Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (32 page)

3
The Rock had won the WWF world title belt for the first time five weeks earlier, when he was the last man standing in a fourteen-man elimination tournament at the Survivor Series pay-per-view in St. Louis.

SIXTEEN

AFTER HE LISTENED TO
the details of his youngest brother’s fall, Bret Hart pulled himself together and flew on a chartered plane back to Calgary to rejoin his family. He dreaded seeing what the death of Owen would do to his parents. On Owen’s last trip home, the clan’s light-hearted son had been uncharacteristically moody, telling his folks that he did not want to talk about wrestling, that he was sick of it. Bret would think about that as he held his seventy-five-year-old mother’s hand and watched his father sit in stony silence.

The media fallout the next morning was like nothing anyone involved in wrestling had ever seen. As the WWF business staff in Stamford was poring over the morning’s headlines—“Death in the Ring,” screamed the front page of the
New York Post
—Vince huddled with his creative team in St. Louis, trying to plan a response. He’d been hammered when he put Brian Pillman’s heavily sedated widow on the air nineteen months earlier; he wasn’t making that mistake again. Instead, he decided they would try to produce something tasteful. All the company’s wrestlers would stand silently in full costume as a short video tribute was aired. Then they’d engage in the tradition of tolling a bell ten times.

“What I experienced that night couldn’t have been done any better,” recalled Jeff Jarrett, Hart’s tag-team partner. “Was it shameless? Not at all. What we do is sports entertainment, and that’s how sports entertainers pay tribute. We’re not baseball players. We’re not actors. We’re the hybrid.”

Yet if wrestling was on trial—as Owen’s brother accused it of being—it was hard to call the evening tasteful. When Jerry Lawler, who cradled the dying Owen in his arms the night before, tried delivering his own homage, he had to deal with a group of drunken men behind him who were sloshing beer in plastic cups and waving a Styro-foam middle finger.

Precisely because the broadcast on Monday, May 24, drew a 7.24 rating, Martha Hart angrily dismissed it as a sanctimonious exercise in conscience cleansing. “Had Owen talked about discomfort with the increasing complexity of the stunts that wrestlers are asked to do?” the host of
Good Morning America
, Charles Gibson, asked her when she made the talk show rounds the next morning.

“Well, yes, we did discuss this stunt,” she replied. “And, you know, I did voice that I wasn’t comfortable with it and that I thought it wasn’t safe. And I did say that there should definitely be safety nets. He never liked the format of the wrestling business, the way it was going. He was just trying to fit in as best as he could so …”

Gibson interrupted her so he could probe further, “What do you mean by feeling uncomfortable with the way it was going?”

“Well, he was just a solid wrestler, and he wasn’t into all the sex and violence and everything that it was promoting. He always said that he, you know, it was definitely not appropriate for children.”

Gibson turned to Bret, who was seated beside her, to ask if he thought his brother’s death would prompt any changes.

“You know, this family, our family, always prided ourselves on wrestling being a fun thing to do,” he replied. “We’re not dead set against the business. We’re just disappointed in the drastic turn that it’s taken in the last two years.” Then he paused, as if wondering whether he should say the thing that was really bothering him. “It’s a shame,” he said, frowning. “Because the fans have become wild dogs. They just want more and more and more all the time.”

To be sure, McMahon had become totally seduced by the loud, angry circus he’d created. In February, he wrapped up the feud he’d started with Steve Austin at
Wrestlemania XIV
by making his own wrestling debut at the Pyramid Arena in Memphis. He ordered a steel cage installed over the ring for the occasion, then came out to chants of “asshole.” He let Austin chase him up the side of the cage, hammer his head into the wire mesh, and throw him fifteen feet down to the arena floor, where he crashed through a gimmicked announcer’s table. “Is the son of a bitch still breathing?” Austin growled as faux paramedics tried to lift Vince away, tipping the gurney so he tumbled to the cold floor. As he lay crumbled in a heap, he signaled his intention to give up every inch of his body by flipping Austin a middle finger. After he’d been beaten to what looked like an inch of his life, he gave Austin the finger with
both
hands.

