Eugen Sandow - The First Superstar
When one first becomes fascinated with the early history of professional wrestling, one endless source of frustration is the scarcity of footage - major matches were often filmed, and the footage shown in select movie theatres, or subsequently recycled as newsreel content, and even in the earliest days of the cinema, wrestlers would bargain on a cut of the film rights as part of their fight contracts, yet precious little has survived.
For some of the reportedly greatest and most influential wrestlers of all-time, the likelihood is we will never see them in motion as audiences of their time did - promoter Jack Curley made a pretty penny off the film rights for the second, infamous George Hackenschmidt vs. Frank Gotch fight in Chicago in 1911, yet no single frame of that footage, nor any footage of either Gotch or Hackenschmidt survives to this day. Just as tantalising, a film of Hackenschmidt performing with his friend and professional rival Harry Houdini in 1905, certainly existed at some point, and was aired on both sides of the Atlantic, but is now considered a lost film, which Houdini experts and scholars have contested the fate of for many years (a debate which I am glad to say I was able to provide some small amount of clarification for earlier this year, thanks to the many months I've spent with my head lost in the life and times of George Hackenschmidt). Similarly, only a description of the film of George Hackenschmidt's theatre engagements during a tour of New Zealand tantalisingly survive in the archives.
Another opportunity to see the great George Hackenschmidt in full motion was lost to us in the late 1940s, when The Russian Lion was in his seventies, but still a formidable figure with a frankly terrifying exercise regimen, having regained much of the bulk and muscle he had lost during the war years, which he spent in Nazi-occupied France. His wrestling career over some three decades prior, Hackenschmidt had reinvented himself as a writer and philosopher, lecturing at universities in both England and the United States, but had been approached about stepping back between the ropes on two separate occasions. First, British wrestling promoter, creator of All-In Wrestling, bullshit artist extraordinaire and 7th Baronet of Shrewsbury Sir Atholl Oakeley was a devotee of Hackenschmidt's, and in his efforts to restart the British wrestling scene following the Second World War, and before the reforms that lead to the establishment of Admiral Lord Mountevans Rules, told the newspapers that the legendary George Hackenschmidt, still something of a byword for wrestling stardom in the United Kingdom, would be on hand to referee his big comeback tournament in Harringay in 1947. The announcement made headlines, but came to nothing - whether Oakeley ever even spoke to Hackenschmidt is doubtful, and as much as Hack, who always enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy, may have revelled in the company of a Baronet and Knight of the Realm, he had little time for works, fixes, and undue bells, whistles and showmanship in professional wrestling (though doubtless partook in a few works and fixed fights himself, and begrudgingly adopted a more showman-like approach at the suggestion of his former manager, theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran), and as an outspoken critic of modern wrestling, would have been particularly offended by the wild and woolly anything goes approach preferred by Oakeley.
So the refereeing gig was a non-starter, but two years later, Hack got another offer - this time, from Hollywood. Hackenschmidt was offered the role he was born for - that of a burly, aging Greco-Roman wrestling legend out of his depth in a shady new underground world of professional wrestling, in the film noir masterpiece Night And The City (subsequently remade, starring Robert De Niro, in 1993, though with the focus shifted from wrestling to boxing). The role called for the Greco-Roman old-timer Gregorious to get into a heated and rule-breaking fight with a younger wrestler, The Strangler - not too subtly modelled on near-contemporary perennial champion Ed "Strangler" Lewis, but portrayed by wrestler-turned-actor and founder of the Cauliflower Alley Club, Mike Mazurki. The fight scene is rough, brutish and uncomfortable to watch, shot in close-up intimate detail, capturing a moment in time as the last of the old guard of wrestling's first golden age butted heads with a newer, rougher breed of wrestler that built on the rule-bending and dirty fighting of Frank Gotch with a dose of showmanship and a list of vicious hooks and holds in their back pocket. As wrestling footage, it stands in stark contrast to the more increasingly flamboyant and acrobatic style of the day, and to the tongue-in-cheek tone that newsreels and newspapers took when covering the sport, while as a Hollywood fight scene it is compelling and utterly unique for its time, almost completely shorn of heroic silver screen razzle dazzle.
