by John Capouya
He’d found this vacant house and brought Betty up for a twilight tour, walking her like a realtor through the empty rooms: the entrance hall, the kitchen off to the left, and the big front room with huge windows that also showed beautiful views. Down a few steps there was a bedroom for Don, and on yet another level, one for Carol, along with a second bathroom and a den that was forty feet long. That room had the sliding-glass doors Don would later run into and shatter, but emerge from unhurt. Behind the house was a big backyard that looked down on La Brea Avenue. The terrace, which faced the opposite way, hung out over a steep drop, suspended in the air over all the shimmering lights.
What did she think? First Betty had a half-conscious realization that made her smile. He brought me up here at twilight on purpose; it’s exactly the right time to show the place off. Her second, more fully formed thought was that his strategy was working. The house was pretty grand and the terrace and views…“It’s like fairyland,” she told him. He came and sat down with her and they talked quietly for a while. It started to get cool, and darker. In the privacy of the terrace it seemed to George and Betty that they were far away from everyone else and all that they saw, very much alone together.
They’d been living in Hawthorne, about six miles south, with the kids and Pat. This house gave them lots more room in a nicer neighborhood. Of all the places he and Betty lived together, this one, his choice, was George’s favorite. It was big, classy, and showed that he was getting places. This Gorgeous George person they’d invented was becoming someone to reckon with. When he and Betty came to L.A. late in 1947, the promoters had gotten word from their brethren of George’s increased drawing power in Texas, St. Louis, and elsewhere. This time he was booked not just into the smaller arenas like Legion Stadium and Ocean Park, but finally into L.A.’s premier pit, the Olympic Auditorium, on Grand Avenue between Eighth Street and Washington Boulevard. A couple, Cal and Aileen Eaton, ran this boxing and wrestling venue, and the Olympic would be George’s redoubt for the best part of his career.
In one of his early matches there, George flew out of his corner as the opening bell sounded, leaped straight up in the air, and dropkicked Reginald Siki into the land of no light, winning in just twelve seconds. (This was unusual; perhaps one of the combatants had another booking across town to get to.) Remarkably, this abbreviated match didn’t leave the crowd feeling cheated; the throng of 9,600 felt it had gotten its money’s worth from George’s finery and preliminary antics alone. He was Gorgeous George now, billed here as “a new personality in wrestling,” with no connection made to the George Wagner who’d toiled in L.A. many times before. “The goon who dresses like Beau Brummell,” also known as “the gorilla with glamour,” was an instant box-office attraction.
Almost as soon as he acquired his beautiful new home, though, George essentially abandoned it. The Gorgeous One was in demand, and there was money to be made in other territories. He was on the road for five or six weeks at a time, then home for just a few days. Carol Sue, who went by Susie in those days, was old enough to start school there, but what she remembers more clearly is missing him. They all did. When Betty knew George was on his way home, she’d sing a version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” to the kids, but with Gorgeous George substituting for Saint Nick. “You better watch out, you better not cry, better watch out, I’m telling you why…” After a while she’d just start humming it, and they knew.
Absence was his strongest parental trait, but when he was home George was an affectionate father. While some parents are apt to fudge unpleasant truths with their children or to sugarcoat, George was strikingly, painfully honest. “I’m not going to tell you there’s a Santa Claus,” he said to Carol when she was still very young. “Because there isn’t.” One morning George threw a tam on over his blond tangles and drove her to see the doctor. He was in a good mood, relaxed, just back from a profitable trip. As they sat together in the waiting room, the blond four- or five-year-old with a gap between her front teeth wore an orange skirt, a white embroidered top, and a matching orange ribbon nestled in the part of her hair. Betty had dressed her brightly and cheerfully, but her young face was fearful. As the slender little girl sat with her brick house of a father, she clenched one or two of his fingers in her hand. Turning to face him, she asked, “Daddy, if I have to get a shot, will it hurt?” George looked her right in the eye and replied evenly, “Yes, Susie, it will.”
