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

how you came off my reputation, Cyndi!” he screamed, waving an indignant finger at the woman he insisted he had made a star by virtue of his appearance on her “Girls” video. “Tell them how all women are nothing! They’re slime!” Lauper, just getting over a cold, had little trouble looking irked. She threw over a table, jumped to her feet, and clocked Albano with her purse. The only thing that took him by surprise was the bottle of perfume in it. It left a small welt.
    That episode of All-Star Wrestling aired in mid-June. By the end of the month, Wolff, along with Piper and Albano, was in MTV’s offices with a tape, pestering the channel’s director of programming, Les Garland, for attention.
    Since its debut in 1981, MTV had gone from reaching 2.5 million homes to nearly 20 million in 1984. With two-thirds of its viewers under the age of twenty-five, the music channel was discovering it had a remarkable power to push video-friendly acts up the Billboard charts. Garland was the man most responsible for pushing those acts. A onetime San Francisco deejay, he’d worked for Atlantic Records in Los Angeles before signing on with MTV. An impeccable dresser with a distinguished mane of salt-and-pepper hair, he had an office that was as well appointed as his wardrobe—filled with smart art, fresh flowers, ashtrays that he kept compulsively clean, and a putting green he liked to use during meetings. In that office, he charged up his creative staff to think of the most outrageous promotions imaginable to get the channel noticed.
    When Wolff told Garland about his idea to draw attention to Lauper by creating a feud with Albano and asked whether Garland would give it airtime, Garland’s eyes brightened. He’d taken in a few recent matches at the Garden and had been favorably impressed by Vinnie, whom he’d briefly met backstage. And though MTV had never done a nonconcert event, Garland said, “Not only will I promote it, I’ll carry Cyndi live.”
    Wolff was ecstatic and didn’t want to waste any time. He raced over to Albano’s Manhattan apartment with a handheld video camera he’d borrowed from MTV. After rearranging some furniture, he filmed Albano slobbering milk from his beard and bellowing, “Ms. Lauper, you’re a liar! You’re a cheat! You’re a disgrace!” (Sports Illustrated would describe his looks as “a gross meringue of facial hair, rubber bands and morsels of food that makes him look like Jabba the Hut.”) Then Wolff raced over to the Epic studio where Lauper was recording and filmed Cyndi’s answer, which went something like this: “I challenge you, you fat windbag!”
    As the dueling clips aired during the early summer of 1984, Wolff couldn’t believe his good fortune. Not only was the She’s So Unusual album turning into a genuine phenomenon, on its way to selling 6 million copies, the disparate worlds of rock music and wrestling were seamlessly coalescing around the Garden event, just as he’d imagined. If one thought about it, the marriage wasn’t so strange after all. Lauper needed to put distance between herself and another MTV discovery, Madonna. But with her secondhand Soho threads, she was also cannily winking at the downtown hipster crowd. When that crowd—which traveled as a pack between art galleries and clubs and hot new restaurants—followed her into wrestling, it brought its own publicity machine. Suddenly, the New York Post was reporting that Andy Warhol was thinking of painting Hulk Hogan and that David Letterman was raving to his high-powered friends at NBC about TNT. The irony crowd had discovered wrestling.
    On July 23, the show that Garland dubbed The Brawl to Settle It All aired to the highest rating MTV ever had. Teenagers were discovering wrestling, too.
    EARLY IN the fall of 1984, Vinnie called together a dozen of his top aides in the boardroom of his cramped Greenwich offices on Holly Hill Lane to announce his latest idea. A North Carolina wrestling company had