Download PDF by John Capouya: Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created

This is the first-ever biography of the mythical wrestler attractive George, choked with excellent never-before-told tales. George without delay stimulated the likes of Muhammad Ali, who took his bragging and boasting from George; James Brown, who started to put on sequined capes onstage after seeing George on television; John Waters, whose movies featured the outrageous drag queen Divine as an homage to George; and too many wrestlers to count number. Amid those popular culture discoveries are firsthand money owed of the professional wrestling online game from the Nineteen Thirties to the 1960s.

The excellent American male was stoic, quiet, and dignified. yet for a tender couple suffering to make ends meet, within the desperation born of the lingering melancholy and wartime rationing, an concept was once hatched that modified the face of yank pop culture, an concept so daring, so over-the-top and absurd, that it was once perfect. that concept reworked journeyman wrestler George Wagner from a dark-haired, clean-cut stable man to a peroxide-blond braggart who blatantly cheated each probability he bought. Crowds have been stunned—they had by no means noticeable something like this before—and they got here from miles round to witness it for themselves.

Suddenly George—guided by way of Betty, his pistol of a wife—was a draw. together with his golden tresses grown lengthy and styled in a marcel, George went from good-looking to . . . good . . . gorgeous in a single day, the small, dank wrestling venues giving strategy to significant arenas. as though the hair wasn't sufficient, his robes—unmanly issues of silk, lace, and chiffon in faded pinks, sunny yellows, and wealthy mauves—were yet a prelude to the act: the regal front, the tailcoat-clad valet spraying the mat with fragrance, the haughty appears and sneers for the "peasants" who paid to observe this outrageously prissy hulk prance round the ring. How they enjoyed to work out his wonderful mane mussed up through his manly rivals. and the way they enjoyed that alluringly alliterative identify . . . beautiful George . . . the self-proclaimed Toast of the Coast, the feeling of the Nation!

All this was once timed to the arriving of that new invention all people used to be conversing about—television. In its early days, expert wrestling and its larger-than-life characters ruled prime-time broadcasts—none extra so than stunning George, who offered as many units as Uncle Miltie.

Fans got here in droves—to boo him, to stay him with hatpins, to ogle his robes, and to celebrate in his comeuppance. He used to be the fellow they enjoyed to hate, and his provocative, gender-bending act took him to the pinnacle of the leisure international. the United States might by no means be a similar again.