When he began to make real money, George hired a business manager, a wrestling booking agent named Johnny Doyle. George either thought his new status called for it, or recognized that neither he nor Betty had any discernible financial acumen. The manager paid the mortgage and the other bills. Betty had no idea how much George was earning; she only knew that for practically the first time, there was enough. She wrote checks without worrying. When she said, “George, we need this,” or “Hey, George, can I have that?” he’d say, “Sure, do what you want.”
He did what he wanted as well. George might have chosen a Ford sedan, say, to transport himself and Jefferies around the country. The four-door Super Deluxe would have set him back about $1,255. Instead George went for a 75 Series Fleetwood, an enlongated, seven-passenger limousine with jump seats in the back—the biggest Cadillac available. For a frequent traveler such as George, with a lot of gear, this land yacht could almost be construed as practical, but he really bought it to make a statement. This was the kind of car the swells drove, he reckoned. And he suddenly had an image to maintain, or inflate. For this shot of swagger, George shelled out about $5,000.
Betty was never a spender like her husband, and had no particular yen when it came to cars. She was intrigued, though, with the idea of buying one of the newfangled television sets she’d heard about. RCA made one that cost $350. It was like a radio, only the programs came with pictures as well. Someone else said it was like having movies right in your living room.
When Bert Sugar, boxing analyst and former editor of The Ring magazine, was growing up, his parents ran an appliance store on F Street in Washington, D.C. When the Sugars closed their store for the night, they left their dazzling new entertainment machines turned on, facing outward so the flickering screens were visible through the storefront windows. “People would stand three-deep out there on the sidewalk to watch whatever was on, just to see television,” Sugar remembers. By 1948 or ’49 the Sugars added outdoor loudspeakers so their sidewalk patrons could fully appreciate their favorite broadcast every Tuesday night, the wrestling shows from Baltimore. Sellers of receiver sets all over the country used similar techniques to entice customers, though most found they didn’t need speakers; just leaving the sets on and tuned to wrestling was enough. Some took an even easier, lower-tech approach: After hours they simply taped photos of Gorgeous George over their television screens and let the public gaze in on him.
As best as can be determined, the Gorgeous One first strutted into a televised wrestling ring at the Olympic Auditorium in November 1947; Sam Menacker was most likely the opponent. When his image appeared on the tiny black-and-white screen, heat became electric. (A half century later Entertainment Weekly declared George’s TV debut one of “The 100 Greatest Moments in Television,” ranking it No. 45 on that list.) Looking back, it seems there was truth as well as hubris in one of George’s most grandiose declarations, his take on this new delivery system for Gorgeousness. Assuming a deliberating posture—arms folded, with one hand to his chin—he would muse thoughtfully as he pondered a conundrum. “I don’t know if I was made for television,” said Gorgeous George, “or television was made for me.”
Certainly, in the early days of the new medium, television and wrestling formed a spectacularly successful union. This electronic convergence was long and fruitful, combining all the best attributes of a love match and an arranged marriage. The two partners had complementary strengths and shored up each other’s weaknesses. There was affection between the spouses, and both sides made out well financially—everyone’s needs were met. Of the c
ouple, wrestling was definitely the older, more experienced partner; in the years immediately following World War II, television was still very young and knew nothing of the world.
Not long after NBC showed President Roosevelt speaking at the 1939 World’s Fair—the one Betty and George’s neighbors in Eugene visited—broadcasting was virtually shut down until the war ended. In 1946 it resumed with CBS and ABC the second and third networks and Dumont, a manufacturer of TV sets, the fourth. These were still small regional outfits showing a limited hodgepodge of programs. Often the broadcasters took nights off and went dark, including on Saturday nights when, it was thought, Americans had better things to do.
In its infancy television was a very tentative and chancy business. RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, issued the 630TS model television in 1946, but sold only ten thousand or so that year at $350 apiece. The Model T of televisions, it was twenty-six inches wide by fifteen inches high with a miniature screen in the center, flanked on both sides by covered speakers. It looked, not surprisingly, like a radio. This appliance clearly had some novelty and entertainment value, but no one knew if the American public would take to the flickering invader. Movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck famously gave it six months, saying: “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Advertisers, habituated to radio and newspapers, were skeptical, so they were often given free time, and that helped make early broadcasting a money pit. Programmers, network executives, and station owners were simultaneously breaking ground and anxiously hedging their bets. Like American business at the advent of the Internet, they knew they had to be involved—lest TV turn out to be the next big thing—but didn’t want to overinvest in case Zanuck was proved correct.
