by John Capouya
George wasn’t a syndrome or a walking pathology, but he did create the life of the ultimate narcissist. He chose a profession based on calling attention to oneself, then devised the Gorgeous act, in which he shouted out his superiority. Television became an incredibly potent enabler, providing a whole new body of attention, which the narcissist confuses with love. George swam in it, and may have drowned in it. Cruelly, when adult George was given the love he needed as a child, by Betty, he couldn’t fully accept it. He didn’t know how to take it in, process it, and extract the benefit; he’d never had the practice.
In another emotional reading of his ring act, George, having seen his mother get the attention he craved, dolled himself up like her to get attention himself. Taken even further, he’d be angry at Bessie for her unintentional abandonment, and so he called down condemnation on her—that is, him in female form—from the rafters and the angry crowds. In this scenario, the valet, the little, loyal, ever-attentive helpmate, is George.
When the admiration in George’s mirror was disrupted—the failure of his first marriage, and later, the public fever for him abating—his drinking accelerated. Alcohol was the second outside force he looked to for comfort that failed to love him back sufficiently. At first drinking reliably numbed the pain; then it didn’t. After a while it caused him even more pain. But still he clung.
If his childhood did George damage, however, it was also his gift. The boy must have learned to read his mother’s changing condition and availability very closely: “How is she feeling? What can she do and not do?” And, most fundamentally, “What can she give me?” He’d become very adept at getting her attention, working mightily to pull it toward himself through her suffering. As an adult, George could sense very acutely what drew people and what lost them, and his success as an entertainer was based on that ability. In his private life, he knew what to say and do to make women lovers and men loyal. That sounds coldly manipulative, but in life—in George—it produced warmth. He wanted to be liked, and became truly likable. Just as there was a tinge of genuine meanness in Mean Old George that made his ring villainy so compelling, there was real good in Good Old George.
Whatever led him to adopt his Gorgeous alter ego, changing identities as he did almost certainly contributed to George’s downfall. Artists have to take risks, but this one can be especially unmooring. Consistently, some of those who create new personae—from Papa Hemingway, the Great White Writer, to Tupac Shakur, the thug—flounder trying to reconcile the old and the new, or to incorporate both in a single coherent self. The mainstream culture can reward those who shock us with the transgressive ideas they embody and portray, but often there’s a price: These new, exaggerated selves no longer fit into life’s constraints. It seems that George had the imagination and determination to make his Gorgeous leap, but couldn’t continue to inhabit the extreme character he created. Ultimately, pitiably, he wasn’t able to live with his first self or live up to his second. Nor could he overcome the power of the past.
Chapter 25
THE ORCHID AND THE BUTTERFLY
I am the greatest! I cannot be defeated! All my so-called opponents are afraid of me, and they’re right to be afraid—because I am the king! I’m warning everybody right now: If this bum I’m fighting messes up the pretty waves in my hair, I’m going to kill him. I’ll tear off his arm! And if that uneducated punk somehow manages to beat me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off all my beautiful hair—and then I’ll take the next jet to Russia! But that will never happen, because I am the greatest!”
It’s George, of course, holding forth at a Las Vegas radio station in June of 1961. The bum he’s about to grapple with is Fred Blassie, and the venue, the new Convention Center just off the Strip. As boastful rants go, it’s a fine one, delivered with style and conviction. What sets it apart, however, is the audience, one particular listener. A much younger man, strong and athletic, he sits five or six feet away from George in the radio studio. He takes in the wrestler’s words and energy, processing them with his own quick mind. In what will become an increasingly rare event, this younger athlete—he’s a boxer—is quiet and still, smiling as he feels Gorgeous George’s braggadocio at work on him even though he understands perfectly that it’s a manufactured act, a gimmick. Perhaps he recognizes a like soul. The boxer’s name is Cassius Clay.
