by John Capouya
Once he took Carol and Donnie to a drive-in and conked out in the back of the car while the kids watched the movie from the front seat. Don started looking around for the snacks their mother had packed for them, reached behind the seat, and came up with a quart bottle with some brown liquid left in it. He held it up, delighted with his find and eager to show off his knowledge of adult matters to his older sister. “Whiskey!” he exclaimed loudly. George snoozed through the whole episode.
“These things stay with you,” said Carol as an adult. “I didn’t like to be around him when he drank; I wanted our dad.”
On another afternoon late in their marriage, George and Betty threw a turkey dinner at the ranch, charging wrestling fans a few dollars a head to come see the place (including the turkeys on Celebrity Row), meet George and some other wrestlers, and eat all the barbecued bird they could hold. Jesse and Johnny James were there, as was Danny McShain, with his second wife, Sallee. Off-duty policemen were hired as security and more on-duty officers had to drive out and help handle the car traffic that built up around the ranch. Hundreds of people showed up, but George didn’t appear. By early evening the food was running out and the crowd milling in front of the makeshift stage in the backyard was demanding to see the Gorgeous One. Howard Cantonwine, the business manager, was boiling with anger, but otherwise none too helpful.
Jesse and Danny went back into the house to help Betty pour black coffee into George, who had passed out in the bedroom. Danny McShain asked his wife to take the mike and try to distract the fans. She wasn’t an entertainer, but she was blond and curvaceous; the thinking was that at least the crowd would have something to look at. Eventually George made it to the stage, about three hours late. He’d needed help getting into a robe. He made a few remarks and strutted a little unsteadily and the crowd was satisfied. Betty was furious. “Of course she was,” said Sallee. “George was drunk out of his skull.”
He began to stay in character more offstage, when formerly he’d revert to just George. Ida Mae Martinez was just eighteen when she became a professional wrestler and early in her career she worked on the same card as George. He asked her to fix his hair before a match (for some reason he was without a valet). Happy to oblige, the young girl combed and, following his instructions, put the hairpins in his blond curls, which fell to just below his neck. Then she dropped one of his pins and said, “Whoops, I dropped the bobby pin.” George turned on her, yelling, “That’s a Georgie pin!” He was livid.
Later in life Betty consistently took the high road when asked about another of George’s husbandly deficits. “If George was running around on me,” she insisted, “I never knew about it.” In her legal petition she alleged only the umbrella term mental cruelty. Those who knew George, however, especially the wrestlers who encountered him on the road, described him as the lead hound in a notoriously skirt-chasing pack. “He always had a couple of broads with him,” said one former wrestler based on the East Coast. “When he flew in he’d start meeting them right at the airport, invite a dozen or so to a party later at his hotel, so that way, we could pick and choose, you know?”
Cherie, his next wife, either had a different experience from Betty or was more forthcoming. Was George faithful? she was asked in an interview with Canadian filmmakers Claude and Dale Barnes for their 2006 TV documentary Gorgeous George. “Well, not always, no,” she said, looking away from the camera. “When I was expecting with our son, Gary,” Cherie continued, “George had to go to Australia alone. I was in no fit condition. He got a little inebriated and called me to tell me”—here she changed to a deeper, drunken voice—“‘Honey, I just dumped my ashes.’ That was his way of saying he’d been with a woman. I said, ‘You didn’t have to call me long distance, collect, from Australia to tell me that!’ And I hung up.”
With her, George seems to have used the same brutally honest approach he did with his children: Where his faithfulness was concerned, there was no Santa Claus. “He never lied to me about it,” Cherie said. “I wish to hell he had lied sometimes. At least he was honest; he was an honest playboy.” Cherie ventured that George’s infidelities weren’t entirely his fault. “He had many temptations with female fans when I wasn’t traveling with him,” she said. “He wasn’t looking for women; they came to him. He had a million chances to be unfaithful.” But George was hardly prey for corrupting huntresses. There was something excessive and compulsive about George’s womanizing, as there was in his lust for alcohol. He ached for female touch and attention, needed this other rush of chemicals that was thrilling and also soothing, an intoxicating succor.
