by John Capouya
Culturally and artistically, Gorgeous George was ahead of his time. His character’s shameless materialism, the way he brayed about his wealth and displayed his high-end possessions, was refreshingly rude in its day. Generations later, flaunting’s still of interest (in hip-hop, for example, and in the pages of the Robb Report); it’s become so conventional, however, that it lacks the old impact. Early adapters, George and Betty anticipated the requirements of a new media age even as it arrived. Ishmael Reed, the writer, poet, and critic, was born in 1938 and grew up in Buffalo, New York, watching George on the wrestling set. “I remember his entrance,” he said. “This guy had majesty about him. And the way he held his head, he was like a peacock.” To Reed, the dandified wrestler was a very modern figure, or something even more advanced. “He worked very hard to create an image, and he knew how important that was. The showmanship, the androgyny…I would consider what he did art, and I think he is one of the early postmodernists.”
A postmodernist in a purple Packard? Perhaps. Yet the Gorgeous One was then, and still is, a link to the past as well. Through his costumed form and theatrical showmanship we can see all the way back to the traveling carnivals where show wrestling arose, to the broad comedy of vaudeville, and to burlesque, with all its drag turns and cross-dressing. George did accomplish this very forward-looking feat: He became famous for being famous. His wrestling and even his original Gorgeous persona were eventually eclipsed by his celebrity, the renown he and Betty generated and television then exploded. In a dynamic with which we have since become familiar, the question of what he actually did to become famous, and whether or not he deserved it, faded away into irrelevance. Like the young (blond) heiress Paris Hilton, who worked a Bad Girl gimmick in the early twenty-first century and seemed to have accomplished very little else to earn her renown, George was famous, and, well, there you had it. In this way the ultrastylized Gorgeous One may have contributed to the triumph of style over substance.
His body of work was himself, the invented Gorgeous George persona, and that was also the commodity George sold on the open market. Since then many others have emulated his celebrity salesmanship. Donald Trump, another boastful character with improbable hair, seemed very much an extension of George. In 2007 he even won a “hair match” when his surrogate beat a stand-in for World Wrestling Entertainment impresario Vince McMahon. (As George did, McMahon then had his head shaved in the ring.) The Donald appeared to run his casino business along the lines of the Gorgeous One’s purple turkey farm, but no matter—he issued several bestsellers on business tactics and starred in a TV show, The Apprentice, based on his executive acumen. Trump is no doubt a smart man, just as George could actually wrestle well. More importantly for both men, they entertained.
Madonna, by her own admission not the best singer, dancer, or songwriter, got heat by acting out, pushing buttons, and “violating taboos” in some hoary and essentially harmless ways. With her instincts and can-do shamelessness, she would have made a great lady wrestler. As George and Trump did, she simply declared her own fabulosity, kept insisting on it, and got the media and a willing public to buy in. In the 1980s and ’90s basketball star Dennis Rodman tapped two strains of Gorgeousness. First he made himself a Bad Boy using George’s totem, dyed blond hair, adding a copious covering of tattoos, back when that body modification still had the power to offend. Then he, too, acted out in the sexual arena, wearing a dress at one point and telling reporters he’d dreamed of having sex with men. It worked: Rodman was an exceptional athlete, but his outrageousness made him a celebrity.
One of the lasting proofs George helped set out is that any attention is good attention, commercially speaking. As the late celebrity author Norman Mailer knew, yelling “Look at me!” is not just a matter of ego gratification, it’s also an economic imperative—advertisements for oneself. In what’s been decried as America’s descent into collective narcissism, cooperation was little prized and less admired. Instead, citizens longed to be triumphant superiors, hailed with this tribute: “You rule!” In this realignment of the attitudinal planets, modesty, that long-standing value that George did so much to upend, hardly seemed a viable lifestyle choice anymore. Where would that get you? In his book Life: The Movie, Neal Gabler argues that in the latter part of the twentieth century Americans came to embrace, and to embody, the values and qualities of Hollywood movies over all others. As he puts it, entertainment conquered reality. He cites the triumph of sensation over reason, and our preference for simple, easily understandable story lines over the tiresome complexities of truth—what previously passed for reality. Gabler is quite persuasive, but an equally convincing argument could be made, using the same evidence, that American life has come to resemble professional wrestling. In the six decades since World War II ended and television began, that bit of Gorgeous George in everyone came loudly to the fore.