The nineteen-year-old Clay and the forty-six-year-old Gorgeous One sit on either side of the radio host—it might be Charlie Swan, at either KORK or KLAS—at a long wooden table. A short, fat-headed microphone stands on the table in front of each man. Standing behind them with his back against the studio’s rough cinder-block wall is Mel “Red” Greb, who’s promoting both of their upcoming bouts. The promoter wears black-framed glasses and his red hair slicked back; he’s about five-foot-seven and above him a huge wall clock counts off the minutes of the 1 P.M., half-hour show.
Clay has won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics, but he’s unproven as a professional fighter. Sports Illustrated calls him “an unsophisticated Olympic gold medalist who hasn’t run out of luck…physically and mentally immature.” Even his own trainer, Angelo Dundee, tells the reporters, “I can run down a list of twenty things he does wrong.” Clay’s in Las Vegas for his seventh pro fight (he won all the previous ones relatively easily); his opponent is Kolo “Duke” Sabedong, a hulking six-foot-six Hawaiian. This fight tops a Monday-night card, when the new Convention Center cannot be put to any more lucrative use. Like all of Clay’s matches to date, it won’t be televised.
Today he wears dark slacks, an open-collared white shirt, and a blazer patterned with small black and white checks. His new clothes fit him well. At this age Clay is still quite slender; at 195 pounds he’s grown since the Olympics, but shirtless in the ring a few nights later, his back looks almost concave. The young boxer’s arms are long snakes; his eighty-inch wingspan will make the Ali jab deadly. His muscles are supple and distributed smoothly, without prominent bulging, over a six-foot-three frame. Over those muscles his light brown skin with its moist, slightly oily texture, has the color and surface tension of a well-made cigar. His features are symmetrical, his face handsome, and his smile is engaging. He’s a superb athlete in top condition, and there’s something more: Clay has his own special energy.
Like the man he’ll become, Muhammad Ali, young Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. is singularly mutable: When he’s excited, his voice is high, up in George’s unexpected register, but at other, calmer times, it’s a deep rumble. He alternates between spurts of dynamism and near lethargy, when he seems to be recharging his power supply. Clay is already being called cocky and brash for his prediction that he’ll win the heavyweight championship of the world before he turns twenty-one. Many resent that claim—in this age, fight managers brag, not fighters. And black fighters’ boasts are the least appreciated. Yet many who come in contact with him in these early days are struck by how quiet, soft-spoken, and respectful he is—shy, they say, especially around girls. This afternoon Clay is either in a low gear or, since he is interviewed first, he may not be fully warmed up. When asked about the outcome of his ten-rounder against the thirty-one-year-old Sabedong, he says fairly mildly that “somebody’s got to go before the tenth, and you can bet it won’t be me.” Later he will remember: “I can’t say I was humble, but I wasn’t too loud.”
George waits his turn, wearing his usual loud clash of colors and knit tam over his blond curls. Juxtaposed with the tall fighter, he looks wider and whiter than ever, and he appears, as indeed he is, more than twice as old. But he still has the force of his Gorgeousness. Asked again about his match with Blassie, George hunches forward over the microphone, with one forearm on either side of the device, and testifies on his own behalf. “I am the Gorgeous One! Not only am I the best wrestler, the most highly skilled, with the greatest technique, but I’m also the most beautiful wrestler who ever lived! That’s why all these curs, these ignorant brutes, don’t want to take me on—they’re afraid of my brilliant style of w
restling. And they know that the fans only want to gaze upon my manly beauty.” Clay knows it’s a performance but still finds himself thinking, Man, I want to see this fight. It don’t matter if he wins or loses; I want to be there to see what happens.
A night or two later the two appear together on KLAS-TV, Channel 8, the local CBS affiliate, on sports editor Dick Porter’s segment, In This Corner. Afterward George, always affable with fellow athletes, invites the kid to come and see him work. “Red will bring you,” he tells Cassius. “And come by the locker room after, and we’ll talk.” Maybe George sensed a like soul as well; he seems inordinately interested in the young boxer. “One more thing,” he adds with a smile and a clap on the black man’s back: “You can stop calling me ‘sir.’ Just call me Gorgeous.”
