by John Capouya
She’d met George before when she dressed up some wrestling publicity pictures he was in, and when they ran into each other again, George was already thinking about adding some pulchritude to his act. He’d seen the reaction to Lillian Ellison, who became the Fabulous Moolah, earlier in her career when she was Slave Girl Moolah. As the sexy helpmate indentured to the Elephant Boy (Bill Olivas), she wore leopard-print sandals and a dress that fell off one shoulder, like the outfits Jane wore in the Tarzan movies. One of her challengers was Daisy May, the girl from L’il Abner’s Dogpatch come to life (with one letter of her name changed), who wore extremely short, ragged shorts and a blouse tied across her midriff with a deeply plunging neckline. George needed a new valet, and he always needed female companionship.
A business proposition, he told Cherie—could she stop by his room after the show to discuss? (In her telling of this story she didn’t suspect his interest went further, which seems uncharacteristically naive.) When she went to his hotel room, Cherie said, George was in a smoking jacket and in his cups, and he made some crude advances, which she rebuffed. As she walked back to the elevator and began urgently pushing the buttons, George followed her out into the hall, bellowing drunkenly and “calling me every foul name you can think of.”
So she married him, naturally. After apologies and flowers were issued, she said, she agreed to become his valette. She took over the Jefferies role and added her own flair, including but not limited to her showcasing those legs in fishnet hose that ran all the way up to her valette-tay’s posterior. Above she wore a short black jacket; a white shirt with either a bow tie or a string tie; heavy, dark eye makeup; and bright red lipstick. One sportswriter particularly liked what he saw, leering in print at the “copper-haired cutie-pie, measurements 35-20-34.”
After George’s death, Cherie told interviewers he’d been twenty-eight years older than her, but the difference was really fourteen years. Cherie also maintained that during the first year or so she traveled with G.G., as she always called him, before they were married in Benson, Arizona, in October 1958, their relationship was professional and they “weren’t intimate.” But that was almost certainly a work. Cherie had two daughters, Shari and Bobbette, from a previous marriage, and in August of 1959 she and George had a son, Gary Wayne.
Unlike Betty, who operated mostly behind the scenes, Cherie loved to perform in the ring. She adopted the deadpan, dignified air of the male valets, never cracking a smile. George and some of the other boys tried to break her mask by whispering filthy comments into her ears that the marks couldn’t hear, but she never wavered. As time went on Cherie boldly got involved in the stunts and brawls, and took some bumps and potatoes of her own. Once in Odessa, Texas, George had arranged with the local babyface that Cherie would bash him in the head with the spray gun. “I talked to him,” George told his wife before the match. “He won’t do anything to you, don’t worry.” So she clocked him, and as he was supposed to, the babyface went after George instead. However, an irate, inebriated fan charged the ring, threw a body block at Cherie, and cracked three of her ribs as she slammed into the turnbuckle.
Cherie also played a prominent role—a bigger one than she’d bargained for—in an infamous sequence of matches that began one Toronto evening in March 1959. George’s tilt against hometown boy “Whipper” Billy Watson in the Maple Leaf Gardens began as usual, with the valette spritzing the ring with the fragrant odor of Chanel Number 10. However, this match, as advertised heavily by promoter Frank Tunney, carried an unprecedented gimmick: If he lost, Watson vowed, he would retire, a threat the besotted locals took as dire. If George lost, the result would be even more unthinkable: The famous peroxided locks would be immediately shorn in the ring. It’s not clear why George would have agreed to lose this “hair match”; perhaps a substantial bonus payment did the trick. He succumbed to Watson’s Canuck Commando, a variant on the sleeper hold, in front of fourteen thousand screaming fans, whereupon a wooden stool was placed in the middle of the ring. To save her master from the ignominy of the waiting barber, Cherie immediately sat down on the stool and refused to move. But the forces of order hauled her away and George, wearing just his white trunks and boots, was, as one Toronto paper described it, transformed into Yul Brynner, as Cherie sobbed uncontrollably. She gathered the clipped Gorgeous hair in a towel. It would be preserved in a special urn, the newspaper informed its readers, and then offered to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Immediately after the shearing George ran ashamedly from the ring, trying to cover up his shorn scalp with both arms. The next day’s headline was GORGEOUS JUST ISN’T AFTER WHIP WINS, and the caption to the accompanying photo read: “Hi, Baldy!”
