Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (8 page)

His fourth hour of weekly television was
All-American Wrestling
on USA, and because Nielsen had just begun monitoring cable viewership it became Kay Koplovitz’s first measurable ratings hit, easily outdoing Robert Klein and Don Adams. Knowing a good thing when she saw it, Koplovitz asked Vince if he wanted to fill an hour-long hole in her Tuesday lineup as well. He had no idea what to do with it until he was out to dinner one evening with a director named Nelson Sweglar, who suggested, “Why don’t you do a talk show?”

Tuesday Night Titans
(or TNT) Vince’s fifth program, was a radical departure for the WWF and wrestling in general. From a shoestring set with a boxy black-and-white skyline behind the talk show desk, he interviewed a parade of wrestlers as if they all lived in some parallel universe where everyone walked around in colored trunks, Arab headdresses, pink leisure suits, tribal feathers, and army fatigues. For a sidekick, he chose a diminutive British wrestler named Lord Alfred Hayes, who dressed in tuxedos and spoke with
Masterpiece Theatre
diction. Because the wrestlers could never leave character,
TNT
became a running improv built around sight gags and skits. Once a week Vince would fly in from New York to a small studio in Baltimore that looked like a loading dock and spend the afternoon filming the two-hour show. At first, the executives from USA didn’t quite know what to make of the grandfatherly wrestler Freddie Blassie, who coined the phrase “pencil-neck geek,” dispensing advice to the lovelorn on a rose-colored set. When Vinnie read him a letter from a woman complaining that her husband wasn’t paying her attention, Blassie groused, “Has the woman tried taking a bath, used underarm deodorant, shaved under the armpits? You goofy broad, that’s what you gotta do!” In another skit, he hosted a wedding for Butcher Vachon and followed it with an all-heel reception at a local banquet hall. Vince put in an advance order for forty custard pies and when a food fight broke out at the party, his cameras caught the mortified owner feverishly scraping pie crust off the walls.

Vincent James McMahon never saw
Tuesday Night Titans
. In January 1984, he confided to Jim Barnett that there was blood in his urine. What his doctors found was that cancer had spread throughout his body. Four months later, on May 27, 1984, he died, with his sons and wife at his hospital bedside.

Recounting the moment to
Playboy
years later, Vince said: “My dad was old Irish … and for some reason I don’t understand, they don’t show affection …. He never told me he loved me …. That time in the hospital, I kissed him and said I loved him. He didn’t like to be kissed, but I took advantage of him. Then I started to go. I hadn’t quite gotten through the door when I heard him yell, I
love you, Vinnie! ‘“

It was to be a final sadness that the man who spent his whole life in wrestling would have so few of his colleagues there to say good-bye. As Barnett remembers, “There was a very small wrestling contingent because all of Vincent’s friends from the business were mad at Vinnie.”

To the promoters of the crumbling National Wrestling Alliance,
TNT
was a heresy, something that transformed their life’s work into a joke. They feared it would turn the public against them by altering traditional, physical wrestling into television comedy. But if the old-timers hated the show, just about everyone else seemed to love it. To
Sports illustrated
, it was “maybe the most provocative talk show on television.” To USA, it was another hit. And to a burgeoning rock manager named David Wolff, it was just the thing he needed to get his girlfriend’s new album noticed.

Wolff, the thirty-two-year-old son of a life insurance salesman, was a fast-talking rock hustler with a full beard, sunken cheeks, and downtown clothes who’d grown up in Connecticut watching wrestling shows like
Bedlam from Boston
. He hadn’t thought about wrestling in years when his girlfriend, Cyndi Lauper, returned home to New York from a concert in San Juan raving about a passenger she’d met in first class. His name was “Captain” Lou Albano, and he went so far back in the business, she said, he could remember being on the
Jackie Gleason Show
.

Lauper was no stranger to show business herself. She grew up in Queens and, after dropping out of a fashion college, where she developed a taste for vampish corsets and rainbow hair, knocked around with a rockabilly band known as Blue Angel. She quit the band after meeting Wolff, and though radio executives didn’t care for her Betty Boop accent (one consultant went so far as to tell Wolff that “she talks like a duck”), Epic Records offered her a seven-album deal. Figuring that her image would help carry the first single, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” executives at the label committed to make a video for it. The scenes were already drawn out on storyboards and the casting done when Lauper returned from San Juan raving about Captain Lou. At the last minute, Wolff asked Epic to call the World Wrestling Federation and inquire if Albano was available to play Cyndi’s father. At first, the grandfatherly grappler said he wasn’t interested, but on the evening before filming, his wife convinced him to change his mind.