Brash, young John F. Kennedy had just succeeded old, modest Ike, effectively archiving the 1950s and making the 1940s, when Gorgeous George came to stardom and television was new, seem positively archaic. JFK was promoted by his father, Joseph Kennedy, the Vince McMahon of American politics. The handsome president’s youthful vitality was something of a work (outside the bedroom), as he had already been diagnosed with Addison’s disease. But that fact didn’t fit the forty-three-year-old babyface’s image, so it was suppressed. In the televised presidential debates, broadcast to 70 million viewers, the ill-shaven, sweating Republican Richard Nixon seemed almost eager to play the heel.
The failed U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was just two months past; America’s Red enemies and the nuclear threat they were thought to represent were ever-present preoccupations. Daringly, given that surround, Cassius Clay gave statements to the Las Vegas press the week of his fight there that generated this headline: YOUNG FIGHTER CLAIMS RUSSIANS NOT SO BAD: HE SAYS REDS, U.S. CAN BE FRIENDS.
At the Olympics, Clay told the reporters, he’d actually met a Red or two. “When we moved into the Olympic Village we found we were neighbors with the Russians,” he said. “Some of them became friends for life.” He continued with this apostate line, adding that he saw the same friendly attitudes among the athletes from the other Eastern-bloc countries. He saw no reason, Clay concluded, why East and West could not live together in peace. As Muhammad Ali, he would make a similar declaration about another of America’s enemies. When resisting induction into the military during the war in Vietnam, he will famously say, “I got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
Las Vegas was booming: The Convention Center, 515,000 square feet on forty-five acres, had begun to bring in name-tagged tourists from all over the country, joining the gamblers and nightlifers who’d come before. Delta and National airlines just announced that they will extend their routes to serve the city. Vegas casinos and clubs had only been integrated a year before, averting threatened protest marches and boycotts. Previously Las Vegas had been so harshly segregated that the city was called “the Mississippi of the West.” In June 1961 that change was far from complete. Mel Greb booked rooms for Clay and his mother, Odessa Clay, at the Dunes in his own name, and when the hotel operators saw just who their guests were, they weren’t happy and let the promoter know it.
Young Cassius hadn’t yet rebelled against these kinds of racial realities, or let his opposition be known. He didn’t want to alienate his syndicate of white Southern sponsors, surely, but he also didn’t yet possess the consciousness and confidence to protest; he was only nineteen. (The myth of Clay throwing his Olympic gold medal into a river in disgust over racism in his native Louisville seems to have been just that.) When asked by Soviet reporters at the Olympics how he felt about representing a country that still denied him equal rights, in fact if not by law, he answered: “We have our best people working on that and the U.S. is still the greatest country in the world.”
Sammy Davis Jr. was performing at the Sands, and now, in theory, he could stay there overnight. (The other Rat Pack members played “the fabulous Copa Room” just before and after Sammy did.) Milton Berle, who’d vied with George as the most popular star of early TV, was doing two shows a night at the Flamingo. All the competing nightlife notwithstanding, George’s match with Classy Freddie Blassie was expected to fill the Convention Center on Friday night. Blassie, a Gorgeous George descendant—an arrogant, loudmouthed heel with bleached blond hair—was a skilled showman, too, with a real gift for projecting his heelishness and antagonizing the public. So convincing was he that George, at the end of his career and now evoking nostalgia in some wrestling fans, may well have been the babyface in their main event.
The Rotunda, the Convention Center’s bowl-shaped arena, is designed to look like a spaceship; topped with an eight-story-high, gleaming silver-colored dome, it resembles a flying saucer come to Earth just east of Paradise Road. Inside, that shape means there are no pillars or other obstructions blocking views from any of the 4,400 upholstered seats. With portable seating added, it holds over 7,500. It’s new, clean, and open—seeming to belong to another century than the old armories and legion halls, with their sagging, splintering seats, where George’s career had begun almost thirty years earlier. Greb, who promoted boxing and wrestling in Las Vegas for more than thirty years, has constructed a remarkable card. For four, three, or two dollars, any mat fan willing to forgo the Rat Pack and other attractions will feast on the main event, George vs. Blassie (who has just announced that instead of Classy Freddie Blassie, fans should now call him “Frederick the Great”), and an undercard that includes Lou Thesz taking on Reggie Parks.
