Gorgeous George

by John Capouya

  Chapter 16

  PACKING THEM IN LIKE MARSHMALLOWS

  Gorgeous George was coming to town, Betty told the children after she hung up the phone. He was returning from New York, having wrestled a good many dates on the way back, and traveling the last leg by train. She’d arranged to drive down and pick him up the next morning. He sounded a little down, Betty thought; he might have still been upset by that night at Madison Square Garden. She felt, not for the first time, that underneath the surface her husband was an insecure man. A swerve might cheer him up. In any case, just meeting him at the station, running the dutiful spousal errand, seemed lacking in flavor, so she gave the chauffeur the next day off. By this time they employed not only a driver but also a housekeeper and a maid. Pat, the longtime nanny, had married Virgil Gray, Cyclone Mackey’s stepson, with Betty and George hosting the wedding, and she was now a friend and frequent visitor.

  Betty borrowed the driver’s visored cap and somehow got herself up in an extra-small dark green chauffeur’s uniform. Early the next day she drove between the rows of palm trees on Alameda Street to L.A.’s Union Passenger Terminal. The beige station gleamed yellowish in the sunny California morning, and with its tiled roof, inlaid arches and tall clock tower, it looked like a Spanish church attached to a monastery. Betty stood by the car, at the beginning of the concrete walkway. Between her and the main entrance gathered a small group of reporters who had been alerted to the return of the Gorgeous One.

  Then he appeared, resplendent in a pink silk shirt, lime-green slacks, and two-tone, brown-and-white shoes. Coming from the cooler north after a date in San Francisco, he still had a white scarf hanging loosely around his neck and a camel-hair coat draped over his shoulders. Had anyone else made these fashion choices they might have been regrettable, but on him it all looked good. As he swaggered forward, his hair tucked under a tam, he didn’t notice the chauffeur waiting, and turned his attention to the writers. After he answered a few questions, Betty approached, lengthening her stride and marching upright, giving her best approximation of a male liveried servant’s march. When she got close, she tugged at her cap in a saluted greeting, adding a little servile nod of her head. She’d taken him completely by surprise, but the showman didn’t flinch. With no hesitation or sign of recognition, George nodded briskly and handed her the bag he was carrying—porters were toting the rest of the trunks and valises—and strode silently ahead of her to the car. There he waited by the back door for the chauffeur to catch up and open it, after which the master climbed in. Betty, not uttering a word herself, deposited the bag on the front passenger seat, then came deliberately around and got behind the wheel. Without so much as a glance behind her, she gunned the big engine and drove off. The two didn’t even greet each other until they were well out of sight. After they’d laughed and caught up a little, George leaned back in his seat and added a last line to the gag. “Home, Betty,” he said.

  Home at this point was a ranch they’d bought in Beaumont, a town of three or four thousand people roughly eighty miles east of Los Angeles, high up in the San Gorgonio Mountains near the San Bernardino National Forest. George filled her in on his Madison Square Garden debacle. He’d had a long trip home in which to reframe it in more favorable, ego-soothing terms. After all the wrestling he’d done, he knew how to fall. Promoter Johnston, who’d shelled out $6,000 to rent the Garden, lost about $1,500 on the night, but George’s share of the gate still made a darn good payday, he told Betty. If they want to call it a “bomb” or a “flopperoo,” George said, he would gladly tank again. In fact, this “sweaty creature,” as he’d been labeled, took home more than $1,800 from that one thirty-minute tugging match when, across the country, John and Jane Doe’s annual household income was something like $3,100.

  Still, it stung. When he wrestled next at the Olympic Auditorium a few nights later, the Orchid arrived with a little extra determination. He would show everyone—hadn’t he done that his entire career, his entire life? This was his bop hall, where Gorgeous George had become a sensation two years before, and these marks were his people. The Los Angeles fans, who’d come to know him on the KTLA broadcasts, were primed, too. George was still new enough to surprise them, yet they were familiar enough with him to expect a raucous good time. Gorgeous was billed elsewhere in the country as the Hollywood Invader, they knew, and the Toast of the Coast. That made him their champion, and the villain they had the greatest right to hate. On this Wednesday night in early 1949, George had been honing his craft for fifteen years and refining the Gorgeous persona for the last two. He was ready to deliver the performance of his life, and the fans would get every bit of what they came for: Gorgeous George, at the top of his outrageous game.

