Le Domino Rouge, Orion & Kendo Nagasaki - the Magic & Mystery of the Mask
If you had to come up with one single symbol to universally represent professional wrestling, what would it be? You’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than a mask. When I met with Ric at Action Figure Cellar to hash out our ideas for the cover art for my book, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History Of Professional Wrestling, we toyed with the idea of using a simple wrestling mask design, something instantly recognisable, but opted against it not because it was inappropriate, but because Wes Brown’s Breaking Kayfabe had already beaten us to it a few months earlier.
When Ric also very generously gave up his time to help me out with graphics and poster art for Slam & Pinegrapple, the fundraiser show for Camden’s Lost Souls Pizza that I booked and co-promoted last year, we had a stacked roster of wrestlers to choose from as to who should appear on the poster. There are obvious considerations - the bigger names front and centre, make sure to include anyone who might turn heads and attract attention, and be sure to reflect the diversity of the card, rather than the lily-white all-male posters you see at all too many wrestling events - but I was also adamant that the two masked wrestlers on the card, Jerry Bakewell and Illusionisto, be prominently featured (the third masked wrestler, Blue Kane, was an unannounced surprise, and didn’t appear in any advertising). Because if you don’t know who any of them are, a line-up of posed photos of wrestlers could be almost anybody doing anything, but the moment you’ve got a couple of fellas in masks and tights on there, you know right away that this is wrestling.
But how did we get here? How did masks become synonymous with professional wrestling in the first place?
Well, let me take you on a journey…
Paris' Masked Wrestler depicted in a 1911 illustration
Masked wrestlers probably first competed in France, somewhere around the mid-19th century. The romantic historian in me, tempted as it always is to draw threads of cultural connection wherever they might arise, is always quick to notice that France is the ideal birthplace for The Masked Wrestler - this is the country that hid the identity of a mysterious prisoner beneath a velvet hood, which the imaginations of Voltaire and Alexandre Dumas reinvented as an Iron Mask, the country that gave us The Phantom of The Opera and the master-criminal Fantômas, and which provided the historical backdrop for the Scarlet Pimpernel to become fiction’s first masked, secret-identitied superhero. Why wouldn’t wrestlers jump on the same bandwagon?
Masked wrestlers first started to emerge in Europe in the 1840s, though seemingly as a matter of convenience more than as an attraction in their own right - these were wrestlers who, for one reason or another, saw fit to disguise their identity; they were amateurs wrestling professionally in secret, or established wrestlers earning a few Francs on the side.
L’Homme Masque, the masked sensation of the 1860s, was a very different proposition. The Masked Man, as his name translated to - I guess that when you’re the first, you can afford to be uncreative when it comes to the name - was perhaps the first wrestler to realise that an identity-concealing mask (or, slightly adorably, a “cagoule” in French) was more than a matter of expediency, it was a selling point in its own right. Because a mask is, if nothing else, a mystery.
When L’Homme Masque first came to Paris in 1867, it was in an unmarked horse-drawn carriage, driven by a man dressed all in black, and who popular rumour insisted was deaf and mute, so as to prevent him letting his master’s secret from ever becoming public. The man inside the carriage dressed immaculately in black and white evening attire, all topped off with a black velvet mask. When wrestling, the velvet mask gave way for a head-covering black hood.
There’s barely a notable French wrestler of the day who hasn’t been accused of being L’Homme Masque, and his countless imitators and successors only serve to muddy the water, but contemporary speculation was even wilder - a mere wrestler can’t have gone to these extreme lengths to hide his identity, so who was he? The Masked Man and whoever else was contributing to his press allowed the public to believe that he was a man of standing, an aristocrat wrestling in secret.
Kendo Nagasaki, pictured with original manager "Gorgeous" George Gillette
Alleging a little blue blood in the veins of a masked wrestler was always good for a bit of a headline, some gossip, or just a bit of camp nonsense. When the Masked Marvel (possibly previous blog subject Johannes Van Der Walt) wrestled in Grantham in 1937, the advertising bill described him as a “prominent member of London society”, and “educated at Eton”.
When British wrestler Kendo Nagasaki could no longer get away with pretending to be Japanese, and following the sad death of his original manager George Gillette, he created an occult, mythic backstory - there were now three distinct identities, The Man Behind The Mask, a three-hundred year old samurai spirit guide named Yogensha, and only when they were spiritually at one through a period of concentrated meditation did they ultimately become Kendo Nagasaki.