After George’s death, Cherie said, “There were lots of women who claimed to be the mother of his children.” She maintained bitterly that they were looking for money. During the writing of this book two women surfaced who maintained that they were George’s illegitimate children. They were looking for information and from that, it seemed, some kind of solace; neither mentioned money. One woman said that while her mother was dating George she made her living in another rough-edged sport popular in that era, the roller derby.
Bob Kurtz, who runs a sports memorabilia store in Berkeley, California, got an unlikely insight into George’s womanizing when he was just ten years old. A wrestling fanatic and junior autograph hound, he begged his mother for tickets when Gorgeous George came to the Oakland Auditorium. She came through in champion fashion: They had front-row seats at the end of an aisle; her friend had gotten the tickets. Then, after George pinned babyface Dennis Clary with the flying side headlock, Kurtz suddenly found himself heading back to the locker room, his mother’s friend leading the way. There, a somewhat tired Orchid sat on a bench toweling off. He asked the youngster his name and how he’d liked the match. He’d loved it, Bobby told him, but he was disappointed not to have gotten a Georgie pin thrown to him before the match. “That’s part of the show,” G.G. told him. “I only throw them to women, especially older ones—they’re my biggest fans. But you look like a really big fan, too, so how many pins do you want?”
“Three,” Bobby figured. “One for me, one for my mother, and one for her friend.” George laughed and said his mother’s friend already had a bunch of them, not to worry. Kurtz went home buzzing with his memories. He was confused, though, as to how the woman came to own Georgie pins. His mother, in her infinite parental wisdom, decided to level with the ten-year-old. “You see, Bobby,” she said, “George has a lady friend in many of the places where he wrestles, and she’s his lady friend in Oakland.” This was in 1951, when George was still married to Betty.
Another subtler breach had formed between Betty and George as well. She had found the Truth, as Jehovah’s Witnesses call their faith. She’d been raised as a Christian, but young Betty was never happy with a God who would put you in a burning furnace forever if you sinned. Witnesses believe that hell is simply the grave, where we’ll sleep until the Resurrection. Then everyone will be returned to the earth in a perfected form; their “flesh will be younger than youth.” First Jesus must wrest this world from Satan, who now has dominion over it. Betty’s face would glow as she explained to her children that, after the Resurrection, “there’ll be no more hunger, no more hurt, no more tears.”
It was Geraldine Massey, the wife of wrestler Corbin Massey (Cyclone Mackey), who helped bring her to the Truth. This was before the war, when the two couples were sharing a house in Columbus, and before George and Betty adopted Carol and Don. The Wagners were upstairs, the Masseys down, and when the two wrestlers were away, Betty would come downstairs in her slippers at night, along with Judy the bulldog. Geraldine was about ten years older than Betty’s thirty-two, blondish, and at five-foot-three, a few inches taller. The two women would make coffee, then sit in their bathrobes, Judy between them, each reading from her own Bible and discussing it together. After George and Betty left Columbus and moved on to Tulsa and all the other territories, she’d find Kingdom Halls in the towns they stopped in and go to meetings, as the Witnesses call their serv
ices. When the Wagners lived in Windsor Hills the Masseys lived in Lancaster, California, so the two women were able to continue studying together. Geraldine, her sons Vance and Virgil; Pat, the Wagners’ former nanny, who married Virgil; and Betty with her two children would all go to the Kingdom Halls. When he was young, Donnie was something of a Kingdom Hall prodigy, with a photographic memory or close to it; he could read an entire Awake magazine or Watchtower, then recite it.
George wanted to belong and, it seemed, to believe. Always a quick study, he learned the tenets and put in some time reading his Bible. He read very little else, rarely dallying with books, magazines, or newspapers, though he’d glance at stories on himself. To Betty it seemed that “George didn’t have time. He was always busy, going here or there.” George the pragmatist may also not have seen the payoff, the immediate benefit. When he’d call home to Beaumont from the road, though, he’d encourage his children to read the Bible, listen to their mother, and go to meetings. With his family George would sometimes attend assemblies, huge convocations of twenty-five thousand Witnesses or more, and several times he donated thousands of turkeys to help feed the gatherings. He absorbed enough of the Truth, and valued it enough, to teach it to his last girlfriend, Beverly Styles. It was always in his consciousness, Carol believed. But his grasp of other things, and the holds they had on him in return, proved stronger.