George couldn’t have achieved what he did without the new technology that suddenly, providentially, empowered him. Through television George’s reach became enormous; his emanations were everywhere. Today neuroscience tells us the stimuli infants are exposed to can mold them, creating personalities if not shaping their destinies. Synapses are formed and in their firings they define a lifetime. In Gorgeous George’s day America was in its media infancy, its citizens babes of the airwaves. By dominating those airwaves so, he penetrated the culture, altering the collective brain chemistry with his loud, vain, and perfumed sensibility.
George’s delivery system gave him an influential advantage: He was able to penetrate the American middle from the middle, the living-room locus that would come to define the mainstream. From there he could disseminate his insidiously liberating message. George’s strut said that one could be wildly, proudly different, could not conform, not play by the rules, and survive, even thrive. Who was more successful, who seemed to be enjoying his life more than the Human Orchid? It was a radical notion, yet conveyed in an implicit, subliminal way that made it that much more effective. In the 1950s bebop jazz musicians and Beat writers overtly rejected the status quo, while James Dean and Marlon Brando, among others, were also promoted as rebels. While the work and the personalities of all those wild ones were genuinely exciting, their messages were clearly oppositional: Everyone could see them coming. George didn’t seem the least bit insurgent, but, to appropriate the title of Vance Packard’s 1957 bestseller on advertising, the Gorgeous One may have been a hidden persuader.
George’s shocking success helped move the outrageous and the outré from the fringe of our culture to the center. He and others who followed embedded it there so deeply that it will likely never be dislodged. Today the bizarre—the radically entertaining—is welcome in the mainstream; now the difficulty lies in finding an act that can deliver a sufficient shock to a jaded audience. When George made his offer of outrageousness, however, it was still “an original and daring idea,” as filmmaker John Waters remembers. He never forgot his first glimpse of the Gorgeous One on the living-room screen in Baltimore, when Waters was eleven years old. “He was bizarre, I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “A man who wore women’s clothes, who had bleached hair, who made people scared but also made them laugh.” His parents were offended, shouting at the wrestler on their television; young John was mesmerized.
Seeing George perform helped him realize that he wanted to be in show business, too. Waters grew up and made cheerfully filthy movies such as Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (there’s a gory wrestling match in Desperate Living). His best-known and most outrageous characters were those played by Divine, the hulking cross-dresser portrayed by the late Glenn Milstead. “Gorgeous George inspired me to think up bizarre characters with humor,” the filmmaker said. “In my films, I’m beginning to realize, all of my characters have something to do with him, subliminally. It’s almost as if you went to a shrink and they said, ‘What’s your first strong memory?’ And I think I would say it’s Gorgeous George.” Like the Gorgeous One’s performance art, Waters and his
work moved from the outer limits of acceptability to something like respectability—and the filmmaker created an instantly recognizable, reliably scandalous public persona of his own, with a trademark pencil mustache. Waters still has a color postcard of the Sensation on his bedroom wall.
Most enduringly, he dared. Shaking off expectation and defying convention, George Wagner did what he wanted to do, and became who he wanted to be. Perhaps Gorgeous George was the person this uniquely gifted and tormented man needed to be. In 1948 sportswriter Red Smith interviewed George in a New York beauty parlor. At one point in Smith’s story George explained his modus vivendi, what living Gorgeously meant to its creator. Smith, who seemed to see the wrestler as an amusing thug, rendered this in a dialect he presumably associated with the hoi polloi. In one idiomatic quote, though, Smith actually summed up George’s legacy, the upheaval he arguably helped create in a nation’s view of itself.
“Allus I do is what I please,” George said. “And nobody stops me.”
