Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (25 page)

AT EIGHT
o’clock on November 7, 1996, a black screen appeared on USA warning viewers that what they were about to see was both graphic and violent. It was the only time it would be shown over the next hour and was the last thing shown before the scene switched to Brian Pillman’s stately colonial home in Walton, Kentucky, thirty miles from Cincinnati.

A graphic in the upper-left corner was stamped “Live!” and a reporter stationed in the driveway was there to set the stage for those unfamiliar with WWF product: A hobbled and frightened Pillman was trapped inside, he said, waiting for Austin to make good on a threat to kill him.

Pillman was introduced while lying on his couch, his ankle in a cast from the operation he’d just endured. “Don’t you feel like a hostage in your own home?” Vince asked through a remote hookup. “Austin is a dead man walking,” Pillman replied on cue, unsheathing a Glock pistol and cocking it confidently. “When Austin 3:16 meets Pillman’s nine-millimeter gun, I’m gonna blow his sorry ass straight to hell!”

Later, Vince would insist the scene was no different from the standard fare in police shows and cable movies. But he’d have a hard time explaining why, if his audience was really adults, a Milton Bradley rock-em-sock-em Karate Fighters commercial preceded the next piece of footage—arguably the most violent thing that he’d ever put on television.

When the program resumed, Austin had arrived outside the Pillman home to force his way past three plainclothes “guards” (actually extras from a nearby wrestling school) on hand to protect the feeble Pillman. In street-fighting style, he punched and clawed and used children’s toys (a hockey stick and Radio Flyer wagon) to barge past them. In the ugliest moment, Austin forced the head of one of the men into a car door and slammed it as the victim wailed. Finally, with the guards subdued, he disappeared into the dark—a jackbooted intruder bent on terrorizing a typical suburban couple with kids toys in the driveway and a loaded Glock in the basement.

If this was the new WWF, it had to coexist jarringly with the old WWF because the action quickly switched back to matches that had been previously recorded in Fort Wayne, Indiana, including a bout featuring, of all people, the Iron Sheik, the very symbol of Vince’s eighties heyday. It was a head-spinning juxtaposition—the old naïveté next to the new noir. Even Vince seemed a bit unsettled by the new ground he was plowing.” There’s a very uncomfortable feeling in that live shot we just saw,” he said, as much to himself as to his audience.

He was right to worry. Whatever it looked like on paper, whatever it sounded like in the writer’s room, there was no way he could have known the next scene would look like this: Pillman, trapped in his basement, holding his gun over his head. Suddenly, a hand breaks through a glass door. Melanie screams. Brian, his eyes as wild as downed power lines, cocks the gun. Austin lunges. And then the video feed is cut, the screen goes gray, and Vince intones, “Quite frankly, a publicity stunt has gone too far and our hope is that nobody has been hurt.”

For most of the next hour, periodic attempts to “restore” the feed were tried. Each effort “failed,” however, with the on-site director insisting his men were afraid to get out of the truck. To make sure new viewers tuning in at nine o’clock were kept in the loop, the incident was replayed twice more, interspersed with the more conventional Fort Wayne matches. Finally, at 9:55
P.M.,
the video feed was “restored” in time to capture a scene out of
Cops
. As Pillman tried to leap up and chase Austin, his bodyguards held him down. The handheld camera shook so as not to give any clear idea of who was shouting. “Did anyone fire a shot?” “Is anyone hurt?” “Do you know where Austin is?”

And then: “Oh my God, he’s back.”

Melanie cried, “Will someone call the police.”

Austin taunted, “Shoot me!”

Vince yelled from the studio, “Grab the gun! Will someone please call the cops.”

And then Brian Pillman cocked his Glock, aimed it squarely at Austin, and screamed, “This son of a bitch has this coming. Get the hell out of the fucking way.
Get out of the way
. Let him go!”

The screen went gray again, and a gunshot rang out.

WATCHING THE
show in his Connecticut home, Wayne Becker sank back into his chair. Did he just hear the word
fuck
go out over his network’s airwaves? Yes, he was sure he did. Without missing a beat, he called USA’s control room in Manhattan and ordered that a copy of the show be on his desk by the next morning.

