Linda McMahon, From Co-founder Of The WWE To U.S. Senate Candidate
The Washington Post
By Jason Horowitz
February 22, 2010
HARWINTON, CONN. — Melissa Russell, a Republican voter in a silk American-flag scarf, interrupted her chat with U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon at the Fairview Farms Golf Club here earlier this month to bring up an old acquaintance.
“On a side note,” said Russell, 41, “when I was in high school, I met Sergeant Slaughter. He came out of a camouflage limo!”
McMahon dipped her head back and laughed. Sgt. Slaughter, the ’80s-era professional wrestling character, was known for dressing in fatigues and applying the “cobra clutch” hold on his Iranian archenemy, the Iron Sheik. He also wrestled for McMahon, whose entire business experience — her sole qualification for public office — has been built on the broad backs of muscle-men and -women in spandex.
A co-founder with her husband of the wildly successful World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), McMahon is willing to spend up to $50 million to fill the Senate seat opened by Chris Dodd’s retirement. First she has to get by former congressman Rob Simmons in the Republican primary, then the heavily favored Democratic state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal.
“I am an outsider,” McMahon, 61, said in an interview. “What I hear over and over and over again is, ‘We want somebody with real-life business experience.’ ”
“Real” is not the first word that leaps to mind when one thinks of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Koko B. Ware leaping off the top rope, or other grown men pretending to clothesline, body-slam and “suplex” the living daylights out of each other. And yet the roughly billion-dollar enterprise McMahon and her husband, Vince, built from scratch is very real, as is the WWE’s enduring popularity. “It’s the longest running weekly episodic program on television, longer than ‘Lassie’ or ‘Gunsmoke,’ ” she said.
McMahon, a remarkably polished and poised first-time candidate, is ready to embrace the serious success of the company and even the aura of scrappiness it lends her. Then with poise and legalese, she distances herself from wrestling scenes that are sexually explicit and purposefully inflammatory, moments her opponents hope to highlight. That trick is made even tougher by McMahon’s star turns inside the ring. While her appearances were nowhere near as regular as those of Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, her groin-kicking alter-ego nevertheless did combat with her own husband, son and daughter. Watching her recite well-coached corporate talking points to reconcile the two can be a spectacle in its own right.
On the rampant and deadly use of steroids in pro wrestling: “The thing of it is, there is no competitive advantage for using steroids — it’s not going to make you jump higher, run faster, hit the ball farther or anything like that,” she said, adding that “drug policies have evolved, health and wellness policies have evolved.”
On the sexually explicit content the company broadcast over the past decade, including the time in 2006 that brawny Edge and vampish Lita disrobed one another, hopped into a bed, simulated sex and flashed a bare breast in the center of the ring (“WWE.com’s No. 7 Greatest Moment in Raw History,” according to the company’s Web site): “I’m glad to see that the programming has now evolved from TV-14 to PG,” McMahon said. “Because that’s where it should be. It’s good for our audience. It’s good for our sponsors.”
And the way WWE wrestlers, including her husband, mercilessly taunted and beat up a mentally challenged character named Eugene in 2007: “He had a childlike quality about him, and he was a fictional character in a fictional world that was showed no special privilege by WWE and actually was part of a full running story line in which he was an underdog and wound up victorious.”
And the footage of McMahon herself in the ring, being called a bitch and slapped to the ground by her daughter, kicking one man between the legs and then having her head inserted between the legs of another man as he pile-drove her down to the mat: “My skills as a CEO are absolutely and completely apart from my being a bad actress every now and then, written into a story line for emphasis.”
McMahon is also quick to point out that she resigned from the company in September. Since then, the WWE has developed a primer for reporters, which answers commonly asked questions. “How many wrestlers have died while under contract with the WWE?” Only five! The lack of health coverage? “Such as actors and singers, WWE performers are independent contractors.” And the risque story lines? “Much like many other shows at the time [e.g., 'NYPD Blue,' 'Jerry Springer,' 'Big Brother'], WWE engaged in what was known as ’sensationalized TV’ in a TV-14 environment.”
