The real women behind GLOW
This female wrestling league was dangerous and sexist — and the best job of their lives
LOS ANGELES— The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling have endured kicks to the head, knees to the groin, body-slams, insults, rivalries, ridicule and spangly neon unitards. On Friday, they face what may be their toughest challenge yet: a new Netflix series based on them. Their old TV show, GLOW, was huge in the 1980s. The women sang, danced, did sketch comedy and flung each other around a ring. Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan is bringing it back as a half-hour scripted comedy called, well, GLOW.
The new GLOW is a fictionalized version of how the old GLOW came to be. None of the original women are in it. Nor were they consulted, a fact that doesn’t exactly sit well.
When asked about it, former wrestler Tracee Meltzer — whose character on the old show was Park Avenue princess Roxy Astor — rolls her eyes. “Some are happy. Some are sad. Some girls you can’t even bring it up to,” she says.
The women are in their 50s and 60s now. They are accountants, real estate agents, sales associates, tech support workers and pet groomers. Yet wrestling is still very much on their minds.
If the women feel proprietary about GLOW, it’s only because they gave so much of themselves to it. It was brutal work. The pay was measly, the material was campy and racist. For many, however, it was the best job they ever had.
The joke, of course, is that professional wrestling is fake. But the pain was real. Virtually none of them started out as trained wrestlers. They were actors, dancers and models who answered casting calls for “a new sports entertainment show.”
Dee Booher, who played German villainess Matilda the Hun, recalls that after a match “these girls sometimes came out with handfuls of hair.” At her apartment in Seal Beach, Calif., in Orange County, she flips through an old photo album while sitting in a motorized wheelchair: the result of wrestling-related spinal deterioration. Her fingers, numb from nerve damage, are tipped with Band-Aids from burning herself while cooking.
“I’d beat ’em up. Eat ’em up! It was beautiful!” she says. “Here’s Spanish Red. Look at this girl. Look at how she moves. She was a dancer. Here’s Ashley. Look at those ta-tas on her.”
Angelina Altishin, who played Little Egypt, tore her anterior cruciate ligament. Everybody suffered cuts to the eyes from cheap glitter weaponized with dried hair spray.
There were broken collarbones, broken shoulders and broken toes. “And that was just the tryouts,” Cheryl Rusa recalls with glee. “No, it never got easier.”
Patricia Summerland, a.k.a. Sunny the California Girl, cracked a wrist, broke two knuckles, ripped muscles and ligaments in her waist and blacked out from being hung upside down and dropped on her head: a piledriver. “It’s the deadliest manoeuvre in wrestling,” she explains. “They no longer do them.”
She did them every night. Once, after a piledriver, paramedics carried her out on a stretcher. The women made between $300 and $700 a week. No dental. No medical. Then there was the emotional pain.
“The boys” — meaning director Matt Cimber and producer David McLane — “liked to get us riled up,” Booher recalls. The angrier the girls, the better the footage.
Cimber, the creative engine behind the show, was a veteran director of Broadway and blaxploitation films. He excelled at the art of casting aspersion. “Your butt looks like mashed potatoes!” he’d yell. Or “You’re no good. That’s why she’s making $200 more than you!” Still, the girls stayed. The show was shot in Las Vegas, so each season, 30-plus GLOW girls bunked up at the Riviera Hotel (then in later seasons at a dumpy apartment building off the strip).
Cimber dreamed up their characters, heightened stereotypes all: housewives wielding brooms and plungers, New Orleans voodoo queens, slutty cheerleaders, sexpot Russian communists. But most of the women embraced these personas as if they were being granted superhero identities.
Take Sandy Manley. A genetic anomaly called Turner syndrome makes her short. Cimber cast her as a gremlin.
“It never felt exploitative,” Manley insists. Not when Cimber called her an “ankle biter.” Not even when another wrestler dumped her into a trash can. It was cathartic.
Besides, you got to be famous. “People would stand in line all day to watch us film,” Booher recalls. The girls made appearances on sitcoms and game shows and late-night talk shows. When they performed in Panama, thousands of fans mobbed their van.
At the centre of everything was the ring. It was violent, yet intimate. Careful, yet wild. You had to protect your opponent from injury, yet make the crowd think you were killing her.
“We came alive in the ring,” Booher says. “Like winding up a good-girl doll or a bad-girl doll.”
Then, in 1990, GLOW was abruptly cancelled. The show’s main financial backer, Israeli billionaire and Riviera Hotel owner Meshulam Riklis, withdrew his support. To this day, the women are unsure why, though they suspect Riklis’s wife, Pia Zadora, wanted him away from the harem of sexy, young female wrestlers. Cimber was simply tired of doing it, he says now. The women dropped back into their ordinary lives. Of the hundred or so girls who churned through the system, zero went on to full-time acting careers. Only four became fulltime wrestlers. Booher was one of them. Afterward, she earned a living doing what she calls “slam-o-grams,” singing telegrams with wrestling.
Some of the girls became drug addicts. Some, alcoholics. At least two wound up homeless. Meltzer’s tagteam partner Sandra Scott, a.k.a. Tiffany Mellon, turned to porn. Some wanted to be rid of GLOW. “Frankly, it was so painful, I didn’t want to bring up those memories,” Altishin says.
Some wanted to milk it for all it was worth. Ursula Hayden, a.k.a. Babe the Farmer’s Daughter, purchased the trademark in 2001 from Riklis. For years afterward, she eked out a living selling videos of the old episodes.
Others simply couldn’t let go psychologically. As Meltzer says, “For me, it was just never quite done.”
The new Netflix GLOW turned out to be an easy sell. Showrunner Carly Mensch had worked with Kohan and emailed her the idea.
Mensch and co-showrunner Liz Flahive were drawn to the connections among the women.
“There was something amazing about learning that wrestling isn’t really about fighting your partner,” Flahive says. “It’s about trusting your partner.”
“We found that so beautiful,” Mensch adds, “and so exactly opposite of what our assumptions were.”
They spoke with only one of the original wrestlers: Hayden, who owns the trademark. “When we thought about building characters, we really wanted to do it however we wanted to and not feel tied to any real-life stories,” Flahive says.
Some of the women plan to bingewatch the new GLOW when it debuts.
Summerland will be there with popcorn: “Whether we’re gonna eat it or throw it at the screen,” she says, “remains to be seen.”