by John Capouya
The men in the wrestling audiences were the most dangerous, but the soprano fans also bore watching. “Women, for some strange reason, often go berserk,” observed New York Times writer Sam Boal. “The villain especially is in danger and women specialize in taking off high-heeled slippers and beating the poor man heavily about the head. Or sometimes they just yank out his hair.” Dick Beyer, the Destroyer, never forgot his match against Gorgeous George in Birmingham, Alabama, due mainly to one particular woman at ringside. “She was standing on a chair and cheering and screaming for me—while nursing a baby.”
What exactly happened between one female fan and the Gorgeous One in the summer of 1948 isn’t clear. But their one-fall dustup, which took place in the Ocean Park Arena in Santa Monica, made headlines all the way across the country. The Washington Post ran a version of a United Press wire-service story on the heel’s latest outrage: “Gorgeous George, a perfumed wrestler of daintiness and refinement, was sued by a grandmother today for forgetting his manners and bopping her on the kisser.”
Mrs. Elsie Alexander, forty-eight, got a half-nelson on the wrestler with a suit for $35,000. “The attack,” she announced, “was malicious and without provocation.”
Mrs. Alexander, who weighed in at 150 pounds, began the evening peacefully, eating her popcorn in a back-row seat. That night the Gorgeous One wore a robe of gold lamé with a red satin lining, and for some reason, he had gone back to the ill-advised blue hair. Mrs. Alexander was amazed by this. Her exact quote was: “Humph! Last time I saw him rassle his hair was blond.” At the end of the match she rushed to the ring, intrigued, to take a closer look. When she did so, Mrs. A. alleged, George bopped her on the button. “Wham!” the wire service story said, explaining the concussive event.
“Since then,” the grandmother said, “I’ve suffered headaches, dizziness and have been under a doctor’s care.” George denied it vociferously, maintaining he never laid a perfumed paw on her. Even for wrestling’s ur-heel, actually punching an elderly lady in the face would have been bad form. Older women were a vital part of his constituency, and outside the arenas George was conspicuously chivalrous and solicitous with them. Once he was having dinner with wrestler Pete Burr in Buffalo and they were approached by two of the local boy’s former grammar school teachers. The famous wrestler immediately stood, kissed elderly hands, chatted, flattered, and bestowed Georgie pins. “What a gentleman,” the ladies said to each other afterward. “And he has advanced degrees in psychology, too, imagine that…” The alleged kisser-bopping incident may have been a put-up job or publicity stunt, and it’s also possible that, while Americans were not nearly as litigious in 1948 as they later became, this was a frivolous lawsuit on Granny’s part. (No outcome was recorded.)
In the television era more boys could do well, even outearning some other professional athletes. In 1948 Bob Geigel had a chance to play for the Chicago Cardinals of the National Football League, earning $4,800 a season; instead he became a babyface and made $28,000, working his way up to $45,000 or $50,000 in the 1950s. One way he and his peers were able to accomplish this was by working all the time: Geigel wrestled fifty-one weeks a year, taking one week off to hunt and fish. In the late 1940s New York state law actually forbade wrestlers to grapple more than four nights a week for health reasons. Besides George, Lou Thesz, Antonino (“Argentina”) Rocca, and Baron Michele Leone, very few wrestlers were getting rich. That’s why they traveled four or five to a car and many of their meals were roadside “baloney blowouts.” The Fabulous Moolah, the late Lillian Ellison, said she often drove all night to get to her next booking, then slept in her car to save money.
When their pockets were light, the boys often felt the hands of the promoters at work. Cal and Aileen Eaton, the couple who ran the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, were fair, the wrestlers thought, but most of the other promoters would cheat them anytime they could. In a cash business in which the promoters counted the receipts, that was fairly easy. Lou Thesz said of Toots Mondt, who ran a New York promotion: “You couldn’t trust him with a dog’s dinner. He’d go through the wrestlers’ pay envelopes and take out fives, tens, and twenties, saying, ‘Ah, that’s too much for that guy’…the whole operation was being controlled by a thief.”
