The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend
368
The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend
368eBook
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Overview
In this in-depth account, journalist Jeff Leen pulls back the curtain on a forgotten era when a petite midwesterner used her beauty and brawn to dominate America’s most masculine sport.
At only five feet two, Mildred Burke was an unlikely candidate for the ring. A waitress barely scraping by on Depression-era tips, she saw her way out when she attended her first wrestling match. When women were still struggling for equality with men, Burke regularly fought—and beat—male wrestlers. Rippling with muscle and dripping with diamonds, she walked the fine line between pin-up beauty and hardened brawler.
An unforgettable slice of Americana, The Queen of the Ring captures the golden age of wrestling, when one gritty, glamorous woman rose through the ranks to take her place in athletic history.
“Jeff Leen has made a fabulous contribution to the sports-history canon. The Queen of the Ring is a marvelous evocation of an era, and a riveting portrait of a one-of-a-kind American moll.” —Sally Jenkins, author of The Real All Americans
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802199935 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 59,173 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Match of the Century
On August 20, 1954, as America slipped into the conservatism of the Eisenhower era, a professional wrestling match unlike any other took place in Atlanta, Georgia. To begin with, two women were wrestling for the world championship. The opponents, the champion Mildred Burke and the challenger June Byers, were widely considered to be the two best female wrestlers in an era when wrestling skill still mattered. Bitter rivals, they once had worked closely together for the same manager, a man known as Diamond Billy Wolfe, who had been the husband of Burke and the lover of Byers. But this was no catfight over a man. It was a business dispute, pure and simple, aimed at settling the question of who would run women's wrestling throughout the nation.
Most astonishing was the character of the match itself. In an age when every other pro bout was a faked exhibition designed to fool spectators, Burke and Byers planned to wrestle for real, to conduct what was known inside the game as a "shooting match." Pro wrestling had been fixed for years, and by the 1950s the ring action had become more and more florid in its fakery, but the ability of wrestlers to "shoot" still set them apart. Shooting ability protected champions from opponents who might think of deviating from the script and pulling a double cross in the ring in a bid to steal the title. In the past, when powerful promoters could not agree on who should be champion, they let their wrestlers shoot for the title. But that had not happened in decades.
So Burke and Byers would shoot, with no time limit. The first woman to win two falls by pin or submission would receive the championship belt and effective control of the business. Since the public was never told outright that wrestling was staged, it would likewise not now be told that this match was for real. Only the wrestling cognoscenti would know; this match was for their benefit, not the fans. The Atlanta bout was not merely an aberration; it was one of those moments that in later years can be seen as a signpost for the passing of an era. The fading epoch would come to be known as the Golden Age of Wrestling, a period when television and the strong interest of women fans won for wrestling its highest place thus far on the American scene. Female wrestlers had their own place in this renaissance of their sport; wrestling's golden age had been a time when women built like gymnasts had donned tights, laced up boots, and filled wrestling arenas as equals to men.
Mildred Burke had put the women there. More than just a champion, Millie Burke had pioneered women's wrestling as a viable arena attraction in America. She was its Babe Ruth and its Jackie Robinson. At her peak she earned $50,000 a year, as much as Joe DiMaggio and more than twice that of the legendary golfer Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias, who was widely considered the greatest female athlete of the century. A Baptist girl from Kansas who followed an improbable dream, Burke had emerged during the depths of the Great Depression alongside two other hardscrabble underdogs, the spectacular colt Seabiscuit and the Cinderella Man, boxer James J. Braddock. She began by wrestling men in carnivals, pitting a preternatural balance and command of leverage against local pride and male muscle in dried-up Dust Bowl towns throughout the Midwest. When she was starting out, she was so fast in the ring they called her the Kansas Cyclone. She was a small woman, petite, only five feet, two inches tall, and 120 pounds in the beginning, but she had a bull neck and fourteen-inch biceps in an age when women didn't have biceps. "Muscles" had been another of her early nicknames. Her legs were so muscular and stout that they vaguely conjured up the image of a centaur: a human torso atop the trunk and legs of a horse. Despite the muscles and her lack of conventional beauty, many men found her extremely attractive. Her pinup calendar, which featured her flexing her biceps and posing in a revealing zebra-stripped two-piece swimsuit and high heels, had found a happy home in newsrooms across the country.
