by John Capouya
That Wednesday night in November of 1962, the hair vs. mask match was the main event, set to go two out of three falls, with a one-hour time limit. Attendance was 7,634; not a sellout by any means, but a good crowd in the biceps bin. “Pomp and Circumstance” rang out in the Olympic Auditorium for the last time. George couldn’t afford to pay a valet anymore and the promoters wouldn’t take on the extra expense, so he strutted down the metal walkway to the ring alone, then did his own spraying of Chanel Number 10. He wore his white boots and one of his favorite Kay Cantonwine creations, the Kiss of Fire, a robe in crimson nylon festooned with rhinestones and embroidered with glinting yellow thread, or, as George always described it, “eighteen karat gold.” When he removed the robe his body looked thick but taut. By not drinking he had lost his paunch and his arm muscles still had definition. Instead of their customary champagne color, though, George’s curls looked almost white and lacked sheen under the lights; he may have had to resort to a cheaper dye job. But the overall effect was something approaching Gorgeous.
The Destroyer was deeply tanned, much darker than the pale Gorgeous One, and he also wore white boots. They matched his white leather mask, which was trimmed in orange around the eyeholes and mouth hole. As arranged, George managed to win the first fall with the reverse cradle, rolling up and over Beyer, who was on top, for the pin. The older man, close to fifty, with countless hard miles on his chassis, was moving well; he could still sell the bumps and put the match across. Said Beyer approvingly, “He gave the people their money’s worth.” George twisted his knee inadvertently during the second fall, but kept performing, hamming it up through the pain. He hadn’t wrestled in what seemed like forever; it was a respite and a joy to be back in the ring.
In the second stanza, the brutal Destroyer began to persecute George’s left arm—twisting it, ripping it, pinning it to the mat, then jumping on it with both knees. The Destroyer was selling it, too: As he inflicted these savageries, he bellowed through his sinister-looking mouth hole. The crowd responded to the two showmen with cacophony, stomping and screaming. Under this mistreatment George lost the second fall and then quickly the third as well. The Destroyer’s finishing move was a figure-four leg lock. Asked later to explain that maneuver, he replied tersely: “I bend the guy’s leg ’til it looks like the number four.” First he got George up on his shoulders, though, and took him for an airplane spin, followed by a slam to the mat, and then the figure four.
The referee held the Destroyer’s arm up to signal his victory, and Beyer raised the other in exultation. The fans roared as Frank and Joseph entered the ring; now the vainglorious Orchid would have to suffer the ultimate indignity. George was genuinely exhausted now, and sat down on the metal folding chair in the middle of the ring with his chest heaving. He closed his eyes as the hairdressers draped a towel over his shoulders and began working away at his curls with shears, placing the shorn whitish-yellow snips in a plastic container. (There was no discussion this time of donating the hair to the Smithsonian.) Still fully in character, the Destroyer yelled, “Yeah, that’s it! Shave him good!”
Then an untoward thing began to happen. The bloodthirsty crowd, including those who had been screaming earlier for George to get his comeuppance, fell practically silent. George was too tired to act anymore, so he just sat there stoically as Frank and Joseph denuded him, buzzing his stubble down to the skin with electric clippers. “Leave him alone!” yelled one man in the audience, and other cries of sympathy were heard. So moved were the fans, Boxing Illustrated reported, that many “couldn’t bear to watch and quietly slipped out of the arena.” By that point the Gorgeous One was completely bald, his massive head gleaming under the ring lights. Good Old George was now Poor Old George. Not everyone sympathized. A photograph taken at this moment was the image that George’s enemy, promoter Jack Pfefer, kept and cherished in his Gorgeous George file. On it he scrawled (and misspelled): “The final end of a swolen headed drunk.”
