"GORGEOUS GEORGE"

By ERIC COMPTON

Posted: 3:21 am
August 24, 2008
You see the title of John Capouya's biography of Gorgeous George - which claims the flamboyant wrestler "created pop culture" - and you are struck by its audacity. A wrestler responsible for something that important? Impossible.
But as you go through the pages, you can't help but agree. For a whole generation of Americans in the 1940s and '50s, Gorgeous George (nee George Wagner) was the symbol of a changing country.
Using the ideas of his first wife, Betty, George took wrestling to another level of entertainment, using a valet to accompany him to the ring, dressing in flashy women's robes and sporting a blond curly hairdo. Playing the ultimate heel, George became a sensation, especially with the advent of television.
Wrestling played a huge role in the growth of TV after World War II. It was cheap to produce (one or two cameras and a microphone were all that were needed) and there were shows from coast to coast. In Los Angeles, which was George's home base at the time, the five local stations broadcast wrestling shows six nights a week. Time magazine ran a story calling George "the newest, slickest, most popular performer of them all," and said that bars trying to attract new customers would put up signs that read, "Gorgeous George, Television, Here Tonight."
"I don't know if I was made for television . . . Or if television was made for me," George said. Whatever. In television's infancy, George was every bit as important as Milton Berle.
George's flirtations with femininity not only appealed to both sexes but opened the door for a new wave of wrestlers who took large pieces of his act and incorporated them into their persona. "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers, Jesse Ventura and Ric Flair are just three of the famous grapplers who were inspired to a large part by the Gorgeous George character.
But it was outside of wrestling that George left his biggest impression. How drab would boxing have been without a young Cassius Clay to revive it in the early 1960s? Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, only became a colorful loudmouth after a pep talk from George in Las Vegas in June 1961.
After a match with Classy Freddie Blassie, George sat the young boxer down and told him, "You just gotta have a gimmick . . . Tell them how pretty you are, tell them how great you are. And a lot of people will pay to see somebody shut your big mouth."
Bob Dylan, meanwhile, who met the wrestler in Hibbing, Minn., in the mid 1950s while he was still an unknown Bob Zimmerman, called George "a mighty spirit." "Crossing paths with Gorgeous George was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come," Dylan said.
For all that bigger-than-life persona, though, George was very much mortal. A drinking problem cost him two marriages, his gambling was out of control, and he died virtually penniless in a skid-row house in Los Angeles. As befitting his style, he was buried wearing one of his sequined robes and was laid to rest in an orchid casket.
In a sign of pop culture icons passing the torch, George passed away December 26, 1963, the day Capitol Records released the first single of a young, brash English group. The single was "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles.
Gorgeous George
The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture
By John Capouya
HarperEntertainment

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