They loved it, of course, despite the grinding pace, the weaselly promoters, the blood they shed and left behind. The rigors the boys faced only confirmed that they were tougher than everyone else, feeding their egos. Wrestlers in George’s day were among the luckiest of performers, hams who constantly got work in front of responsive audiences. Though in some ways they were pawns of the promoters, “there was really a lot of freedom, a lot of improvisation to what we did,” said Don Arnold. How many would-be actors and athletes would trade their eyeteeth, as the saying goes, for such a creative outlet and a similar level of exposure? Usually, that’s a rhetorical question. But in this wrestling era, the boys actually got to make that bargain.
Chapter 14
GEORGE VS. GEORGE
After the World War, wrestlers and promoters saw night after night just how much the public craved being entertained. With the fear and pain of that long effort eased, returning troops as well as relieved civilians were ready for a harmless hoot or two, and the kind of thrills that held no real danger. Rationing was finally over, too, and folks had money to spend, at least enough to purchase gasoline, wrestling tickets, popcorn, and the right to act silly. Television’s coming was perfectly timed to meet that need for excitement and release.
At the same time this was no longer a nation of innocent farmers. Four hundred thousand of America’s soldiers had died, and the survivors had seen and done things in the war they would find hard to forget. This wasn’t a nation of cynics, by any means, but balanced on a moral cusp. In that equipoise, amusement-seeking Americans were ready, as they might not have been beforehand, to embrace a not-too-heinous villain, a man who embodied some complexity and contradictions—just as they did. The Gorgeous One made it clear how highly he thought of himself, that he thought only of himself, and he broke every rule he could find, Suddenly that was an engaging possibility—still a bit scandalous, certainly, but not completely contemptible. Americans had just shared sacrifice; collectivism had been lived at its limits. In a natural reversal, individuals began to think of themselves a little more that way. On one level George tantalized with his egotism, challenging viewers to stop pretending that they’d never thought as he did—never dreamed of standing out and acting out, never felt the impulse to put themselves first. More overtly, he offered Americans the opportunity to condemn him for his unabashed selfishness, denying that emerging part of themselves. Today it’s a given, but at that time Americans were just working up the nerve to admit it: There’s a little Gorgeous George in all of us.
Six months after his first televised match, Time ran a story on the TV wrestling phenomenon, calling George “the newest, slickest, most popular performer of them all.” In Buffalo, 11,845 fans had just jammed the Memorial Auditorium to see the outrageous performer in person. He drew 20,000 in Cleveland and 18,000 in Toronto, attendance figures unheard of for wrestling. In Hollywood, the Time story also related, some taverns and restaurants trying to attract customers with their new television sets were changing their tactics. Formerly, they’d put out signs with just the single word TELEVISION. Now, Time said, “They put out signs reading, GORGEOUS GEORGE, TELEVISION, HERE TONIGHT.”
Their forces joined, George and television changed the wrestling game as they gave it new life. Earlier generations of fans had been enticed with gimmicks such as mud wrestling, offered in male and female varieties. There were ice-cream matches, like the tussle between Joe Reno and Roughhouse Ross in 250 gallons of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. On Michigan’s upper peninsula you had the fruit-for-all known as the Blueberry Bowl. In a “Good Housekeeping match,” opponents beat and slashed at each other with various household appliances, including toasters and electric mixers. Now that grunt and groan was a successful arm
of show business, however, different entertainment values prevailed. For the boys, grappling technique wasn’t a major asset anymore, and an imposing physique was no longer sufficient. Instead, wrestlers with highly developed characters, eye-catching visual displays, and “acting” ability were in demand. As the novelty of Gorgeous George proved such a good drawing card, the boys and promoters furiously invented their own increasingly wacky personalities, in hopes of replicating his success.
Out came the Gorilla, wheeled to the ring in a cage while he roared and shook the bars, and the Bat, who dressed in black from head to foot and pretended to suck opponents’ blood. Professor Roy Shire wore a cap and gown to the ring. Ricki Starr, a friend of George’s, developed an act that could only have flown after the Gorgeous One flitted. Starr, who’d actually had ballet training, appeared in a pink tutu and would leap across the ring in jetés and rush at opponents up on the tips of his toe shoes.
