Free Sex, Lies, and Headlocks by Shaun Assael

headdresses, pink leisure suits, tribal feathers, and army fatigues. For a sidekick, he chose a diminutive British wrestler named Lord Alfred Hayes, who dressed in tuxedos and spoke with Masterpiece Theatre diction. Because the wrestlers could never leave character, TNT became a running improv built around sight gags and skits. Once a week Vince would fly in from New York to a small studio in Baltimore that looked like a loading dock and spend the afternoon filming the two-hour show. At first, the executives from USA didn’t quite know what to make of the grandfatherly wrestler Freddie Blassie, who coined the phrase “pencil-neck geek,” dispensing advice to the lovelorn on a rose-colored set. When Vinnie read him a letter from a woman complaining that her husband wasn’t paying her attention, Blassie groused, “Has the woman tried taking a bath, used underarm deodorant, shaved under the armpits? You goofy broad, that’s what you gotta do!” In another skit, he hosted a wedding for Butcher Vachon and followed it with an all-heel reception at a local banquet hall. Vince put in an advance order for forty custard pies and when a food fight broke out at the party, his cameras caught the mortified owner feverishly scraping pie crust off the walls.
    Vincent James McMahon never saw Tuesday Night Titans . In January 1984, he confided to Jim Barnett that there was blood in his urine. What his doctors found was that cancer had spread throughout his body. Four months later, on May 27, 1984, he died, with his sons and wife at his hospital bedside.
    Recounting the moment to Playboy years later, Vince said: “My dad was old Irish … and for some reason I don’t understand, they don’t show affection …. He never told me he loved me …. That time in the hospital, I kissed him and said I loved him. He didn’t like to be kissed, but I took advantage of him. Then I started to go. I hadn’t quite gotten through the door when I heard him yell, I love you, Vinnie! ‘“
    It was to be a final sadness that the man who spent his whole life in wrestling would have so few of his colleagues there to say good-bye. As Barnett remembers, “There was a very small wrestling contingent because all of Vincent’s friends from the business were mad at Vinnie.”
    To the promoters of the crumbling National Wrestling Alliance, TNT was a heresy, something that transformed their life’s work into a joke. They feared it would turn the public against them by altering traditional, physical wrestling into television comedy. But if the old-timers hated the show, just about everyone else seemed to love it. To Sports illustrated , it was “maybe the most provocative talk show on television.” To USA, it was another hit. And to a burgeoning rock manager named David Wolff, it was just the thing he needed to get his girlfriend’s new album noticed.
    Wolff, the thirty-two-year-old son of a life insurance salesman, was a fast-talking rock hustler with a full beard, sunken cheeks, and downtown clothes who’d grown up in Connecticut watching wrestling shows like Bedlam from Boston . He hadn’t thought about wrestling in years when his girlfriend, Cyndi Lauper, returned home to New York from a concert in San Juan raving about a passenger she’d met in first class. His name was “Captain” Lou Albano, and he went so far back in the business, she said, he could remember being on the Jackie Gleason Show .
    Lauper was no stranger to show business herself. She grew up in Queens and, after dropping out of a fashion college, where she developed a taste for vampish corsets and rainbow hair, knocked around with a rockabilly band known as Blue Angel. She quit the band after meeting Wolff, and though radio executives didn’t care for her Betty Boop accent (one consultant went so far as to tell Wolff that “she talks like a duck”), Epic Records offered her a seven-album deal. Figuring that her image would help carry the first single, “Girls Just Want to Have