  The Olympic was a massive cinder-block rectangle, painted white with maroon-brown trim, at Eighth Street and Grand Avenue. The roof, though not clearly visible from the street, formed a half dome; a sign easily seen from the adjacent parking lots declared this the LARGEST BOXING AND WRESTLING ARENA IN THE WORLD, SEATING 10,400. Over the marquee loomed a huge color mural of a boxer. Cal and Aileen Eaton, the couple running the Olympic, claimed they led the nation in wrestling attendance the year before, 1948, drawing more than 300,000 through the turnstiles. Of course, as Mike LeBell, her son and his stepson, who later took over the promotion there, admitted, “We lied a little about things like that.” He said the 10,400 capacity was really more like 10,052, and others put it at 9,900. Regardless, it was one of the country’s premier mat palaces. In other words, something of a dump. Like wrestling itself, the Olympic had a shiny facade and a grandiose line of patter, but in its heart and bowels it was a grimy sweatshop, a much-beloved bucket of blood.

  George sits in the lower-level locker room, with Jake Brown standing by, taking a robe out of its garment bag, under one bare lightbulb. The room itself, more concrete blocks painted white, is tiny, maybe six feet by eight feet. Besides the beat-up metal lockers, nails driven into a wooden lath at eye level serve as the coatrack. Uncovered pipes run above and the occasional porcelain sink juts from the walls. When his opponent, Bobby Managoff, comes into the room, George doesn’t get up. He stays sprawled, wearing just his trunks and socks, in a metal folding chair in front of the lockers, reflected in the frameless mirror on the opposite wall. But he gives Managoff (real name, Robert Manoogian Jr.) a friendly grin and sticks out his hand. George likes Managoff and considers him a good worker, trained by his father, an Armenian who went by Big Yusiff. Later in the year George will land Bobby Jr. a role in his wrestling flick.

  “Hi, Bobby,” he says with a laugh. “I hear you’re going to put me over tonight.” Cal Eaton wants them to go the distance, three falls with a one-hour time limit, and Gorgeous is to be the winner. “George,” says Managoff, who stands to get a hefty payoff after this main event, “it will be my pleasure.” The two put their heads together briefly and talk about different moves they’ll use. Managoff is a dropkick man: He leaps straight up, turns his body sideways, and slams his opponent’s chest with the soles of both feet. (Antonino Rocca became a great box-office attraction with this as his signature move. A former acrobat with no wrestling training, he was a great leaper, and wrestled barefoot.)

  As George looks at Managoff, three years his junior, he sees a strongly built, dark-haired fellow with bushy eyebrows, about his size but a little darker-complected. The writer from Sport magazine here tonight to write a feature about George—“Goldilocks of Grappling”—calls Managoff “a nice-looking Armenian boy…with a back as broad as a good garage.” The guileless earnestness he projects makes Managoff the perfect babyface to go against this egotistical heel. In a sense tonight’s headline match pits a version of the younger George Wagner—strong, willing, with fewer sharp edges—against his new Gorgeous self. Cal Eaton’s expecting a sellout or something close. Ringside tickets are four dollars, and the next ten rows behind them, called the “club circle,” go for three. A crowd this size requires forty ushers to work the narrow aisles and the man by the
VIP entrance on the west side of the building reports that Rita Moreno and Eddie Cantor are on the celebrity list.

  Now George stands up and the lanky valet comes over to help George into his robe. Jake is a couple of inches taller than his boss and boyhood friend. But in his tight waistcoat the valet, who weighed 185 when he went into the army, appears even thinner next to George, whose stocky silhouette is widened further by his billowing robes. Tonight Jake is sporting a kelly-green vest and matching bow tie over his white shirt with a stiff, pointed Gladstone collar, along with the dark butler’s morning coat, pin-striped trousers, and black patent-leather shoes. At other times he wears a light purple or orchid-colored ensemble. His black hair is already receding from his forehead though he’s just thirty-two, brushed back in front and tufting out a little on both sides, just north of his largish ears. In his act he is deadpan, never smiling, but as he grins now while approaching George, he reveals long, fanglike incisors.