Lord Leslie Carlton worked a faux-royal act, similar to Lord Lansdowne’s. Killer Kowalski was also quite successful, though more of a throwback. A pure heel, he made his bones when he accidentally tore off Yukon Eric’s cauliflower ear in the ring. The referee said that when he picked it up and put it in his pocket, it was still quivering. The ethnic or national villain—like the German Hans Schmidt, actually a French-Canadian—continued to play well after World War II. Later the Nazi heels would morph into Russians and then Iranians, including the Iron Sheik.
Few of these characters could match George’s ornate silliness, however, or the sincerity of his pose. While some of the other wrestlers were clearly playacting in their ring roles, and even seemed a little embarrassed, George clearly identified with and completely inhabited his character. He’d found the role he was born to play, and this was intrinsic to his success: more convinced, he was more convincing. Now, thanks to television, he could impress millions of fans in a single night, and the response to his new, Gorgeous self continued to grow. Before the cathode-ray glow came on in American living rooms, George and Betty’s ring creation was a well-known success, for a wrestler. After the great illumination no one, including those two, could tell where his success might find its limits—were there any limits for TV stars?
Then George suddenly felt he could lose all he’d worked for, just as stunningly as he’d attained it. He heard the alarming, infuriating news from one worried friend, then another, and next in a phone call from a loyal promoter: Others were stealing his act, inhabiting the same Gorgeous character.
George hated very few people; he got angry, but his fury didn’t have the requisite stamina. What’s more, in the pragmatic, transactional way he viewed the world, hating or not hating wasn’t a very useful construct. But for promoter Jack Pfefer, George made a thorough exception. Pfefer (born Jacob) was a tiny man, five-foot-two, with an unruly mass of black hair. He came to this country in 1921 from Poland, then part of the Russian empire, and began promoting wrestling three years later. In the mid-1930s Pfefer fell out with his partners and showed just how fierce and vindictive an enemy he could be. He exposed all the inner workings of wrestling’s fakery to Dan Parker, sports editor of New York’s Daily Mirror, who wrote a series of exposés. Wrestling lived to pretend another day, however, as did Pfefer. When he returned to the business, he specialized in what he called his Angels, huge men—and the occasional woman—mostly foreigners, with congenital deformities and misshapen heads. He dubbed them the Swedish Angel, the Lady Angel, and so on. “I love my freaks,” he told Collier’s magazine. “I am very proud of some of my monstrosities.”
He had bad breath and bad manners, rarely smiled, and, for what it’s worth, never married. The promoter constantly felt himself ill-used and complained bitterly to his peers, wheedling, threatening, gossiping, and always at the ready to retaliate for some perceived offense. “I can smell and feel there is a lot of cunning going on,” he wrote to St. Louis promoter Sam Muchnick. “Believe me, I can see what’s cooking far ahead, more than all the wise guys together. I am always far sighted in the smelling game and that is why I am still around punching and holding my own.” For anyone prepared to dislike Pfefer, there were many points of purchase. Some of the disdain for Pfefer among the wrestlers and the press was tinged with anti-Semitism; he was almost always described as “the wily Russian Jew.” But much of it was earned.
A 1939 letter from George’s buddy Jesse James to the promoter shows the most likely source of Wagner and Pfefer’s enmity. Stating his case matter-of-factly on stationery from the Hotel Padre in Hollywood, Jesse wrote:
Dear Jack,
Every time you write to me you ask me when I intend to come back to N.Y. I want you to know the reason I never did come back to you was because of the $240 that you still owe me, and you still owe Billy Raeburn over $300.