Once, after George’s death, when she was in her late twenties, Carol was sunbathing at her home in Grants Pass, Oregon, and as she often did, she thought of her dad. An alarming thought suddenly came to her. When he’s resurrected, he’s going to ask me if I ever tried to help Gary [George’s son with Cherie] find the Truth about the Bible. And what am I going to say? So she sent her half brother some books and a letter explaining their beliefs. But she never heard back from Gary.
When Betty told George she was through, he was shocked and sullen. After stewing for a day or two, he got angry. “I’ll fix you,” he threatened over the phone. “I’ll take you to court, and I’ll take everything.” Mean Old George, indeed. Go ahead, she told him, contest the divorce. “I’ll get everyone we know to come and testify about how you’ve behaved.” That quieted him down quickly. In the settlement they arrived at in Riverside County Court, both parties agreed it was unwise to sell the ranch and divide the proceeds at that time; Betty and the children would continue to live there. She kept her Packard and the house trailer in which they’d spent some of their best moments. He got the Cadillac he was driving at that time, and all rights to the name Gorgeous George. George was to pay her $400 a week for child support. The divorce went through on September 23, 1952; they’d been married for thirteen years and seven months.
George’s support payments were neither prompt nor frequent. In 1953 they came to a new arrangement in which Betty got all the income from the ranch to support the children instead of fixed payments by George. She also got the right to use the name “Gorgeous George Turkeys” in connection with that business. Those rights and that supposed income proved to be of scant worth, so Betty went to work as a cocktail waitress at a club called Pinky’s in nearby Redlands. Since her shift started at 6 P.M., she was home when the children returned from school, and her sister, Eve, was right next door to look after them the rest of the night. Betty missed a lot of evening meetings at the Kingdom Hall, but it had to be done. She liked the work, and she made good money, too. “I was a damn good cocktail waitress,” Betty said.
Betty’s still alive, at this writing, still crackling with energy. She stayed on the West Coast, and when the first interview for this book was about to take place in her hometown, her end of the phone conversation went like this: “You’re at the hotel? Good, stay there. I’ll come right over.” Click. Soon her fifteen-year-old red Plymouth Acclaim pulled neatly into a parking space. “I’ll be ninety-three in January,” Betty announced, “and I didn’t make any mistakes driving over here, either.” Her rich dark hair was now a bright white, piled in snowy curls on top of her head and over her ears. Her face was deeply wrinkled, but her green-brown eyes were still bright. She wore high heels on fancy occasions and shiny gold or silver slippers for most others, along with makeup and bangly gold jewelry. And Betty still favored the brightest shades in clothes, including orchid, the color of Gorgeousness.
She lived alone in a modest ranch house with a tiny, fluffy dog. After her divorce from George, Betty married again, and stayed with that man for twenty-five years until she outlived him, too. She never acquired much of an interest in what others might think—or she continued to delight in confounding their expectations. During her second marriage Betty adopted two more children, a boy and a girl. Her husband was reluctant; in fact, “he objected strongly,” she said. “But I did it anyway.” Sixty years after she first learned the Truth with Geraldine, Betty continued to go to meetings, attending by speakerphone when the weather was too inclement or she was feeling poorly. Because those of her faith don’t believe in society’s false governance, she’s never voted in a public election. Her daughter Carol lived a few hours away, but Don left the family soon after he graduated from high school, reappearing just once in the late 1970s, and neither Carol nor Betty had heard from him in more than thirty years. He didn’t stay with the Truth; he once told Betty, “It’s too easy for me.” His mother feared he’d fallen away into the world.
She stayed fond of George’s memory and keeps pictures of the two of them in their outrageous finery on display in her home. “I thought a lot of George,” she said, using the same locution she had when talking about her father. “We had some very good years, a lot of fun together. But then it all went to his head. He’d have a drink and he thought he was Gorgeous. I liked it in the ring, but at home I didn’t want it. I wanted us to be a family.” If she had the same choice again, though, Betty said, she wouldn’t divorce George. She said this unbidden, during a ride to a favorite seafood restaurant. “In those days we didn’t know what we know now about alcohol and treatment,” she explained. “At the time, I didn’t know what to do, I really didn’t. I couldn’t keep putting the kids through that. I just kept hoping he’d stop.
