into a body slam,” said Pete Burr, who wrestled out of Syracuse in the 1950s, including with Gorgeous George, “you aren’t just going to grab a guy that is 250 to 300 pounds, pick him up and flop him. He has to push off your leg, jump a little, help get you started. Once he gets the momentum going you can lift him and all, but you need to work together.”
After his youthful faux pas, George vehemently kept to the code of kayfabe. In his 1950 profile of the Gorgeous One in American Mercury magazine, writer Ted Shane recounted, “I got up my courage and asked George, ‘Is wrestling fixed?’
“‘You might,’ George said haughtily, ‘also ask me if I enter false income tax returns or if I beat my wife. To the best of my knowledge I have never engaged in any fraudulent bout…everybody in there is trying to kill me.’”
Even with his friends and drinking buddies, “George would get pretty upset when he heard anything about it being fixed or rigged up for him to win,” said Ernie Serfas, who owned the wrestler’s favorite Los Angeles saloon. “And he would never admit it. Never.” George taught Betty some of the secret language the wrestlers used, calling it “double-talk.” One night in the late 1950s George and his daughter, Carol, were leaving a restaurant in Hollywood, and as they approached a driveway a car came out too fast and too near for George. He said something sharp to the driver in double-talk—and the man stopped and answered back using the same lingo. It turned out he’d been in the game, too.
Chapter 4
POSSUMS AND HOOK SCISSORS
In 1933 Texas repealed its alcohol ban, Houston’s first legal beer in thirteen years flowed from the new Gulf Brewing Company plant, and whiskey ran from the cask. Shortly thereafter, when George was almost nineteen, local promoter Morris Sigel gave him his break into the bigger-time. Sigel put on regular Friday-night cards at the City Auditorium downtown for more than forty years. He called George into his office in the Milam Building, a block or so away, and booked him on a January 26, 1934, card. To George the Auditorium was a palace, and when the building opened in 1910, that’s how it was intended: as a landmark cultural center and monument to Houston sophistication. The massive brown stone facade, facing the Auditorium Hotel across the street, had three central arches above the entrances, surrounded by decorative brickwork. This was Houston’s Carnegie Hall, not some carnival midway or hick town.
On other nights of the week higher-toned performers filled the dressing rooms and held the stage, including orchestras and ballet troupes. But on Fridays rude and crude wrestling moved the turnstiles, and a good seat could be had for fifty cents. The ring was set up in the middle of the main floor, after some seats had been removed—and the ones that remained were real wooden seats, not splintery benches or spindly folding chairs. The ceiling soared several stories above the orchestra seating, and the stage was draped with a heavy velvet curtain. Most impressive to George, the place held four thousand people, more than the entire population of Harrisburg.
During the period of George’s first Auditorium matches, the Houston papers—the Chronicle, Post, and Press—were full of bitter Depression truths. NO AGREEMENT IS REACHED IN OIL STRIKE read one headline; another said MEAT WORKERS WALKOUT CONTINUES. In yet another labor conflict, “a group of armed guards employed by the Southern Steamship Company…opened fire on a group of striking longshoremen, wounding four persons.” More period ugliness, from Newton, Texas, about 150 miles northeast of Houston, was summed up this way: NEGRO FOUND WITH WHITE GIRL IS HANGED.
Dollars were thin but Houstonians still spent on entertainment, the slighter the better. Shirley Temple cutesied around with Adolphe Menjou in Little Miss Marker, and Will Rogers, in the feel-good Mr. Skitch, was opening at the Majestic. Bessie Wagner’s radio station, KPRC, aired the “droll humor” of blackface comedians Molasses and January. Gangsters were front-page news, and took on a decided populist appeal. Shortly after George’s pro wrestling debut the Post blared: BARROW SPEEDS TOWARD DALLAS. Clyde Barrow, wanted for six killings and a slew of robberies along with his cigar-smoking moll, Bonnie Parker, had just broken six men out of a prison near Huntsville in “a spectacular machine gun raid.”
