There’s a strange, funny moment in Bob
Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles:
Volume One” — and oh please, let there be a Volume Two — in which he
explains how a wink from Gorgeous George, the professional wrestler, changed his
life.
At the time Mr. Dylan was still Bobby Zimmerman, stuck in high school in
Hibbing, Minn. He was performing on a makeshift stage in an armory lobby one day
when, Mr. Dylan writes, Gorgeous George “roared in like the storm” for a match,
his blond curls flowing, his “eyes flashing with moonshine.”
The pair had a brief, flickering mind-meld. Gorgeous George threw the young
musician a mighty wink and seemed to mouth the phrase, “You’re making it come
alive.” That message, Mr. Dylan writes, “was all the recognition and
encouragement I would need for years to come.”
As musical creation myths go, this is not quite Robert Johnson and the Devil
down at the crossroads. (Mr. Dylan’s Devil wore perfume, bobby pins, satin robes
and tights.) But it’s terrifically, tantalizingly weird.
As John Capouya makes plain in “Gorgeous George,” his slim, genial new pop
biography, the wrestler had a similarly electrifying effect on millions of
people in the 1940s and ’50s, the early days of television.
Professional wrestling was broadcast live across America almost every night
(programmers had few better ideas), and “the Human Orchid,” as Gorgeous George
called himself, was among the most famous and invigorating entertainers alive —
the swishy bottle blond audiences loved to hate. By 1950 he was making $100,000
a year, as much as Joe
DiMaggio pulled in for playing center field for the Yankees.
The best parts of Mr. Capouya’s book detail how Gorgeous George worked his
gender-bending, “sublimely ridiculous” magic night after night in arenas all
over the country.
The first thing Gorgeous George liked to do, when he arrived in a new town
for a match, was to alert the news media and then head for the nearest woman’s
beauty parlor to tune up his blondeur. He’d modeled his pin-curled hairstyle on
those of actresses like Betty
Grable and Gene
Tierney, and he knew that doing interviews with his head under a hot
croquignole machine — this in an era when John
Wayne represented the masculine ideal — was good hokum.
Later, at the arena, he’d send a valet out first, to spray the ring with
perfume and to daintily tidy up the place. Then an announcer would come on the
P.A. and intone: “Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George refuses to enter the
arena until everyone is standing, in a show of respect for the Human
Orchid.”
He’d emerge to “Pomp and Circumstance” and then spend 10 minutes in the ring,
to furious booing, folding and refolding his satin robe. Between rounds he
sipped tea from a silver set.
The biggest cheer of the night inevitably arrived when his opponent messed up
his hairdo.
In professional wrestling lingo Gorgeous George was not a “cleanie” but a
“meany” — that is, he fought dirty, or pretended to. But off stage, Mr. Capouya
suggests, he was basically a sweetheart: affable, generous and loyal to his old
friends, many of whom he employed.
Not a lot is known about Gorgeous George’s childhood, and Mr. Capouya, a
former editor at Newsweek and The New York Times who now teaches journalism at
the University of Tampa, in Florida, skims over it quickly. The future Gorgeous
George was born George Wagner in Butte, Neb., in 1915, and he grew up near
Houston. His father was a down-on-his-luck house painter; his sickly mother died
when he was 17. Mr. Capouya suspects his subject dropped out of high school (the
records have been lost), but while in school George did become skilled at one
thing: amateur wrestling.
He soon began wrestling professionally, first as a handsome, dark-haired good
guy. Eventually, with help and inspiration from his first wife, Betty, he got
the idea to dye his hair and dirty up his act, and people began to take
notice.
Young Bobby Zimmerman wasn’t the only aspiring entertainer held rapt by
Gorgeous George: Muhammad Ali, James
Brown and John
Waters have all cited him as a yea-saying inspiration. Gorgeous George
himself, of course, had borrowed some of his moves from earlier bad-boy
wrestlers and probably, Mr. Capouya suggests, from a generation of flamboyant
black preachers.
Mr. Capouya relates Gorgeous George’s story with enthusiasm and good cheer,
but his franks-and-beans prose style will make some readers squirm. He’s the
kind of writer who won’t use a word like “arena” if a phrase like “mat palace”
or “biceps bin” or “bop hall” is handy. Chapters have groaner titles like “King
Strut.”
Mr. Capouya is better at straightforward narrative than social analysis; he
strains to live up to his subtitle’s (wacky) contention that Gorgeous George
“created” American pop culture. He’s not a lot better at putting this straight
entertainer’s transgressive high jinks in context. Though he does write this:
“In a sport in which two barely clothed and oiled men try to mount each other,
there’s a bit of a homoerotic subtext.”
Toward the end of his career the demons that had chased Gorgeous George
caught up with and pummeled him. He became an alcoholic; he lost his looks; he
had a “stripper period”; women claiming to have had children with him began
climbing out of the woodwork. He died of a heart attack in 1963, at the age of
48, just two years after his retirement.
Mr. Capouya charts how the crazy moonshine Bob Dylan saw in Gorgeous George’s
eyes got there. But his heart doesn’t seem to be in the darker details, in the
grease between the gears. He’s not a writer like Nick Tosches, whose biographies
of somewhat similar performers (Jerry
Lee Lewis, Dean
Martin) are neon-lit midnight rides.
But “Gorgeous George” does leave the words of one long-ago sports reporter
ringing in your ears: “Oh, my, what a strut. If only this man had been born in
the barnyard. What a rooster he would have
made.”