Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (22 page)

“Two guys just got carried away,” Vince replied. Then he wrapped a thick hand around Ortman’s shoulder and added, “It won’t happen again, Mike. I promise.”

On Sunday, December 17, Ortman was in his home when he flicked on the follow-up pay-per-view,
In Your House
. Once again, the matches unfolded as expected until Hart met his real-life brother-in-law, Davey Boy Smith. Not a minute into their bout, Hart fell on a raft of metal stairs and split his forehead. With blood streaming down all sides of his face, he continued to wrestle. No sooner had he won than Linda called Ortman to say, “Vince knew you’d be upset, Mike. But we didn’t have anything to do with Bret cutting his head. It was an accident, and we still had a half hour to go with the show.”

While that may have been true (and there is ample reason to believe it wasn’t, that Hart had bladed himself), the McMahons couldn’t have been unhappy with the result. Footage from the match was edited into
Raw
’s opening sequence, and a memo was distributed through Titan Tower warning that while they had a “responsibility to exercise appropriate restraint when younger, unsupervised viewers may be watching,” the company’s shows “may include elements which are consistent with the time period.”
Nitro
was in its eleventh week, and the two shows were even in the ratings. To Ortman, the memo suggested that the WWF could no longer afford to have principles.

In January, Vince announced he wanted to do a series of skits lampooning Turner. Aides tried to talk him out of it, reminding him that he had a long-standing policy of never acknowledging the competition. But he dismissed their concerns. “It’s going to be the funniest thing we’ve ever done,” he said.

The first episodes, which started airing in January 1996,
were
funny. An actor in a terrible toupee and a cheap suit portrayed Turner leading a roundtable meeting of his top acts, which included a white-haired Huckster and his portly sidekick, the Nacho Man. In one skit, as images of Vince’s current acts flickered onto the boardroom projector screen, the limp-skinned Huckster sighed and said, “No way can I do that, brutha. At my age my feet don’t even leave the ground.”

But over the next six weeks, the vignettes went from funny to malicious. In a draft of one script entitled “TV Trivia, “Turner was depicted as a game show contestant playing beside a dizzy blonde. As the host introduced a Jeopardy-like category called “Pompous Quotes,” the draft called for this dialogue:

H
OST:
Who made the racial comment, “As for blacks, well, most of them are not black anyway. They’re brown. Well, aren’t they? It’s very seldom you see a black black.”

T
ED:
Michael Jackson. (buzzer)

G
IRL:
That’s funny, Billionaire Ted.

H
OST:
Right! Next question. What famous person said this? “King Henry VIII didn’t get divorced, he just had his wives’ heads chopped off …. Now, that’s a good way to get rid of a woman—no alimony.”

T
ED:
Why that was my buddy, O.J. (buzzer)

G
IRL:
(To Ted) Shame on you, Billionaire Ted. (Ding ding ding.)

H
OST:
Yes! The correct answer is Billionaire Ted ….

The more elaborate the skits, the more Vince became willing to stop the company’s work to produce them. Employees were sent e-mails directing them to drop what they were doing because extras were urgently needed in the WWF’s in-house production studios. But what little humor was left in the rivalry disappeared when McMahon directed his legal staff to send a brief to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that merger talks between Turner and Time Warner be stopped because Turner was “engaged in a systematic plan to destroy the WWF.”

That was too much for Kay Koplovitz. The president of the USA Network had been following the Time Warner talks, too, and though she and Turner were fierce rivals when it came to programming, she had to be more circumspect where Time Warner was concerned. After all, the media giant owned cable systems around the country that accounted for about 10 million of USA’s 70 million viewers. While Koplovitz usually didn’t interfere with what the McMahons broadcast, the Billionaire Ted skits put her in an indelicate position. After the March 18 episode of
Raw
featured Turner as the Jack Nicholson character in
A Few Good Men
—thundering the famous line, “You want the truth, you can’t handle the truth”—Koplovitz decided things were going too far. Something had to be done.

