by John Capouya
Only once did George issue a direct denial of homosexuality. “I am not a you-know-what,” he told an interviewer in 1951. “If you read history, you know that men wore curls and lace before women did.” He might have made one other implicitly hetero statement in 1957 when he announced: “I am suing Confidential magazine for the unauthorized use of my name, which has been copyrighted, without my permission. I am seeking $250,000 in damages.” It’s not legally possible to copyright a name (he could have trademarked Gorgeous George, but federal records indicate he didn’t), so if there really was a suit, it went nowhere.
The reason for George’s bluster, aside from the usual one, publicity, seems to be that he was mentioned in an article on Liberace, who was suing the magazine for $25 million over the same piece. The offending story was touted on the cover under a picture of the grinning pianist and singer, who showed perfect white teeth and wore a tiger-print bow tie. The headline read EXCLUSIVE: WHY LIBERACE’S THEME SONG SHOULD BE, “MAD ABOUT THE BOY!” Confidential detailed Liberace’s pursuit of a young, “innocent” male publicist. “The sour note came when the Kandelabra Kid tried to turn public relations into private relations,” the magazine noted in its trademark style. One such encounter, the writer said, had “all the lively action and wild comedy of a TV wrestling match. A referee certainly would have penalized the panting pianist for illegal holds.” When a purring Liberace came after the “reluctant ballyhoo boy” a second time, the story recounted, “before you could say Gorgeous George, the pair were playing a return wrestling match.”
Presumably, it was being mentioned in this gay context that angered George. Then again, George had never liked the panting pianist. He felt—and he complained loud and long—that “Liberace stole my entire act, including the candelabra!” G.G. maintained that he’d had his valets carry lit candelabra to the ring early in his career in Texas, though fire marshals had later forbidden the flaming prop. In all likelihood this wasn’t true, but it’s certainly possible that Liberace was influenced by the Gorgeous act. Though he became a star in 1944, the pianist never even dared to wear a white tuxedo instead of the traditional black onstage until 1952, and it wasn’t until 1955, when George’s fabulosity had been on national display for seven years or more, that Liberace first performed with a gold lamé jacket and tie, moving from there into glittering outfits of brocade and beads, and then into capes, and still later, wigs. Seeing George’s success in the mainstream may have emboldened Liberace to make a glittering, queenie show of himself. Of course at the time most admirers of the singing pianist, including many older women, didn’t know or wouldn’t admit that their Lee was gay. To them Liberace was exquisitely sensitive, too much so for brutish men to understand—just the rationale many soprano fans used to explain their fealty to Gorgeous George.
The knowledge that George wasn’t gay, and didn’t act effeminate or cross-dress in private, begs the question: Where did he get the moves? How did the Harrisburg Rat and brawling wrestler learn his provocative performance art? His voguing seemed so natural, as if this was the real George or at least a real part of him. It’s accepted lore in the wrestling world that Sterling “Dizzy” Davis, George’s boyhood friend, was gay or bisexual, and that George accepted him without any difficulty. It’s possible that George took more than the orchid gimmick from Dizzy (who’d used gardenias). More likely, though, he learned to flit in the big, bad city, where everyone goes to experience—or at least to brush up against—the forbidden and the extreme.
When George came to New York in the mid-1930s, Prohibition had only recently been repealed. During that period of banned vice, a culture emerged, especially in America’s big cities, that was much more daring and permissive. In the 1920s white New Yorkers with money had gone up to Harlem to get their kicks at Negro nightclubs and brothels. By the early 1930s another marginalized culture broke out in “the Pansy Craze.” Now New Yorkers went to Greenwich Village, and to Harlem again, to drink and watch gay comedians and singers like the campy wit Gene Malin, as well as “ambisextrous” female impersonators, including Ray Bourbon. Soon these acts were supplemented by a formerly underground event known as the drag ball. Blacks and whites attended these contests in Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom and the Rockland Palace, which held six thousand people. Mae West wrote a play called The Drag, which opened only in New Jersey due to legal problems stemming from her earlier Broadway play Sex. To cast this second one West auditioned fifty cross-dressing men she’d met at Paul & Joe’s, a gay bar on West Ninth Street in the Village. The drags spread to the theater district around Times Square and other Manhattan arenas, some of which, including the St. Nicholas Arena at Sixty-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue, also hosted wrestling.
