by John Capouya
In 1947 there were just 180,000 TV sets made in this country, but the following year that number was close to a million, and then in 1949 production tripled—60,000 sets were sold every week. In roughly four years, TV went from nonexistent to a four-and-a-half-hours-a-day habit for those fortunate, plugged-in owners. And while many have since decried the sleeper hold television has on the collective American neck, at that time it was still hailed as a wholesome family activity—TV was still a babyface.
Some accomplished wrestlers shriveled under the TV lights and froze in the camera’s eye. These stiffs, as Lou Thesz called them, had to quit the business or try to make a living working only nontelevised bouts. With George, the opposite occurred. His charismatic energy was transmitted fully to the small screen, losing none of its intensity. Those platinum locks, his overopulent wardrobe, and eye-opening antics made him the most recognizable and memorable of the new mat celebrities. TV announcers chuckled and played along appreciatively as they narrated all the stages of George’s arena folderol. Yet almost all of what set him apart—George’s looks, rituals, and mimed hauteur, as well as his ring acrobatics—was easily apprehended as pure visuals and motion. If the sound couldn’t be heard in a bar, for example, his Gorgeosity still came through.
A bit later, when TV announcers began doing interviews with the wrestlers before and after matches, George proved himself bombastically adept as well. When the camera zoomed in during these spots, his big talking head filled the picture and George’s expressive face was captivating in close-up. He sent out special signals, it seemed, on frequencies only he could transmit. If Gorgeous George didn’t make television great, as he proclaimed, he certainly made great television. Watching him strut and wrestle, then strut some more, was more fun than a picnic.
Chapter 13
RING RATS AND CADILLACS
During those early years of television, the sweet spot of his career, George essentially lived with Jake Brown, spending more time with his loyal Jefferies than he did with Betty and the children. All those nights at the arenas and then the hotels and bars, and through the interminable driving, they were together. From 1947 until 1952 or thereabouts, Jake woke him up in the morning; Jake dressed him before the matches; Jake fixed his hair; Jake took care of all the bills, checks, and tips; Jake made sure they got to the next mat palace on time. In a sense, the manservant took on another wifely duty as well: Jake loved George.
Born in 1917, he was two years younger than his friend, the second of Leon and Molly Brown’s four boys. The parents ran a neighborhood grocery in Houston, and raised their children as observant Jews, keeping kosher. George wouldn’t talk about his early childhood, but the adult Jake was a little more forthcoming. One of Jacob’s most searing memories was of his father forcing him to hold one of his brothers still so Leon could beat him. Terrified, young Jacob put all his hope in his mother, Molly. Like George, Jacob dropped out of Milby High School early, after tenth grade, to help support his family. He was working as a machinist at Reed Roller Bit in Houston when he was inducted into the army in August of 1943. During his two years, four months, and three days of service, he wrote fervent declarations of filial love. In one entitled “Memories,” he wrote:
Send me the pressure of your hand,
The glance that says you understand.
Send me the love that’s in your heart,
So you and I will never part.
Through the years alone of suffering and strife,
You will always be the light of my life.
And when this is over and the victory is won,
I’ll hurry home to you, Mother, your loving son.
Very soon after his return, however, Molly Brown died of stomach cancer (her husband was already deceased, from complications of diabetes). Jake, who was working in a Houston department store, recovered enough to marry a woman named Beulah Mae Crosson in July of 1947. She was from Illinois and seven years younger; somewhat surprisingly, she was a Baptist. Then George and Betty took Jake on as the valet, and he and Beulah followed them to Southern California, where they bought property in Culver City. Their first daughter, Elizabeth—named after George’s Elizabeth—was born in 1948 and her sister, Brenda, in 1951. Beulah was tall, over five-foot-eight (when Jake met her in Dallas, she was working as a model), and her blue eyes and dark hair made her strikingly attractive. She was also domineering, unhappy, and at times unstable. Jake feared her anger but resisted only passively: He escaped with George.
