There’s a story I love about Marilyn Monroe, when she was studying at The Actor’s Studio in New York. She was walking down the street one day with her friend Susan Strasberg, dressed casually with a scarf over her hair, utterly unrecognized by the passersby all around. Strasberg marveled at how the world’s most famous woman could pass through the crowds so anonymously. Monroe replied that it was because she hadn’t “turned Marilyn on.” To illustrate the point, she walked up to a guy and smiled that smile at him. The guy startled, flabbergasted, fell out all over himself. Monroe then turned back to her friend and they continued on their way, as perfectly ordinary as before.

As much as popular memory would like to portray Marilyn Monroe as an eternal victim of her own success and as the puppet of more powerful forces, the reality is that she was a lot smarter, more capable and more in control than most people realize. She knew, decades before Andre Agassi said it, that “Image is everything,” and even as she longed for greater substance, Monroe knew exactly how to present the package that paid her bills.

This installment is about two of Monroe’s contemporaries who also knew the power of the image and made their mark on the 20th century in the most unlikely ways…

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Spurious George: Once, when I was a kid growing up in central Florida in the ’70s, my folks took me to a real live pro wrestling match. I don’t recall the undercard, but the headline match was a tag-team bout between Dusty Rhodes the American Dream and Rocky Johnson (father of future master thespian Dwayne) on one side and Ole Andersen and Killer Karl Cox on the other. As I and all my friends knew from watching “Championship Wrestling from Florida” every Saturday night, Dusty and Rocky were the good guys and Andersen and Cox were the bad guys, the latter being members of the malevolent Gary Hart’s Army, a crew every bit as villainous as the Legion of Doom and the Russian mob combined. Justice prevailed that night, with the bad guys going down in defeat.

Now that I’m older and know that pro wrestling is rank fakery (as anyone over the age of seven should), I’m amazed at how little it took to distinguish the good guys - the “babyfaces,” as they’re still called in some circles - from the “heels,” the bad guys. Bad guys were the ones who cheated, ganged up, used weapons, and generally acted like vicious assholes. Good guys were the ones who acted like, well, less vicious assholes. But that’s really all you needed to know. Today, in order to follow the players in pro wrestling “sports entertainment” one must familiarize oneself with an L. Ron Hubbardian saga of fantastic backstories - stolen girlfriends, unpunished crimes, rival empires, mind-control experiments and returns from the grave itself - all to fuel a multimillion-dollar industry built around a bunch of pituitary cases in their underwear pretending to beat the hell out of each other.

For all the Wagnerian angst surrounding the Undertakers and Stone Colds and their ilk, pro wrestling’s greatest heel of all time remains the guy who incited the hatred of a nation simply by dyeing his hair and wearing a frilly pink bathrobe. From the 1940s to the ’60s - wrestling’s Golden Age - the ring’s premier showman was George Wagner, better known as Gorgeous George, a slab of a man who pretended to be a vain, effeminate fop and used that image to become one of the first superstars on the brand-new medium of television. Journalist John Capouya chronicles the rise and many falls of the Human Orchid in his new book Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture (HarperCollins, 2008).

Capouya follows George from his humble beginnings as an athletic kid from the wrong side of the Houston tracks who discovers both a love of roughhousing with his friends and a lucrative enterprise in doing it for penny-pitching spectators. As he grows up, he is introduced to sideshow wrestling on the carny circuit and learns the tricks of the trade: how to jump, how to hit, how to fall down spectacularly. As the Great Depression ravages the nation, George ekes out a living, fake-fighting his way through the South, in the heartland and finally to the Pacific Northwest, where he meets his first wife Betty, a tiny woman with big ideas who takes the dark-haired babyface and convinces him that he’d be a better draw as a heel.

