GLOW to return, minus original cast

Dee Booher, aka Matilda the Hun or Queen Kong, poses in her home in Seal Beach, Calif., dressed in her old costume from GLOW.
Dee Booher, aka Matilda the Hun or Queen Kong, poses in her home in Seal Beach, Calif., dressed in her old costume from GLOW.

LOS ANGELES -- The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (aka GLOW) have endured kicks to the head, knees to the groin, body slams, insults, rivalries, ridicule and spangly neon unitards. Now, 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.

Meltzer continues, "They say it's not about us, but then why are they using our name? Why not call it something else?"

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. Laurie Thompson, aka Susie Spirit, knocked her elbow out. 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, aka 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 maneuver 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.

"I hope you're getting paid enough for this," she recalls one of the medics telling her.

She wasn't.

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. "It was twisted."

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!" Or, "You are more boring than a Sicilian funeral!"

Still, the girls stayed.

The show was shot in Las Vegas, so each eight-month season, 30-plus GLOW girls bunked up at the Riviera Hotel (then in later seasons at a dumpy apartment building off the strip).

"We lived together. Worked together. Hurt together," says Eileen O'Hara, aka MTV, or Melody Trouble Vixen, with more than a little wistfulness.

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.

O'Hara says she felt more exploited in the corporate environment she worked in pre-GLOW.

And the tiny, tacky costumes? She shrugs. "It was the '80s."

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.

Then, in 1990, GLOW was abruptly canceled. 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' 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 who churned through the system, zero went on to full-time acting careers. Only four became full-time wrestlers. Booher was one of them. She thinks she stayed in it longer than she should have. Afterward, she earned a living doing what she calls "slam-o-grams," singing telegrams with wrestling.

"That's part of the damage in this business," she says with a wry laugh. "You don't want to disappoint. Them or yourself. You don't want to admit that it might be ending. So for 10 years, I pretended I was still there ... and I wasn't."

Some of the girls became drug addicts. Some, alcoholics. At least two wound up homeless.

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, aka Babe the Farmer's Daughter, bought the trademark in 2001 from Riklis. For years afterward, she eked out a living selling videos of the old episodes.

The new Netflix GLOW turned out to be an easy sell. Showrunner Carly Mensch had worked with Kohan and emailed her the idea.

"Do you want to make a show about women's wrestling in the '80s?" she wrote.

"Yes," Kohan wrote back.

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.

As to whether they plan to bring in any of the original women: "We can't answer that at this stage," Mensch says. "We made Season 1, and now we're just hoping to get to Season 2."

In the meantime, the original wrestlers continue to enhance their legacy. Meltzer hosts annual GLOW-theme cruises. Fellow GLOW girls and fans attend.

Currently, no one is speaking much with Hayden. The other GLOW girls resent her. Yet they understand her.

"Somebody's offering you money and you don't have money? When she's selling videos of us to make her money? You're gonna go, 'yeah,' " Meltzer says. "But I would have also thought, 'What can I do for the girls?'"

Asked whether he misses the old show, director Cimber scowls. "No," he grouses. "Because it was driving me nuts." All those women. All that drama.

Some of the women plan to binge-watch the new GLOW. Summerland will be there with popcorn: "Whether we're gonna eat it or throw it at the screen," she says, "remains to be seen."

Style on 06/27/2017

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