Forty years after Smith wrote this, a documentary about wrestling aired on public television, narrated by journalist Clifton Jolley. In the film’s opening moments he remembered vividly the effect seeing the Gorgeous One had on him as a young man. “Some people thought George was ridiculous in those robes, and his curls pinned back on his head,” he said. “But all I could see was that he was free…”
We know Robert Zimmerman, Cassius Clay, James Brown, John Waters, and others followed George’s liberating example, and that they in turn were followed. The culture at large shifted, too, toward defining oneself rather than accepting the roles and limitations society attempts to impose. Could those George inspired have found their best selves without his most conspicuous example? Possibly. But the precedent was there: George had broken free, he’d reinvented himself, and everyone within reach of a television set had seen him do it.
His signature strut outlived the strutter, as the parade of Gorgeous George imitators continued well after the original passed on. All told, there were at least eight wrestlers who called themselves Gorgeous George, including impostors in England, Australia, and New Zealand. An appropriator calling himself Gorgeous George Junior wrestled in the United States in the 1970s, and in the late 1980s, Gorgeous Jimmy Garvin was attended by his female valet, Precious, who sprayed aerosol room freshener instead of perfume. In possibly the last variation, one George might have tolerated more easily, a young woman named Stephanie Bellars appeared in a few World Championship Wrestling events calling herself Gorgeous George. Flaunting what appeared to be dyed blond hair and enhanced breasts, she acted as the valet to Randy “Macho Man” Savage. She later changed her stage name to George Frankenstein.
As professional wrestling continued to evolve, it all but dropped the pretense of competitive matches and became more overtly a work. The cathartic violence, pyrotechnics, and intricate feuds and betrayals between the boys and promoters took precedence; one analysis counted eight minutes of wrestling in an hour-long TV program. In the modern version put out by Vince McMahon’s WWE, formerly the World Wrestling Federation, both wrestlers, heel and babyface alike, are often trash-talking loudmouths. Two Georges, it turned out, are even better than one.
The twenty-first-century boys are surpassingly athletic, executing stunts and falls the old-timers could not have conceived of, and the arena shows are much more technologically sophisticated. This grunt-and-groan product is different in tone, too: even more violent, hyper-sexualized, and hypertrophically bigger. Like the Gorgeous One himself, the bone-bending game of his day still carried a little potbelly. Rude and crude it certainly was, and politically incorrect. But because wrestling entertainment was still being invented, improvised live every night, the 1940s and ’50s matches with their preposterous characters had the freshness of originality to them, and today they seem to offer a much more innocent and rewarding form of depravity.
More than fifty years after the golden age there is still a good-size cadre of wrestling fans who remain loyal to the old school. They disdain the current cable and pay-per-view version, devoting themselves instead to a visual spectacle that can no longer be witnessed. They come to reunions and appearances by the surviving wrestlers, trade memorabilia, watch old matches that have been preserved, and argue obsessively but good-naturedly online about their favorite heels, faces, and feuds. Reggie “Sweet Daddy” Siki, who began wrestling in 1955, may well have been the first black wrestler to dye his hair blond. As one newspaper article put it, “He is known as the Negro Gorgeous George, and he is as tough as they come.” He also did a Siki Strut to the ring. Looking back decades later, Siki mourned the golden age with a very idiosyncratic focus. “We had midgets,” he said sadly, evoking Fuzzy Cupid, Sky Low Low, who stood forty-two inches tall, Little Beaver, Tiny Roe, Prince Salie Halassie, and the “lady midget” Diamond Lil, the Fabulous Moolah’s adopted daughter. “Kids really liked the midgets. These days they don’t use them. Wrestling is not what it used to be. There’s no respect for the midgets anymore.”
Chapter 29
THE SHOWMAN’S FAREWELL
Carol resisted the orchid casket at first; she didn’t want her father’s funeral to be a circus. Ruth and others convinced her, though, that George would have wanted as many colorful gimmicks in place as possible. On the Sunday evening following his death, George’s body lay in state in a Hollywood mortuary, and the memorial service began the next day, December 30, at noon, at Utter McKinley’s Wilshire Chapel, 444 South Vermont Avenue. The high-ceilinged chapel, its interior painted a pearly white throughout, was packed: More than five hundred people crowded in, while hundreds more lined up outside, hoping to pay their last respects. “This was a big place,” said sportswriter John Hall, George’s drinking buddy and neighbor at the House of Serfas, who covered the event for the L.A. Times. “It was really more like a church than a chapel. George had been out of it for a while, but everybody rallied up.” As Hall expressed it in his next day’s story, “Gorgeous George played to his final turnaway crowd.”