George sees his fortunes improve, and together the Wagners conspire to remake George as the ultimate wrestling bad guy. As it is by this time the middle of World War II (George has escaped the draft for some unknown reason), when the nation has rallied behind the war effort by heroically doing without, the Wagners recreate George as a pompous, self-loving popinjay, his hair blond and styled in the mass of ladies’ waves and curls called the marcel, his frame draped in pastel satin robes that he will delay a match in order to fold and lay upon a piece of fur while his valet spritzes the ring, the ref and George’s opponent with “Chanel Number 10.” George mastered a sneer, an imperious tilt to his chin, and a vocal disdain for the “peasants” surrounding him. Whether he was a challenge to the nation’s standards of manhood, as Capouya suggests, or simply too obnoxious to ignore, the character worked like gangbusters, and virtually overnight Gorgeous George became the most despised man in all of sports, real or fake, with the box-office receipts to prove it.

As televisions began to appear in postwar American homes, cheap-to-produce wrestling was one of its earliest staples, and Gorgeous George was easily its most recognizable star, as famous as Uncle Miltie. At the top of his game, George rubbed shoulders with Hollywood stars, wrestling Burt Lancaster for charity with Bob Hope playing his valet, and spent and gambled more cash than he ever dreamed possible. As these stories inevitably go, however, George’s profligate gambling, drinking and womanizing begin to catch up with him, and Capouya bears witness to the Gorgeous One’s decline.

Capouya puts together a fascinating read for anyone interested in pro wrestling or in the cult of celebrity as it cusped in the crucial ’50s. The only sour notes come whenever Capouya tries to live up to the book’s hyperbolic subtitle. Periodically Capouya will take a mention of George in Bob Dylan’s autobiography, or a throwaway quote from James Brown, and attempt to meld them into some sort of evolutionary timeline that has Gorgeous George influencing the careers of both men and indirectly helping to create folk-rock, soul and hip-hop. More credible is his assertion that George influenced the young Cassius Clay to become Muhammad Ali in all his glory, but beyond that, Capouya’s reach vastly exceeds his grasp. Gorgeous George should be taken for what it is, a solid biography of one of pop culture’s more colorful figures - that’s all it needs to be.

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Our Favorite Girl Next Door: Last month’s publishing schedule being what it was, I was unable to report on the passing of another icon of the 1950s, pinup queen Bettie Page, who died on Dec. 11 from heart failure. Bettie has been documented as one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, despite her relatively short career, and her pictures remain among the most unique and powerful images still in circulation. Even if you don’t know Bettie, you’ve seen her. Her centerfold from the December 1955 issue of Playboy, decorating a Christmas tree in just a Santa hat and a smile. Bunny Yeager’s photos of Bettie frolicking on Miami Beach. Bettie, sultry and dangerous, in a leopard-skin bikini or cavorting with an actual leopard. And then there are those other photos, the fetish postcards with the corsets and the ropes and the spanking…

Bettie Page was a photographer’s dream, a perfectly proportioned brunette who stood out in a sea of ’50s blonde pinups, her trademark bangs framing a face that never failed to engage the camera. Bettie modeled with the kind of poise and enthusiasm that most supermodels can’t seem to conjure up. Every picture of Bettie has a freshness and immediacy, as if there’s nothing in the world she’d rather be doing than posing for us, and that was her unique gift. Decades after she walked away from modeling amid a scandal involving her fetish photos and a Senate subcommittee out for blood, turned to Jesus and disappeared from the public eye like J. D. Salinger, she became a favorite subject for comic-book artists and fantasy illustrators. She is a goddess in the rockabilly scene and a frequent tattoo. Bettie was America’s Subterranean Sweetheart, the pinup girl for the rest of us, and she will be missed.

There are many, many books out there depicting Bettie’s likeness, from the paintings of Olivia de Berardinis to the good-girl art of Jim Silke, but for the best views of Bettie, check out the comprehensive Bettie Page Confidential (St. Martin’s Press, 1994) and Richard Foster’s unflinching and often painful biography The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of Pinups (Kensington, 2005). In the wake of Bettie’s passing, there will no doubt be more material coming. She was just too beautiful for there not to be.

John G. Nettles