  The robe Jake holds in front of him is a shiny, floor-length, quilted pink satin beauty. The lining and lapels are a contrasting bright yellow silk; on the robe’s shoulders are epaulets of glimmering silver sequins. This is either one of Betty’s last efforts—she stood down from robe making when the children required more of her time—or created by Kay Cantonwine, the daughter of George’s buddy and fellow wrestler Howard “The Hangman” Cantonwine. From the end of her high school years into the mid-1950s she fashioned many of the Gorgeous One’s robes. The Los Angeles Times dubbed her “the Betsy Ross of the mat world.”

  Working from a woman’s size-sixteen pattern, Kay and her mother, Gertrude, would spend a couple of weeks on each one, working from one of Betty’s ideas or their own flights of fancy. The younger woman, who made clothing and swimwear design her profession, ordered the fabrics from a specialty shop in New York. George would come by their house on Harvard Street in South Central L.A. to try on each new showy wrapper, always in a bit of a hurry. George would drape the new gown over his street clothes and suddenly he’d assume the Gorgeous persona, swelling himself up and stalking the Cantonwines’ front hall in front of the full-length mirror. At times Kay worried that she’d gone too far. Would George reject the robe with a bulging bustle of turkey feathers that protruded from the Gorgeous posterior? Or the two pink fans she’d made for him to swish around his body, fashioned with stripper Gypsy Rose Lee in mind? She needn’t have been concerned. As Betty had told her, with George no design was too lurid, no feminine touch too effeminate. “Do you love it?” Kay would ask. “I sure do,” George always replied. Then, just as suddenly as he’d gotten in character, he’d deflate himself, reverting back to just George, remove the new robe, and he’d be off.

  Managoff left the locker room, gone to enter the ring, where he joins the nameless, faceless, stripe-shirted referee and the longtime Olympic announcer Jimmy Lennon (uncle to the singing Lennon Sisters). Like the other boys, Managoff takes a narrow passageway from the locker rooms and climbs up a small stairway that emerges just in front of the ring. That truncated arrival won’t do for George, of course; he has a much longer, grander entrance in mind. The undercard’s over and by now even the late arrivals have taken their places. As one sportswriter describes them, the fans are now “as jam-packed as marshmallows in a box.”

  “Behind you and all around you, you can feel the expectant stirring welling up in the crowd,” Hannibal Coons writes in Sport. The announcement that George is coming has already boomed out over the PA system more than once. Back in the locker room Jeff gives the Gorgeous robe one last tug, smoothing a pink padded shoulder as they both stand facing the locker-room mirror. The wrestler has a pink satin scarf draped around his neck that matches his gown and falls down over the contrasting yellow lapels. Smiling at his friend in the mirror, Jeff gives him a little pat on his satin-covered back. “Ready, George?” he asks. His boss answers with a businesslike nod—that is, as businesslike as you can be if you’re a burly man wearing a dress with your dyed blond hair done up in an intricate woman’s hairdo. “Let’s go to work,” Gorgeous George Wagner says, in his surprisingly high, nasal voice. “Time to give the people what they want.”

  Jefferies walks stiffly erect down the long center aisle toward the ring, a spotlight illuminating his progress. As he proceeds, carrying a big silver tray in both hands in front of his chest, his movements are slow and solemn, deliberate and dignified—“aloof as a cake of Life-buoy,” in the words of another witty grappling writer. Not so the crowd, which begins to laugh as the valet descends the aisle. Bending low, Jefferies steps through the ropes and enters the ring, whereupon he deposits the silver tray on the canvas surface. He approaches this, and all his tasks, with reverence. Now Jefferies stoops and removes from his tray a large chrome-plated spray gun with a pump handle. He brandishes it in the air, and the paying customers hoot and laugh some more. His instrument looks like a bicycle pump; it’s commonly known as a Flit gun for the plant insecticide it often contains. But this gleaming version holds a strong sweet-smelling perfume. George tells the press, and TV announcer Dick Lane gleefully relays tonight, that it’s a special mixture, “Chanel Number 10.” No. Five’s good enough for other people, George says grandly, but “why be half safe?”

