Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (9 page)

Wolff didn’t know anything about those concerns and didn’t care. He was too busy meeting with Piper every afternoon in a Manhattan gym to get ready for the December show, learning how to land without hurting himself (he had to fall flat on the back to disperse the impact evenly). But it wasn’t until he was actually in the ring, watching Dick Clark give Lauper her award and waiting for Piper’s stage cue, that he fully appreciated how much real pain was involved in fake wrestling. Lauper and Albano were in the midst of a storyline reconciliation, and to further their rapprochement, Wolff decided that Lauper should give Albano his own award—a souvenir gold record copy of
She’s So Unusual
. Wolff had spent the better part of the day getting the record gimmicked so that when Piper ran into the ring and grabbed it he could easily break it over Albano’s head. Piper played his part to perfection, using the record as a weapon to attack Albano when he tore into the ring to interrupt the ceremony. Then he threw aside Lauper and turned to Wolff. With his body tensed, Wolff stiffened so it would be easier for Piper to lift him and twirl. What neither man counted on was how real it looked—not just to the fans but to a New York City cop stationed at ringside. He raced into the ring, imagining a felony was near. Piper cursed at the intrusion because the ring was small enough as it was. Now the cop was crowding him and screwing up his throwing angle. Piper pivoted with Wolff still on his shoulders, looked for an empty space, and finally let go of him in an awkward way. Instead of landing flat on his back, Wolff landed hard on his ribs. “Jesus,” Wolff thought. “I’m gonna need acupuncture for this.” Then, all of a sudden, he began to think like a wrestler and told himself:
Sell the pain! Sell the pain!

The night was a publicist’s dream. The next day, MTV viewers saw on-air personality J.J. Jackson reporting on the “shocking occurrence at Madison Square Garden last night … that left Cyndi Lauper’s manager under medical supervision.” The episode was so serious, Jackson intoned, that “lawyers and investigators are still holding up release of the actual video.” That set up what purported to be an investigative special in which veejay Mark Goodman brooded, “It’s plain to see the rock and wrestling connection has reached an all-time low,” before introducing the supposedly embargoed video by saying: “Now, for the first time on national television, the event that’s shocked the world.”

Through the winter, Wolff did his part in keeping the feud in the public eye. At a
Ms
. magazine benefit for Lauper, Wolff borrowed an MTV camera that was on hand for the event and stuck it in front of the face of one of the guests, Geraldine Ferraro, who had just run as the first female candidate for vice president on the Democratic ticket, and along with her running mate, Walter Mondale, had been defeated. “Geraldine, do me a favor,” Wolff asked sweetly. “Just say, ‘Piper, you’re going down!’ ” To his utter amazement, she did.

“She had no idea who he was,” Wolff remembers. “So when Vince started running the clip over and over, he got a call from her law office pleading with him, ‘You got to take this off.’ She was mortified.”

McMahon had a devious streak of his own when it came to getting press. On December 28, he let the
20/20
reporter John Stossel into the Garden and arranged to let him interview several stars, including a thirty-six-year-old heel from Tennessee named David “Dr. D” Shults, whose temper once caused him to have to leave the country because he’d hit a fan during a match. Before he went out, McMahon told Shults to “blast” the reporter, which Shults assumed was a license to get physical. When Stossel opined that the sport was a fake, Shults replied, “You think it’s a fake? I’ll show you it’s for real,” and knocked him to his knees with a cupped hand to the right ear.
¹

The ensuing furor made McMahon’s business so hot that the third MTV special,
The War to Settle the Score
, aired live
and
in prime time. To ensure crossover appeal, a new member was added to the cast: Mr. T, whose career had been launched by
Rocky III
and was at his mass-appeal height as the star of NBC’s action show
The A-Team
. On February 18, 1985,
The War
replaced
The Brawl
as the highest rated show in MTV history.

By now, it was obvious that MTV had transformed Vinnie’s business. In markets like St. Louis, the ratings for his syndicated show were doubling. Inside MTV, that fed a perception that the network was giving more than it was getting. The perception was particularly acute with Garland’s boss, Robert Pittman.