But on May 31, it was a different Vince who sat in the last pew of the Mclnnis & Holloway Funeral Chapel in Calgary. He sat still and silently, aware this wasn’t friendly turf. Martha was no Melanie Pillman, no grieving wife willing to suffer her loss within the context of a larger family. She resented her in-laws for not denouncing the WWF (Bret was one of the few Harts who could afford to turn his back on the business and rally to her side) and bridled at the organization’s attempts to project an image that had them all grieving as one. When she arrived at the chapel and noticed a huge floral heart by the casket with a WWF logo on its side, she grew so angry that she told one of the funeral directors to “get it out of my sight. “When it came time for the eulogies, she was in no more of a mood to forgive the business for what it had become. “I’m not bitter or angry, but there will be a day of reckoning, “she said. “I promise that.”

ONE OF
the top executives in the WWF, a former
Muppets
executive named Jim Bell, liked to preach a cardinal rule about business: It’s easier to apologize for something after you’ve done it. That was an aphorism Vince and his writers took to heart as they continued to ratchet up the sexual content of
Raw
. As the head of licensing, Bell had few complaints about the show’s tone. Having been in children’s programming for much of his career, he took the same position as Bonnie Hammer, who’d worked in public television in Boston before coming to USA: If parents didn’t want their kids to watch, they were in the best position to stop it.

Sure McMahon and his writers went over the line. Like the episode of
Raw
that aired the prior January in Beaumont, Texas, where Mark Henry was portrayed as being so desperate for a blow job that he accepted the advances of a character portraying a transsexual. Yet as Bell saw it, a little controversy wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. When he first arrived at Titan Tower in 1996, licensers told him that the WWF was a dead brand. Now it was being called
edgy
.

The WWF marketed that edge to companies such as M&M Mars—which agreed to shell out $1 million to sponsor the upcoming
Wrestlemania
—with a variant of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy. The WWF’s version went something like don’t watch, don’t ask, and it promised to deliver young demographics so long as advertisers didn’t spend too much time looking into the details of how the McMahon’s got them.

As Harvey Schiller, who was overseeing Turner Sports at the time, puts it, “Vince was using sex to fight us at TBS because he knew that we weren’t allowed to do that kind of thing. So they got all these fourteen-year-old boys to lock their doors and tell their parents it was just wrestling, and because those parents remembered wrestling as Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik, they said, ‘Sure, yeah, fine.’ ”

Most could be forgiven for assuming that wrestling dealt with sex in a harmlessly burlesque fashion. Those who grew up in the 1950s may have remembered the way Lillian Ellison appeared as a slave girl, wearing a revealing leopard-skin dress, to escort Elephant Boy to the ring. The WWF had a brief flirtation with feminism in the Cyndi Lauper years, but Vince made his feelings toward that side of the business clear when Wendy Richter, Lauper’s confederate, pushed him to expand his ladies’ division. Irritated, he stripped her of her title. Through the early 1990s, the largest part for a woman belonged to Randy Savage’s demure wife, Liz. When Liz followed her ex-husband to the WCW, the WWF’s hemlines came up with Tammy Sytch, who distracted opponents by wiggling her breasts or hiking up her skirts. But it took the arrival of Rena Mero to cause the WWF to lose what little innocence it had left.

Mero was the born-again Christian wife of Marc Mero, who erased his past as the son of a Jewish detective from the Bronx when he reinvented himself as a Little Richard look-alike named Johnny B. Badd. With a heavy tan that he deepened with skin creams so he could pass for black, he became a modestly successful midcard act at WCW. He was driving through Jacksonville on the way to a show one day when he stopped at a restaurant and laid eyes on his future wife.

Rena grew up as one of six kids in a crowded, working-class Jacksonville home, which she left in tenth grade to become a teen bride. She was widowed with an eight-year-old daughter, and was making money by modeling, when Mero passed a note to her table asking for a date. A whirlwind courtship followed, and the two married. Marc was so devoted to Rena that he slowly let his feelings toward her, and toward the born-again faith that they shared, interfere with his work. Things came to a head when he refused to do a sexually charged angle with Dallas Page’s wife and later no-showed a special appearance Bischoff had booked him for; after that, Bischoff suggested that WCW might no longer be the place for Mero. The wrestler agreed. Soon thereafter, he turned up at Titan Tower with Rena looking for work. McMahon was so taken by Rena that he offered them a double deal: While Marc wrestled, his wife—who would be renamed Sable—could linger at ringside as his valet.