It added an additional layer of intrigue to the Kendo mystery - as well as skirting around the culturally insensitive gimmick, and the rather obvious point that, mask or no mask, he was a 6’2” bloke from Shropshire. But, by separating the “Japanese” Yogensha from the flesh-and-blood Kendo Nagasaki, Kendo’s new manager Lloyd Ryan was free to invite any and all speculation as to who the man behind the mask could really be. Had his face been disfigured in a fire? Was he a member of the Royal Family indulging their violent delights in secret? And what of that trademark pinky finger, severed at the knuckle, a grisly reminder that whoever was under the mask was for sure the real Kendo Nagasaki, whatever that meant, as well as an echo of Yakuza ritual - enough to make the sceptics wonder. Lloyd Ryan’s personal favourite bit of business seemed to be to suggest that the Man Behind The Mask was the 6’1” Lord Lucan, missing since the murder of his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett in 1974, but a reliable source of silly season tabloid headlines to this day, routinely “discovered” living in hiding in Australia, Goa, or South Africa - would it really be that much more ridiculous to suggest that he was hiding in plain sight, behind the mask of a TV wrestler?
Outside of the wrestling business, Lloyd Ryan and Kendo Nagasaki both had interests in the music industry - Kendo as one-time record label and executive and manager of glam-punk band The Cuddly Toys, and Lloyd Ryan as a big band drummer and session musician, whose main claim to fame was teaching Phil Collins how to play the drums. And the music industry had a dalliance or two into the world of masked mystery too - just as Lord Lucan was “spotted” all over the globe long after his likely death in the 1970s, Elvis Presley was sighted everywhere from Graceland to Legoland, to the background of a scene in Home Alone, long after his death in 1977. Throughout the 1980s, and persisting in weirder corners of the internet to this day, there was a cottage industry in maintaining the fiction that Elvis had faked his death - by the ‘90s and ‘00s, it was a common enough belief to be routinely pastiched in pop culture, popping up in The Simpsons, Men In Black, Bubba Ho-Tep and everything in-between.
But one particularly unscrupulous record producer, Shelby Singleton, went one further, and knew that there was money to be made down this particular rabbit hole. Capitalising on author Gail Brewer-Giorgio’s 1978 novel Orion, about a Southern pop superstar who faked his own death to escape the spotlight, Singleton hatched a plan to launch the “real” Orion on the world. He had, for some years, been struggling to find the right way to package a young singer named Jimmy Ellis - his problem was that Ellis sounded just too much like Elvis, so much so that Singleton’s earlier efforts had been to release Ellis’ records uncredited, with his vocals recorded over old Sun Records instrumentals, to create the illusion of undiscovered early Elvis demos. The next step was even more audacious. Singleton had Ellis dye his hair and sideburns black, and don a sequinned jumpsuit, then disguise the top half of his face with a patterned and sequinned mask. Just as masked wrestlers and their promoters were happy to encourage speculation that their masks hid aristocrats and royals, Singleton openly invited speculation that “Orion” was really the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll hiding in plain sight.
That the brown-eyed, wide-jawed Jimmy Ellis didn’t look particularly like Elvis didn’t seem to matter all that much.
The not particularly Elvis-like Orion, pictured on the reissue of his first album "Reborn" - the original cover was an illustration of Orion seemingly emerging from a coffin containing his own doppelganger.
Sometimes, a mask can become oppressive, an obstacle preventing its wearer from expressing themselves fully. Many a masked wrestler has removed the hood - some to greater success, and some to indifference and eventual obscurity.
Orion removed his mask in 1983, though when success failed to follow him under his real name, quietly put it back on in 1987. Kendo Nagasaki’s unmasking ceremony was a spectacular affair, uniquely ritualised and in bold contrast to the otherwise staid and pedestrian wrestling fare on offer that night at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in 1977. With George Gillette in the mock-Egyptian garb of some Dennis Wheatley cult leader, and flanked by black-robed acolytes with shaven heads, Kendo’s mask is removed to reveal eyes made dark red by contact lenses, a striking, not quite handsome, face, but most noticeably of all, a head almost entirely shaven aside from a long, plaited ponytail, crowned by a large tattoo atop the crown of his head, a stylised six-pointed star made of two interlocking triangles, with an eyeball in the centre.