Babe Ruth’s New York swats were tracked all the way in Houston, as were the fights of world heavyweight boxing champion Max Baer. Wrestling coverage was especially fulsome—the sports sections ran grappling results from St. Louis and New York—and boosterish. Two days or more before a Sigel card at the Auditorium, the city’s papers would begin a series of preview or “run-up” stories on the matches, explaining with great brio why this grappler wanted dearly to rack revenge on that one; what vicious holds each might employ; why the action was certain to be hot, heavy, and hopefully, bloody. In a city eager for diversion, the Friday-night lines at the Auditorium snaked around the block from the Louisiana Avenue entrance and up Texas Avenue.
The biggest names to wrestle at the Aud in the 1930s were Strangler Lewis and Jim Londos. A Greek, Londos was known not just for his prowess but also for his handsome face and perfectly proportioned physique; Greek-god comparisons were commonplace. Though his was a decidedly masculine beauty, the attention paid to Londos’s pleasing appearance—a new phenomenon in sports—might certainly have registered with the future Gorgeous One. But when George Wagner was coming up, the man on top in Houston was Whiskers Savage (real name Eddie Civil). Supposedly from Boone County, Kentucky, he also went by Leo Daniel Boone Savage, and his gimmick was the hillbilly act. He sported a big, scraggly beard, wore overalls over his trunks, and over his shoulder he carried a “toe sack,” the burlap sack that potatoes were sold in. It was full of hillbilly necessities like a moonshine jug and live possums. George no doubt cast a calculating eye on the impact Savage’s gimmicks, elaborate for that time, had on the crowds and the cash receipts. He wouldn’t have been awed. More likely, he thought, Possums? I can do better than that.
In its run-up to George’s first Auditorium card, the Post doesn’t even mention him or his opening match; it may have been a last-minute replacement or addition by Sigel. In the main event, Paul Jones, “Houston hook scissor star,” beat Dynamite Joe Cox, “rough New York matman,” in two straight falls. Last and least, the next day’s papers noted that “In the opening match between local middleweights, Billy Smith defeated George Wagner after 19 minutes…although at the time of the fall Wagner had a hook scissors on Smith. Smith reached up and pulled Wagner’s head and shoulders to the mat before Wagner could break away.”
In the scissors you trap your opponent between your legs—they’re the blades—and squeeze, usually around the torso or stomach. You’re usually sitting up; ideally you’re behind him, and he’s sitting or prone. The hook, said Tommy Fooshee, who refereed in Houston and other southern cities in the 1950s, comes when you bend one leg and stick that foot behind your other knee, then pull on the foot with your hands to cinch down even harder. Paul Jones, the main-eventer on the night of George’s debut, used it as his finishing move, and on this night the rookie used it, too. Was this an early glimpse of George the appropriator, who would take elements from friends, competitors, and anyone else who’d succeeded, when he created his Gorgeous act? Despite bad weather, a reported crowd of about two thousand turned out. Even allowing for
a friendly count and George’s going on first, he likely performed for ten times as many people that night as he had ever done before.
It took him six months to appear before that kind of crowd again. When he worked the Auditorium next, in June, George was once again relegated to the opening match, the eight-fifteen curtain-raiser, and the last paragraph of the next day’s report: “Ernie Mulhausen, bouncing Houston middleweight, scored a one-fall win over George Wagner, winning in 16 minutes with a series of flying mares.” This maneuver, a wrestling staple, is a throw in which Ernie, let’s say, grabs George by the wrist—or the arm, or the hair—turns his back to George, then flips him over his shoulder onto the mat. It looks flashy: The flippee is airborne, and hits the mat with a very satisfying whomp. But since he falls squarely on his back, it’s safe. George later made the flying mare a specialty, and as preeminent wrestling historian and former promoter J Michael Kenyon observed, he used it to great effect “in both directions.” By that, Kenyon meant “either throwing his own man or, even better, being thrown, because he could catapult himself so high, with his long hair flying, and so far as to make it look as though the other fellow had thrown him 15–20 feet.”
