Gorgeous George Read online

  His wavy hair, his dainty air

  Are every mama’s pride and joy.

  He’s such a pet, you can’t forget

  Gorgeous George is just the darlin’est boy

  His eau de fleur, his manicure

  The way he struts so cute and coy

  Will show you why you can’t deny

  Gorgeous George is just a bundle of joy.

  He reinvented himself, in a unique iteration of our national idea. George Wagner, child of the Great Depression, used his wit and prodigious will, then bent his broad back to create a better destiny. In another classic American scenario, his showmanship, catchy moniker, and the outré persona he played to the hilt transformed this poor boy into one of the country’s highest-paid entertainers. As a youngster, he’d wrestled with his friends in a sawdust pile on the banks of a Houston bayou, and they’d split the change thrown by passersby. By the time he was thirty-five he was taking in $100,000 a year, the same amount the legendary Joe DiMaggio made playing baseball for the Yankees. (One newspaper headline dubbed George “Gorgeous Moneybags.”) An astonishing percentage of those boyhood buddies became professional wrestlers, too, and after he became a star George would loyally find them work, insisting to promoters who wanted the Gorgeous One that they book his friends as well.

  His success was at once hard-earned and an amazing fluke, something that could only have happened when it did. Even more unlikely, and less understood, is Gorgeous George’s remarkable influence. James Brown, the late, great soul singer and entertainer, saw George’s shimmering robes as a young man and was moved to add more splendor and flourish to his shows. The sequined capes and lush robes he wore onstage? “That came from the rassler Gorgeous George,” he said. For more than fifty years Brown used this glittering array in his legendary live performances, and each night the Godfather of Soul also had a faithful valet attend to him onstage.

  Muhammad Ali sat right next to Gorgeous George and heard him declaim on his wrestling superiority and “manly beauty.” This was in 1961, when the boxer was just nineteen years old and his name was still Cassius Clay. Then Clay, a manly beauty himself, went to the matches at George’s invitation and saw him inflame a sellout crowd with his boastful arrogance. The fans were there, the boxer realized, “to see this man get beat. And his talking did it.” As Muhammad Ali, the lethal braggart, his most frequent and strident proclamations were “I am the prettiest” and “I am the greatest!” Few realize how closely those boasts echo the great wrestler’s song of himself—they were vintage Gorgeousness.

  Clearly, Gorgeous George’s flamboyant showmanship didn’t take hold with his other most prominent student, Bob Dylan. Instead, a chance encounter with the wrestler when the teenage Robert Zimmerman was a distinctly unpromising musician in Hibbing, Minnesota, convinced him that he could succeed as a performer, that he, too, had the charismatic gifts—Dylan called them “lightning and vitality”—that the Gorgeous One so clearly overflowed with. To him George was “a mighty spirit.” Like George Wagner and Cassius Clay, Robert Zimmerman reincarnated himself, changing his name and taking on the persona of a troubadour poet, a Dylan.

  Three Gorgeous disciples, among the most important American cultural figures of the twentieth century, they changed sports and entertainment, and more, inspiring countless heirs, descendants, and imitators. They had it in them, of course; George didn’t grant them their genius. All of these men freely acknowledged, though, that the wrestler helped draw out their gifts and give shape to their artistry. Gorgeous George, the greatest, silliest practitioner of a faux, lowbrow sport—whose work seemed so utterly, intentionally unedifying—can reasonably be called a forgotten father of our popular culture.

  When George Wagner grew up watching movie cowboy Tom Mix and screen detective Bulldog Drummond, male American icons were heroes and good guys. Villains, almost never. A remarkable man, worthy of our attention and devotion, was stoic and brave—like Sergeant York, the deeply religious World War I combat hero. That was the prevailing model of masculine virtue in entertainment as well, and Gary Cooper, the man who played Sergeant York in the movies, took on those qualities in the public imagination. A real man was also humble and unfailingly modest, like another hero Cooper portrayed, baseball slugger Lou Gehrig, in Pride of the Yankees. After World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, and one of his most admired traits was that even he, the conquering hero on a world stage, was a steadfastly modest man.