Engaging and articulate, Rena became a favorite of Bonnie Hammer, who thought
Raw
needed a strong-willed woman, and of Vince Russo, the head writer who was grateful to have a bombshell who wasn’t on drugs. When Marc blew out his knee on a show one evening and Sable was left with no one to valet, Russo let her headline a series of matches with Luna Vachon, the Gothic-garbed daughter of Paul “the Butcher” Vachon. (Because she was afraid of falling on her implants, Sable was introduced in a series of evening gown matches that required the tearing of more clothes than limbs.)

Sable provided a potent new weapon in the ratings war. Just as Mick Foley redefined athleticism, she became the prototype for the aerobicized temptress in ass-hugging spandex—a category that would grow to include Terri Runnels, the pert and pouty wife of the androgynous Goldust; Debra Marshall, who wore gray-flannel micro-miniskirts with square-cut jackets that opened to her bra; and Jacqueline Moore, an African American black belt in tae kwon do who was hired to be Marc Mero’s girlfriend after an on-air “split” with Sable. As a group, the women wrestled one another in mud, cottage cheese, vats of oil—whatever was good and greasy. They pounded each other’s chests, ripped off each other’s clothes, squeezed each other’s heads between their thighs.

The lone exception was Joanie Laurer, who was neither pristine nor innocent, and had the muscularity to wrestle for real. With a string of stepfathers that caused her to consider making a career out of kicking men’s asses at an early stage in life, Laurer was serious about her athleticism. And having chucked a job as a singing telegram girl to train with Killer Kowalski in Boston, she had no interest in the women’s division. She wanted to fight men. By mixing equal doses of
Carrie
and
Charlie’s Angels
to develop the character known as Chyna, Laurer set herself apart as a kind of New Age feminist. She even argued that she was advancing the cause for sexual equality by delivering the first blow, and then letting men hit her back without being viewed as wife beaters or misogynists.

But for every pile driver that Laurer took for womankind, Sable and her imitators were there to make sure that no one got the wrong idea about what the WWF was selling. A report being prepared by the Federal Trade Commission showed that major movie studios were targeting R-rated movies to kids as young as nine. And the WWF was indisputably in the trenches with them. At one house show in Texas, Sable wore so little that she popped out of her top lunging for Luna, causing a stir when stills were bootlegged on the Internet. In the summer of 1998, she and Jacqueline were paired in an angle that culminated with a pay-per-view bikini contest that Sable won by strutting out with painted palms on her otherwise bare breasts. A couple of months later, the two brought their show-and-tell act to live television. In an evening gown match, they went at it so hard that Sable popped Jacqueline’s breasts from her dress and took a victory strut around the ring in her lingerie.

Though the “accident” couldn’t possibly have surprised anyone in the WWF, McMahon was sheepish about owning up to it, asking the
Rocky Mountain News
in Denver, “ls that appropriate at 8:45
P.M
.? I dare say it’s not even appropriate for 10:45
P.M.
It’s just not what we want to do.” But the truth was that selling sex was
precisely
what the WWF wanted to do. One only had to listen to the announcers, who watched the action like horny uncles, elbowing their nephews (or in this case, the 36 percent of Raw’s audience that was under the age of eighteen) with an endless supply of one-liners like “She certainly seems comfortable with that microphone up at her mouth like that.”

By the start of 1999, it was pointless to ignore the obvious. A study of fifty episodes of
Raw
from the prior year released by Indiana University counted 1,658 instances of crotch grabbing, 157 obscene gestures, and 128 instances of simulated sexual activity. What McMahon needed was a way of acknowledging the success without seeming to be gloating about it. (And there was a lot to gloat about. His 1998 cable TV ratings were up by 50 percent over 1997; attendance increased by 72 percent; and pay-per-view buys had climbed by two-thirds.) His solution came in a brilliantly conceived, unflinching commercial that cost $1.6 million to air during Fox’s coverage of the Super Bowl. It showed Sable walking through the WWF’s offices and passing, among other things, a couple who seemed to be hard at sex on a desk. The spot, which was designed to get viewers to watch a WWF halftime show on USA, wasn’t without a sense of humor. By its end, a melee broke out on one of the upper floors of Titan Tower while McMahon stood outside, watching as a fireball flew out of the building and a hapless office worker plunged to the ground. The signature line came when he smirked and said, “Get it?”