Those who paid to see her could tell she was an obvious master of "scientific" wrestling. She expertly employed the most painful and punishing holds of the day: the wristlock, the step-over toehold, the body slam, the body scissors, the head scissors. When she drop-kicked an opponent in New Jersey the crowd gasped; they didn't think a woman could do that. What she had envisioned and then created was something no one had seen before: a female champion who was both feminine and strong, beautiful and powerful, combining the physique of an athlete with the sex appeal of a bathing beauty and the glamour of a movie star. "Sure, when I'm on the mat, I'm tough as a picnic egg," she told a reporter in the early days in her flat, slightly nasal midwestern accent that always made even the most outrageous pronouncements sound merely matter-of-fact. "But when I'm dressed for the street or home, you won't find anybody who would take me for a wrestler. I'm still all woman and twenty-six inches around the waist."
Against all odds, she had broken the barriers to give women's matches a place as the main event on wrestling cards with men. Millie Burke had wrestled before thousands from Los Angeles to Boston, from Miami to Mexico City, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. In Havana, the Cuban president himself had welcomed her to his marble-lined palace. In Washington, she had basked in the adoring attention of senators. In Manhattan, she had performed eighty body-bridge exercises on the desk of Robert L. Ripley, who enshrined her in his Ripley's Believe It or Not. She had been written up in Time and Life and by hundreds of newspaper hacks across the land. Leading a life lit by flashbulbs, she went out into the night draped in diamonds and furs and the finest silk dresses. More than all that, she had come along when the entire industry of pro wrestling was in a precarious position, rocked by scandals brought on by newspaper exposés of fixed matches and fake champions. With her speed and skill and style, Millie Burke had helped save the sport and send it on to its greatest heights in the new age of television. Yet now it was she who was in the precarious position.
On the eve of the Atlanta match, Burke was unusually quiet as she sat in the dank locker room at the city auditorium, an aging redbrick structure at the corner of Courtland and Gilmer streets. She had just turned thirty-nine, and time and her trade had coarsened her features and added twenty pounds, most of it muscle, to her frame. By her side was her twenty-year-old son, Joe, the one constant in her life. He noticed immediately that something was wrong. His mother had always been loose and joking before her matches, the picture of confidence. She had learned early that wrestling was mostly mental, and she had armored her mind against panic, controlling her emotions, sensing the fear in others and using it to her advantage. Now it was she who felt the fear and it made her tight. She was hurting and the stakes had never been so high. Her son became fearful too. He thought of all of her injuries and for the first time he was afraid she might lose.
She shouldn't be here. Throughout her career she had been a physical marvel but now she was a near wreck, a patchwork of pain and wounds. In twenty years in the ring, she had dislocated both thumbs, broken ribs, torn up both knees. Three years earlier, she had narrowly escaped death in a spectacular automobile accident; five of her ribs had been snapped near the spine. The convalescence she needed had been cut short, for she was not just a champion and an icon but also a business and there was money to be made. Her neck and ribs were never free of residual pain. Her long-standing weak point, a gimpy right knee that occasionally slipped out of joint, had been reinjured in a recent match; bloody fluid had been drawn but the swelling and soreness remained. She should have postponed the match but her circumstances and the pride that had driven her from the beginning wouldn't allow it.
Local dignitaries came into her dressing room, as they often did before a big match. The chief of police arrived to wish her well. Burke told him that Joe was now her driver and the boy needed a license. Could the chief help? You come by my office tomorrow, Joe. I'll fix you up. That had been the kind of life she had lived for nearly two decades.