As an overbearing father trying to contain his flighty daughter, Albano was delightfully campy. Even better, having a wrestler in the video was just the kind of quirky thing that the executives at MTV loved. In the spring of 1984, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” became one of the network’s most played videos, and Lauper was designated (along with Duran Duran, Adam Ant, and the Stray Cats) one of the station’s core artists.

Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Wolff racked his brain for ways to leverage that exposure until he had a vision that made him, as he’d later say, “see the future.” And so it was that he took the forty-minute trip out of Manhattan to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he met the president of the WWF for the first time. Grabbing a seat on a leather couch, Wolff thanked McMahon for making Albano available for the “Girls” video. Then he hit him with the idea that, he said, “will make us a fucking fortune, Vince. I mean it. A fucking fortune.”

The idea, Wolff explained, was to stage a feud between his girlfriend and Albano, whose role in the WWF was as a manager. Managers are assigned to new wrestlers or to ones that need help getting over with the crowd. They walk their charges to ringside, make threats on their behalf, and stand by the ring in case someone needs to be hit with a metal chair or a tennis racket in the heat of the moment. Besides the loud Hawaiian shirts that stretched against his three-hundred-pound frame, Albano was best known for a safety pin that he stuck through his pierced cheek. For reasons Wolff never quite figured out, Albano used the pin to dangle rubber bands off his cheek like earrings. Wolff knew his girlfriend was no wrestler, but, he told Vince, she’d be a perfect manager and therefore a perfect foil to play off against Albano at ringside. Wolff suggested they start small, with the two appearing on a WWF show together. Then they could build up to a main event at Madison Square Garden, where both stars would come out managing wrestlers who’d fight their grudge match for them.

Vinnie had the perfect candidates. One of his oldest sideshow acts was Lillian Ellison, a South Carolinian battle-ax with red hair and garish blue eye shadow who broke into the business in the late forties as a slave girl called Moolah and had trained most of the female wrestlers who’d come along since. The other was one of Ellison’s protégées, an auburn-haired Texan named Wendi Richter. Wolff said that sounded fine, so long as Lauper got the young one and the young one won.

In late May, Wolff and Lauper drove in a rainstorm from Martha’s Vineyard to Allentown, just in time to make the taping of the syndicated
All-Star Wrestling
. After studying clips of the show, Wolff decided to start the feud on one of
All-Star
’s funniest and most unpredictable segments, Piper’s Pit, which starred the combustible, kilt-wearing heel known as Roddy Piper. It was ostensibly an interview segment, but Piper tended to be less interested in getting answers than in getting offended and throwing his guests out of their chairs.

As Wolff rushed, dripping wet, onto the set on the fairgrounds (in the farmer’s pavilion, which he noted smelled faintly like livestock), he explained to the cast that he wanted to keep things simple. Albano would answer one of Piper’s questions in a manner that was insulting to Lauper, and she’d slug him with her purse. When the cameras started rolling, Albano delivered in spades. “Tell them how you came off my reputation, Cyndi!” he screamed, waving an indignant finger at the woman he insisted he had made a star by virtue of his appearance on her “Girls” video. “Tell them how all women are nothing! They’re slime!” Lauper, just getting over a cold, had little trouble looking irked. She threw over a table, jumped to her feet, and clocked Albano with her purse. The only thing that took him by surprise was the bottle of perfume in it. It left a small welt.

That episode of
All-Star Wrestling
aired in mid-June. By the end of the month, Wolff, along with Piper and Albano, was in MTV’s offices with a tape, pestering the channel’s director of programming, Les Garland, for attention.

Since its debut in 1981, MTV had gone from reaching 2.5 million homes to nearly 20 million in 1984. With two-thirds of its viewers under the age of twenty-five, the music channel was discovering it had a remarkable power to push video-friendly acts up the Billboard charts. Garland was the man most responsible for pushing those acts. A onetime San Francisco deejay, he’d worked for Atlantic Records in Los Angeles before signing on with MTV. An impeccable dresser with a distinguished mane of salt-and-pepper hair, he had an office that was as well appointed as his wardrobe—filled with smart art, fresh flowers, ashtrays that he kept compulsively clean, and a putting green he liked to use during meetings. In that office, he charged up his creative staff to think of the most outrageous promotions imaginable to get the channel noticed.