The strategy most settled on was ginning up cheap content with mass appeal. Original programming, including dramas, was costly to produce, and while variety shows like Milton Berle’s, Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, and those hosted by Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey were extremely popular, they required an investment in talent. Quiz shows were an early, low-budget offering, but sitcoms didn’t make any real impact until 1951 or so, when I Love Lucy debuted, and the heydays of the western and the hospital drama (Dr. Kildare et al) were still to come. Sport was a natural solution and brought in TV’s first mass audience, when just shy of four million viewers watched the 1947 World Series. With TV sets still an expensive rarity, almost 90 percent of those folks watched the Series in bars.
The sports leagues had already built their audiences and their schedules were set; they could supply ready-made airwave filler. Starting in 1946, NBC let the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports go on for hours, two nights a week. For programmers, wrestling was the easiest solution: All a broadcast required was one fixed camera pointed at the ring, a few extra lights, and one out-of-work actor to serve as the announcer. Promoters would accept small fees for the rights to broadcast from their arenas; to them it was extra revenue with very little extra effort. Baseball and football presented much greater technical challenges with the need to follow the ball, and boxing matches, though easy to shoot, couldn’t be counted on to fill the required time slots. The pesky fighters insisted on knocking each other out at unpredictable intervals. In addition, boxing’s champs and top contenders fought only a few times a year, so they weren’t helpful very often.
Wrestling, on the other hand, was a plastic material, something you could really work with. Their biggest stars, including George, would work as often as you wanted them to. Promoters could make the matches go as long or short as needed. And the grunt-and-groan game was all about mass, never mind the class. As a result, wrestling was slathered across early prime-time schedules the way reality shows and forensic sleuthing are sixty years later. When wrestling shows began to air, however, they did so with very little competition—instead of hundreds of cable and satellite channels, most areas received three or four stations and there were no remote-control devices to make changing channels easy. As a result, wrestling on TV was endlessly available and all but inescapable.
In 1948 NBC offered wrestling on Tuesday nights, and ABC gave over half its evening schedule to it on Wednesdays, where it remained for most of the next six years. Dumont, the network with the shallowest pockets, aired two hours of wrestling on both Thursday and Friday nights. The latter show originated in New York’s Jamaica Arena, with Dennis James, later the host of Name That Tune and The Nighttime Price Is Right, at the microphone. Beginning in 1949, Dumont carried the action from Chicago’s Marigold Arena, with Jack Brickhouse announcing. That show ran for nearly six years as well—apparently, America didn’t have anything better to do on Saturday nights.
Local stations, at least as needful of cheap programming as the networks, beamed out even more matches. In Los Angeles, German-born engineer Klaus Landsberg ran the first commercial station west of the Mississippi, KTLA, and Channel 5 quickly became the market’s number one station, and the seat of George’s broadcast kingdom. TV-set owners in L.A. were invited to a televised wrestling orgy: broadcasts six nights a week, Monday through Saturday, on five different stations. So voracious was the demand, and abundant the supply, that Channel 13 came back on Sunday mornings with Wrestling Workouts. This was practice, mind you. For staged matches.
Before the networks became truly national, broadcasting coast-to-coast, in 1951, wrestling and other programming was distributed via the kinescope. This was filmed by a movie camera pointed at the TV screen, a technique Kodak pioneered in 1947, allowing audiences all over the country to watch what had been broadcast live in some other locale. Kinescoping was so widespread that at one point the TV industry actually used more film than the movie business. For wrestling and the boys, this was a huge gift, free exposure to vastly greater audiences. Now they could be seen on every set in the land.