Very soon thereafter George was a celebrity guest on the popular TV game show I’ve Got a Secret, hosted at that point by Garry Moore. The celebrity panel—Bess Myerson, the former Miss America; actress Betsy Palmer, who was in The Last Angry Man that year; Bill Cullen, a future host of the show; and comedian Henry Morgan—couldn’t guess George’s secret: He was wearing a blond wig over his stubble, which Cherie ceremoniously removed for the audience and the stumped panel.
Of course there had to be a rematch with Whipper Watson, but George didn’t have any marcel left to bet. So he put up Cherie’s hair. She only agreed, she said, “because I was told G.G. would get the win somehow.” But there was a double cross, either by the promoters or by George betraying his red-haired wife. She was furious, struggling mightily against the men who held her for the clipping, and her surprise and anger appeared to be genuine. Unlike George, Cherie didn’t get shaved completely, but her hair was shorn quite short; afterward she made the promoter buy her a human-hair wig.
Adding some sex appeal to his matches proved a good thing for George and it’s still a wrestling staple. The classic combination is beefcake (the male wrestler) paired with cheesecake, a female “manager,” preferably scantily clad. Once again George kept his relationship with his wife under wraps and in the ring they showed each other no affection, rarely touching. He acted the irascible master and she the longsuffering servant. As he did with Jefferies, George turned on this loyal helpmate in the ring. After a loss, he would blame her for his defeat, remonstrating with her and drawing back a fist; she’d counter by threatening him with the spray gun. This churlishness played well with the marks, making them angrier at George, but it also distanced the wrestler and the valette. In the subliminal script they acted out, her sexuality meant nothing to him; it was only for the crowd.
Cherie’s presence created yet another facet in the Gorgeous One’s already complex presentation, raising new questions and reviving familiar ones about the wrestler and just where his sexual loyalties might lie. Who or what was this queenly brute, really, this killer fruitcake? As Cherie noted, “George didn’t really come off as gay,” like Keith Franks, who wrestled as Adorable Adrian Adonis, or the bizarrely cross-dressed Adrian Street, both of whom effected less subtle “queer” personae in the ring. Yet George was also the furthest thing from a straitlaced macho man like Thesz. The Gorgeous One seemed neither completely manly nor wholly feminine. Instead, Cherie said perceptively, the Gorgeous persona was really something in between…
Chapter 23
BETWEEN A FLIT AND A MINCE
When George’s fame reached a certain critical mass, he could no longer be denied the appropriate tribute: a Gorgeous George movie. Hedda Hopper, who kept the nation abreast of Gorgeous doings in her syndicated Hollywood column, called on the industry to “celluloid” him, and in 1949 Republic Pictures complied. That year Carol Reed’s The Third Man with Orson Welles, White Heat with James Cagney, and All the King’s Men with a bravura performance by Broderick Crawford were all released and they’ve since become film classics. Gorgeous George’s first and only movie would not be joining them. Alias the Champ compares more favorably to another 1949 film attempting to cash in on an athlete’s popularity, The Story of Seabiscuit, a racing saga into which the producers somehow managed to inject a teenage
Shirley Temple.
Alias the Champ never aspired to cinematic grandeur, but at least Republic reconsidered the original title, Pardon My Toehold. When it was released, Alias played mostly as the second act in double features, and George’s flick had a run in Mexico, where it was entitled Jorge El Magnífico. Reaction to this B picture was drily distilled in the L.A. Times sports pages when previewing a 1950 match: “Gorgeous George, who may win an Oscar for his performance in ‘Alias the Champ’—and again, may not—will wrestle Lord Blears of England…”
It’s a murder mystery with a wrestling backdrop, and six of G.G.’s ring buddies had roles. Hoodlums from New York are attempting to take over California’s upstanding grunt-and-groan game, and when George won’t play along, they frame him for murder. Homicide Lieutenant Ron Peterson, played by Robert Rockwell (of Our Miss Brooks) uses a replay of a kinescoped match to cleverly crack the case, with the help of George’s lovely manager, Lorraine Connors. As might be expected, sparks of romance fly between the lieutenant and the manageress, but Alias is really a showcase for George, who plays himself quite naturally and confidently, holding the big screen. What’s really remarkable about the film, though, is the high level of camp he reaches, seeming to channel Talullah Bankhead, Bette Davis, and Mae West in an arch and hilariously queenly turn.
