Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (4 page)

As Gagne would remember it, Vinnie was halfway to the departure gate when he turned around, cupped his hands over his mouth, and yelled, “Verne, I don’t negotiate.”

Only later would the promoter learn what he meant. Without Gagne’s knowledge, Vinnie had opened a back channel to the owner of KPLR, the station that aired Muchnick’s seminal St. Louis show,
Wrestling at the Chase
. Vinnie insisted that if his company, WWF, was allowed to take over the time slot, he would produce a better show for St. Louis while kicking back more money to the station. The owner was intrigued and impressed with the young man as they ate steaks in the Tenderloin Room at the Chase Hotel. At the end of their dinner, Vinnie announced he had to leave because he had a meeting early the next morning. “I’m going to sign Hulk Hogan,” he said. “I’m going to take over the world.”

Not only would the young McMahon take Hogan away from Gagne, he’d lure away another three dozen of his stars, tearing the heart out of the AWA. The telegram was just the start. It was the first strike by the man with bullets in his eyes.

1.
Thesz also hated McMahon’s aging partner, the old vaudevillian promoter Toots Mondt. “You could give Toots a million dollars, then come back a week later and he’d be broke,” Thesz says. “He’d go through wrestlers’ envelopes in the office and take out fives, tens, and twenties, saying, Ah, that’s too much for this guy or that one. You couldn’t trust him with a dog’s dinner. The whole operation was being controlled by a thief.”

2.
An old friend of Rogers named Tim Woods insists the story was a fabrication, designed to give the tired star a sympathetic way to exit the stage after helping launch the WWWF.

TWO

IN THE MID-1940S
, the armed forces condemned tens of thousands of acres in North Carolina to build bases that would help gird the U.S. war effort. In just a few years, Fort Bragg was built for the army, with the Pope Air Force Base attached so the soldiers had a way to fly in and out. Ninety-five miles away, the Marine Corps put Camp Lejeune on forty-five thousand acres and placed the Cherry Point Air Station in a tiny town nearby called Havelock. At the time, it was so small that the U.S. Census Bureau listed its population at just over a hundred people.

That census included the family of Leo Lupton, an electrician with a son and daughter of his own and two other sons by his wife, Vicki’s, first marriage. No one in town knew about the boys’ biological father or what he did for a living. No one asked.

The boys lived in a manner far different from the way their absent father had grown up. Vincent James McMahon was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, a stable, middle-class New York City neighborhood that was about as distant as his father, Jess, could get from the Commonwealth Sporting Club on 135th Street in the Bronx, where he put on fights, and still get home in time for dinner.

In 1925, when Vincent was just ten, Jess received a prestigious invitation to come to work at Madison Square Garden for Tex Rickard, a legendary gambler who’d promoted all of Jack Dempsey’s fights and at his height built a new Garden on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street to replace the old one on Madison Square. Needing someone to help him find fighters, Rickard gave the matchmaking job to Jess, a graduate of Manhattan College who knew how to run a tidy nine-to-five office.

The pair worked together for three years, during which time young Vincent James got to explore the catacombs beneath the Garden. It was the golden age of sports, and the eleven-year-old boy had a box seat to it all—at least until a scandal led his father to be suspended by the state athletic commission. It involved a deal between two managers to cheat a fighter out of about $5,000 and a bogus set of contracts that were placed on file with the commission. Jess, who winked at the shady deal but appeared not to take an active part in it, took the fall.

In 1935, Jess helped his son set up a small office that booked fights and concerts in an arena in Hempstead, Long Island, and Vincent worked there until the United States entered World War II, in which he served in the Coast Guard. Though he never publicly discussed how he met Vicki, their brief marriage didn’t survive the war. While Vicki was left in North Carolina, Vincent moved to Washington, where he opened a company called Capitol Wrestling and spent a few thousand dollars to wire for television a dingy theater on W and 14th Streets. At the time, the top wrestling show in the nation was
Live from the Marigold Theater
in Chicago, which aired Saturday nights on the DuMont Network. In 1956, when DuMont went down, Vincent’s gamble paid off. Since
Live
no longer had a national outlet, he convinced the DuMont affiliate in Washington to carry his matches. Since its owners had a sister station in New York, WOR (Channel 9), he parlayed the arrangement into a lucrative two-city foothold.