Oh but here's the downside - the role of Gregorious didn't go to George Hackenschmidt, but to another European Greco-Roman champion of similar vintage, Stanislau Zbyszko. Unlike Hackenschmidt, the aging Zbyszko had clung to the wrestling business for decades, still wrestling well into the 1920s as his preferred style faded from popularity in favour of catch-as-catch-can, and, despite often complaining of the wrestling business' shift towards showmanship, was never shy of doing business or fixing a fight when duty called. After his retirement in 1928, Stanislau and his younger brother Wladek went into promoting and training the next generation of wrestlers, counting the great Harley Race among their students.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pqtBNpNHJs
Reporting on the casting of Stanislaus Zbyszko, London's News Review made the mistake of trying to play cute with the competition between the two wrestling old-timers, stating;
"When Stanislaus Zbysco (sic), the world champion wrestler, topped the London Pavilion forty years ago, one of his most formidable victims was Hackenschmidt. Last July, seventy year old Zbysco again beat Hackenschmidt and fifteen other aspirants for the role of Gregorius, the Greco-Roman wrestler, in Night and the City."
George Hackenschmidt, who hadn’t lost a match in years prior to his first fateful encounter with Frank Gotch, was incensed and got his lawyer on the case - he was never a "victim" of Zbyszko, and intended to prove it, and that he did, settling the issue in a London courtroom.
It's tantalising to see a glimpse of a man many called one of the all-time greats in Stanislaus Zbyszko, even if it comes a quarter-century after the tail-end of his athletic prime, and in the more controlled setting of a Hollywood noir than in a "genuine" wrestling match, but so many before him have passed without leaving such a record - and, of course, it's the loss of footage of Hackenschmidt in action that I mourn most of all.
So, then, one starts to wonder - what footage does exist? What is the oldest wrestling footage still extant in the world?
One common answer to that question is this short clip of a match between Gustav Frištenský and Josef Šmejkal, in Prague in 1913. While the names may mean little to most of us, many of you will doubtless recognise the footage, as a few scant seconds appear in the introduction of all WWE programming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upVtlB2Exj8
Šmejkal was a reasonably successful journeyman wrestler across Europe prior to World War 1, but Frištenský was something else entirely - boasting thousands of fights to his name, and wrestling from his teenage years until the age of 72, the "Bohemian Hercules" crossed paths with many of the biggest names of the pre-WW1 years, and became a household name and symbol of strength and patriotism to the Czech people. That strength and patriotism became more than just a symbol, when he actively supported, and bankrolled, a number of anti-Nazi resistance groups during the Second World War. Quite a guy.
There is, however, footage of wrestling even older than that 1913 match. While not footage of a "genuine" live wrestling match, this one minute film, Ringkämpfer, dates from 1895.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehdxytFM2I0
Clocking in at less than a minute, including titles, it's a demonstration of wrestling techniques of the time - largely Greco-Roman in nature, though that owes as much to the men involved as to the predominant style of wrestling popular in that day and age, as Greco-Roman had already begun the process of being largely supplanted by catch wrestling in the United States, and was headed the same way in Europe - that is also constrained by the limitations of technology; a static camera, only able to film within a very small space, requires the wrestlers to move around as little as possible. The footage was recorded by cinema pioneers Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioscope projector, and the first people to have ever aired moving pictures to a paying audience.
Ringkämpfer was of a kind with many of Skladanowsky's films, which were often played on a loop, depicting physical activities like dance, juggling, boxing or, in this case, wrestling. It's a remarkable cultural artefact, made even more so by the identity of one of the two wrestlers - not John Grenier, who I've sadly been unable to find any information on, but one Eugen Sandow.
Born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in 1867, Eugen Sandow was, strictly speaking, not a wrestler. He was a bodybuilder, showman, strongman and pop culture icon, who dabbled in Greco-Roman wrestling as an adjunct to his theatrical feats of strength, but he was never more than a perfunctory grappler.
The young Sandow was raised in Prussia, in what is now Kaliningrad, but left as a young man, running away to join the circus in order to avoid military service. There, he plied his trade as a strongman, showing off his prodigious strength with the help of gimmicked breakable chains, phony weights, concealed pulleys and magnets, and all the other requisite tricks of the trade. Unlike most strongmen of the time, who - like Louis Cyr, who got a passing mention in my earlier post on The Great Antonio - were often huge, barrel-chested specimens of masculinity, Sandow cut a svelte, dashing and handsome figure, with a well-groomed moustache, and was able to earn a reasonable living on the side as an artist's model.
It was those good looks that allowed Sandow to become more than just a circus sideshow attraction. Thanks to the guidance of his mentor, Ludwig "Professor Atilla" Durlacher, a gym owner and strongman himself, Sandow left the circus and went on tour as a solo attraction, while training his body to better resemble the sculpted musculature of Ancient Greek and Roman statuary, combining the Victorian era's fetishism for antiquity with the emerging physical culture movement. While one dominant and hugely influential strand of the physical culture phenomenon was "muscular Christianity", Sandow's approach was all muscle and not a lot of Christ; he was unapologetically vain and ambitious, and took the strongman act into the mainstream.