Back in 1934, however, brief stints as Ernie Mulhausen’s flying mare earned George five dollars or so and precious little ink. One story referred to him as “Wagoner” and the writers dwelled longer on promoter Sigel’s homemade air-conditioning system. “With the hot spell still present,” said the Post, “a corps of ice men will begin dragging 300-pound slabs of the cold stuff into the Auditorium and sliding them into the ventilating tunnels.” Afterward, the move was judged a success: “The tons of ice [were] a big help to both wrestlers and spectators.” George kept working one or more day jobs, still living at home with his father; Elmer, who was attending Milby; and Carl, who went by the nickname Buddy. Though he was still a part-time pro, his career quickly took on more bounce. Whatever nervousness he had felt during his debut matches at Sigel’s opera house quickly vanished and the promoters at Houston’s grittier arenas started using him as well. The Wagner kid had a live body, they saw. His athleticism was a cut above, such that he could easily do a kip-up, for example: Lying on the mat on his back after being thrown down, drawing his legs back toward his face, then torquing them forward and down with such force that, along with the thrust of his head, neck, and back, he propelled himself suddenly upright, all the way to standing.
It wasn’t just that George could do things in the ring others couldn’t. Somehow, what he did was more dynamic. When another young, strong wrestler rolled or jumped or reacted to being struck, the fans saw movement, but when George did the same thing, it was action. The energy he put out in the ring didn’t die there but was transmitted, felt palpably, all the way up in the balcony. Later this would hold true in the much longer transmissions of television. Live or in the living room, he could put it across to the fans. In these early years his antennae got more sensitive, too, his entertainer’s feel for the crowd more acute. He’d sense a reaction from the fans and then, in less time than it would take a conscious thought to form and that intention to get carried out, he’d give them another jolt—either the same move over again or an immediately improvised variation—of the same juice.
In 1935 he piled up some important firsts: on October 14, he beat Tiger Mudd in two straight falls—his first recorded win. Another semifinal, this one on the regular Wednesday-night card at Harrisburg’s Boulevard Arena, earned him his first headline, albeit after a semicolon: BULL HANNA TOSSES GONZALES IN THREE FALLS; WAGNER WINS. He beat Happy Jack Beaty, “after 20 minutes of fast wrestling.”
Outside the arenas, in daylight, Houston was beginning to find its way out of the Depression. The city was getting a push of sorts: Jesse H. Jones, a prominent banker and businessman, was chairman of the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation and steered dollars and jobs toward Harris County. New intracoastal canals linked Houston with the Mississippi River navigational system and helped the economy rebound. The word recovery began to be heard, and ladies’ fashions looked more opulent than they had in years. “Ostrich plumes once again will do their share to enhance the pulchritude and charms of the chic woman,” the Press announced. A dozen years later those feathers would enhance the pulchritude and charms of the Gorgeous One.
Just as things began to improve, George decided to clear out. He’d wanted to leave since his mother died, but didn’t know where or how he could earn his keep. In 1936 a veteran wrestler from Atlanta—probably Karl von Hoffman—came to town, and was impressed by young Wagner. He had pull with a Georgia promoter, he told George, and could get him regular work there. George was ready to make it as a full-time pro wrestler, one of the boys. He could feel it—his skills were sharpening and he was filling out, getting stronger and tipping in closer to 180. No more backbreaking, no-collar jobs for him; or rather, he’d only do the kind of backbreaking labor he loved.
When he told Poppa Wagner of the offer, the father feared for his son and tried to dissuade him. “Don’t go, George,” he pleaded. “It’s a hard game to get into. You’ll be home in a month, broke and all beat up. Stay here and come into the painting business with me.” Elmer did just that, but George wanted more. He bought a bus ticket and packed up his scant gear and belongings, including the heavy woolen tights that some wrestlers still wore in the ring. George didn’t like them; after the tights got soaked with sweat, they weighed three or four pounds, and he felt they slowed him down. But if the Atlanta men wore them, he’d fit in. He’d called the Atlanta promoter and the man confirmed what von Hoffman had said: There was plenty of work, and he’d find George a cheap place to flop. George would train with the more experienced local boys, and they’d teach him all he needed to know. With their help, he’d be on his way.
Instead, they nearly murdered him.