With his father’s New York connections, it was only natural that Vincent would also gain the exclusive contract to book wrestling shows at the Garden.

By then, Vincent’s two boys were living in a mobile home seven miles out of Havelock, under the names of Rodney and Vinnie Kennedy Lupton. Because Havelock revolved around the Cherry Point Air Station, they, like many of the local boys, considered Marines aloof intruders, and the Marines in turn tended to view the town people warily. While families of military officers were allowed to use facilities on the base, such as the pool and athletic courts, locals like the Luptons had to watch with their noses pressed against the fence. The mutual suspicion was in large part fueled by race. The only African American people that several longtime residents could remember living in Havelock at that time were the local sanitation contractor and his family, and they lived far out in the woods. When black Marines started trickling in, the native kids would hang out at the local drive-in, The Jet, waiting for them in the hope of starting fights.

Douglas Franks, a native who stayed in Havelock after many of his contemporaries left, says: “If we thought there would even be a whiff of trouble, we’d dress for combat in blue jeans, cut-off shirts, and big boots.”

Franks remembers Rodney as someone “who didn’t have to work at his charisma. It came naturally.” Vinnie, on the other hand, tried to earn his stripes hanging out at The Jet. “He tried to be one of the gang kids, but he never quite made it,” says Franks. “He was a wannabe.”

By Vinnie’s accounts, the atmosphere in the trailer home he grew up in alternated between moments of normalcy—as when they all watched
The Jackie Gleason Show
together—and frightful violence. In an interview with
Playboy
, Vince alleged that his stepfather started beating him when he was six with a pipe wrench. “My stepfather [was] a man who enjoyed kicking people around,” he remarked. “It’s unfortunate he died before I could kill him.”

McMahon described his mother as “a real performer, a female Elmer Gantry,” saying that she was “very striking” and had “an excellent voice”when she sang in her church choir. However, he also said that he was long estranged from her and hinted that the reason was sexual abuse. “Was all the abuse physical, or was there sexual abuse, too?”
Playboy
asked him.

“That’s not anything I’d like to embellish,” he replied, “just because it’s so weird.”

In separate interviews, two of his longtime acquaintances remembered Vince describing his childhood as so troubled that he once even flirted with the idea of drowning himself by walking into the sea along the Carolina coast.

Vincent James rarely talked about the boys he’d left behind in North Carolina. He’d become a stylish man who liked his limousines and his running reservation at the New York steak house Jimmy Weston’s, where he’d go after a show at the Garden. He’d invite a dozen or so friends there, and they’d eat and drink on his tab late into the night.

In Washington, he ran things from a neat and proper suite on the seventh floor of the majestic Franklin Park Hotel. He also remarried, to a sophisticated native of south Florida. The couple wouldn’t have any children of their own, but his new wife, Juanita, insisted that her husband get to know the children he already had. So in 1957, Vinnie and his older brother got their first look at their father when he came to visit them in Havelock. One can only imagine the two boys, 12 and 14, dressed in their best clothes to meet the father they’d only vaguely heard about, standing in front of the six-foot-five man with a kind, jowly face and a pocket full of jangling change. “I immediately fell in love with him, “Vince once told
New York
magazine.

But Vincent wasn’t about to let his long-forgotten sons get too close to wrestling, or for that matter too close to him. At the very least, Vinnie was a handful, certainly more than a man in a second marriage and in his mid-forties needed. Still, Juanita softened him up enough that the boys started spending summers with them in Maryland.

Vinnie went from being a military brat to a son of the circus, a wide-eyed kid in a world of new possibilities. His favorite wrestler became Dr. Jerry Graham, who at three hundred pounds resembled nothing so much as an inflated Jerry Lee Lewis with peroxided hair and a bloodred Cadillac convertible that matched the color of his threads. Graham lived life large, lighting his cigars with hundred-dollar bills—just the kind of outsized figure who could forever alter a young boy’s image of what constitutes normalcy. Vinnie was so impressed with Graham in the summer of 1958 that he asked his stepmother to bleach his hair in the kitchen of their summer home in Delaware. She obliged, though her husband was far from amused when he got home. He’d be damned, he said, if his son was following him into wrestling.