After defeating a number of other strongmen in challenge acts on the London stage, Sandow's act was down pat - he would appear on stage, not grunting and grimacing in leotard and furs like most of his predecessors, but dressed to the nines in a near-immaculate suit, and stripping to reveal his near-nude physique, before getting started on the lifting and hoisting required of the profession. He became a sensation, and was followed by legions of challengers and imitators. While the strongman routine had traditionally fallen into the "dumb act" category of the vaudeville or music hall bill - that is to say, as an act that carried no expectation that the audience would have to pay attention to music or dialogue, it was always scheduled first, last, or just after intermission, any time that audiences would be milling about to and from their seats without giving the act on stage their full attention - Sandow made it headline material.
Before long, it became clear that the appeal in Sandow's performances had little to do with his vaunted ability to lift baby elephants with a single finger (one suspects some theatrical gimmickry at play) or support a grand piano on his chest, but in a rare public spectacle of naked male flesh. The feats of strength, and the increasingly rare demonstration of Greco-Roman Wrestling, was sidelined in favour of posing routines, flexing his muscles, mimicking the poses of classical statuary, while lit from the most flattering angles, clad in the skimpiest of briefs, and set to music, often performed by Sandow's Very Close Personal Friend, housemate and travelling partner, the Dutch pianist Martinus Sieveking. A reporter for the New York World, in 1893, the same year that Sandow had his American breakthrough performance at the Chicago World's Fair, and a year before he posed for Thomas Edison's video camera in a precursor to his wrestling match for Skladanowsky, explained how Sieveking would practice piano stripped to the waist, while Sandow sat beside him working on his muscles.
The stage alone couldn't contain Sandow's fame, and he soon began to take advantage of the increasing affordability of photography and small-batch printing to produce flyers and promotional photographs for sale - many of them decidedly risqué, showing Sandow in mock-classical poses, covered only by a fig leaf, or a suggestively placed sword rising from his hip. They were a hit with women, but even moreso in London's gay subculture, which claimed Sandow as one of their own - and not without evidence.
Aside from his close bond with Sieveking, who he insisted travel with him on all international tours, and his clear comfort with showing off and flaunting his physique in decidedly homoerotic settings, Sandow developed a reputation for being chaste with women, rejecting the advances of even the most desirable of society beauties, so much so that his management would often invent tabloid stories of steamy affairs just to dispel the rumours that often circulated about his sexuality. Sandow would invite male admirers to join him in his dressing room, for private displays and the opportunity to touch his muscles up close and in the flesh, all in the name of education and physical improvement, of course. Female fans, however, were asked to donate a considerable sum to charity for the privilege - $300 was the going rate during Sandow's time in Chicago.
Before coming to London, in 1888, Sandow talked of meeting an admirer while swimming in Venice's Lido di Venezia; that admirer turned out to be the artist Aubrey Hunt, whose painting of Sandow now belongs to London's excellent Wellcome Collection. That the Lido was a popular haunt for gay men of the time to cruise goes unmentioned in Sandow's account of the meeting, but contemporary queer readers would be sure to have reveled at the implications in that chance encounter.
In 1896, Sandow married Blanche Brooks, the daughter of a Manchester photographer he had once posed for. While, in the early months of their engagement, Sandow continued to live with Martinus Sieveking, their relationship appears to have come to an end by the time of Sandow's marriage. Coming less than a year after the trial of Oscar Wilde, Sandow did all he could to distance himself from the overt homoeroticism of his earlier career, performing in the leotards he had worn in his youth, rather than the scanty underwear of the height of his fame, and shifting focus to selling systems of physical improvement, fitness and wellbeing, rather than his own sex appeal. While never quite falling into line with the ranks of muscular Christianity, he ploughed a similar furrow, holding the world's first bodybuilding contests, selling mail order fitness pamphlets, and advertising his services as a personal trainer to the great and the good.
Although Sandow and Blanche remained married until his death and had two daughters, rumours of his profligate bisexual affairs continued to put a strain on their relationship. When the strongman died, aged 58, in 1925, he was buried, at his wife's insistence, in an unmarked grave in London's Putney Vale Cemetery, and all his personal effects, diaries and correspondence were burned. The official cause of death was an aortic aneurysm, the press reported that the strongman had died as a result of a brain hemorrhage brought on by the strain of dragging his crashed car from a ditch, while society gossips whispered the dread word “syphillis”.