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McMahon’s contortion is not an easy move to pull off, but she has proved to be an especially agile and impressive candidate. Her pearls, freshly coiffed blond hair and hundreds of millions in the bank ingratiate her to the country-club set even as her wrestling production provides jobs, packs arenas and boosts ratings with fans who respond to the anti-elite, nationalist jingoistic sentiment stoked by WWE scripts. Not a bad base in the “tea party” era.
After waking up at 4:30 a.m. to appear on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” McMahon ended her day at the Harwinton golf club with an entourage of five campaign aides. She sat near a table loaded with the sleek, wrestling-reference-free campaign fliers that are inundating Connecticut mailboxes. (“Two very different records,” read one pamphlet depicting Simmons in an aged black-and-white photo next to McMahon smiling in vivid color.) She watched stonily as Simmons declared his confidence in the wake of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Senate race upset. A January Quinnipiac University survey showed him 10 points ahead of McMahon, but her campaign says its internal polling consistently shows her up by two points in the Aug. 10 primary.
When it was her turn, McMahon stepped from behind a lectern adorned with an Abraham Lincoln portrait because, she said, she didn’t want any barriers between her and the 200 gathered voters. Wearing a pink knee-length dress under a black blazer, calf-high black-suede stiletto boots, gold earrings and diamond rings, she jabbed her finger toward one man in the front and said, “I wanted to get to hear from you.” Her speech was heavy on outsider talking points — cut the deficit, cut taxes, Washington is broken — and on overcoming early adversity and bankruptcy to build a successful corporation that allowed her to self-finance without any special-interest money.
“I’ve created a product that is one of America’s greatest exports,” she said, referring to the WWE programming in 145 countries and 30 languages. She called herself a “scrapper” who can both rub and “knock elbows.”
As McMahon returned to her table to healthy applause, Simmons whispered his rebuttal from the corner of the room.
“A broader basis of experience is generally better,” said the former congressman, a Vietnam veteran and onetime CIA official, who wore a blue tie flecked with golden mini-Connecticut capitol buildings. Asked if voters in Connecticut should be worried about McMahon’s connection to the WWE, Simmons stepped back, nodded his head emphatically up and down and said, “I really can’t comment on that.”
After the speeches, McMahon and Simmons mingled with the voters, sometimes inches apart, without exchanging pleasantries. As Simmons talked to a group of men about his CIA experiences, a young McMahon aide snickered at the candidate’s tie. McMahon, shadowed by her campaign photographer, put voters at ease with her down-home Southern accent and easy manner. She had them nodding along with her talk of deficit discipline and her assurance to get up to speed on national security with “the best people around.” But wrestling was an irrepressible topic.
Jane Golec, a 77-year-old woman from Harwinton, asked McMahon to sign a WWE publicity head shot for the son of a friend who had taken ill. McMahon signed the picture “To Eric” and handed it back to Golec.
“Look how nice that is,” Golec said to a friend.
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As an only child growing up in New Bern, N.C., McMahon was more interested in basketball than wrestling. That changed when, at 13, she started dating 16-year-old Vince McMahon. They married right after her high school graduation. At East Carolina University, she majored in French and became pregnant with the couple’s son, who, like his younger sister, has frequently appeared in the ring. In 1969 the couple moved to Gaithersburg and Vince began working as an independent promoter with his father’s Capitol Wrestling company, located in the District at 1332 I St. NW.
To help make ends meet, Linda McMahon took a job as a receptionist at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where she said she used her familiarity with French to help translate documents related to the estate of the poet Ezra Pound, who had been a client of the firm.
“She was not real excited about the wrestling business at that time,” said William James Myers, who met McMahon in 1973, when he wrestled as George “the Animal” Steele, a hirsute, green-tongued, missing-link character with a taste for the stuffing in turnbuckles. “It was not great theater to her. She kind of rolled her eyes.” But they moved to New England and founded the World Wrestling Federation, and soon bought Vince’s father’s enterprise.
Myers said he then told Vince about “a promoter I knew very well in Detroit, the old Sheik. Everyone just thought the Sheik was just the toughest businessman in the world, but his wife handled all the payoffs. If here you are, a big burly guy, and you’ve got a problem with your payoff, you can argue with Vince, [but] how do you argue with a woman? The next thing I knew, Linda was in the chair.”
McMahon handled the administrative side of the business, and she used skills acquired at the law firm to start trademarking her husband’s ideas. In 1983, the McMahons moved to Greenwich, Conn., and started recruiting top wrestling talent.