This wasn’t quite the end. The hair vs. mask match had gone well: The gate was probably around twenty thousand dollars, with the two main-eventers receiving 8 percent each, or sixteen hundred. Wrestling’s businessmen thought it could go well again, and promoter Hardy Kruskamp set up a rematch for December 11 in Long Beach. The parties had to wait several weeks for George to grow some stubble, so he could wager his hair again. The result was the same, of course. Beyer and George were professional enough to vary things: This time the Destroyer finished him off with an armlock. The crowd was smaller, and so was the payoff. For less than three thousand dollars, George had sold his Gorgeous hair, his difference maker, one of the inspired innovations that helped make his persona and his career. He never wrestled again.
Chapter 27
“THE SPORTS WORLD IS SADDENED”
When Christmas came in 1962, the ex-wrestler was so broke he tried to make young Gary a skateboard, a recent invention also known in California as a sidewalk surfer, instead of buying him one. He couldn’t do it. In the spring of the following year George, behind on both support payments, sold the Ringside. The newspaper ad he ran called it the “most gorgeous beer bar in the Valley,” adding: “Other commitments force quick sale.” He showed up at the Cantonwines’ house in Laguna Beach a few times, and money changed hands. The Hangman, always protective of George when he wasn’t trying to kill him, told his daughter Brenda that his friend had come over to pay back some loans. Later she realized he was actually there to borrow more.
George moved out of the House of Serfas and into a flophouse on Hollywood Boulevard, where, in late 1963, his friend Woody Strode paid him a visit. Strode was a football star and decathlete at UCLA who became one of the first black players in the National Football League in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line. He also wrestled; already a sports hero in Los Angeles, the handsome Strode was a natural babyface. He took up acting as well and is best known for his lead role in Sergeant Rutledge and his turn in the 1960 movie Spartacus. The imposing Strode—six-foot-four and a muscled two-hundred-plus pounds—played Draba, the gladiator with the net and trident whom Kirk Douglas refuses to kill in the arena. Along the way, Strode and George had wrestled with each other, and the two became friendly.
When he arrived at the address George had given him, he was dismayed to see it sat on Skid Row. Then Strode went inside and was shocked to see the extent of his friend’s decline. George was lying down on an old steel-frame bed, and the mattress sagged so much the bed looked like a hammock. George, who was actually a year younger, looked decades older than the fit actor. Strode remembered that “George’s forehead was wet with perspiration, and he could barely get the words out between coughs.” Still lying down, he called for his son and introduced Gary, whom Strode described as a beautiful brown-headed boy. George explained that his wife had divorced him. “It was the first time,” Strode wrote in his memoir, Goal Dust, “I had ever seen anyone truly brokenhearted.”
George’s last girlfriend was Beverly Styles. Nine years younger than G.G., she was an exotic dancer of some repute; she currently holds a place of honor in Exotic World, the burlesque hall of fame in Las Vegas. Voluptuous, she was also short in stature, even in her work heels, and was billed at one point as “The Unpredictable Imp.” Styles also had dyed platinum-blond hair, like George’s. She and George put a nightclub act together. “The Human Orchid, Gorgeous George” and “Muscle Control Expert-Artist Beverly Styles” appeared briefly at the 400 Club on West Eighth Street in L.A., along with Barbara Hutton’s Musical Entertainers. The term muscle-control expert raises more lurid questions than it answers regarding her part of the act; for his part, George simply acted Gorgeous. Though his time with Beverly could be seen as a coda to George’s extended stripper period, their relationship was not a cursory one. She cared for George; he depended on her and, as far as can be determined, treated her well. George taught Beverly about the Truth, but didn’t tell her it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs he was relaying. She thoug
ht him a sage. “He could start his own religion!” Beverly once exclaimed to Carol.
The day after Christmas 1963, Betty’s sister, Eve, saw the news on television. At that time the sisters were living in Grant’s Pass, Oregon. Cherie heard it on the radio as she was getting dressed in Reseda, and Carol got a call from Ruth Peters, George’s last business manager. He had been admitted to General Hospital with chest pains on the evening of Christmas Day and died the next afternoon, a Thursday, after a heart attack. Prolonged alcohol intake most likely contributed to his heart disease, and liver problems may have created an additional strain. George was only forty-eight years old.