Kendo Nagasaki had achieved what perhaps no other masked wrestler in history had done. His unmasking might have answered some questions, but it only offered more. What did the tattoo mean? Who really was this man? Did he really go about his day-to-day life, as a businessman in the midlands in the 1970s, looking like that?
The unmasked Kendo Nagasaki
Kendo’s time without the mask is largely overlooked these days - he made a handful of televised wrestling appearances without it, but stepped away from the ring the following year, focusing on his other interests. When he returned to the ring in the 1980s, it was with the mask, and the public seemingly collectively deciding to forget that he had ever appeared without it. And, following George Gillett’s tragically early death from AIDS in 1988, aged just 48, new manager Lloyd Ryan was firmly in place to go back to the old favourites, speculating about Kendo’s true identity, actively willing out of existence any memory we might have had of having already seen the man’s face.
Not only his face, but his name was public knowledge by this time. After a chance encounter with a plumber who, on attending a house call to a Peter Thornley and being met at the door by Gorgeous George Gillett, put two and two together and figured out that the muscular and silent Thornley of the house was none other than Kendo Nagasaki, the secret was out. The plumber handed out flyers outside wrestling events revealing Nagasaki’s real name and address, and even took out advertising space in local newspapers to sit alongside wrestling bills, exposing the masked man’s secret identity, until a court harassment order put a stop to his activities. But people like a mystery, and Kendo Nagasaki really being Peter Thornley never seemed to make a dent in his mystique. After all, who was Peter Thornley anyway?
In the 2015 movie Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, a friend of Jimmy Ellis, the man behind that particular mask, claimed that Ellis’ birth certificate listed his father’s name as “Vernon”, with no surname given - leaving the possibility open that Orion could have been an illegitimate son of one Vernon Presley. That, according to this supposed birth certificate, his mother shared the first name Gladys with Elvis’ mother seems all too good to be true, and given the lack of evidence, it’s almost certainly a little fanciful extra wrinkle to the story. But Orion wasn’t born Jimmy Ellis, and no one seems quite sure where he was born - at two years old, in Alabama, he was given up for adoption.
Kendo Nagasaki, meanwhile, was also a child of adoption. Before he was Peter Thornley, he had been Brian Stevens, a fact only revealed to the public in his 2018 autobiography Kendo Nagasaki and The Man Behind The Mask, the masked man still retaining his capacity for mystery to this day.
But let us set the clock back to 1915, and make our way to New York. L’Homme Masque had made the occasional headline as a novelty, but the fad for masked wrestlers had seemingly not made it to the other side of the Atlantic.
At the Manhattan Opera House, promoter Samuel Rachmann was hoping to reverse the tide of mistrust in professional wrestling with a grand fifty-man Greco-Roman tournament, pitting some of the best Europe had to offer against one another. There was a slight problem - American tastes move quickly, and Greco-Roman had been a thing of the past for the better part of a decade, supplanted by the more dynamic catch-as-catch-can style, and even that was beset by scandal and rumours of fight-fixing, particularly after the disastrous final match between George Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch. Wrestling was in the doldrums and, despite strong early ticket sales, Rachmann’s efforts to drag it back into the limelight with the help of a bevy of European musclemen were falling flat.
The tournament took place in two legs, one in April, and one in November. And while tickets for April’s matches sold reasonably well, ticket sales for November were disappointing - fans no longer accustomed to the long, grinding, drawn-out nature of Greco-Roman were bored to tears by matches dragged out to stalemates, with wrestlers locked in the same position for sometimes hours at a time. Combat sports historian Ken Zimmerman Jr. described how patrons would sometimes leave the Opera House, dine at a restaurant across the street, and return to find the same match still ongoing, sometimes with no perceptible movement haven’t been made in the meantime.
Rachmann needed a solution, or his investment was going to fall flat. While his intention had been to restore legitimacy to the wrestling game, money talks, and the absence of it talks even louder. If what the 1915 tournament needed was a little showbiz razzle-dazzle, then that’s what it would get! Now, there were always ways to tot up intrigue and interest in a newcomer to wrestling - George Hackenschmidt, in his London debut, answered the open challenge of Jack Carkeek from one of the theatre’s private boxes, in full evening attire, and stripped to reveal wrestling trunks and his uniquely imposing physique. Carkeek had second thoughts, and never consented to a bout with Hackenschmidt, but nevertheless, a star was born. That would be a start. But this was New York, more than a decade later. This would need something a little extra.
The Masked Marvel, and the Unmasked Mort Henderson
Rachmann’s solution was The Masked Marvel - a name used by any number of wrestlers over the decades but here was likely the first, certainly the first in America.