Despite his own wrestling career only amounting to a handful of exhibitions, carnival fights, and the clumsy tussling of two strongmen in ersatz Greco-Roman bouts on the stages of London music halls, Sandow did have one peculiarly notable encounter, against an opponent named Commodore.
It was all the brainchild of California circus manager Edgar Daniel Boone - he claimed to be a Kentucky Colonel, and descendant of American pioneer and folk hero Daniel Boone, but in reality he was born "Boon" in Norfolk, England and simply added an "e" to his surname when he came to America. Boone worked for the famously unscrupulous and publicity-hungry, if inventive, circus promoter and horse salesman Adam Forepaugh, as a menagerie manager (imagine an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie, won't you?).
In 1894, Boone was going it alone after the death of Forepaugh, and eager to find any new angle that might attract curiosity-seekers to his fledgling circus. His first attempt was to promote that he would be hosting a fight between a grizzly bear and a lion, at $20 a ticket, but that was a non-starter when, understandably, the SPCA stepped in. Just as hungry for publicity, Eugen Sandow's American manager, Florenz Ziegfeld stepped in with a counter-proposal - the law might prohibit a fight between two animals, but not between an animal and a man. And not just any man, but the much-vaunted strongest man in the world! Eugen Sandow vs. Commodore The Lion was on, and Ziegfeld's publicity machine went into overdrive, promising a death-defying battle for life and limb. Most absurdly, it was billed as a Catch-As-Catch-Can Wrestling match - something Sandow had no aptitude for, let alone the lion.
The publicity paid dividends, drawing an audience of 3000, but the fight didn't come close to matching expectations. Commodore turned out to be an aging, drugged animal with his claws clipped, yawning and refusing to take part in the whole sorry affair, even as Sandow tugged at his whiskers. When it became evident that Commodore couldn't be roused into action, and the audience to a man booed the sorry spectacle, Sandow salvaged what dignity and showmanship he could, hoisting the lion over his shoulder and parading it around the ring in a now futile show of strength.
With no shortage of self-publicity, Sandow's autobiography tells a different story - talking of the lion as a furious beast, roaring and vicious, breaking its chains and running amok before the fight, only to become prone and tame when the fight began, not because it was an old, drugged up wreck of a mistreated circus animal, but because it cowered in the face of Sandow's superior strength. Even by the standards of a master self-promoter, it's a phenomenal display of bullshit.
Sandow's most notable wrestling matches, then, are against a poor abused animal, and against a man who has left no other mark on the historical record. But his influence on wrestling is still widespread - many of the wrestlers who came up through performances on English music halls, including the great George Hackenschmidt, were cut from similar cloth, and accented their stage appearances with strongman acts and muscular poses straight out of the Sandow playbook, and even a man as clean living, sober and straight-laced as Hackenschmidt wasn't averse to selling the odd racy photo to make ends meet. Similarly, Sandow's debut on the London stage had introduced the open challenge format, borrowed, perhaps, from a similar routine employed by P.T. Barnum, that became a mainstay of music hall wrestling, and which Hackenschmidt again would emulate, making his debut by challenging Jack Carkeek from the audience, removing his immaculate evening suit to reveal wrestling gear and an intimidatingly muscled physique. In the United States, late nineteenth century heavyweight champion William Muldoon took to posing in gladiatorial costumes as part of his athletics shows, in a similar nod to antiquity to that popularised by Sandow.
In 1918, wrestler Wilhelm Baumann changed his ring name to Billy Sandow, trading on the lingering popularity of Eugen. The elder Sandow had fallen from public favour - in 1915, the New York Clipper reported on rumours that he had been executed as a German spy in London, and while that wasn't the case, Sandow's heritage and heavy German accent made him an object of suspicion in his adopted homeland. With the likes of British fascist Oswald Mosely openly accusing Sandow of raising funds for the enemy, he was left struggling to find business for any of the products he had lent his name. Whether Sandow chocolate, Sandow cocoa, Sandow dolls or Sandow corsets, there was simply no appetite for them in a fiercely anti-German England, and the strongman was left financially ruined, but his name still carried enough weight in the United States that the newly christened Billy Sandow believed that some of that fame and stardust would rub off on him.
Billy Sandow wasn't to follow in Eugen's footsteps as a strongman, but he brought to professional wrestling the kind of visionary publicity that Eugen had brought to the strongman act. The extent of Sandow's influence is another story for another time (or, indeed, my book), but the former vaudevillian, as part of the so-called Gold Dust Trio, introduced showmanship, pageantry and fantasy to professional wrestling on a grander scale than ever before, created the role of the ringside manager, and transformed the way wrestling was booked, promoted, and sold to the public forever. But he never wrestled a lion.