At the drag balls gay men, stunningly transformed into the most exotic and outrageous women, would parade down a central runway. A panel of judges would declare one of them the most fabulous, the queen of the drag. Each contestant would take on a distinct and complete persona—one might be a Spanish señorita, another a Southern debutante at her coming-out party—and a new identity. Just like George and the boys in their ring characters, the draggers reinvented themselves, and then performed with high drama. These lovely and regal creations didn’t mince, it should be noted: They strutted.
Everyone—or everyone in the nightlife, the show people, demimonders, and bon vivants—went to the drags. Men took their wives and dates. Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom, the boxer who would later hire George to perform at his L.A. nightclub, was a habitué in those days. By the time George got to New York, after Repeal, another cultural shift was under way, a reversal that would again repress gays with “degeneracy laws.” But the drags continued to be held, as long as the police were paid off sufficiently, and at them liquor was still being served, though it was now, less excitingly, legal. On an off night, would twenty-two-year-old George Wagner, a young wrestler with a taste for the outlandish and the first real money he’d ever made in his pockets, have gone to the drags? Quite likely. If he did, would he have taken mental notes on the gorgeous creatures he saw there? Almost certainly.
In the late 1940s, when George was becoming a national celebrity, a magazine called Sports Week attacked him in print. This hatchet job, by one Marty Berg, was headlined PHONY SISSY’S MAT FRAUD. “This George gee is positively the last word in rassle finesse,” Berg hammered into his typewriter, “all because he has all the earmarks of what we kids used to call a ‘sissy’…the mannerisms that go with a swish-boy. They went wild for him on the West Coast, where the sissy production runs high, anyway.”
Gorgeous George used to be George Wagner, the story revealed, and showed a picture of him in the early, black-haired days. “He’s emerged with a new look and that makes him a phony,” Berg declared, “a bilker of the public,” though how one could condemn a pro wrestler for adopting a ring persona at that point is hard to fathom. Berg then floats the notion that G.G. might have gotten the inspiration “for affecting the sissy business after he’d visited a ‘drag’ at the St. Nick in NY, where those shindigs used to be popular.” The caption under the photo read “Pantywaist George.”
Chapter 24
INTO THE DRINK
Betty heard about George’s new wife, including a bit from him, and she was curious. One day she got word that he and Cherie were making a promotional appearance near the turkey ranch, lending their presence to the opening of a service station around Redlands. She didn’t think of it as spying, exactly; Betty and her sister simply wanted to get a look at the new Mrs. George. She borrowed her hairdresser’s car so George wouldn’t recognize her purple Packard and watched through a store window across the street. Very few people came, and that led Betty to think of the time she’d attended a Jehovah’s Witness assembly with him in the same area a few years earlier, when he’d been mobbed by kids and adults alike.
Betty watched as George handed out a few Georgie pins at the gas station. Then she saw Cherie and for a moment caught her breath. First, Betty thought she recognized her, that
she’d seen her around Redlands before, maybe at Pinky’s, where she was a cocktail waitress. And that raised certain suspicions. But mostly she was taken aback by Cherie’s looks, her stature, the way she appeared standing next to George. “She was my size,” Betty said, remembering that odd feeling. “She was pretty, too, I’ll give her that, and she had a nice figure. I mean, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. She could have been my sister.” Betty didn’t say anything to Eve.