The mysterious masked man took his seat in the front row at the Manhattan Opera House and, as the show went on, began to stand up between matches, demanding an audience with the matchmaker, and insisting that he be included in the tournament. He created enough of a spectacle that the newspapers took notice and, incredibly, people began coming to the shows purely to see the Masked Marvel, and to insist that he be included in the tournament.
In December 1915, The Masked Marvel entered the tournament. While most, if not all, of the tournament matches to date had been legitimate, the Marvel was certainly supported and encouraged to a few wins, if his opponent’s weren’t throwing the fights outright. Rachmann’s plans to restore wrestling’s credibility had instead crafted the last coffin nail for its place as a legitimate sport, as promoters recognised that the shorter, flashier, and more cooperative matches of the Masked Marvel were box office smashes while the ponderous affairs of his Greco-Roman compatriots had audiences turning away in droves.
The Marvel’s impact was vast, but his personal success was shortlived. He was defeated by Aleksander Aberg - the man Samuel Rachmann hoped his tournament would launch to stardom - in the final, and was inadvertently revealed as journeyman wrestler Mort Henderson that same month, unmasking for good the following year.
Aleksander Aberg was never able to capitalise on his tournament-winning success. He embarked on a world tour along with his fellow Estonian and former Soho resident Georg Lurich in 1917, they found themselves caught up in the turmoil of World War I, and of the Russian Civil War. Eventually forced south to Armavir, the two wrestlers were effectively cut off from the world - as the civilian death toll grew and grew, and both sides fought over control of the city, the possibility of getting medical supplies from outside was almost non-existent. Both Aberg and Lurich developed typhus, and died within a month of one another. They were buried in a single grave.
But back to our Masked Marvel - where did he come from? Not plain old Mort Henderson of Rochester, New York, but the inspiration for this masked man of mystery? For that, we turn to one of Samuel Rachmann’s business partners, Mark A. Luescher.
The mysterious mask of Le Domino Rouge
Mark A. Leuscher’s interests weren’t really in wrestling, but in anything that would sell tickets - in vaudeville, in theatre, in opera, and in dance.
It was dance that led Leuscher to concoct the plan for The Masked Marvel, digging into his own bag of tricks and recycling an idea he had first used for a dancer he had managed in the early 1900s.
Taking his lead from a Daniel Auber opera, Le Domino Noir, she was to be Le Domino Rouge, the girl in the red mask. She danced masked at the Folies Bergere in - where else? - Paris, claiming that the mask was to protect her eyes from the glare of the theatre lights; though the press were quick to notice that she seemed to wear it everywhere, not just where the lights were brightest. Not only that, but a golden coronet symbol embroidered on the side of the mask got familiar rumours circulating - here was a hint to a noble birth, the secret hiding behind the mask.
Le Domino Rouge travelled to London, appearing at society parties and in the most high class restaurants and salons, but she refused to accept any theatrical or music hall engagements, or to give any interviews, saying only, “I am soon going to America” in Russian-accented broken English.
In the months to come, she made the news for apparently saving the life of a drowning girl in Hyde Park - while still clad in her signature red mask, of course - and for finally arriving in America, disembarking at New York dressed head-to-toe in red, mask firmly in place, having reportedly never removed it or said a single word to fellow passengers for the entire transatlantic journey.
Le Domino Rouge was sighted all over New York - in hotels, cafés, clubs and theatres, before finally taking to the vaudeville stage. There, she proved to have been worth the wait, and worthy of all of the hype - her dancing was spectacular, combining classical ballet and modern dance made all the more amazing by her apparent sightlessness behind the mask. Combined with the ongoing mystery of her identity, she was a sensation everywhere she performed.
Mlle. Dazie
Like others would after her, Le Domino Rouge unmasked, revealing her identity as “Mademoiselle Dazie” at New York’s Weber’s Theatre in 1906, a more demure take on an earlier stage name, La Belle Dazie.
In reality, she was Daisy Peterkin. Child of an American vaudeville family, she first danced on stage at the age of eight, and earned enough money to travel to Europe to study classical ballet, which she took to like a duck to water, soon performing all over the continent, from London to Moscow.
Her career brought her back home to America and to the vaudeville circuit where, in 1904, she met the light opera super-producer team of Louis Werba and Mark Luescher, the latter of whom became not only her manager and the mastermind behind Le Domino Rouge, but her husband.