George treated him like an equal, not an employee, yet Jake was in thrall to him as well and his devotion countenanced all George’s faults. Their years together—“When I was with George,” as Jake always put it—was the best time he ever had, he told his daughters. They’d known each other forever, grown up poor during painful boyhoods, and both lost their mothers too soon. George couldn’t be faithful to women, but he was loyal to men, most of all to Jake. Beyond those similarities the two men were complementary opposites, down to their appearance: George beefy and blond, Jake lean and dark. Jake was gentle where George was rough, and quiet amid his friend’s blare. Despite all his opportunities and his unhappy marriage—and much to the amazement of the other wrestling men—Jake was faithful to Beulah.
Their wrestling life was essentially nocturnal. After the matches ended at 10 or 11 P.M., groups of boys piled back into their cars and careened through the night to get to the next booking. The leading cause of death in this business wasn’t ring falls or attacks by deranged fans, but car accidents. When you did get to the next town, you’d be exhausted, recalled John Lakey, a New Zealander who wrestled here as Jack Carter beginning in 1948. “Not much enthusiasm to spare. But you had to be a trouper.” He finally quit the game when he fell asleep at the wheel one night on the way from Detroit back to Chicago. Most shrugged when that happened, and kept going.
It didn’t help that many of the boys thought nothing of drinking at the wheel. The owner of the car called the shots; Killer Kowalski, for one, never let anyone drink or smoke in his car. But most didn’t impose any such bans. There were few illicit drugs to be had, much less steroids, but there were boozers aplenty. Paul Vachon, the Butcher, had his last drink twenty-five years ago, downing twenty-four bottles of King’s beer in a motel room in Edmonton, Alberta, in a final binge. When he was out on the road in the 1950s, though, beer wasn’t considered drinking but rather healthy rehydration. Vachon explains the hundred-mile rule: “One six-pack per 100 miles. If you had to go a couple hundred miles, it was two six-packs.” Per person, of course.
Once, when Dick Beyer was driving through the South with Sky Hi Lee, he noticed that Lee’s car stank for days—or rather, nights—on end. He’d seen that Lee kept a bottle of whiskey on the front seat between them and pulled on it frequently, but this odor was different. Finally, he asked Lee, “What’s that smell?” Sky Hi reached up and flipped down his windshield visor, showing the Destroyer the huge head of garlic hidden behind it. “If we get pulled over,” he told his passenger, “I’ll take a big bite of the garlic so they don’t smell the whiskey on my breath.” At that time, though, law enforcement on drinking and driving was light, especially if you were a wrestling celebrity. A couple of free tickets usually made any such problems disappear.
Jake Brown was a drinker, too, but just beer, and he didn’t imbibe every day. Thankfully, he was a sober driver. When he was home his drinking drove Beulah crazy, but then, as someone who knew them both remarked, she was already crazy.
Usually, he and George took off by themselves after the matches, but at other times they’d stay overnight, eating and drinking with the boys. Even in his most successful times, George never high-hatted the other wrestlers—the Gorgeous act was just for the ring and the marks. He loved their company and they his. George told jokes, did card tricks (he could throw a card at a wall and make it stick), bought drinks, and slapped backs. He was a physical man in a physical business. When George started horsing around, remembered one of his drinking buddies, and h
e grabbed your arm or shoulder, you could feel how powerful his muscles were under the loose clothes.
Like other persuasive public men, George had a way of engaging others, of being squarely, fully with them, such that they both felt included and wanted to be included. The boys, who had considerable egos of their own and might have resented his success, still considered him one of the brethren. Yet in some ways he stood apart. No one else traveled by chauffeur-driven limousine, for one. More importantly, George had his ineffable current, the quality that allowed him to cannily, intentionally diminish his natural handsomeness and still become a star, and that overshadowed his impressive athletic ability. Ted Lewin, the babyface who became an illustrator, worked with George just once, when he was nineteen or twenty years old. “I had so many matches over fifteen years,” he said, “and I don’t remember one from the other. I remember this one, though, because of Gorgeous George. You see him perform and he’s bigger than life, then when you get in his company in the dressing room, he still had that quality about him. Other guys were great wrestlers and great workers, but they just didn’t have that star power.”