Betty’s sense was right, even more than she knew. George was trying to re-create what he’d lost. Just as he and Betty had done, George and Cherie bought a little camper trailer, pulling it behind their car as they traveled with their children—her two daughters and their infant son, Gary—to wrestling dates. Cherie called this time, early in their marriage, the fondest memory of her life with George, just as Betty did. “We camped at different parks, including a big one near Las Vegas,” Cherie said. “Gary was in a little playpen, and I remember George romping and playing with his son and step-daughters. Other wrestlers were staying there, too; they’d have us over, then we’d have them over. It was a wonderful time that I’ll never forget.” Like the curator of a living diorama, George placed his new family members in the same tableau his former wife and children had occupied in his own happiest days. He left out only Judy the dog.
There were differences in the dynamics of the two families, certainly, and as even George must have realized on some level, he wasn’t the same man. Cherie was tougher and harder-edged than Betty, which made her a more capable and more frequent adversary for George. She battled harder and could drink with George longer, due in part to her upbringing (her French parents had wine on the dinner table every night). George did maintain a certain continuity in his two marriages, however, bringing to the second the same deficits that helped ruin the first. He was still gambling, for one. When Gary was a toddler, George, Cherie, and the three children settled in Reseda, not far from Windsor Hills, in Los Angeles County. One night Cherie came home while a poker game was in progress at their house and saw her fur coat lying in the middle of the table. George had put it up as collateral.
Drunk or sober, George wasn’t a lucky gambler. And, though he loved to show off his card tricks and manipulations, he wasn’t a very good one. Once after wrestling in Nashville, with Cherie joining him in the ring, George lost all his earnings in Printers Alley, that city’s French Quarter. Cherie went to the casino the next day and threatened to sue them for taking advantage of George in his drunken condition, but got no satisfaction. They’d driven to Nashville in the camper trailer (without the children on this trip), and when George was out gambling that night, a small pack of wrestlers decided to pull a swerve on the couple. Jessica Rogers, Penny Banner, the Fargo Brothers, and Ray Stevens got together and moved the trailer to another spot. The swerve worked: When George and Cherie got home early that morning, inebriated and infuriated, respectively, they were certainly surprised. And it took them a long, acrimonious while to find their all-too-mobile home. When the wrestlers saw Cherie, still fuming, the next morning and heard how badly her evening had gone beforehand, none of them wanted to take any credit for the swerve. Instead, they sympathized, then slunk away.
As Betty had done, Cherie began to stay home more, so George used fill-in valets when he traveled. Without her along, he missed dates, including one on a New York swing for promoter Vince McMahon Sr., and the state athletic commission suspended him. The demand for George had already begun to cool. Television was no longer an exciting novelty but a less remarkable fact, and broadcasters were trying to attract more upscale viewers and advertisers. By the mid-1950s wrestling no longer aired much on the networks, shunted instead onto local stations, where it would remain for decades. A younger cadre of wrestlers, including Vern Gagne, Killer Kowalski, Pat O’Connor, Chief Don Eagle, and Yukon Eric (he of the missing ear) had by now equaled George in popularity, or surpassed him. The mention of George’s name, or a knowing reference to his arrogant personality, still drew smiles to American faces, but he’d lost some of his power to outrage and inflame. Now he was regarded with something more like affection—Mean Old George had become Good Old George.
Tom Drake, the Wrestling Sergeant, who’d worked lucrative main events with George in Georgia during the Korean War, encountered him again in Jasper, Alabama, in 1960. Drake had just been elected to the Alabama legislature; he would serve two terms as the speaker of the house under Governor George Wallace. So he was now billed as the Wrestling Legislator. Drake noticed right away that George had developed quite a stomach; he’d lost muscle tone and put on weight. He still had the robes and the pins, but his fancy ring attire was looking a little worn. The headliner was driving himself on this trip, without a valet, and when he got to Jasper’s old armory, he lacked the energy Drake remembered. He didn’t need it. After everyone in the locker room got dressed, oiled, and pumped, the promoter came in and told them to stand down. No one had showed up; there weren’t enough fans in the house to go on. The promoter gave George a few dollars for expenses and gas, and Drake and the others reached into their pockets as well.