  With great concentration, Jefferies sprays the entire twenty-by-twenty ring floor—the Gorgeous One’s white-shod footsies must not touch anything malodorous or unclean. “Around the ring he dashes,” writes the thoroughly entertained reporter from the Long Beach Democrat. “Spraying here, and spraying there. Spraying all over and everywhere. Like an insane housewife knocking off flies with a Flit gun in her kitchen.” Now the valet makes a move with the spray gun toward Managoff, as if to decontaminate him as well, but the black-haired grappler raises a cocked fist, snarling, and Jefferies hastily retreats. There’s more laughter in the stands at this pantomime.

  The spray-gun gimmick, which replaced the whisk broom, may have been born of George’s early experiences with dirty, infectious mats. He said, and it could even have been true, that he began disinfecting the ring to avoid getting boils and other contagions. When the fans gave him heat in response—George did the decontaminating himself in the early days—he made the fumigant a fixture. (At one point George and Betty discussed wafting floral perfume through the Olympic’s ventilation system but apparently this early biological weapon was never put to use.) The perfume spritzing by George’s valets, including Cherie, became an enduring signature, one of the most memorable parts of the Gorgeous act.

  Now the valet removes a square of cherry-red carpet from the tray. Dick Lane tells the 1949 viewing audience, seeing all this in black and white, that it’s a “a beautiful cerise color.” Jefferies places this rug on the floor near the tray; George will stand on it after he makes his entrance. With a flourish the valet removes another square and places it near the first. This one is mink, and it will hold the folded, precious robe off the mat once George has consented to its removal. (Apparently mink, while not luxurious enough to cover the Sensational body, is adequate to cushion his kimonos.)

  His preparations complete, George’s man Friday stands by the rugs and awaits his master’s arrival. “By this time the excitement is pretty much tense,” Coons reports, “with much confused babble and neck-craning.” He can appreciate the delay, the tease. In his piece he calls George “a well-muscled and remarkable man who could have given P. T. Barnum three Tom Thumbs and licked him as a showman in straight falls.” Just now the PA system booms again, but with a different message: “Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George is here!”

  The majority of the audience stands up immediately. The spectators twist and crane this way and that, trying to catch their first glimpse of the star attraction. In George’s crowd, roughly 35 percent are soprano fans; it seems the writer who called him “the answer to a maiden’s prayer, as well as a matron’s,” was not mistaken. Most if not all of the women are here with male companions, and they’re dressed up for a night on the town. Many wear hats, some of which have v
eils, and all the fan-ettes wear blouses, skirts, and hose; no woman wears pants. Some of the men have on suits and ties, though the ties are generally loosened. For these gents, hats are the norm. Above ringside the men are less swank, with more of a working-class Angeleno look to them. From the haze hovering over the ring lights, it’s clear that from the front rows to the upper balcony, where the seating is rows of wooden benches, smoking is both allowed and enjoyed.

  One middle-aged woman leaps up from her seat. “Land’s sakes, look!” she shouts. The popcorn man and the soda-pop vendors are temporarily out of business, as the fans are riveted to the coming of George. “Look, there he is!” someone else shouts. “He’s in pink tonight!” Heads swivel as the Gorgeous One appears at the top of the main aisle, standing stock-still, hands on hips, head cocked back, taking in the entire Olympic laid out before him, a mighty lord surveying his realm from on high. To get to their seats the fans have walked upstairs to the concession level and the mezzanine doors. From there it’s an extremely steep drop down the aisles and the rows of seats (they have arms, a rare luxury in wrestling arenas) to the ring, which sits in a pit at the very bottom. The balcony looms, stacked right on top of the lower levels and the ring. In these upper reaches there’s a small section cordoned off with wire mesh on three sides. This is “the cage,” where the wrestlers’ wives or friends of the promoters can sit if they need protection from the raucous crowds.