George drank a good bit, and at times he would fight, both of which the boys heartily endorsed. Jody Hamilton, who wrestled as the Assassin, once said approvingly, “George never weighed over 190 pounds and yet I saw him deck a 300-pound truck driver in a bar in the old Claridge Hotel in St. Louis. He dropped him colder than a wedge.” After they wrestled, the boys usually hit a local bar or three. Frequently, some inebriated patron would recognize one of them, or just react to his size, and say something along the lines of, “You think you’re tough, big guy?” Almost invariably, he did, and fights followed. Marks would also confront the boys with the accusation that their game was fixed. The wrestlers’ first response was usually rhetorical. “The guy who wins a match makes more money than the guy who loses,” they’d say. “So why would I ever go in the tank?” Untrue, but eminently reasonable. At times, though, fans would keep insisting the fix was in and then another kind of argument came into play. Killer Kowalski once found himself sitting at a saloon table next to three businessmen in suits and ties when one of them looked over and declared, “Wrestling’s all a fake.” Kowalski got up, grabbed him, lifted him up, and slammed him down on the table headfirst, whereupon the executive sensibly lost consciousness. Kowalski turned to his friends and said, “Is that a fake? Now get him the hell out of here and don’t come back.”
Their travel schedules were tight, but the boys always made time for their groupies, whom they charmingly called “ring rats,” or simply rats. Wrestlers weren’t the most attractive lot, but they were big, strong men, and as Don Arnold, a beneficiary of this dynamic, points out, they were becoming TV stars, which had its own powerful pull. Then, too, some women liked the fact that tonight’s date would be almost assuredly gone tomorrow. A mating routine evolved. On a cool 1950s night in San Bernardino, let’s say, Arnold is making his way from the arena to his car. At twenty-seven the blue-eyed lifeguard with a weight lifter’s build is an up-and-coming babyface, and to his delight he’s starting to make real money. Arnold’s taken a shower after the night’s exertions, he’s feeling good about life, and would like to feel even better. As he strolls into the parking lot with his duffel bag in one hand, a ring of fans forms around him. Arnold horses around with some of the kids, putting them in headlocks or lifting them overhead in a military press, and he signs a few autograph books. There are young women in the little throng, too, some with their husbands or dates, some not. One kind is more interesting than the other.
Arnold turns toward one of them, a dark-haired girl in a skirt and white blouse who has a certain air. She looks kind of sassy, somehow, and the signals she’s sending, he’s receiving. He turns toward her, they chat, and then she asks, “How long will you be in town?” Or she might be even more direct: “Where are you staying?” If he didn’t like the way she looked, he’d say, “I’m not staying, I’m leaving town tonight.” But this isn’t one of those times. “I’m at the So-and-So Hotel,” he tells her, “and I’ll be there at eleven.”
In this boys’ club, locker-room humor prevailed. Much discussion revolved around the size of Antonino Rocca’s penis, said to be the biggest in wrestling. According to some of the boys, Rocca would leave the locker-room door open at times to let potential ring rats get a look at his main-eventer. Lou Thesz, who possessed a more elevated wit, said of Rocca, an Argentine of Italian ancestry, that “blessing him in the jockstrap was the Lord’s way of compensating for not giving him any brains.”
Early in his career, George worked out in local gyms in the afternoons whenever he could, but as his stardom grew he no longer had the time, and fitness was no longer essential to his act. Even if he’d continued, no amount of muscular armor would have made the game safe. Cracked ribs were so common as to not be worth talking about, said Don Leo Jonathan, who wrestled for roughly thirty years before a severe back injury forced him to retire. In a construct that rivaled the sayings of baseball’s Yogi Berra, he estimated that “Sixty percent of the guys was mostly 50 percent of the time hurt.” One night George came to Phoenix’s Madison Square Garden with a badly sprained ankle, using a crutch and Jake’s help to get from the car to the dressing room. Rod Fenton, the promoter, had a doctor already there, and after he examined the ankle the doctor conferred with Fenton in private. “I wouldn’t have him do anything with that, I’d just wrap that sucker up and send him home,” he said.