The Harrisburg Rats were represented by Johnny James and Chester Hayes; the latter was a pallbearer. Alongside him came barrel-chested Antone Leone, who had shared a house with the Wagners in Columbus. He wore dark sunglasses and a skinny black 1960s tie fastened into in an even tinier knot. Other pallbearers included Jules Strongbow, the hulking booker at the Olympic, who’d set up George’s hair match with Dick Beyer; promoter and former wrestler Hardy Kruskamp; the bald and bespectacled TV wrestling announcer Dick Lane; and of course the valet Jefferies, attending his master for the last time. Jake Brown was visibly shaken and seemed anaesthetized with something stronger than his usual beer. All the pallbearers wore baby orchids in their lapels. The Hangman, Howard Cantonwine, couldn’t bear to come inside. He paced outside on the sidewalk the whole while.
Cal Eaton, who ran the Olympic with his wife, Aileen, rallied, as did the hairdressers Frank and Joseph. According to one report, they had made three trips to the funeral parlor to get the Gorgeous curls just so. Mike Mazurki, who became a movie heavy after his ring career, turned out, as did Sandor Szabo, Pepper Gomez, Gino Garibaldi, Count Billy Varga, Hardboiled Haggerty, and Tiger Joe Marsh. Some of the boys, like Vic and Ted Christy, wore the traditional dark suits. But other wrestlers wore red and other loud colors, and jackets with big pads bulging atop their already massive shoulders, fashion misstatements they’d had generated specially for this occasion at the men’s store Foreman and Clark. A good contingent of exotic dancers turned out for George as well, as did various L.A. athletes, gamblers, and barflies. The strippers wore outfits ranging from the questionable to the demure.
Jimmy Lennon, the ring announcer from a musical family, sang hymns and then the Lord’s Prayer. Brother Harry Black, a Jehovah’s Witness elder, gave the eulogy, which helped satisfy Carol. As she and Ruth Peters had conceded, however, decorum would not be the highest prevailing value at these ceremonies. Given the identity of the main-eventer on this particular card, that would have been i
nappropriate. Instead, all the pro wrestling traditions—spectacle, ballyhoo, high melodrama, and exaggerated conflict—were gloriously upheld. George would have been proud.
For decades afterward, there was bitter disagreement over who paid for the chapel, funeral plot, casket, and all the other necessary elements of this final fall. Brothers Gene and Mike LeBell, who seldom agree themselves, insisted that their parents, Cal and Aileen Eaton, picked up the tab. The boys said they paid for it by taking up collections all around the country; Buddy “Nature Boy” Rogers, George’s heated rival, said he sent one hundred dollars all the way from Texas. Ruth Peters said the funeral home rendered their services for free, in exchange for all the publicity. Ernie Serfas, friend and owner of George’s L.A. haunt, never blinked in taking full credit. “Oh yeah, my brother and I buried him,” he said. “We had to pay for it; he was broke. He had lost all his money.” For her part Cherie angrily denied that the costs were covered, saying Jules Strongbow and an L.A. promoter each gave her $1,000, but that “the coffin alone cost over $10,000, so that $2,000 was a drop in the bucket. I know, because I was working two jobs for years afterward to pay it off.” Her pricing seems high; in 1963 the average U.S. house cost only $19,000.
The best theater, however, centered around George’s women. Un-allied witnesses—those not in Betty’s, Cherie’s, or Beverly’s camp—remember the three diminutive and strikingly attractive women vying for primacy, including the place of honor nearest the elevated casket. Betty and Cherie ended up on opposite sides of the aisle, fittingly enough, with Beverly a few rows behind them. All three sobbed and howled uncontrollably, said John Hall, along with another attendee who remembers “they were all going at it pretty good.” Betty disputed this and denied that she, for her part, did any vying, citing as proof her beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness. “Funerals and such don’t matter, because you are in God’s memory. And when you are resurrected, you are not going to have that same body, anyway.”