“Beat it, Junior, you bore me,” he tells the detective grandly at one point, flicking him away with one dangling wrist. Later he scornfully advises the lieutenant to “See my valet; he has a knack with children.” (Jack Hunter got this screen role over Jake Brown, for some reason.) As George decamps—or demanifests—from one scene he stands in the doorway and gestures like a bossy dowager aunt for Audrey Long to accompany him. “Come, little one,” he pronounces grandly. “It’s time for my marcel.”
Most American men in the postwar era hewed considerably closer to the ethos of machismo. In America’s idea of itself and the images entertainment provided—including war movies such as The Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne, and A Walk in the Sun, with square-jawed Dana Andrews—this was a nation of conquering tough guys who’d fought and died in a just cause. If there were other ways of being a man, Americans didn’t seem to want to know about them. In Hollywood, gay or bisexual stars’ greatest fear was that they would be outed, for which the sentence, imposed immediately, was box-office death. The fictional world of detective stories and noir films, created before the war, was still influential, and in it contempt for anything queer was overt. In Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe takes a punch from a very handsome young man named Carol Lundgren and shrugs it off. “It was meant to be a hard one,” he narrates, “but a pansy has no iron in his bones.” The detective knocks the boy unconscious, but not before calling his older boyfriend a queen and a fag.
In this attitudinal landscape the apparition of a wrestling man with a feminine tinge, who exuded vanity—thought to be a female trait, and tolerable only in women—was quite a shock. Some sensed that the disturbance George caused was sexual in nature, and thus alarming. In Tacoma, Washington, public-safety commissioner James T. Kerr demanded that the local board of censors investigate G.G.’s matches. These performances, he felt, might constitute a threat to public morals. (No outcome was discoverable.) George was convincingly, even excessively heterosexual; of that there’s no reasonable doubt. But since he raised the issue, many wondered. When Bob Hope and Burt Lancaster agreed to work with George at the charity circus, the first question they asked his stand-in, Vic Holbrook, was: Is George gay? Holbrook was astonished that two Hollywood showmen didn’t recognize a performance when they saw one.
George clearly invited the curses and shouts of “Queer!” and “Sissy!” directed at him, becoming a lightning rod in the arenas. In his business any strong reaction was a good one; homophobia was just another form of heat. Yet, amid the indignation the crowds worked themselves into over George’s taboo behavior, they admired his daring, too. A few onlookers may have been truly angry, but wider swaths of the postwar audiences enjoyed being startled by George in his certain, special ways. The electricity coming off the Gorgeous One’s strutting form wasn’t just garden-variety stimulation—that jolt, though powerful, was as old as pornography—but a new and ambiguous frisson, a much more subtle sensation. He invited onlookers to enjoy his thrilling transgressions, but only vicariously. So much of what Gorgeous George did and said set himself apart from the audience, and that positioning allowed the public to participate without endorsing him or becoming like him—whatever that meant, exactly. Being a “sissy”? A “fruit”? No, not them.
By determinedly keeping his family life a secret—a habit so ingrained it was noted in his obituaries—George kept his sexual identity as mysterious and open to interpretation as possible. In its profile of George, Time magazine seemed genuinely puzzled. “He doesn’t seem to mind playing his swishy role,” the writer noted. “But he steps out of character whenever anybody asks nosey questions about his wife and two kids. ‘Let’s leave the better half of my life outta this, yes?’” Though of course neither effeminacy nor cross-dressing is the same thing as homosexuality, George’s drag turn compelled some to defend his heterosexual honor. Hannibal Coons, writing in Sport magazine, simply denied unequivocally that the wrestler acted effeminate. “George never uses a swishy voice or a swishy gesture. George is above that. His role is that of the powdered, beautifully dressed, ageless, worldly monarch.” In 1948, the early days of Gorgeousness, a San Francisco paper ran a picture of George with his robe open and the caption “Not a Sissy Physique.” When George wrestled Ernie Dusek at Madison Square Garden the next year, New York Times sports columnist Arthur Daley saw that he was only playacting—but found that as objectionable as the real thing. As the match unfolded, Daley wrote, “feelings of disgust grew in leaps and bounds…A display of effeminacy in a man, even simulated effeminacy, is nauseating and Gorgeous George has made himself over into a most revolting character.”