“We can’t do that,” Fenton replied. “We’ve got the house full and people are waiting to see him.”
The two men went back to the dressing room and offered George a needle, a numbing shot. “If you’re careful,” the doctor said, “you can get through the match.” George was game, and of course he wanted to get paid. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give it a try.” Twenty minutes or so after the shot he was standing on the foot, then pushing on it hard. Hey, this isn’t so bad, he thought to himself. With his opponent looking out for his injured ankle, George not only got through the match but tore the house down. The next morning in his hotel room, though, George woke up in agony. He couldn’t put any weight on the foot at all; when he tried to get up and touched the floor, he fell back on the bed, screaming. Then he called Fenton, at 6 A.M., and cursed a filthy blue streak that impressed even Jake, who’d heard George angry before.
Wrestling was becoming family television fare, but the Romans in the arenas still went berserk at the sight of gladiatorial blood. The subset of wrestlers known as “blade men” gave theirs intentionally. To get heat, a boy would conceal an eighth-of-an-inch razor blade on a wrist or finger, fixing it there with tape. When his opponent slammed him face-first into a turnbuckle, he’d put a hand to his forehead, drawing the cutting tool across it and opening up a slash that gushed crimson. When the crowd saw the blood, or “juice,” running down his face and neck and staining the mat below, it let out a primal roar. A star like George would never have to resort to blading or “getting color,” as it was also known. But quite a few others did, their foreheads gradually becoming hatch-marked with tiny whitish scars.
Just as they had during George’s Oregon years, ticket-buying fans around the country felt they’d bought a heel’s license themselves, and got their money’s worth by screaming, cursing, throwing things, and at times more. Late in the wrestling boom that George and television touched off, an up-and-coming young reporter for the New York Times named Gay Talese wrote: “Next to rock ’n’ roll addicts, Dodger baseball fans and untipped taxicab drivers, perhaps the most violently expressive citizens to be found these days are those who pay to watch wrestling matches.” He noted that at most Madison Square Garden sporting events there were five New York City policemen on duty. However, an upcoming wrestling show required twenty patrolmen and two sergeants.
Classy Freddie Blassie once felt a pain in his leg midmatch, and looked down to see a knife protruding from his calf. He also had his Lincoln Continental set on fire in San Bern
ardino, California. Cars were a frequent target. Tom Drake worked as a babyface called the Wrestling Sergeant, out of Fort Benning, Georgia. If a visiting heel worked him over too badly, some of Drake’s fellow soldiers would go out and turn his car over, smashing the headlights and windshield. Or they might destroy another car they mistakenly thought belonged to the offending wrestler.
One memorable night in 1949 George threw Jim Mitchell, the Black Panther, out of the ring into the first row of seats at the Olympic Auditorium. Then, when the Panther tried to climb back in, George kicked him in the face, and he crashed onto the typewriters on press row. The referee signaled that the battered Panther couldn’t continue, George was declared the winner, and the Olympic fans took it the wrong way. First a huge man, sitting close, threw off his coat, climbed into the ring, and charged George. The wrestler, sensing a real threat, cut his theatrical strutting and gloating short, and crouched down in a combat stance. George sidestepped neatly, then flipped the man over his shoulder. But rather than stopping to appreciate this display of hand-to-hand technique, tens more irate fans poured into the ring, and as the Los Angeles Times report said, “a general free-for-all ensued. The fighting spread from the ring into the aisles and seats and even continued outside the building.” Both George and Mitchell were scratched, cut, and bruised, but neither went to the hospital. However, in the melee Mr. C. M. Bullard of Azusa was stabbed in the right shoulder and a friend suffered a broken thumb when he came to Bullard’s aid. Thirty-one-year-old Miss Norma Romero was struck in the eye with a blackjack before scores of additional police officers called in could restore order.