The wrestling card would begin at 8:30 p.m. Burke and Byers would be working the co–main event on a bill that included a passel of colorful pachyderms: Buffalo Boy Zimm, Chief Big Heart, Bowery Boy Jack Steele, and El Toro. But the women's match was the one everyone wanted to see.
"All eyes of the wrestling world will be watching the ladies' title match in which Mildred Burke, the present queen, will meet Miss June Byers, title contender," the Atlanta Journal article announced. "Most Important Match of the Year Scheduled for Atlanta," the wrestling programs headlined. "National Wrestling Alliance members, promoters and wrestling officials from all over the United States are making plans to attend."
The hype left out the fact that Burke was hurt.
"These two clever girl wrestlers are both in tip-top condition and both have plenty of experience behind them. The match promises to be one of the hardest fought contests of the season as both are equally determined to win and each is confident in her own mind she can defeat the other. The girls have asked that the match be a two-out-of-three-fall affair, with no time limit. There must be a winner."
A "grudge match," it was called. That wasn't hype.
Millie Burke's grudge was not with June Byers; it was with Byers's manager, the emperor of the women's wrestling business, Diamond Billy Wolfe. Once he had been Burke's manager as well as her husband. Billy Wolfe was an American archetype, the lone man who builds an empire through vision, courage, ruthlessness, and the general greasing of palms. He had been the brain behind Burke's wrestling brawn, a fast-talking, fast-thinking carnival barker of a businessman whose steely toughness powered her rise. "She's my prize package," he told a newspaper reporter in the early days. "She's got balance and a sense of timing. And did you feel her muscles? Let the gentleman feel you, Millie. What biceps for a dame, huh? And feel that muscle under the shoulder. Not only that, but Millie's got magnetism like an actress or a lady preacher. When she comes out into the ring, everybody takes to her." Her muscles and his mind had made the industry of women's professional wrestling in America. They both gloried in the money they made and used it to cover themselves with precious gems. But the male peacock outdid the female. He sported diamonds on his belt buckle, watch fob, cuff links, and stickpin. He had four diamond rings, including one with a ten-carat stone. "His diamonds make him shine like a chandelier in a gay '90s dining room — $60,000 worth," a Washington Post columnist noted.
At their height, Wolfe and Burke had thirty women wrestling for them and filling arenas across the country. A ladies' man surrounded by female flesh and more than willing to partake, Wolfe slept his way through almost half of them, but Burke didn't care. Theirs had always been a business relationship rather than a loving matrimonial bond, a mutual dependency based on pure pragmatism. She wanted only to be champion, and she was willing to do whatever it took. Then it all came apart. It turned into a legal and financial fight, a war of money, for the business they had created. The last battle of the war would be of muscle and blood and bone, two women for one championship to settle it all.
June Byers entered the ring, and then the call came for Burke. The champion always went last. Millie Burke walked out of the dressing room, Joe trailing her. Like Byers, she wore full makeup — rouge, eye shadow, and lipstick — looking her best. Her auburn hair was dressed in a careful marcelled wave. The hair would be tossed and the makeup smeared and sweated off within minutes of action in the ring, but that first impression on the crowd meant everything.
Tonight, as she nearly always did, Millie wore wrestling tights of brilliant white satin, a one-piece swimsuit that had been reinforced with elastic for industrial use in the ring. At a time when most wrestlers donned drab black togs, she had been the first to regularly wear white. People had protested; it was obscene, it made her look naked. She didn't care. With her innate sense of ring style she knew that the white reflected the harsh descending light back into the crowd, making her sparkle like a diamond. Her deep tan contrasted nicely with the white satin. Her matching white wrestling boots, size five, were custom-made using the finest soft leathers at Barney's, a little shop in downtown LA, for sixty dollars — a month's wage for a workingman when she started buying them back during the Depression. Her robe was the crowning gesture. Again she chose white, satin and silk, trimmed in ermine and encrusted over every inch with rhinestones. It was worth every ounce of the physical effort it took to wear it. "When the powerful ring lights hit those rhinestones, it was a shimmering symphony," she later wrote in an autobiography that has never been published. Around her waist, to complete the effect, hung her most prized possession: her championship belt. It weighed fifteen pounds and was said to be twenty-four-carat gold with four sapphires, six amethysts, and a seven-carat diamond. She had held the title so long her cameo had been inserted into it.