The Los Angeles City Council adjourned early to show their respect. Councilman George E. Cassidy introduced a resolution reading: “The sports world is saddened today with the passing of George Raymond Wagner, one of the most colorful performers in wrestling history. He was gifted with a personal magnetism and a rare quality of showmanship that made him a true headliner wherever he appeared. Gorgeous George was not only a fine athlete, but a fine citizen. His friends are legion in number.”
Beverly asked Carol if she’d like to have her father’s belongings, some things he’d kept at Styles’s apartment in Hollywood. The daughter came by and together the two women looked through the suits, a few robes, some shoes, fan mail, and a few empty picture frames. That was the entirety of George’s estate. Cash flows freely through a drunken man’s hands, but Jack Daniel’s could not have been the only culprit. Losing poker plays and other wagers no doubt accounted for some of the financial vacuum he left behind. George had also invested in a chain of Wonderland motels in the mid-1950s, to be located adjacent to Disneyland, then new. Since Howard Cantonwine, an equally unlucky and unwise money manager, was also an investor, George probably lost money there, too. Somehow, through what must have been truly prodigious drinking, spending, and gambling, George managed to burn through the fortune he made in the ring.
The TV wrestling announcer Dick Lane said George once told him he kept all his money in cash. They were taking a stroll through Beverly Hills at the time, George sporting a white gabardine suit with a black tie and a white Panama hat. As they walked he twirled a black walking stick with an ivory handle. He told Lane he wanted to stop by the bank, and there, G.G. visited a safe-deposit box filled with high-denomination bills. “I want my money right here where I can take my shoes off and walk around in it if I want to,” George said. If there were any greenback caches left when George died, however, they were never found.
His only other possessions were in a trailer—not a house trailer, but a much smaller cargo carrier—in back of the Ringside. It sat there long after he’d sold the place and, surprisingly, remained undisturbed for months after his death. When Carol came by to claim it with her husband in March of 1964, a man appeared, claiming George owed him money and demanding to be paid. She refused. Inside the trailer she found more robes and clothes; nothing special. But she did find George’s scrapbook, the one with tan wooden covers, bound with leather straps, that he’d had custom-made many years before. In it was the yellowed, thirty-year-old newspaper story on the Houston Typewriter Exchange on Fannin Street, showing the eighteen-year-old employee George—front and center in the photo—grinning at the camera as he absorbed his first taste of publicity. On the cover of the bulky, hinged album was a reproduction of a 1941 photograph, burned into the wood. In it, young, black-haired, handsome George—trim, V-chested George—kneels on one knee in the middle of a wrestling ring with the ropes behind him, wearing white trunks and black boots, flexing one substantial bicep. He’s looking to his left and smiling at the tiny dark-haired woman standing next to him; she’s smiling back and squeezing that bicep appreciatively. She wears a short white dress of shiny, satiny fabric and white boots that should never be confused with cowgirl boots.
Barely a month before George’s death, the assassination of President Kennedy had thrown the country into shock and mourning. The very day George died, the Beatles released their first hits in the United States, the singles “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” So there were other, more powerful cultural forces at work and more urgent news was being made. Yet, as Ruth and Carol began to make funeral arrangements, it became clear that, in his last hospital interview with G.G., L.A. Timesman Sid Ziff had not completely misjudged his subject’s continuing fame. The wire services wrote obituaries, which ran all over the country. Then word of some unorthodox funeral plans got out and that led to another slew of stories before the ceremonies. The AP version began:
GORGEOUS GEORGE TO REST IN ROBE
LOS ANGELES—Gorgeous George will be attired in his favorite orchid-colored robe when he is buried Monday in an orchid-colored casket.
His golden hair will be dressed the elegant way wrestling fans remember it.
“That’s the way he wanted it,” said his business manager, Ruth Peters. “We want to keep it all very dignified. But he loved his orchid color so much.”