The word came to Ortman in a phone message from one of Koplovitz’s top aides: Not only would there be no more Billionaire Ted skits on USA, the network wanted to see advance copies of his scripts and have a representative at all future creative meetings. It was more than just the skits that worried the network president.
Raw
’s ratings were as low as they’d been since the show was launched. And other strange things that Vince was trying weren’t working. Doink the Clown, for instance, was introduced as kind of a slasher-film villain. He’d chase fans into the audience, later bringing his midget assistant, Dink, into the act. It was as if Vince’s dark side was spilling out without any of the perspective or filters that had carried him to the top of the business in the eighties. Koplovitz thought that Vince was letting the strain get to him. She’d seen it before in Hollywood. He was losing his balance. He needed someone to keep him in touch with the outside world.

The person she chose to pair him with was Wayne Becker, a former golf programmer who favored double-breasted suits and presented himself as an urbane insider. He was fiercely loyal to Koplovitz, who he viewed as a genuine pioneer. As he put it later, “As far as we were concerned, the WWF was low maintenance as long as Vince was behaving himself. But the whole FTC thing really changed that.”

Going to midwestern arenas to monitor the WWF shows was slow torture for Becker, who was used to the more genteel world of PGA clubhouses. But he dutifully did it, and what he saw genuinely opened his eyes. “Vince is very hard to deal with because he’s such a character,” says Becker.” There are times where your greatest challenge is trying to decide whether his view of reality is the same as yours because he is so into what he was doing. I never knew if I was dealing with Vince the person or the character because he’d waffle back and forth.”

Of all the things the WWF did, nothing struck Becker as more darkly confusing than an androgynous character named Goldust. As played by Dustin Runnels, the son of Virgil Runnels (Dusty Rhodes), Goldust was a giant wink to the gay community, though it was hard to imagine many found it all that fun to watch him beat rivals with the kinds of homoerotic advances that sent them out of the ring screaming. Dustin spent hours in makeup, streaking his long and puffy face with golden paint and black lipstick, then framing it with a platinum blond wig that dipped past the shoulder pads of his massive pantsuits. Once he disappeared into character, he was willing to do anything to shock, including running his hands over his breasts and crotch in the ring and making bondage part of the act by wearing dog collars and spiked bras. What struck Becker wasn’t just that Goldust sprang from the minds of men who had some pretty fucked-up ways of amusing themselves. What struck him was that Dustin was running his career into the ground—as a wrestler, he’d never quite recover from the act—simply to spite his father. Becker also thought that McMahon seemed to take special delight in stoking the family feud, which as best as Becker could tell involved Dustin’s marriage to an ex-cosmetologist named Terri Boatwright, who vamped around as his cigar-smoking manager. (In a speech that he gave in full costume one evening on
Raw
, Dustin showed how many levels wrestling scripts could operate on when he spoke directly to his father through the cameras lens. He said: “All those years I looked up to you, you were bigger than life, and I wanted to be just like you. I wanted to live like you. So I became a professional wrestler …. There is no one on the planet who can do Goldust as well as I can. I hope you’re proud of my family and myself. I’m very proud of them.”

But as uncomfortable as Goldust made Becker, he also realized he was a stranger in a strange land and had to proceed cautiously. He had to earn Vince’s trust. It was something of a breakthrough, then, when Vince approached him one day to solicitously ask for a piece of advice. On
Raw
that night, he wanted one of his wrestlers to refer to Goldust as a queer. Becker knew that Vince had already made up his mind to do it, but he acknowledged the gesture. When he was told that Goldust would fight back, he agreed. It may not have been a huge step in the cause of human rights, but it was a small step in the cause of Wayne Becker’s gaining the trust of Vince McMahon.

The effect of that night’s show, and others like it, was evident in a focus group that USA commissioned. A tape of one of the sessions showed a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys gathered around a conference table behind a one-way mirror. Asked about their favorite viewing habits, they ticked off a long list of sports. When one mentioned wrestling, they all quickly agreed that, yes, they watched it, too. Their favorite show?
Raw
, they all answered. Then the moderator asked each to pick a character they didn’t like. “Goldust,” said one boy in a down parka with a pair of headsets dangling from his neck.” He’s a queer.” But, interrupted another kid, “he’s got a chick. “The reference to Dustin’s real-life wife prompted a lusty debate among them that was finally settled by a third boy.” Nah,” he concluded. “She’s a lesbian.”