Now, Jack, if you will promise to treat me right, and pay me back the $240 I’ll come back and work for you, otherwise I’ll never come back. You may let me know in return mail what is what. Sincerely,
Jesse
That was a good deal of money in 1939, and it seems Pfefer pulled something similar with another Harrisburg Rat. George’s response was not nearly as reasoned as James’s. Their climactic dispute took place in the promoter’s New York office in the Times Building and the argument ended with George reaching into his wrestling bag, pulling out his sweaty, smelly jockstrap, and rubbing it in the little man’s face. Years later, when George became such a gate attraction, Pfefer sought his revenge. He hired a series of imitators, had them copy George and Betty’s gimmicks, and promoted his boys as Gorgeous George. The most successful was Gorgeous George Grant, aka Danny Sheffield, who was wrestling in L.A. as Darling Danny in 1949. A promoter there had already dyed Sheffield’s hair blond in imitation of George when Pfefer recruited him, and together the two undertook a blatant theft. Grant strutted to the ring in fancy robes, to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance.” He used a series of valets, including Sir Charles and a midget called Mister Jeffrey. Grant’s wife, Christine, put his bleached blond hair up in pin curls; he posed for publicity photographs in beauty parlors and was promoted as “The Original Hollywood Dandy,” “The Toast of the Nation,” and “The Original Platinum Blond.” Grant split with Pfefer in 1966 but continued to use the same gimmicks up until the early 1970s. Before he retired he was “saved,” as Grant termed his religious conversion, and became a preacher as well as a wrestler, but he never repented or renounced his imitation of George.
In 1948, when George Wagner was still very much on the rise, the Los Angeles Times noted that Gorgeous George was “a sobriquet now apparently affected, like the name Santa Claus, by various practitioners.” Gorgeous George Arena strutted on three-inch platform heels and claimed he used the act before George, beginning in 1936. His valets sprayed Evening in Paris. Gorgeous George Winchell (“Dutch” Schweigert) was another strike at George launched by Pfefer from Toledo in the late 1940s. The promoter kept it up for practically the entirety of the original George’s career, trying both to ruin him and to cash in on his moneymaking prowess.
The real George Wagner was beside himself. Sure, he’d used some of Lord Lansdowne’s gimmicks, George reasoned, but he and Betty added plenty of their own—and he wasn’t calling himself Lord Lansdowne, taking money out of the man’s pocket. This threat was a dangerous one, he knew, especially when he learned that the impostors were not just stealing his act but undercutting him as well; they were working for much less money. Arizona promoter Rod Fenton wouldn’t book the pretenders, but others did. George knew how the business worked. What if the rest of the promoters decided, as they were inclined to, that the cheaper alternative was the better one? He began billing himself as “The Original Gorgeous George”—but some of the fakers quickly imitated that as well.
In public, though, George didn’t show his concern. In an interview, he admitted he’d been “complaining rather severely about some of the second rate wrestlers who were trying to copy my style. It burned me up to see a young punk strutting around
the ring, wearing a shabby robe, hair dyed grotesquely in what he thought was a reasonable facsimile of me.” But then, he recounted, his good friend Eddie Cantor set him straight. The comedian, singer, and actor, one of the country’s most popular entertainers from the 1930s to the ’50s, was an early booster, giving the wrestler important exposure on his hit radio show, Time to Smile.
“George, if you see a singer on the stage on his knees and singing ‘Mammy,’ you don’t think about that singer, do you?” Cantor asked.
“No,” George replied, shrugging his shoulders. “I think of Al Jolson.”
“That’s it, Gorgeous,” said Cantor. “Imitation is the highest form of compliment. No matter who it is up there in the ring, imitating you, the audience will always remember the one and only Gorgeous George.”
The promoters tried hard to keep the Gorgeous Ones apart, but they occasionally crossed paths. When he and George Wagner did, George Grant acknowledged, “We never got along too good. If I walked into a bar and he was already there, I’d walk out.” Once, in October 1956, though, they were booked against each other in the National Guard Armory in Pocatello, Idaho. Promoter Jack Reynolds put up posters all over town: “Gorgeous Hair vs. Gorgeous Hair…Gorgeous Robe vs. Gorgeous Robe…Gorgeous George Wagner vs. Gorgeous George Grant!”