When Wolff told Garland about his idea to draw attention to Lauper by creating a feud with Albano and asked whether Garland would give it airtime, Garland’s eyes brightened. He’d taken in a few recent matches at the Garden and had been favorably impressed by Vinnie, whom he’d briefly met backstage. And though MTV had never done a nonconcert event, Garland said, “Not only will I promote it, I’ll carry Cyndi live.”

Wolff was ecstatic and didn’t want to waste any time. He raced over to Albano’s Manhattan apartment with a handheld video camera he’d borrowed from MTV. After rearranging some furniture, he filmed Albano slobbering milk from his beard and bellowing, “Ms. Lauper, you’re a liar! You’re a cheat! You’re a disgrace!”
(Sports Illustrated
would describe his looks as “a gross meringue of facial hair, rubber bands and morsels of food that makes him look like Jabba the Hut.”) Then Wolff raced over to the Epic studio where Lauper was recording and filmed Cyndi’s answer, which went something like this: “I challenge you, you fat windbag!”

As the dueling clips aired during the early summer of 1984, Wolff couldn’t believe his good fortune. Not only was the
She’s So Unusual
album turning into a genuine phenomenon, on its way to selling 6 million copies, the disparate worlds of rock music and wrestling were seamlessly coalescing around the Garden event, just as he’d imagined. If one thought about it, the marriage wasn’t so strange after all. Lauper needed to put distance between herself and another MTV discovery, Madonna. But with her secondhand Soho threads, she was also cannily winking at the downtown hipster crowd. When that crowd—which traveled as a pack between art galleries and clubs and hot new restaurants—followed her into wrestling, it brought its own publicity machine. Suddenly, the
New York Post
was reporting that Andy Warhol was thinking of painting Hulk Hogan and that David Letterman was raving to his high-powered friends at NBC about TNT. The irony crowd had discovered wrestling.

On July 23, the show that Garland dubbed
The Brawl to Settle It All
aired to the highest rating MTV ever had. Teenagers were discovering wrestling, too.

EARLY IN
the fall of 1984, Vinnie called together a dozen of his top aides in the boardroom of his cramped Greenwich offices on Holly Hill Lane to announce his latest idea. A North Carolina wrestling company had just staged a huge event in Greensboro and simulcast it to two dozen theaters across the Southeast. Vince wanted to do a show ten times as large and broadcast it nationally by closed-circuit TV.

His top aides were skeptical. After all, his two prior closed-circuit endeavors had been fiascoes. And the company’s cash flow was tight. He was paying out a small fortune—up to $10,000 a week to some stations—to guarantee that
All-Star Wrestling
and its siblings had berths on broadcast television in major markets such as Chicago. On top of that, Hogan’s novelty was starting to wear off. They were going to need a new star soon. Did Vinnie really want to tie up his energy, not to mention what little cash flow he had, in a single supershow that would involve hundreds of theaters and the inevitable technological hassles that came with closed-circuit broadcasts, not to mention advertising and promotion?

Vinnie wasn’t listening. To have a truly national promotion, he needed a national event. But six weeks before the show, when they hadn’t sold enough tickets to cover the deposits on the two hundred theaters they’d booked, it looked like his advisers were right. This thing they were calling
Wrestlemania
was going to be the Snake River Canyon all over again. So Vinnie rushed out to the New York public relations firm of Bozell & Jacobs with a $90,000 check. “I have eight weeks to put a million asses in the seats,” he told publicist Frank Holler. “Make it catch fire.”

Holler could have sent out all the press releases in the world, but they would have fallen on deaf ears had Garland not been so ecstatic about the ratings that
Brawl
achieved. He wanted another event on MTV. So McMahon and Wolff came up with the idea of an award ceremony at the end of a December show at Madison Square Garden, purportedly to reward Lauper for her work on women’s rights. (As her MTV image grew, Lauper used the mock feud with Albano to position herself as a rock feminist.) Instead of standing outside the ring, Lauper would be in it, receiving a plaque with Wolff at her side, when Roddy Piper would storm inside. Then, in a move that would set up a whole new rivalry, Piper would attack Wolff by lifting him into an
airplane spin
(balancing him on his shoulders and twirling) and throwing him hard to the mat. Besides being shown on MTV, the surprise finish would be shown and reshown on all the WWF’s broadcasts, breathlessly billed as an attack on rock and roll. It would divide the WWF into pro- and antirock camps, setting up an inevitable confrontation that would be tailor-made for another MTV special. A third special was important. If Vinnie could get it to air just before the troubled
Wrestlemania
, the publicity might be enough to put those “million asses” in the seats.