Chapter 5
A HURTING BUSINESS
Then as now the wrestling game was clannish and rough, and the promoters ran their territories like lordly fiefdoms. The boys, as their nickname makes clear, were the serfs. In the tradition of oppressed classes everywhere, they took it out on one another. Every territory had a “hooker,” an experienced worker with real wrestling skills, a repertoire of painful, crippling holds called hooks—and a mean streak. If someone dared try to win a match he was supposed to lose, for example, the promoter would send a hooker to teach him a lesson. The bosses would also settle business disputes among them by vicarious combat, commanding their best hookers to fight until one man couldn’t continue. In this medieval form of justice, one that made perfect sense to all involved, the winning wrestler’s might established his boss’s right. In St. Louis, where Lou Thesz learned the business, the administrator of pain was his teacher, George Tragos. In his memoir, Hooker, Thesz describes how Tragos cleared up one ring misunderstanding: “George hooked one of the kid’s arms with a double wristlock, and jammed it home. It tore the ligaments, tendons and muscles in one motion. I am sure the ambulance had no trouble finding the arena, because the kid was screaming at the top of his lungs.”
When a new boy came to town, the hooker, or anyone handy who didn’t mind hurting people, would initiate him in his first practice session. Johnny Buff, who had his introductory hazing about fifteen years after George’s, remembers it with seared clarity. When he got out of high school in Seattle, he approached a local promoter, Jack Ryan, who laughed at the 145-pound Buff, but told him the boys worked out at the Eagles Club on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. When he got there to find an old mat laid down in the balcony of the gym, Buff was matched with Russ Rogers, a 220-pounder whose day job was at the phone company. “He was pretty tough,” Buff remembered, without rancor. “He took me in and broke four of my ribs almost immediately.” That was a Tuesday. On Thursday, Buff was all taped up and couldn’t take a deep breath. But he showed up at the Elks Club anyway, three times a week, until he healed. In so doing, Buff passed the test. “If you come back, they teach you. If you don’t, you didn’t w
ant to wrestle anyhow.”
George never saw it coming. He didn’t name any names, but in later interviews he made it clear that, as fresh meat, he got his pounding. Like other fraternity hazers, the boys easily justified their brutality: They’d taken their beatings, too, hadn’t they? Then, too, George’s brand of cockiness might have inspired more than the usual reprisals. Instead of controlling their strength as they usually did, for instance, they might grab George by the arm and whip him into a turnbuckle, full force. The rough treatment continued during the couple of dozen matches he worked in the Atlanta area—against his friend Karl von Hoffman, who went by “Count” von Hoffman there, Wild Bill Collins, John Mauldin, and Mex McClain, among others—in the summer of 1936. “They do little unkind things like trying to break your toes and fingers,” George later explained. The scariest part of this mistreatment, he added, was that “your hands are your breadwinners.” Taking time off to heal a torn calf muscle or a cracked rib meant you didn’t earn. Of course, no one had health insurance, either.
In the finest moment of its most elevated hour, wrestling’s always been a dirty, hurting business. Back then staph infections were frequent, picked up from the smeared, grimy mats, and they caused wrestlers’ bodies to break out in hideous boils. Trachoma, a contagious eye infection, was another occupational hazard. The folk remedy in use was rubbing the eyes with a blue stone, which was probably closer to a superstition than a therapy. Strangler Lewis was only one of the wrestlers blinded by this disease; in the ring he could see only the vague shape of his opponent.
Even with a script, any actor can slip, forget a blocking or a line—and on this stage that kind of mistake meant loosened teeth, a broken nose, or cracked vertebrae. A “potato” was a hard punch that accidentally landed. Normally the agony the boys acted out in their “crippling submission holds” was feigned, but if a wrestler found himself in real pain, the coded signal to his partner to ease up was tapping him quickly two times on the arm or leg. The “bumps,” the falls the wrestlers intended to take, were hard, too, and the injuries real. Years of pounding on the mats and one another wearing no protective gear took its toll. Ears painfully swollen with fluid from ruptured blood vessels—cauliflower ears—were another occupational hazard, one the boys shared with boxers. That’s where today’s old-time wrestlers’ alumni association, the Cauliflower Alley Club, gets its name. When the boys who’ve survived into their seventies and eighties arrive for their annual conventions in Las Vegas, they sway a little, clanking in on their metal hips and knees.