By Tuesday afternoon, Kay Koplovitz had already heard about it. The complaint lines of the network had lit up with parents whose kids mistook what they saw for real news footage and with advertisers who were aghast. This was more than bad-boy Vince pushing the envelope. This was an out-and-out betrayal of her trust. She told Becker that she wanted him to thoroughly examine USA’s contract with the WWF and report back on their options. Becker thought that if they wanted they could get Vince on a standards-and-practices issue. Koplovitz considered it, then said, “Get Vince down here. I want him to know that.”

When McMahon finally arrived at USA’s offices, he was led to a conference room with windows that overlooked Rockefeller Center. There was a screen behind Koplovitz’s chair, and Becker had prepared a video to show. The video had everything he thought could be construed as violating McMahon’s contract: from Goldust’s homoerotic gyrations to Steve Austin giving his middle finger to a crowd. In short, the whole ugly New WWF canon.

After he played it, Koplovitz leaned forward. Though there were half a dozen people in the room, she looked at Vince as if they were the only two in the world.” Vince, “she said with a controlled evenness that gave Becker a shiver.” This is not fun. This is not for kids. And this is not what we are going to be doing. It has to be lighter. It has to go back to the original formula.”

Vince played the contrition card and promised to make a public apology, which he did the next Saturday on the WWF’s
Live Wire
show, addressing his audience by saying: “In an effort to draw attention to our new time slot at 8 p.m., there is no doubt we went overboard. We humbly apologize. The actions and the language were reprehensible and this will never ever happen again in the WWF.”

But apology or not, Vince was sure he was onto something. His competition wasn’t WCW, he decided, but the rest of what America was watching at night:
NYPD Blue, Homicide, Cops, Law & Order
. All of a sudden, the scripts emerging from the creative meetings got strikingly darker.

They included the Nation of Domination, a black-power gang that taunted their rivals by telling them to kiss their “black asses;”
¹
Degeneration X, the white-trash successor to the Clique, which popularized the crotch chop—an open-palm chopping gesture toward a thrusting pelvis—and the “Suck It” war cry; and the Hart Foundation, a Canadian heel group that drew patriotic jeers by calling the American cities that they visited “toilets.”

The overall tone for the show was set by Jerry Lawler, who sat at the announcer’s table alongside Ross during
Raw
. One night in Evansville, Indiana, he referred to the feud between Dusty Rhodes and his son, Dustin, who was in costume as Goldust, by saying, “Your father doesn’t love you because you put on a woman’s wig and went around kissing men like a flaming fag.” If Koplovitz continued to be appalled by what she was airing, the inescapable fact remained that
Raw
was still the network’s highest-rated show, outdrawing the drama that followed it,
Le Femme Nikita
, by a two to one margin. So in February 1997, Koplovitz felt compelled to listen to aides who argued for expanding
Raw
to two hours and moving its start time to nine o’clock.
²

The first show in the new time slot aired after the two-week stretch when
Raw
was preempted by the U.S. Open. McMahon was inconsolable. Each year, he muttered that the people at USA had no appreciation for how hard it was to get an audience to come back after it had lost the thread of a soap opera. This year was even worse because
Nitro
had shattered all previous records by luring more than 3.5 million homes to its shows, creating an astounding 4.97 cable rating. To hook his audience back quickly, Vince and his writers concocted a story line featuring Pillman and one of his old flames, Dustin’s wife, Terri.

Winking at a past sexual relationship, the WWF writing group came up with an angle that paired Brian and Terri—who now used her husband’s birth name, Runnels—in a love triangle. It started when Pillman pinned Goldust at a Louisville show and, as a spoil, earned her “services” for a month. Over the next four episodes of
Raw
, Brian tormented Dustin. (This was another uncomfortable inside joke, since the real-life marriage of Dustin and Terri Runnels was in shambles.) In one episode dubbed “Brian Pillman’s XXX-Files, “Terri lay in bed next to him in a seedy motel, handcuffed to the headboard. In another, he led her into the ring while she was hunched over, announcing that he’d “given it to her.” The end of the arc was set for October 7, when Terri’s thirty-day sentence was to be finished. The script called for her to renew her vows with Dustin live on
Raw
that night, only to ditch him at the last minute and run off with Brian.