“In a way,” she continued, “it’s my fault.” The white-haired woman’s eyes welled up and she looked away, to her right, out the passenger-side window of the car moving up the Pacific coast. From time to time a long trailer truck loaded with timber, slender tree trunks with the bark still on, went by on the two-lane road, just as they did in the Oregon logging country she grew up in. “I made him Gorgeous,” she said finally, “and he just couldn’t handle it.”
Chapter 21
WHAT BOB DYLAN SAW
When he left the turkey ranch, George moved his robes and supplies of ersatz-gold bobby pins into the House of Serfas, a favorite L.A. watering hole. A combination restaurant, saloon, and motel in Inglewood, it sat at the top of View Park Hill, where three good-size streets came together—the HOS motto was: “Where Stocker, LaBrea, Overhill, and Good Friends Meet.” The thirty-two small units in back were mostly rented out to the Dodgers and Angels baseball players, and to other bar regulars when, as one of them, L.A. Times sportswriter John Hall, put it, “we were between wives.”
Ernie Serfas, the Greek-American who owned the place with his brother Nick, was very proud of his heritage and a big wrestling fan; he’d grown up idolizing the Greek champion Jim Londos. Serfas was convinced that his buddy and excellent customer was Greek, too, on his mother’s side. George had reeled off a couple of Greek phrases he’d learned from the James family back in Houston and embellished a bit to seal their kinship. “The Hill,” as the House of Serfas was also known due to its location, was an early prototype for both the sports bar and the singles bar. The booths were red leather and behind the bar, instead of mirrors, Serfas had commissioned colorful paintings of voluptuous sirens enticing sailors to their doom, lit with a special blue light. All the baseball and football players, sportswriters, and other sharpies who frequented the place had a long-running home stand there wi
th another L.A. team: the young women who came to the Hill to meet them. “It was a big meat market,” said Hall with some satisfaction. “Some of the waitresses there were a part of it, too.” Such was the female availability, Serfas said, that prostitutes couldn’t do any business there. “I didn’t want them, anyway,” he said. “The sheriff in L.A. County then was a Greek, a good guy, and I wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass him.”
So as not to miss any of the good times, Bud Furillo, sports editor of the Herald Examiner, would call Mike LeBell at the Olympic and ask what was going to happen in the wrestling matches that night. Then he’d knock off two or three clever paragraphs about the results, file his story in the afternoon, and go right to the Hill after work. George was in his element here, friends with the deferential owners, surrounded by admiring men and willing women, in a booze dispensary where good ballyhoo was appreciated. When he was in town, he held court, standing with a glass of Jack Daniel’s, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and slacks, his Gorgeous hair pinned under a tam or beret. He told jokes, he did his card tricks, and Serfas said he saw George hypnotize people, too, though that could have been a work. George joined the poker games that went on in the motel rooms, and he dated a string of exotic dancers. In this, his stripper period, as one friend called it, George’s dalliances were all brief.
George got more recognition than any of the ballplayers, but to him they were peers. On one occasion, though, George did remind the jocks of his star status. He bet a few Rams he was drinking with that he could bring one of their games at Memorial Coliseum to a halt. The seven footballers each put up $100 and George put up $700; Ernie held the money. George told Nick Serfas, who was occasionally playing the Jefferies role by then, to get out the monkey suit and fill the spray gun. That Sunday, about five minutes into the first quarter, George—in one of his outlandish robes, valet leading the way—paraded up from the tunnel entrance to the Serfas brothers’ seats, thirty-seven rows up. The fans stirred and someone yelled, “Look, it’s Gorgeous George, he’s at the game!” Soon the referees were looking up to find the source of the commotion, then some of the players did, too. Finally. Amid the chaos, one of the officials called time-out. “There goes our 700 bucks,” said one of the betting Rams to another. Not entirely. When they all got back to the Hill that night and George collected, he dropped the folded bills on the bar and announced, “We’re having a $1,400 party.”