Cassius Clay doesn’t know or care anything about wrestling; he’s here to see George. Standing at the top of one aisle with Greb, he wears a slightly louder madras-plaid sport jacket, neatly creased khaki pants, and a yellow shirt. It’s well after 10 P.M., nearing the end of a 108-degree day, before the main event gets started. The air-conditioned Rotunda is beginning to warm. Finally the arena lights go dark and the announcement booms through the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George is here!” A spotlight swings to catch him at the top of the main aisle, and the boxer sees Gorgeous George revealed in a voluptuous, formfitting red velvet gown that falls gracefully to the floor. The robe’s shoulders are puffy with padding and the lining is white satin. It’s only now that Clay gets his first glimpse of the Gorgeous hair; even from this distance he can make out the unnaturally bright blond color of the marcel. Until this instant Clay’s face has worn the look of a bored teenager. Now his expression flashes into that of a young man being mightily—and best of all, transgressively—entertained, his eyes widening with something like glee.
The Sensation of the Nation begins to make his way to the ring, parading regally to the sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.” The boxer sees the fans stand up, hears them spewing insults and curses—he feels the heat. The inside of the spaceship is vibrating with noise and the stomping of feet, thrumming to George’s provocative tune. George stops several times to give it back to the peasants, telling them just where they stand relative to contempt. “When he got to the ring, everyone booed,” Muhammad Ali would later recount to Dundee, the trainer, and other confidants. “Oh, everybody just booed him. I looked around and I saw everybody was mad. I was mad! I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat, and his talking did it. And I said, ‘This is a gooood idea.’” More likely Clay saw five thousand people, but no matter: The lesson was clear. It was reinforced three nights later, at the same venue. Cassius Clay, the up-and-coming star of the Olympics, beat Duke Sabedong in ten rounds, winning a unanimous decision, and fewer than five hundred people showed up.
The Gorgeous match isn’t that memorable, perhaps due to George’s deteriorating fitness. It will be recorded as: “Gorgeous George drew Fred Blassie (dcor).” Dcor stands for “double count out of the ring,” meaning both grapplers wound up fighting in the aisles, or running around outside the ring, for more than twenty seconds and were both disqualified. Of course the outcome is not the compelling part for those in attendance, including the boxer. When he and Greb, with a few of the promoter’s sportswri
ter buddies in tow, reach the locker room afterward, George is getting dressed. Clay approaches and sticks out a big paw for the wrestler to shake. His smile is wide; he grins with a young man’s delight. The budding showman understands viscerally what George has just shown him, and he acknowledges the older man’s mastery.
George accepts the compliments with a nod and then begins to mentor the nineteen-year-old, teaching him the explicit lessons of what he’s seen. Nearing the end of his run, George passes the torch. This is one of his last acts of generosity and may be the most important of his life. “They tell me you can fight like a dream, kid,” he says. “You just gotta have a gimmick, polish your act. Boxing, wrestling—it’s all a show. You gotta get the crowd to react. You saw that crowd out there: Most of ’em hated me and the rest of ’em wanted to kiss me. The most important thing is, they all paid their money, and the place was full.
“You got your good looks, a great body, and you’ve got a good mouth on you. Talk about how pretty you are, tell ’em how great you are. And a lot of people will pay to see somebody shut your big mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”
He doesn’t say it but George, the canny gauge of heat, knows that as a black man Clay can be a truly provocative heel—millions of white folks would indeed want to see a loud, uppity Negro’s mouth shut, his pretty face disfigured with bloody force. G.G. approves of the white boxing shoes Clay wears in the ring, just as he does. “The purists will hate you for it,” he says from experience, “and besides, they make your feet look faster.” On a roll, George wonders next if there’s anything Cassius can do with his hair. It’s black and neat, cut short…George tries, but can’t quite picture the right improvement. “I don’t know, kid,” he concludes. “Think about it.” He also tosses out the idea of Clay throwing roses to the crowd as George does with orchids.