The definition of what he did in his Gorgeous act can be parsed very fine, the degree of swishiness debated. George called it “flitting,” as in “I flitted to the ring.” Yet director John Waters, a gay man who was inspired by George, stressed that the wrestling diva didn’t mince. It’s an important distinction, Waters said: George had a queenly manner, yet “he wasn’t a big mincing queen, a bad stereotype that a straight man would use to put others down, which would have been offensive.” Whatever Gorgeous George was, or pretended to be, it wasn’t gay per se. The Beautiful Bicep, as one scribe dubbed him, sent out deliberately mixed messages, and it was in this realm of uncertainty and contradictory possibilities that George did his most original work. Newsweek spoke to George’s complexity, declaring that “this anomalous figure is a mass of incongruities, even to the epithets hurled at him from the gallery, such as: ‘T’row de bum out.’ Gorgeous George looks anything but a bum…”
As Gorgeous, George was a snob, a faux aristocrat who put on airs and derided the peasants. But he was also a manual laborer, and on some level, audiences must have known that George was really a working stiff, lampooning the rich and pretentious. He was a sniveling coward who ran away from conflict—and then he beat people up, absorbing pain and punishment in the next instant. He was a despised heel, yet even in the arenas, cauldrons in which George’s villainy incited bellowed rage and thrown projectiles, he was in some ways beloved. He provoked the fans like no other, giving them license to match their bizarre behavior to his, and for that they were secretly grateful. As writer Al Geronomus acutely observed in a Boxing Illustrated piece, many in the wrestling audiences “jeered him with a smile and hated him with affection.”
Most powerfully of all, he was effeminate and macho, butch and femme, gay and not gay; all of these things at once. At the end of Milton Berle’s televised drag skits he always removed his wig or other female accoutrements, showing himself as a man. Similarly, George followed his prissy antics with the manly act of wrestling, and this transition probably served a simila
r function, un-womaning both performers. In addition, whatever gay possibilities did adhere to his girlie man act were divorced from any overt homosexuality, and thus less threatening. The boys wouldn’t care to hear it, but in a sport in which two barely clothed and oiled men try to mount each other, there’s a bit of a homoerotic subtext. However, as theater professor Sharon Mazer pointed out in her book Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, wrestling is “contact between men with built-in denials” that it’s sexual.
More importantly, the wrestler earned a star entertainer’s immunity. Gorgeous George was an accepted fact of life, practically an institution—if he was swishy, he was a celebrated swish. This may have served George well when the 1950s turned their most intolerant. The Red Scare and the congressional hearings fronted by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy are usually thought of as a witch hunt intended to root out Communists in American government. But investigators were also obsessed with rooting out homosexuals. The Senate’s “pervert inquiry,” begun in 1950, purportedly found two hundred gays in the civil service and the military and many were dismissed for “sexual causes.” In that climate, sexual insouciance in someone else—a civilian or a mark—might have gotten them punished. But George sailed on by. As he put it with characteristic bluntness, “I became so well known that people would say, ‘There goes Gorgeous George,’ instead of ‘There goes a pansy.’”
His gender-bending was perfectly calibrated—titillating but not threatening—and once again his timing was excellent. In the postwar period Americans began to allow themselves slightly more open expressions of their intense, perennial curiosity about things done in the dark. The Kinsey Report, released in 1948, made thinking and talking about sexual mores respectable; it was scientific. In a more lurid, voyeuristic show of our fascination with sex and gender, the country became obsessed with a former World War II private from New York, George Jorgensen, who went to Denmark and came back in 1952 as Christine Jorgensen. One reporter in the swarms asked her if and where her former male genitalia had been preserved; suddenly a penis was front-page news. Jorgensen managed to live gracefully in her new incarnation, and even became a performer and entertainer; as George did, she played nightclub dates in Hollywood and Las Vegas.