Before her were a cone of white light and a small square of white canvas cut against a roaring, darkened circle of humanity, thousands disgorging emotion in waves of sound. "Wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights," a French philosopher would write a few years later. "In both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve." The arena was a smoky, airless place, a swirl of heat and noise. A segregated crowd of white faces stared back at her, an audience of adults in suits, hats, and dresses. In her heavy robe and belt Burke climbed into the ring and under the ropes, as she had on a thousand occasions, one leg at a time.
Bouncing on the taut canvas, she eyed Byers and listened as the ring announcer spoke and the crowd quieted. The announcer gave the weights. Burke was stunned by how big and powerful Byers looked. The Texas woman held every physical advantage. She was younger, bigger, stronger, fitter. She was a full five inches taller, and at least twenty pounds heavier, a bundle of rippling muscle. One of the women wrestlers who saw Byers in training later recalled that she "looked like a racehorse," with "a thick back, very tight and high thigh muscles, big muscular arms and neck." Byers was known as one of the meanest and most brutal women in wrestling. She didn't just beat her opponents, she terrorized them, with punches and open-handed slaps against their breastbones that resounded from the ring. Still, Byers was a bit cowed by Burke, who held the mental edge and the advantage in wrestling skill. Years later, Byers would recall her wariness at the sight of the champion: "She had a bouncy, elastic quality about her and her skin looked as if it were bursting with vitality."
The bell sounded. The crowd drew a breath and gaped at the brightness before it. In the cone of drenching vertical light two women rushed forward, bouncing on the balls of their feet.
CHAPTER 2Millie Bliss
Mildred Burke and Billy Wolfe were products of the Midwest, but not of the placid, stereotypically wholesome land that exists mainly in the imaginations of those who believe that all midwesterners are farmers who grew up in loving, churchgoing families. Burke's and Wolfe's Midwest was a darker place existing on the fringes of the farm economy, a dilapidated Depression-haunted landscape of small towns and wide-open spaces, the Midwest of the carny and the outlaw. Burke's birthplace was Coffeyville, Kansas, in the southeastern corner of the state on the Verdigris River near the Oklahoma line. It is still best known for the day in 1892 when five members of the Dalton Gang, hoping to one-up the James Gang, rode in with the unprecedented plan of robbing two banks in the same town at the same time. The Daltons made it into the street with $25,000. They did not make it far. It was their hometown, after all, and despite the beards they wore as disguises they were recognized. Fifteen minutes later four Daltons were dead, along with four residents of Coffeyville, which became known around the country as "the town that stopped the Daltons."
By the time Millie Bliss was born there on August 5, 1915, Coffeyville had swelled to a population of 13,000 and had made the transition from frontier railroad-and-cattle nexus to manufacturing center. It was home to an astonishing array of industries: nine glass factories, six brick plants, our foundries, the Missouri Pacific railroad shops, the biggest oil refinery in the state, and more than a dozen other factories and plants, making everything from ice to plows to egg cases. The bustling machine shops had brought the Bliss family to this corner of Kansas.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Queen Of The Ring"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Jeff Leen.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 The Match of the Century,
2 Millie Bliss,
3 Billy Wolfe,
4 Wrestling Men,
5 Becoming Champion,
6 Building the Business,
7 "Pulchritude on Parade",
8 Mat Mamas Maul for Millions,
9 Billy Wolfe's Harem,
10 "The Public Likes the Puss",
11 The Golden Age,
12 Tragedy,
13 A Bout with Nell,
14 A Bout with Billy,
15 A Bout with June,
16 Millie without Billy,
17 Billy without Millie,
18 Mildred Burke Productions,
Afterword: Millie's Girls,
List of Billy's Girls,
List of Millie's Girls,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Related Subjects
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