  Not George. He made a spectacle of himself when that word was still a term of disapproval. The strutting showman shouted “Look at me!” with his whole being, issuing an irresistible invitation to share in his self-infatuation—or to condemn him for it. Gorgeous George certainly didn’t invent the pervasive culture of narcissism that followed him, but he may well have been a catalyst, a powerful accelerant. He was an avatar of conspicuous consumption well before that term became cliché, spending and showing off wildly in a country just coming out of wartime rationing. Immodesty personified, he put on a visually dazzling display, then praised himself for it. Along with his pupil Muhammad Ali, George helped make antipathy currency and infamy a profitable path to fame, something today’s athletes, hip-hoppers, and marketers clearly understand. And yet the wrestling audiences also came to love the Human Orchid, or at least the way he so reliably, thrillingly provoked them. As one perceptive writer noted at the time, they hated him with affection.

  Just as daring in his day, the gussied-up Human Orchid was also one of the first male celebrities to flaunt a sexually ambiguous, quasi-effeminate, vaguely gay persona, and to profit nicely from it. In a 1948 story on the Gorgeous George phenomenon Newsweek magazine noted that “both in and out of the ring he affects a…swishy manner, and effeminate fragrance.” At that time any hint of femininity in a man was scorned and, except in a few bohemian enclaves, homosexuality considered depraved. Against this backdrop George strutted into women’s beauty parlors, reporters in tow, and cheekily demanded to have his hair marcelled. He and Betty sensed a change in sensibilities, one that meant the American public was willing to be engaged—both enraged and entertained—by a man who flitted to the ring, as George described his saucy stroll. Filmmaker John Waters said it was Gorgeous George’s silly, scary gender-bending that led him to create his own bizarre characters, including those played by Divine, the wrestler-size cross-dresser who starred in Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Hairspray.

  When the wrestling began, however, George became a battling macho athlete, taking punishment and dishing out pain with nary a swish audible or visible. A Playboy magazine writer would later dub him a “killer fruitcake,” and it was the way George synthesized those two conflicting meanings, his shifting mixture of butch and belle, that made him unique, sui gorgeous. From Little Richard and Liberace—who a furious George claimed “stole my whole act, including the candelabra!”—in the 1950s to David Bowie and Boy George decades later, many other entertainers have transgressed successfully in the sexual arena. This line of provocateurs may have become a full circle in the late 1990s when Stephanie Bellars, a minimally dressed woman with maximal breasts, wrestled professionally under the name Gorgeous George.

  Earlier than most, George and Betty saw the value in shock value; indeed, the young couple helped put it there. They were masters of publicity, too; before the words media and hype were in use, much less combined, George and Betty understood that a press-pleasing persona, spin, and savvy public relations were the ultimate submission holds. Their success presaged the day tennis star Andre Agassi famously declared, in a television commercial for Canon cameras, that “Image is everything.”

  George’s fame outlasted his marriage to Betty, but his good fortune did not. After his spectacular rise he would arc downward just as steeply, then die young—he was not yet fifty years old. When he died in Los Angeles in 1963 the city council adjourned to show its respect and passed a resolution honoring his memory. Gorgeous George is buried under a small bronze plaque in Valhalla
Memorial Park in North Hollywood, near a much bigger monument to Oliver Hardy. Just before his death George Wagner—by then he was legally, completely Gorgeous George—gave an interview from his hospital bed. In it he described the night at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles when he felt his transformation was complete and the rise of the Human Orchid assured.

  “I’ll never forget my first walk down the aisle when my hair was blond, and I was trailed by the haunting scent of perfume,” he said fondly. On that occasion the Gorgeous One wore a purple or orchid-colored robe, festooned with cloth flowers sewn onto the flashy fabric. “When I flitted down that aisle,” George continued, “I got the biggest ovation of my life. They couldn’t announce the match. The announcer burst out laughing, but I didn’t mind. I was a sensation.”