“It was the greatest call of my life,” said Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart, a sequins-wearing wrestling manager from Memphis who usually spoke into a megaphone. “I said, ‘Feet don’t fail me now, brother.’ I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for them.”
“She was always very pleasant, with a handshake, sometimes a hug ready,” said Richard Henry Blood, a half-American, half-Japanese wrestler billed as Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat. “She’d say, ‘Hey, Rick.’ Or, ‘Hey, Ricky.’ ”
In 1985, the McMahons showcased their newly acquired star Hulk Hogan in “Wrestlemania,” the Super Bowl of wrestling that helped build the lucrative pay-per-view television model.
“When we did the first ‘Wrestlemania,’ ” McMahon said, “I think we had everything, including our children, hawked.”
Not all the wrestlers appreciated McMahon’s business practices.
Edward Leslie, who wrestled between 1983 and 1993 for the McMahons as Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake, a villain in purple hot pants and black bow tie who sheared the hair of his unconscious opponents, blamed McMahon for withholding the use of his stage name for more than a decade.
“I’m not sure what kind of politician she is going to make,” said Leslie, who has had legal and personal troubles outside the ring. “If politicians are cutthroats and backstabbers and are not true to their word, then she’ll probably make a great politician.”
The McMahon campaign declined to respond to Leslie’s accusations, and directed all inquiries to the WWE. “The WWE owns the copyright to Brutus the Barber,” said Robert Zimmerman, a spokesman for the wrestling organization.
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If the McMahons spent the ’80s and ’90s building their empire, they toiled over the next decade to defend it in the era of rival companies and rampant steroid use.
“Steroids were muscle-builders and we wanted to look good,” said Bret “The Hitman” Hart, who insisted the McMahons never encouraged wrestlers to use steroids. Asked if the couple ever discouraged the use of the performance-enhancing drugs, Hart responded, “I know that the guys who had a lot of muscles made a lot of money.”
In 1991, the company started testing for steroids, a policy it dropped in 1996, as the WWE faced a challenge from a rival wrestling company owned by Ted Turner, who offered larger salaries and less stringent screening. In 1997 congressional testimony, McMahon said her talent had been “stolen,” and argued that the company abandoned its steroid testing because it had proved so successful in bringing down abuse and was no longer “cost effective.”
In the late 1990s, the company rebuilt with new stars, bought out Turner’s wrestling business in 2001 and changed its name to the WWE after a successful suit brought by the World Wildlife Fund. The McMahons had become rich, flirting with a billion-dollar worth and socializing with Connecticut’s gentry. To stay on top, their wrestling empire entered the “attitude era.”
The McMahons introduced more sexually explicit story lines, many hawking the charms of “the rated-R superstar” Edge. In one episode, Edge demanded that his girlfriend Lita “finish me off” in the ring with “live uninterrupted sex.” In another episode, a wrestler simulated necrophilia with a mannequin in a coffin — a sequence, according to a radio interview with the wrestler, taped in an actual funeral home — in a room adjacent to an actual funeral, with Vince McMahon urging the actor to “do it harder and make more noise and stuff.”
The McMahon family also became characters in the show, sometimes wrestling one another. Vince became a leading villain, whose in-ring exploits — forcing humiliated enemies to kiss his bare behind and having his own face shoved into hefty wrestlers’ buttocks — make for an opposition researcher’s dream cache of YouTube moments.
“That blew my mind,” Myers said. “They come across as a dysfunctional family, and they are anything but that.”
Since June 2008, the WWE has cleaned up its image, and in recent months has scrubbed offending video clips from the Web. Vince McMahon has been kept away from the media, and the WWE declined a request to interview him. The programming is now entirely PG. The wrestling stars have continued to visit the troops abroad. The company held 2008 voter registration drives in its arenas. In 2009, the Connecticut House of Representatives approved Linda McMahon’s appointment by Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell to the state board of education.
Judging from the enthusiastic reactions to McMahon at the golf club on Friday night, wrestling seems a much more acceptable launch pad for a U.S. Senate bid.
“She’s gone through her own business hardships,” said Diana Lepore, 48, a supporter from New Hartford. “We need someone in Washington who knows how to run a business.”