Boxing had its moments, despite its unpredictability—Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts aired Wednesday nights for many years on CBS. And baseball and football broadcasts were regular fodder, too. Yet it’s almost impossible to overstate the degree to which early television was inundated by, and identified with, the maim-and-maul game. It was wrestling hegemony, with Gorgeous George rampant. Paul “The Butcher” Vachon, was a six-foot-one, 280-pound heel who, along with his brother Maurice, “The Mad Dog,” grew up watching wrestling in Quebec during these early years of television. When people talked about buying a TV back then, he remembers, “they said they were gonna get themselves a ‘wrestling set.’”
As it turned out, Americans were not just entertained by that plywood box, they were enchanted by it. TV was…miraculous, really. You got to choose how you wanted to be amused each night, or to be amused many times over by turning the knob from Channel 2 all the way up to Channel 13. Amazingly, no matter how many different programs you watched, there was no extra cost. As history has since confirmed, Americans like nothing better than an all-you-can-consume buffet. Masterpiece Theater it wasn’t. Some tonier programming, such as Actors Studio and the Philco TV Playhouse aired almost from the beginning, as did some well-done journalism. But especially as television spread beyond the big cities, the most popular fare was just that: of the people. Sweating, joking, falling, talking so fast and loud the spittle flew from his mouth, Milton Berle—Uncle Miltie—the star of the hit Texaco Star Theater, was crude and often lewd. A former vaudevillian and burlesque veteran, he would do anything for a laugh as long as it was undignified.
Whether it was “good” or “clean” is questionable, but wrestling was indisputably fun. Most vitally, it was fun for all. As more families acquired sets, they began to tune in together at home, rather than going out to taverns or bars. The console models, and “combo” sets, which had a phonograph and radio built in, were massive pieces of furniture, with ten- or twelve-inch screens at most. When the entire family piled into the living room to watch, it helped to sit as close as possible. Quaint as it now seems, there was only one set per household, so togetherness was assured.
Wrestling’s visceral action, simple story l
ines, and primitive drama—the compelling narrative question of who will kick the bejesus out of whom—gave no one trying to follow it any trouble. As the National Football League has also shown, a violent spectacle in a confined space transmits quite well in this medium. Match action was wild and woolly, with the compelling chaos of a good cartoon (Crusader Rabbit, the first animated series produced just for TV—debuted in 1949, as did the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote), so the youngsters laughed along with the older folks. In 1950 more than 10 million Americans had been born abroad and three-quarters of them were over forty-five; these were the grandparents from the old countries, and many grew up speaking a language other than English. As they found to their delight, you didn’t have to talk American that well to follow grappling and groping, or to appreciate the Gorgeousness of George.
Television would later be described as a “cool medium,” but in the beginning Americans didn’t see it that way at all. They weren’t yet used to sitting passively in front of their entertainments, something we’ve since raised to a fine art. When the TV set showed, say, the supremely athletic Lou Thesz versus the handsome ladykiller Baron Michele Leone, the whole household partook loudly and rowdily, just like the fans in the arenas. (This stylish heel was a different Leone, not Antone, the Wagners’ housemate in Tulsa.) When George the magnificent came on, the dads and grandfathers would shake their fists and yell at him to “Quit fighting dirty! He’s cheating!” Mom and Grandmom, on the other hand, might bellow at his opponent to “Leave Georgie alone! Stop picking on him!”
From the start, women were a substantial part of the wrestling audience. An early survey by Woodbury College in California showed wrestling was easily that state’s favorite TV sport, and that older women preferred it five to one. Wrestling and TV Sports magazine noted that female viewers were partial to announcer Dennis James because “he talks confidentially, not to the male TV viewers, but to ma and the rest of the girls.” The patriarchs, some with Schlitz in hand to re-create the tavern atmosphere, held forth knowledgeably on the holds, techniques, and abilities of the boys at work. (Men reportedly favored the more technical approach used by New York announcer Bill Johnston.) Older children tried out their own versions of body slams and submission holds on their luckless siblings. Everyone in the living room had, and freely exercised, the right to yell at any offending family member, or guest, should they improperly stray: “Hey, stop blocking the set!” And back in what now seems an intentionally naive era, anyone who dared suggest that wrestling was a fake was met with rage, indignation, and complete denial. That heresy invited banishment from the room, or from the house altogether.