Though they were fewer, on good nights he could still give the fans their money’s worth. In 1961, at the very end of his career, he performed again at the Aqua Theater, on Green Lake in Seattle. Here the ring was surrounded by water, and a lifeguard or second referee circled the floating wrestling action in a rowboat, with a concrete grandstand facing the action on shore. Like the gun introduced early in a mystery that must go off at some point, the laws of drama demanded that the water come into play. It was a cool July evening, and by the time the main event got started around nine-thirty, a dip was less than appealing, but a deal was a deal. When George, wearing a billowing red satin number festooned with pink lace, was set to lose a fall to Leaping Leo Garibaldi, he still had the athleticism—and the willingness—to sell Leo’s dropkick by hurling himself backward over the ropes and into the drink. When George hit the cold, twelve-foot-deep lake water, the alarmed announcer shouted: “He can’t swim!” (He could.)
George still felt at home around the boys, and he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. When George worked another small town with Drake, this one in Tennessee, a couple of the boys on the card had heard that he was afraid of snakes (he may have had a bad experience with one back in Harrisburg’s Buffalo Bayou). After George’s main event was over and he’d showered and changed, one of the local workers offered him a cigar. When he opened the cigar box, the wrestler’s pet garter snake raised its head. It was just a tiny harmless thing, but George recoiled, jumping back into the metal lockers, yelling “God damn!” Then he had to laugh—they’d got him. On another night Cherie substituted beer for perfume in the spray gun and gave him a spritz in the ring, trying to get him to react out of character, and he appreciated that, too. But a swerve a day was no longer keeping the blues away.
If she hadn’t known it before, Cherie soon learned her husband was “a full-blown alcoholic,” as she described him. “He couldn’t control it—one drink and he’d be off to the races.” Cherie thought George used alcohol to fuel the outrageous behavior his Gorgeous persona constantly required. Without booze, she said, “he didn’t really have the nerve to do those things.” Betty never had an explanation beyond what she saw as George’s fundamental insecurity; the reasons for his drinking never came up between them, just the results.
The forensics of alcoholism is always very speculative, especially at such a remove of time. It does run in families; however, there’s no sign that drink was involved in George’s mother’s invalidism and death. Poppa Wagner seems to have lived a long life that, though not always easy, was uncomplicated by alcohol. He’d have a drink with Betty on the porch of the turkey ranch, but one was all he cared for. George was immersed in an alcohol-soaked business, where drinking was encouraged and considered manly. And life on the wrestling road led many to drink; it was rootless, lonely, and pain was a near constant.
It seems, though, that Geor
ge was troubled before he became one of the boys. The Wagners were poorer than most, but George’s true deprivation growing up would have been emotional, internal. His family life was dominated by Bessie’s illness, which literally uprooted the family as they moved around the Midwest and to Houston in search of a cure. In the young firstborn son, the unspoken possibility of losing his mother must have created tremendous fear. When she was capable of it, Bessie was a loving mother to George, but she couldn’t parent fully or consistently; she needed constant attention.
At times she was all but paralyzed and her arms and legs were suspended in canvas slings, used to move her so she wouldn’t get bedsores. Cherie described this in a videotaped interview for the Canadian television documentary. An older woman, close to death from emphysema, Cherie interrupted herself frequently with fits of coughing. Her face was gaunt; as she talked, her own failing health seemed to stand in for George’s mother’s. Cherie demonstrated Bessie’s incapacity for the camera by raising both arms high over her shoulders and dangling them as if suspended, her elbows bent, hands flopping limp. In this portrayal George’s mother looked both a pathetic and a scary creature, incapable of embrace.
Instead, George may have gotten something more intermittent and contingent, closer to appreciation: sincere praise and gratitude from his parents for helping his invalid mother. When that happens, psychologists tell us, the result can be a narcissist, someone who comes to rely on—to require—admiration from others, the reflected glory the original Narcissus saw in the water. He may feel inadequate on some level but along with that comes a kind of grandiosity. His need for attention and approval becomes his right to have it: He deserves it. Artists, including the geniuses, are often narcissistic (as are elite athletes). They turn their need for admiration into creative achievement, and if they succeed, that gives them a certain social license to strut.