Chapter 28
A GORGEOUS LEGACY
On the surface of things, he’s been forgotten. When those who remember him hear that catchy name again, it does bring a smile to their faces; George’s grand silliness is a fond recollection. Most twenty-first-century Americans, though, especially the younger ones, have only a vague idea of who Gorgeous George was, if that. The titles Toast of the Coast, Sensation of the Nation, and the Human Orchid conjure up no one, no colorful images. (The One and Only, a 1978 movie starring Henry Winkler, appropriated the Gorgeous ring act but none of George Wagner’s biography; his name was never invoked in the film.) As his contemporaries die out, his place in our collective memory gets more tenuous.
Yet vestiges of the disturbance George caused can still be detected, in the mainstream as well as some odd corners. The orchid path he traced now seems a prescient sketch of the contours American popular culture would take on, in his time and continuing to the present. Like a benign radioactive isotope, Gorgeousness has an extremely long half-life, glowing softly under piles of time.
George was a prototypical Bad Boy, modeling the loudmouthed, self-aggrandizing man-brat and attention-seeking male missile that came to dominate sports, entertainment, and marketing. The role he—and his most potent student, Muhammad Ali—played is now a cultural stalwart: Rappers shout their greatness and extol their badness, sometimes inventing criminal records to bolster these claims. Playing the rogue male who at heart is a sensitive, misunderstood Bad Boy also works for hip-hop artist Eminem and others, and in a daring work worthy of professional wrestling, memoirist and fabulist James Frey pulled off a literary version of this Bad Boy act. Since “Pompous George strutted about the ring like little Lord Fauntleroy” and Ali made his poetic boasts, it’s become almost a given that the villain gets the heat, and the coin, and the girls. Heels have more fun, and in wrestling, they’ve always known that. The rest of America just had to catch up.
Professional sports became chiefly an entertainment, and more like the adrenal spectacle of wrestling. Trash-talking, steroid-laden sluggers, slam dunks, and vicious hits were celebrated, accompanied by self-loving chest poundings worthy of the Gorgeous One. Athletes came to understand that the uncomplaining, team-first player often doesn’t get the biggest contract or the most lucrative endorsements. As a result, even the lowliest rookie, most-traveled journeyman, or obscure bantamweight is a fair bet to crow that he, don’t you know, is the greatest. (Base stealer Rickey Henderson even appropriated Ali’s acronym, calling himself G.O.A.T., meaning the Greatest Of All Time.) In some quarters, though, that self-aggrandizement is still incendiary. Any athlete’s simple, George-ish suggestion that his own interests are foremost, or that they’re in it for the money—that money matters at all to him or her—induces paroxysms in throngs of fans, commentators, and sports officials. At times their outrage seems so excessive as to be complicit in those players’ heel turns, evoking the feigned indignation of the wrestling referees when George was so wonderfully bad
.
After the male prima donna of the mat flitted so provocatively—no doubt leaving those straitlaced heroes Superman and the Lone Ranger aghast—many others sent their own intentionally mixed signals about sexuality and gender roles. Around the time Liberace took his first steps toward effeminate flamboyance in the mid-1950s, Richard Wayne Penniman released his first hit record. Born seventeen years after George Wagner, he may well have been influenced by flamboyant black preachers like Daddy Grace. Like Liberace, however, he would also have seen the Human Orchid’s success before he unleashed his sexually ambiguous persona, the tutti-frutti Little Richard. (His contemporary Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t flirt with effeminacy, but it’s worth noting that he not only declared himself a Bad Boy—“The Killer”—but also bleached his hair a heelish blond.) Decades later came glitter rock or glam rock, in which the androgyny of David Bowie, Gary Glitter, T. Rex’s Mark Bolan, and the New York Dolls was arguably as important as their songs. “What do you think that was?” asked filmmaker John Waters. To him, it was something very much like George: “People who look like big queens who are basically straight.” (Farrokh Bulsara, who called himself Freddie Mercury, named his band Queen because it was “open to all sorts of interpretations.”) Since then other entertainers, including Boy George, Grace Jones, and Marilyn Manson, have mined similarly transgressive veins.