“A year after we made the first deal with Vince, it had occurred to Pittman that he made one mistake,” says Garland. “He didn’t ask for a piece of the action. He kept saying, ‘Look at how big we made it! We put MTV’s seal of approval on it. Why don’t we have a cut?’ ” So Pittman asked McMahon to a conference room in the company’s corporate office and told him the price of continued exposure would be a cut of his gross. McMahon’s reply was short and to the point: “As good as you’ve been to us, we’ve been good to you.
And I’m not asking for a piece of MTV.”

“That was pretty much the end of that relationship,” Garland says.

Vinnie didn’t lose any sleep over the break. He’d gotten what he wanted. Now it was time to save
Wrestlemania
.

On March 27, four days before the show, Bozell & Jacobs booked Hogan to do a talk show,
Hot Properties
, hosted by Richard Belzer on the cable network Lifetime. But through an oversight, no one from the agency went along to chaperon Hogan. “Belzer wanted to be put in a headlock, so Hogan gave him one,” recalls Vince Robatiello, who worked at Bozell & Jacobs.” Then Belzer started goading him, saying it wasn’t much of a headlock. So Hogan kept putting more pressure on him.” When Hogan let go, Belzer fell to the floor unconscious and cut his head. Though the show went on with a replacement host, Belzer wasn’t amused when he woke up at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital after being stitched up. “At that point,” says Robatiello, “I don’t think you could have gotten any more press than we were getting.” The buzz convinced
Saturday Night Live
coproducer Dick Ebersol, who’d already been getting an earful about wrestling from his close friend David Letterman, to invite Hogan and Mr. T onto the late-night show on March 30. It was the pièce de résistance. On March 31, the night of
Wrestlemania
, tens of thousands of fans walked up to theaters to pay fifteen bucks to see what all the fuss was about.

If Vince didn’t possess the most talent-laden cast ever assembled, it might have been the most eccentric, owing to the curious collection of guests he’d hired as window dressing for the main event. Billy Martin, the former New York Yankees manager who was between jobs, was hooked into the appearance through his agent. Unfortunately, he’d never watched wrestling, so he wandered around backstage slightly drunk and muttering, “Who’s this Hulk guy again?” Liberace, on the other hand, understood what Vince wanted right away. The legendary showman, who was headlining Radio City Music Hall that week, arrived in a girdle-tight white satin shirt, trailed by four Rockettes covered in rose red gowns and feathers. As for Muhammad Ali, the third guest looked like he would rather have been taking a pounding from Joe Frazier. Ali had been part of Vince’s stunts before, but even a fat payday didn’t seem to make it any easier for him to watch Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff, along with a bagpipe retinue, strut around the same ring where he’d once awed the world. If the champ was grateful for anything, it was that he was allowed to wear a modest blue shirt and a plain tuxedo. Everyone else looked like they’d been dressed by the costume department of
La Cage aux Folles
. Jesse Ventura, the longtime wrestler (and future governor of Minnesota) who’d given up the ring for the less arduous job of being an announcer, was dressed in a pink satin suit and had an even pinker bandanna wrapped around his head. As Mr. T entered the ring fighter-style with a hooded bathrobe, trailed by his tag-team partner Hogan, Ventura had the line of the night. He said,
“Wrestlemania
is making history.” And he wasn’t wrong. Enough fans watched the show for Vinnie to gross $4 million, a figure that no one in the wrestling world had thought was possible for one night.

DICK EBERSOL
was at a crossroads when he asked Vince to his Trump Plaza penthouse apartment for a meeting.

He’d just finished a second tour at
Saturday Night Live
, the show he’d helped to create, during which he’d assembled a cast that included Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Martin Short. Now he was looking for something that would let him spend more time at home with his wife, the actress Susan St. James, and their newborn son.

Ebersol liked
Tuesday Night Titans
because he thought it shared many of the same elements as
SNL
—namely, the improv, the sight gags, and the running sketches. In fact, it was close enough to the material he’d been producing that he told Vince he’d like to try his hand at producing a network version of it.

Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s vice president for programming, trusted Ebersol, who was a wonder at big-production jobs. The two had gone to Yale together and were neighbors in a tony suburb of Connecticut. But when Ebersol first floated the idea, Tartikoff didn’t consider it a slam dunk. Primarily, he worried that the audiences for
SNL
and wrestling were too different and that
SNL
’s audience wouldn’t watch wrestling in the same 11:30
P.M.
time slot. Because NBC guaranteed a minimum rating to advertisers for the time slot—regardless of what aired—he stood to lose millions in “make-goods” if the ratings tanked. But when Ebersol assured him that they could get Cyndi Lauper for at least one show, Tartikoff green-lighted a pilot.

As he started to hang around WWF shows, Ebersol became impressed with the efficiency of the WWF crew. Gorilla Monsoon ran everything like clockwork from backstage and wrestlers like George “the Animal” Steele (who made his tongue green by eating Chiclets) did their jobs dependably, without much fuss. (Ebersol wished he could say the same about the
SNL
cast.) The problem was that the production values hadn’t changed much since the fifties. Vince’s MTV shows didn’t impress him and
Wrestlemania
struck him as downright primitive. He wanted this new show to be filmed in an arena so that audiences would get the same electric feeling he got when he took in matches at Madison Square Garden. There would also be no more showing up at an arena with a single truck carrying a ring and some lights. Ebersol wanted four cameras at ringside with boom mikes to catch the grunts and groans that usually went unheard. He wanted state-of-the-art lighting rigs. He wanted concert quality sound. As general manager Nelson Sweglar put it, “Dick wanted to show us what was possible through big-time production.”

Predictably, the egos grew in proportion to the expense. The WWF television people felt underestimated and pushed aside by the NBC veterans and by Ebersol, who liked to have his cigarettes lit for him and travel places by helicopter. But Vince had come through too much to be consumed by anything as trivial as jealousy. He studied Ebersol and the way he put together the show like someone being properly fitted for a suit for the very first time.

The maiden episode of
The Saturday Night Main Event
was filmed at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum on May 10, 1985, a Friday night. Mr. T was there, reprising his role as Hogan’s tag-team partner. So was Lauper, who was using the show to promote a new single. In fact, the whole WWF cast was there, from the Iron Sheik (“U.S.A., acht, phew”) to Rowdy Roddy Piper. The show ended at midnight, after which Ebersol and a small crew took the twenty cameras worth of film to a studio on Thirty-second Street and Park Avenue for editing. Through the night, they reassembled the show shot by shot. Early the next morning, Vince walked into the editing studio with Linda to see the final result and was stunned. It was faster paced and slicker than anything that had ever worn the WWF label. He didn’t know wrestling could look like that.

That Saturday night, so many homes had tuned in to NBC to see it that it outrated anything in the time slot since the glory days of John Belushi at SNL. When Tartikoff saw the numbers, he told Ebersol that he wanted five more shows for that year.

It was the start of a five-year run for the show and a period of excess that nearly destroyed the McMahon family.

1.
Stossel collected $425,000 in an out-of-court settlement with Titan Sports. Shults was later fired for attacking the actor Mr. T in an unscripted incident on a WWF show from L.A.

FIVE

WHEN TED TURNER HEARD
that Vince McMahon was buying the stock of Georgia Championship Wrestling in April 1984, and taking over production chores on the two-hour show that aired on his Superstation, he didn’t consider it bad news. Turner had formed a favorable impression of the third-generation promoter when Vince first came to sell him on the idea of airing the WWF on TBS. The little wrestling company seemed to be well financed, and its young owner obviously knew how to get ratings. There was just one thing that worried Turner, and he invited Vince to CNN Center in Atlanta to address it. Turner occasionally watched McMahon’s shows, and he wanted Vince’s assurance that he wouldn’t use TBS as a dumping ground for second-run material. He wanted original studio wrestling. Vince extended his hand and gave Turner his word. Then he walked out and proceeded to break it.

On June 14, 1984, a solitary, round-faced man in a bad toupee appeared in place of the regular Saturday night wrestling announcer on TBS, welcoming Atlantans to a new era. It was, he said, the day of Hulk Hogan and his cohorts, Sergeant Slaughter and Gorilla Monsoon. Then he cued up a tape, and the scene switched to an arena somewhere in the Northeast.