At fourteen, Vinnie found himself enrolled in the Fishburne Military Academy, a haven for the sons of the wealthy in the rolling green hills of the Shenandoah Valley. Fishburne’s yearbook from 1963 contains a photo of a six-foot-two, 230-pound Vince in a football uniform, staring off the page toward a future that lay somewhere between the bleakness of what waited for him back in rural North Carolina and the world in Washington he now knew he wanted to enter. Not completely welcome in either, he decided to go to a college that was fifty-five miles away from a girl whom he’d started dating in Havelock.

Linda Edwards, whose mother worked in the same Cherry Point base building as Vinnie’s mom, was thirteen when she started dating the sixteen-year-old tough. “I had no idea what a family was until I met Linda and saw how they lived,” he remarked in an interview with the magazine
Cigar Aficionado
. “It was an Ozzie and Harriet life. There wasn’t screaming and beating.” Vinnie quickly became a fixture in the Edwards home, and as soon as Linda graduated from high school (with honors), he asked her to marry him. Most of the guests at the small church ceremony were friends of her parents from the base.

Two years after Vinnie entered East Carolina University, Linda joined him there and squeezed her college work into three years so the two could graduate together. On the eve of their graduation day, Linda discovered she was pregnant with their son Shane. It was 1969, and wrestling would have to wait for Vinnie while he lived in Washington, D.C., and worked as a traveling salesman. Six months later, a ring announcer who worked for his father set the next phase of his life in motion. Because Vincent’s wrestling shows were now airing across the East Coast, the unionized announcer wanted to be paid a national rate. Vincent grumbled about having to pay it (the employee was threatening to make trouble with the union), until he learned that union scale didn’t apply to family. So he fired the ring man, and when Vinnie asked, “Who are you going to replace him with?” his father answered, “You.”

Overnight, Vinnie went from doing part-time work setting up rings to appearing on television in neon suits that swallowed his rail-thin frame. The wrestlers laughed at the kid who was trying so hard to sound like Howard Cosell. But once the matches began, even his father had to admit that the boy had a surprising flair for making the make-believe seem real.

In 1971, the show was being seen in thirty cities in fourteen states and had outgrown its confines at the National Arena in Washington. Needing to find a larger space, the elder McMahon decided to tape his shows at a thousand-seat theater in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, and at a slightly larger pavilion nearby on a fairgrounds complex in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Because the shows taped only once every three weeks, Vinnie had ample time to try other things. At first, he tried his hand at booking oldies’ shows with acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Dottie West. But then one day his father got a call from a private investigator, looking for the Vince McMahon who’d run up a trail of bad debts. As the story goes, Vincent listened carefully, then realized the investigator was talking about his son. That was when he decided it was better to keep the kid close rather than let him run down the family’s name.

In 1973, when an opening for a promoter arose in Maine, Vincent installed his son in the territory, telling him that if he wasn’t able to make a living up there, he didn’t want to hear any more talk about wrestling again. (There is some dispute over how the opening arose. In his
Playboy
interview, Vince insisted that his father fired the longtime promoter there for stealing. Others remember that the promoter had simply died.) On weekends, Vinnie would leave the West Hartford, Connecticut, trailer park where he’d temporarily moved his family and drive a beat-up blue Buick to Maine to make fifty or a hundred bucks a show. As Joe Perkins, a close aide to the senior McMahon, once remarked, “Vincent made it quite clear to me that his son had to pay his own bills and I was not to look to Capitol Wrestling if he fell behind.”

Old-time wrestlers like Walter “Killer” Kowalski raised their eyebrows when Vinnie begged them to try new things, like taking their brawls out of the ring and into the parking lots of the new theaters and union halls that he was expanding into. Vincent took note of his son’s growing aptitude, but he wasn’t quick to talk about it or even acknowledge his son to others. “I talked to Senior every day for years in the seventies and I couldn’t tell you a single thing Vinnie did for the company back then,” says James Barnett, who controlled Georgia. “He never talked about Vinnie, which makes me think he didn’t want anyone to know which ideas were his and which ones weren’t.”