Pillman was ecstatic enough about being back in the center of the action that he upped his dosage of pills so he could ignore the pain of wrestling on an ankle held together by fused bone and steel. “One night, me and him, Bret [Hart] and Davey Boy [Smith], were sitting in a room getting dressed,” says Del “the Patriot” Wilkes. “It wasn’t a TV show, just a house show.
³
And he’d just come back from a match. He was skinny looking, unhealthy looking. He’d lost a lot of weight. I said, ‘What are you going to do tonight, Brian?’ He said, ‘I’m gonna go out and get so drunk that somebody will kill me and put me out of my misery.’ It was very obvious that he had just given up. In those last few months he was just one pathetically miserable human being.”

As far as drug testing was concerned, things had eased up at Titan Tower since the dark posttrial days when the McMahons monitored everyone under their roof. But deciding that something had to be done for Brian’s own good, Ross gave him a test that he failed. “As long as nobody pushed the envelope, Vince was willing to let dope smoking or casual coke use ride,” says another wrestler. “But Brian threatened that whole status. Two of the Boys took him out back and roughed him up, you know, saying stuff like, ‘Listen asshole, don’t you fuck it up for the rest of us. We know how to handle it. Don’t screw us just because you don’t.’ Everyone knew what was going on with Brian. They were just afraid to do something about it.”

His “Rehab Is For Losers” shirt pretty much said all there was to say about his attitude toward going straight. One of the few times he agreed to seek a doctor’s advice was after he took his kids to a Chuck E. Cheese’s and drew the attention of a cop because he was stumbling like a drunk. After that, Melanie became worried enough that she told Brian she wanted him to get life insurance for the sake of the kids. He agreed, only to balk when he later learned that he’d have to take a drug test to qualify. A tester arrived at his home four times, and each time Brian refused to submit. On the fifth occasion, the tester said he wasn’t coming back. Brian relented and gave blood. But after the man left, he turned to his wife and said, “Well you can kiss that million dollars good-bye.”

On Sunday, October 6, 1997, Melanie was at home, cooking dinner for the kids and wondering how to break the news to Brian that she was pregnant once again, when a road agent from the WWF phoned to ask if she knew where he might be. He’d missed his early Sunday shuttle to the Twin Cities airport and hadn’t shown up at the
Badd Blood
set in the Kiel Center in St. Louis.

Melanie was more mad than worried. When he’d slipped back to his motel room Saturday night, he’d left her an answering machine message saying that he was going to bed. He probably took too many pills and overslept, she thought. Or maybe he’d smashed up another rental car. After she hung up the phone, she called a friend and said, “Brian’s doing this to spite me. He’s on so much shit, he probably
wants
to lose his job.”

The words had just left her lips when the doorbell rang. She pulled aside the curtain to see a police officer on her doorstep.

The news that the policeman was delivering—that Brian had died of a heart attack in the middle of the night—reached the Kiel Center at about the same time as it reached Melanie.

Three wrestlers were sitting in a room, trying to figure out a finish to their match when a ghostly white Owen Hart walked in and said, “Guys, they just found Brian dead in the hotel room.”

One of them, Leon “Vader” White, looked at his colleagues, then paused. “We can worry about that after the match,” he said. “I’ve got to come up with a
fucking finish!”

As word of the discovery spread, the confusion surrounding the way Brian lived shrouded the way he died. Was it a simple heart attack, caused by the stress his chemically inflated body put on his heart? Was it a suicide? There were bottles of pills and muscle relaxers around his bed. Or was it just an accidental overdose? Vince dreaded that thought. That would be all he needed—something else to start a whole new inquisition, a whole new round of ratings-killing press.

The irony, of course, was that Pillman was one of the few people the WWF actually tested for drugs. The problem was that they let him keep working even though he’d flunked. Referee Ed Sharkey would tell the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
that he last saw Pillman sleeping on the floor of the locker room Saturday night, curled into a fetal position.

After huddling with his advisers, Vince decided to go on the air before
Badd Blood
to announce the death and acknowledge the chance that it might be drug related. That, at least, would explain Brian’s absence. But by the light of the next morning with another show scheduled later in the day in Kansas City, it was clear that wouldn’t be enough. A tribute film was quickly stitched together and a decision made to toll a bell for the sellout crowd at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City while the WWF cast stood for a moment of silence during
Raw
. But was even
that
enough? Didn’t he have a responsibility to do more? For his fans? For his wrestlers? For his ratings? The way he saw it, his competition wasn’t just
Cops
. It was
Dateline
and
Prime Time Live
, too. What would Jane Pauley or Diane Sawyer do?