It scarcely mattered to the McMahons that Goldust was giving millions of teenagers their first images of what gay men acted and sounded like. He was a heel, and in the moral nexus of Vince’s world, there was only one way to deal with someone like that. You had to beat the shit out of him.

That job fell to Roddy Piper, who was making a return to the WWF in
Wrestlemania XII
at the Pond in Anaheim in March 1996. In a pre-taped vignette at a nearby lot, Piper waited for Goldust in a white Bronco, clutching a baseball bat. When Dustin, made up as Goldust, arrived at the lot in a speeding gold Cadillac, Piper cut him off with his Bronco, leaped out of the car, and started madly smashing the Cadillac’s windows. As glass shattered everywhere, Dustin ran for cover, and then Piper hunted him down.

In any other context, it would have been called a hate crime. But what Ortman had come to accept, and what Becker had discovered, was that the rules were different when you called it wrestling.

ELEVEN

THE EXECUTIVES AT THE
USA Network weren’t the only ones who were uncomfortable about Goldust. Before Roddy Piper was penciled in to fight him, Vince had asked a veteran of the game, Scott Hall, to do it.

Hall freely admitted that he’d be living hand to mouth—rather than in a five-thousand-square-foot Orlando-area home—if not for McMahon, who allowed him to develop into Razor Ramon, a James Dean knockoff with oily black hair and a stubble-covered jaw. Despite a terrible Puerto Rican accent that sounded like it belonged in a high school production of
West Side Story
, Razor Ramon became one of the icons of the so-called new WWF and a member of a circle of top acts known around Titan Tower as the Clique.

The Clique was more than a catchphrase. The alliance—comprised of Hall, Shawn Michaels, Kevin Nash, Sean Waltman, and Paul Levesque (Hunter Hearst Helmsley)—was a strong-willed, frequently vindictive group that used their collective mastery of wrestling politics to forge a kind of shadow government in the WWF. All five had close ties to McMahon and used them to obtain special meetings in which they called their own shots and, on occasion, influenced the careers of others. Their swagger was evident on a tour of Germany when one of them, reportedly Michaels, taunted the blond manager Tammy Lynn Sytch by putting feces on her plate during a preshow buffet. Sytch fell apart and left for the States. When her boyfriend, wrestler Chris Candido, subsequently got into a fight with Michaels about it, he was promised that he’d be stripped of his half of a tag-team belt when they all got home. Sure enough, he was.

But in this instance, Hall’s membership in the Clique didn’t help him much. What Vince was asking him to do with Goldust left him facing an impossible choice. “What do I do when my kid goes to school and hears from the other kids that his daddy is a queer?” he asked, genuinely distraught that a long-term angle with Goldust might raise the wrong kinds of questions about his own predilections. Lines had to be drawn, especially when the moral issues got intertwined with the financial ones.

Vince’s contracts featured downside guarantees allowing wrestlers to count on a minimum salary. But the real money to be made was in salary-boosting incentives. If a wrestler worked hard at building his character’s popularity, it could lead to a pay-per-view appearance, which was the Holy Grail. Because talent got a percentage of the gross revenues, a star like Hall might make six figures for a night’s work. The problem was that after a strong year in 1995, Hall had found his hours cut in the general belt-tightening that accompanied Raw’s ratings doldrums. His $400,000 downside guarantee had been cut by a third. Hall feared that if the Goldust act didn’t go over—if the macho Razor Ramon was suddenly viewed as, uh, fruity—he’d irreparably damage his character and the chance to star in lucrative pay-per-views.

Like many wrestlers, Hall had kept his wife largely in the dark about his business affairs. So when he’d started complaining about his salary, she asked, “How can Vince be that unreasonable? Let me talk to him.” Dana, Scott’s wife, didn’t believe all the cynical things that people said about Vince. In fact, she thought the drug tests that he’d put in place after his trial were helping to keep Scott, an addictive personality, clean and sober. She also knew that other wives had gotten involved in their husbands’ negotiations and had found the owner to be reasonable. She was sure that if she could just sit down and talk to him, she could straighten things out.