  Chapter 2

  HARRISBURG RATS

  Gorgeous George reveled in slinging hooey—in making himself fabulous, he became a dedicated fabulist. “I’m actually a trained psychologist,” he told reporters and his more gullible acquaintances. This specialized background, he explained, gave him great insight into, and mental mastery over, his less sophisticated ring opponents, whom he referred to as “the brutes.” Sporting scribes of the day, whose obsession with facts was easily surpassed by the value they placed on entertaining copy, passed this whopper along verbatim and it’s had remarkable staying power: A 1998 A&E television documentary on professional wrestling, for instance, appears to have swallowed it whole.

  Like the original hard-wrestling George Wagner, the unvarnished truth lacked a certain gloss. What people really wanted, he found, was something more lustrous, and George would masterfully shine them on. He didn’t introduce blarney and ballyhoo into pro wrestling; in the grunt-and-groan game, as in the traveling carnivals that spawned it, lies, exaggerations, and misdirection were not just habitual but fundamental. George simply raised them to their highest exponents. No subject, it seems, was too trivial to be shucked or jived. George insisted he was born in Seward, Nebraska, while his birth certificate makes clear that George Raymond Wagner first stepped between the worldly ropes in Butte, Nebraska, on March 24, 1915. He was the firstborn son of Howard James Wagner, twenty-three years old, and Bessie May Francis, nineteen, and the family lived in Phoenix, a nearby farming community. In the next five years the Wagners moved several times within Nebraska and in Iowa, and George’s brother Elmer was born. Carl, the youngest and last child, came along three years later.

  In his private life George was less of a liar, but not necessarily more of a revealer. He didn’t record things, including, to his detriment, his income and expenses. He kept no journals or diaries and neither his wife Betty nor his daughter, Carol, could remember getting so much as a postcard from him during his twenty years or so on the road. He was a caller; he phoned. George and Betty talked about her past and childhood, but never his. Married to him for more than thirteen years, she never knew when George’s mother died, for example, or whether the Wagners went to church. She only knew that he grew up in Houston.

  Actually, it was Harrisburg, Texas. In 1925, when the Wagners moved to what is now a neighborhood in Houston’s East End, Harrisburg was its own city of roughly 3,500 people. John Richardson Harris, a New Yorker, founded it in 1824 on the subtropical, swampy acres where Bray’s Bayou met the Buffalo Bayou, which ran south and east to the Gulf of Mexico. Houston was an outgrowth of that city created twelve years later by two more New Yorkers, the Allen brothers, who bought the land to the northwest along the bayou. Lumber and cotton made the area’s first great fortunes and then, just after the turn of the century, oil was discovered at Spindletop, about ninety miles east of Houston, and Humble Field, twenty miles north. The Buffalo Bayou was dredged to create a deeper shipping channel, and the new oil companies built refineries along its banks, including some at the wide mouth bordering Harrisburg. Other industries set up floating shop there as well.

  The Wagners’ house on Avenue E was less than a five-minute walk from the bayou. Just three or four blocks in the other direction the streetcar line ran into Houston from a triangular turnaround between Broadway, Harrisburg’s main drag, and Eighty-first Street. Few people owned private cars, so everyone—workers, shoppers, and students—relied on the streetcars; the fare was seven cents, or four tokens for a quarter. With their metal antennae reaching for the wires above, the enclosed orange cars hummed along, past Sallee’s Music Store, an A&P, the Boulevard movie theater, and the Wayside Café. Private jitneys, Ford Model T touring cars often crammed with seven people, were also popular, and they cost only five cents ( jitney was slang for a nickel). In December 1927 Houston annexed Harrisburg and the streetcars were gradually replaced by buses; by that time the fare was a dime.

  Like the other thirty houses crowded into their short block on Avenue E, George’s home was a one-story, wooden structure with a peaked roof just high enough for an attic or half floor above the living space. Two stone steps in front were framed by wooden columns. This was a shotgun house, a plain narrow rectangle set with the short end toward the street; there were no sidewalks. The neighbors’ houses were much the same, and chickens roamed the backyards. When Howard and Bessie Wagner and the three boys moved to Harrisburg, these houses were fairly new, thrown up roughly ten years before by the Ship Channel Lumber and Building Company to accommodate the influx of industrial workers near their waterfront jobs. The Wagners’ had electric lights, water, and gas, but it was tiny: The five of them (and later, one of Howard’s nephews) lived in what can’t have been more than six hundred square feet.

