Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture

I was never a big "rasslin'" fan myself but my grandpa and my younger brother were. I remember staying overnight at my grandparents' house and because our bed was made in the living room my sister and I had to stay awake while Grandpa watched the Saturday night rasslin'. He took my little brother to see Gorgeous George in person in our town during the late 1950's and they talked about it for weeks. Last summer when our family was creating a memory book about the way we remembered our grandparents, now long gone, and my brother (60 years old himself) immediately said he wanted to include the story about seeing Gorgeous George. It was the only time he had seen Grandpa get riled up. I bought this book to give my brother for Christmas. I had hoped there would be more about the days, late in his career, when he wrestled in small southwest towns. I was disappointed there was nothing much about those days but I did enjoy being reminded about an era long forgotten. I guess I was paying more attention to the TV than I thought I was because I sure remembered a lot of it. It pretty well researched and easy to read. The photos are great.

Gorgeous George was the biggest star in wrestling from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This is the first biography written about him, as far as I know. It does a pretty good job of covering the events of his life. But I felt like the author did a bit too much speculating about what was going through George's head, when he has no way of knowing that. He also spends too much time talking about famous people who were influenced by George, in an attempt to make George seem relevent to today's world. And not to nitpick, but he refers to the wrestling word for a practical joke as a "swerve", when the correct word is "rib" (a "swerve" is actually a sudden change in the direction of a storyline to surprise the fans). Overall though, this is an entertaining book about a colorful character.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, professional wrestling and Gorgeous George went hand in perfumed hand. It was the ultimate "match made in heaven" and the budding television industry couldn't get enough of this bender of rules and purveyor of sniff. Due to his enormous success, Gorgeous George may have had imitators along the way, but he remained always, the original thing.

John Capouya largely captures the ups and downs of George Wagner's life and career...its many triumphs inside the ring and its disastrous failures outside the squared circle. Gorgeous George was "sui generis" and inspired several future celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan. But the real story here is George and his connection with wrestling as a lifestyle and as a promotion with its sexual subtext. Wrestling, by its nature, is a homoerotic sport, and George played the edges to a fault. Could he have been a star today? I doubt it with the plethora of today's luminaries crossing all sorts of lines. Good vs. bad was more clearly defined a couple of generations ago, whereas now, the boundaries are often nonexistent.

As with many stars of the first order, Gorgeous George could not keep up a life equal to the one he had on stage. His drinking led to his premature death and his marital relations were often in tatters. Capouya's narrative tends to get goofy sometimes, distracting from the larger elements of George's popularity. But if we all wish we had our own fifteen minutes of fame, Gorgeous George had hundreds of hours of being in the public eye to last a lifetime. It's sad that he could never find the happiness, himself, that he brought to millions of others.

In the early days of TV in my life, I remember my aged aunt sitting in her mohair chair screaming in Swedish at the small, black and white image of Gorgeous George prancing across the screen. What she said, I'd not wish to repeat, but it did have some reflections on his parents and some mention of bodily functions. Otherwise, my aunt was prim and proper... we kids would sit out stunned at what we were hearing. This book does some justice to George, but doesn't quite get ot the impact on small town middle American as I recollect it.

Today's fans of the WWE's "entertainment" version of Professional Wrestling now have a chance to read about how the kayfabe era of the business was. For fans of that generation, mention Gorgeous George, and the stories start to unfold. Author John Capouya absolutely reveals the way it was, and shows all of us a Gorgeous George that even the most rabid fans did not know.

His account of George's career is chronicled in a way that is easy to follow, and he end's up giving us a book that is hard to put down.

As I read through his account of George's ups and downs, I felt like I was back sitting ringside again, watching the "Human Orchi" strut his stuff in the squared circle....and I could almost see him throwing those gold "Georgie Pins" to the crowd.

John also gives us an insightful personal side to George Wagner, who lived the life, and sadly boozed it all away. John's research and homework into George's background is to be commended.

Over the last decade, there have been many excellant books published on pro wrestling.....but John's book is "The Main Event". It is a must read, and one that you will read again, and again.