TRAGEDY & PAIN OF THE AFTER 'GLOW'
’80s stars of ‘Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling’ reveal hard-knock lives
IT was 1988, and the Las Vegas set of “GLOW” —“Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” a TV show featuring outrageously-costumed women tossing each other around a ring — was out of control. Mt. Fiji, the 350-pound wrestler who sported a lei and a sarong, was raging, and none of it was in the script.
“She went crazy,” recalled Lori Palmer, a k a Ninotchka, the show’s icy “Russian” villain.
Unable to contain Fiji, producers called 911. When paramedics showed up, Palmer said, “they tried to sedate her. She said ‘no!’ . . . I got on top of her to cover her and she pushed me out of thee ambulance. Some paramedic caught me in his arms and I turned and looked up at his face. Hee was mortified, and I thought ‘Oh s--t, I should be scared.’ ”
Fiji, née Emily Dole, a Samoan-American from Orange County, Calif., was having a bipolar episode (she’d been diagnosed with the disorder in the early 1980s).
“We went to the hospital, they pumped her up with lithium and she was tied down,” said Palmer, now 56 and working as a choreographer and costume designer in Las Vegas. Fiji was later placed in a padded room.
Once she was calm, but still restrained to a bed, the show’s director, Matt Cimber, asked Fiji to listen to doctors. “She told him, ‘All right, coach, I’m sorry,’ ” recalled Palmer. “Then [she] gently lifted her arm and ripped the leather strap right off to shake his hand.”
On the same day, Cimber got another distressing call: cast member Christy Smith, a k a Evangelina, had slit her wrists at the apartment complex where the wrestlers lived.
The Netflix series “GLOW” — which was just nominated for 10 Emmys and released its second season in late June — is based on the 1986-90 show. While it focuses on glitz, glamour and relationship drama, it does not capture the heartache and tragedy that tore apart many of wrestling’s female pioneers.
Fiji died on Jan. 2 at age 60, after several years in an Orange County nursing home. She never married or had children. After the original “GLOW” was canceled in 1990, her weight soared to as much as 450 pounds and she continued to struggle with her bipolarity as well as physical issues due to her weight and years of wear and tear.
“Emotionally and mentally, she couldn’t [make] it in the world,” said Angelina Altishin, 51, who performed as belly dancer Little Egypt.
Today, many of the original women look back fondly on the friendships they formed on “GLOW” but they also resent being bullied and taken advantage of in terms of a lack of safeguards and fair compensation.
“We never made any money off ‘GLOW,’ ” said Palmer, adding that the women had no contracts and didn’t receive residuals from the show. “We were all brobroke. The most we made
wwas $600 a week.”
SPEAKING to The Post, Smith revealed for the first time the story behind hher suicide attempt.
An all-star athlete in “every sport” at her SSouthern California hhigh school, Smith had nonetheless first tried to kill herself at just 15.
“You get tired of being bbeat down your whole life, being told you’re not good enough, no matter what you do,” she said.
She was cast on “GLOW” at age 21, playing preacher Evangelina — whose mission was “to wipe the ring clean of the harlots and Jezebels who flaunt their flesh.”
But, she claims, Cimber (who inspired the character Sam Sylvia, played by Marc Maron, on the fictionalized Netflix show) didn’t think she was as good as the other wrestlers.
“Nothing I did made Matt happy,” she said. “He told me, ‘I don’t know why we should keep you, you’re not good enough,’ but I was. . . . He’d be ogling the prettier girls who always got treated better.”
The day he told her she might be cut from the next season, Smith had had enough.
“It was just a deep sadness,” she recalled. Smith decided then and there to walk to the park by the cast apartments and slash her wrists. “I used a brand new razor blade and slashed real quick.”
“The cuts are smooth as butter and you don’t really feel anything . . . I was numb and didn’t care about life anymore.”
But some of the women followed her and got
her to the hospital. They then persuaded Cimber not to kick Smith off the show. “I could not bear . . . that her death was going to be on me, so I kept her,” said Cimber, now 83.
As for Smith’s complaints of bullying, he said, “I wanted to train these ggirls. I was like a drill sergeant, they needed to be in good physical condition. It was not meant to be dangerous [but I was] very tough on them.”
Months later, while on tour with “GLOW,” Smith got so drunk that she passed out in a cab and then fell on her face at a hotel. “After the tour was done, [Cimber] called me in and canned me,” she recalled. “I was hurt, but I — [had been] told not to drink. I f--ked up.”
Afterward, Smith wanted to finish college, but funds were tight and she made money bartending and working on TV shows. She married in 1993 and endured an abusive relationship, but is a proud mom to two daughters, ages 21 and 25.
Now living in Vancouver, Wash., she suffers from gallbladder and liver issues and said: “My liver is swelling and they don’t know why. I’m not a drinker.”
As for her time on “GLOW,” she forgave Cimber a “long time ago, I don’t necessarily have to like him, but I forgave him.”
Still, she added, “You have to be kind to everyone and give them constructive criticism rather than just belittling them and treating them like crap.”
ALTISHIN was discovered by Dole in 1986, working at a Las Vegas T-shirt store. Struggles with Attention Deficit Disorder had led the young woman not to finish her college education. “Fiji believed in me before I believed in myself,” she said. “She convinced me to talk [to show producer] David McLane. Two weeks later I was . . . on TV.”