  The shotguns lay practically on top of one another, so families created a little privacy by hammering up wooden fences between the houses, and more came from the surging green growth that surrounded them. Hanging vines, palm trees, and tropical fronds flourished in the dank, near-permanent humidity, along with rubber trees, birds-of-paradise with their orange flowers and pointy green stalks, elephant ears, and pecan trees, the neighborhood’s tallest feature. Their dark brown trunks shot up two or three times as high as the houses, and their branches were gnarly, scraggly, and stuck out at odd angles, making the trees look both majestic and bedraggled. Sound still carried through this jungle but at least it blocked neighbors’ views.

  In the fall, when George walked to school—or somewhere he liked better—he’d kick pecan nuts aside and crunch the husks under his feet. He wore a white T-shirt and cotton dungarees, or knickers, the three-quarter-length pants many younger boys wore in the 1920s. When he got a little older and graduated to white button-down shirts, George would roll the sleeves up to show off his biceps. Cotton was plentiful and light, and there were no synthetic fabrics or permanent press yet, so in class pictures from the local schools, Deede Junior High and Milby High, George’s generation looks bright, eager, and thoroughly wrinkled. Despite the summer heat that would drive Harrisburg families to sleep outside, enduring the mosquitoes just to feel a breeze, boys’ haircuts were surprisingly long, with some bulk to them, closer to Edwardian looks or the Beatles’ mop tops than to the 1950s buzz. George wore his dark brown hair longish and side-parted, swept back from his broad face and brown eyes.

  When the Wagners arrived in Harrisburg, half the families there and in the adjacent neighborhood, Magnolia Park, were Mexican-American, considered “non-white.” The white locals included many German-American families, like Howard Wagner’s. Harrisburg wasn’t as strictly segregated racially as some other neighborhoods; there was one black-owned café that everyone patronized, for example. But black children went to the Negro schools, and plans for a Southern Pacific Railroad station were rejected by the city because blacks and whites would have used the same entrances to board the trains. When George began his pro wrestling career roughly fifteen years later, a state law still forbade Caucasians and “Africans” from boxing or wrestling against one another. Some two thousand Ku Klux Klan members from the Houston area held their hooded meetings on the prairie in nearby Bellaire, Texas. Beyond their racial and religious agendas,
they strongly backed Prohibition in 1920.

  George would never be temperate, but he was tolerant; none of his contemporaries remembered him ever uttering a racist remark. In their low-caste subculture, black and white wrestlers often felt more solidarity with one another than they did with the promoters or the “marks,” the paying customers. Egotists and independent contractors all, they tended to fixate on their own fortunes and were less interested in anyone else’s melanin content, and that was true of George.

  George’s dad—Poppa Wagner, as he was known—was a house painter, though he was never listed in the city’s business directory, which seems to indicate that he didn’t own a company. The other fathers on their block (mothers didn’t work) included riggers and pump men at the refineries, tool-plant and construction hands, a carpenter, a baker, and a sanitation truck driver. They all worked with their hands and their sons expected to do the same. Six-day, forty-eight-hour weeks were the minimum a man could expect to put in; logging fifty-four to sixty hours a week was more common and a good many people worked even longer. But work there was, and the residents of Harrisburg were grateful.

  Cherie Dupre, George’s second wife, didn’t get a complete account of her husband’s upbringing either, but she did glean this much: “It was very hard, very deprived.” Three children wasn’t a lot in that era, but Howard Wagner had trouble supporting them all. They moved once or twice to other rentals in their first few Harrisburg years, and had a brief sojourn in Houston Heights, but returned to Avenue E in 1929. They stayed the longest at number 7834, and this was the smallest, meanest house of all, barely wider than two of today’s cars parked side by side. Howard paid sixteen dollars a month in rent and sometimes had difficulty raising it, while the median for all Houston families was twenty-eight dollars, and for Negro families it was over eighteen. So the Wagners’ was indeed a low estate. They never had a phone, but they were one of the few houses in their area with a “radio set,” as they were known. Why would they buy this seeming luxury?