Free Sex, Lies, and Headlocks by Shaun Assael Page A

Fun,” executives at the label committed to make a video for it. The scenes were already drawn out on storyboards and the casting done when Lauper returned from San Juan raving about Captain Lou. At the last minute, Wolff asked Epic to call the World Wrestling Federation and inquire if Albano was available to play Cyndi’s father. At first, the grandfatherly grappler said he wasn’t interested, but on the evening before filming, his wife convinced him to change his mind.
    As an overbearing father trying to contain his flighty daughter, Albano was delightfully campy. Even better, having a wrestler in the video was just the kind of quirky thing that the executives at MTV loved. In the spring of 1984, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” became one of the network’s most played videos, and Lauper was designated (along with Duran Duran, Adam Ant, and the Stray Cats) one of the station’s core artists.
    Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Wolff racked his brain for ways to leverage that exposure until he had a vision that made him, as he’d later say, “see the future.” And so it was that he took the forty-minute trip out of Manhattan to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he met the president of the WWF for the first time. Grabbing a seat on a leather couch, Wolff thanked McMahon for making Albano available for the “Girls” video. Then he hit him with the idea that, he said, “will make us a fucking fortune, Vince. I mean it. A fucking fortune.”
    The idea, Wolff explained, was to stage a feud between his girlfriend and Albano, whose role in the WWF was as a manager. Managers are assigned to new wrestlers or to ones that need help getting over with the crowd. They walk their charges to ringside, make threats on their behalf, and stand by the ring in case someone needs to be hit with a metal chair or a tennis racket in the heat of the moment. Besides the loud Hawaiian shirts that stretched against his three-hundred-pound frame, Albano was best known for a safety pin that he stuck through his pierced cheek. For reasons Wolff never quite figured out, Albano used the pin to dangle rubber bands off his cheek like earrings. Wolff knew his girlfriend was no wrestler, but, he told Vince, she’d be a perfect manager and therefore a perfect foil to play off against Albano at ringside. Wolff suggested they start small, with the two appearing on a WWF show together. Then they could build up to a main event at Madison Square Garden, where both stars would come out managing wrestlers who’d fight their grudge match for them.
    Vinnie had the perfect candidates. One of his oldest sideshow acts was Lillian Ellison, a South Carolinian battle-ax with red hair and garish blue eye shadow who broke into the business in the late forties as a slave girl called Moolah and had trained most of the female wrestlers who’d come along since. The other was one of Ellison’s protégées, an auburn-haired Texan named Wendi Richter. Wolff said that sounded fine, so long as Lauper got the young one and the young one won.
    In late May, Wolff and Lauper drove in a rainstorm from Martha’s Vineyard to Allentown, just in time to make the taping of the syndicated All-Star Wrestling . After studying clips of the show, Wolff decided to start the feud on one of All-Star ’s funniest and most unpredictable segments, Piper’s Pit, which starred the combustible, kilt-wearing heel known as Roddy Piper. It was ostensibly an interview segment, but Piper tended to be less interested in getting answers than in getting offended and throwing his guests out of their chairs.
    As Wolff rushed, dripping wet, onto the set on the fairgrounds (in the farmer’s pavilion, which he noted smelled faintly like livestock), he explained to the cast that he wanted to keep things simple. Albano would answer one of Piper’s questions in a manner that was insulting to Lauper, and she’d slug him with her purse. When the cameras started rolling, Albano delivered in spades. “Tell them