Remarkably, Altishin — who weighed just 102 pounds — received only two weeks of training to learn moves like an airplane spin, in which an opponent twirls you on their shoulders, flips you in the air and drops you flat on your back. If there was an injury, the cameras would keep rolling so producers could build a story out of it. And injuries were inevitable. “We weren’t even wrestling on a real wrestling ring, we were on a boxing ring — just boards with foam on top,” Altishin says. “The impact of landing in a boxing ring meant there were neck injuries and concussions. I tore my ACL because the mat wasn’t put together correctly. Girls were hurt frequently, [but] we just wanted to survive for another week, so our characters were able to have more exposure on TV.”
Altishin also remembers being humiliated by Cimber, whose temperamental nature was legendary. One day while the 19-year-old wrestler was in the ring, the director “was laughing and taunting me, making fun of my gold bra. It covered up too much of my breasts and he hated it. He told me, ‘It looks like you’re wearing your grandma’s bra.’ ”
So the show’s costume designer made her a new, sexier version.
“The next week, my new bra snapped off in my first match,” said Altishin. “I exposed myself in front of a live audience.”
At age 22, that torn ACL forced Altishin into retirement. She’s one of the lucky ones, in that she went on to run a successful real-estate business in Vegas. Her husband, Mike, with whom she had a son, died in February and many of her former “GLOW” co-stars were there for her.
“I’m so grateful for the friendships I made,” said Altishin. “The girls who didn’t have great lives were scared they couldn’t do anything else and that ‘ GLOW’ was the best days of their lives.”
It was just a deep sadness. I used a brand new razor blade and sliced real quick.
MIKI Watkins agrees. The 43-year-old daughter of Lynn Braxton said of her wrestler mom: “It was her life. It was all she talked about.”
Braxton, who wrestled as Big Bad Mama, was a powerhouse who would use “voodoo” to put opponents into zombie-like trances. Fans adored her.
After the show was canceled, she moved her family from Vegas to the desert town of Adelanto, Calif.
“We struggled financially,” Watkins said of their post-“GLOW” life. “There were so many of us. My mother had taken in enough children to bring our number to 13 . . . If she saw a kid or another woman in trouble, she would go out of her way to help them.”
In 1992, just six weeks after giving birth to her youngest daughter, Alice, Braxton was diagnosed with uterine cancer that eventually spread to her ovaries.
Braxton recovered but was diagnosed with cancer again in 2010, this time in her lower peritoneal cavity. She lost 205 pounds from the grueling treatment and was partially immobilized by a degenerative disc disease, forcing her to use a scooter.
But when fans recognized her, she would “light up,” Watkins said. “It really brought her out of her everyday gloom.”
Braxton “came back to life” when filming the “GLOW” reunion documentary in 2012 (the film is available on Netflix). Doctors had given her 18 months to live, so she knew it would be her last chance to see her beloved co-stars. “They cried together,” Watkins said. Still, her mother “was ecstatic.” Months later, in June 2013, Braxton died at age 61.
Meanwhile, Sharon Wilinsky, who wrestled as Chainsaw alongside her sister Donna — aka Spike — is severely ill with a bowel syndrome and suffers from injuries sustained on “GLOW” and, later, as a stunt woman at Universal Studios’ Hollywood theme park. After enduring some 30,000 falls, she was left temporarily paralyzed in 2009.
“It took me a year to walk again,” she said. “I don’t have almost any discs left in my back from taking all those falls, justt slamming my back over and over.”
She recalled, like other wrestlers, thee perils of the “GLOW” set. “The ring wass plywood with carpet foam and the edgee wasn’t covered. I tore the ligament in myy left knee,” said Sharon, 58, who lives inn Portland, Ore., with her husband. (Donna, 53, also lives in Portland and is a manager at a Trader Joe’s.) “I had to keep going. If you got hurt, you got fired.”
(Cimber counters these claims by mul-tiple women, saying, “We certainly didn’tt buy a cheap ring just to hurt the girls.”)
One of Big Bad Mama’s foes in the ringg was Matilda the Hun, a fierce figure cladd in leopard-print and lace played by Dee-ana Booher.
Now 66, Booher lives in a senior-citizens community near Long Beach, Calif, and uses a wheelchair She suffers from lupus and peripheral neuropathy, which has resulted in the amputation of two toes. “All my nerves are dying in my fingers and toes and no one can tell me why,” she said.
“I have a lot of health issues fromm ‘GLOW,’ from lifting and slamming sixx days a week. The lifestyle of a wrestler,, male or female, is brutal.”
Booher started wrestling at age 22, 12 years before she joined “GLOW,” and was the show’s only pro fighter. As such, Hollywood and the advertising world courted her as a star.
“But [‘GLOW’ producers] wouldn’t al-low me . . . I was offered a $1 million beerr commercial and shows that would [have] set me up for life, but they said, ‘We own you,’ ” said Booher. “I had a child and a husband who counted on me.”
She quit, going on to join the competingg group “POWW” — Powerful Women off Wrestling — and made cameos on sitcomss including “Mama’s Family” and “Night Court” until her ailments made it impossible to work.
The current version of “GLOW” leaves her feeling bruised. “They never thanked me — and that’s what hurt.”
But other women say that, even with all the pain the original show put them through, they have no regrets.
“For some people, ‘GLOW’ wass where they peaked and stayed ass opposed to it being a part of theirr life that was different and interest-ing,” Sharon said. “I never gott hooked on it.”
Palmer, whose Ninotchka is thee basis for Zoya — the main charac-ter, played by actress Alison Brie, on the current series — calls the modern tribute a “huge compli-ment.” But, she added, “I hear a lot off bitterb women saying, ‘We created this, why aren’t we making money out of the Netflix show?’ But you have to make the decision: Are you going to be bitter, or take this crumb that ‘GLOW’ gave us and go on to do good things?”