Unmasked, and with no inkling that her promotional gimmick would, within a decade, change the course of professional wrestling, the newly rechristened Mademoiselle Dazie’s career went from strength to strength, performing on Broadway for Oscar Hammerstein, and as a headline act for Florenz Ziegfeld’s 1907 and 1908 Ziegfeld Follies.
Most intriguing of all, at the Follies she was also described as giving jiu-jitsu exhibitions, and performing the “Jiu-Jitsu Waltz” with Prince Toki. Sadly, I can find no further mentions of Prince Toki, so his identity shall remain a mystery, though the Jiu-Jitsu Waltz was subsequently performed in London by the French actress Gaby Deslys and S.K. Eida, an assistant instructor at the London dojo operated by Yukio Tani and Taro Miyake, a pair of martial arts pioneers who were instrumental in bringing Jiu-Jitsu to Europe, and later to the Americas, while making their living as professional wrestlers and music hall performers.
The Jiu-Jitsu Waltz as performed by Deslys and Eida
The final phase of Daisy Peterkin’s time in the spotlight began in the 1907 Ziegfeld Follies, where she was once again a sensation, this time in her performance of The Dance Of The Seven Veils, excerpted from Richard Strauss’ adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
The role of Salome was vocally and physically demanding, so much so that many leading ladies preferred to use a stand-in for the Dance Of The Seven Veils, and while Peterkin was doubtless a dynamic and capable enough dancer, she could never have played the full part, requiring as it does one of the most extraordinary vocal ranges in popular opera.
The dance itself was largely an invention of Wilde - building on previous interpretations of the scene, but shifting focus on to the sexuality of Salome by taking the dance from a public performance to a private, personal display for King Herod.
By 1907, Salome was a byword in the public imagination for emerging female sexuality and, on stage, for the growing art of modern striptease. In solo performance, Daisy Peterkin would remove each of the titular seven veils, gradually revealing more of her naked body until….
Until! At the climax of the show, prior to removal of the final veil, the police burst into the theatre and placed Mademoiselle Dazie under arrest, dragging her off-stage as the curtains fell, and the remaining dance troupe of the Follies began an impromptu can-can to close the show. In a beautiful bit of vaudeville business, almost of kayfabe, it was all an act - the “police” were paid-up performers themselves, and the arrest at the pivotal moment was all part of the show.
Mlle Dazie
Speaking of Kayfabe, after a successful run as Salome - and a lucrative sideline training up more than 100 Salome performers a month for vaudeville and burlesque theatres all over the United States - Mademoiselle Dazie next made headlines in 1909 when, during a pantomime performance, her co-star mistakenly picked up a real knife rather than a rubber prop, accidentally stabbing the former Domino Rouge. The New York Times headline screamed, “REAL BLOOD FLOWS”, and Dazie was apparently left with a four-inch wound, though the same headline tells us the wound was “not serious”. A real injury, a real accident, or some sneaky stagecraft and publicity from the minds that gave us Le Domino Rouge? Neither Peterkin nor her husband, nor her employer Florenz Ziegfeld, were squeamish about trying any publicity stunt they could to keep their names in the headlines.
In the coming years, Daisy Peterkin divorced Mark A. Leuscher, remarried - this time to a wealthy racehorse breeder and Olympic ice hockey coach, the spectacularly named Cornelius Fellowes Jr., who also dabbled as a boxing promoter in New York, providing a feeder league for the shows run by Tex Rickard at Madison Square Garden - to readers of Kayfabe, the name Tex Rickard might be familiar, for the integral role he played in shaping New York’s wrestling scene in the mid-20th century, eventually paving the way for the dominance of the McMahon family. All things are connected, and the more directions your research takes you, the more likely they are to lead you right back where you started!
As the 1910s draw to a close, even as stage performances began to dwindle, Mademoiselle Dazie continued to expand her repertoire, expanding into jazz dance, taking on her first speaking roles (without a trace of Le Domino Rouge’s mysterious Russian accent) and dabbling in silent cinema, while managing a troupe of vaudeville dancers and performers. She retired from performing in 1920, and passed away on August 12th 1952.
She was portrayed in the 1926 circus movie Spangles by Gladys Brockwell, alongside silent film royalty Hobart Bosworth, himself a former professional wrestler in his early try-anything days of odd jobs before breaking into Hollywood.
From the phony Russian of Le Domino Rouge, to the kayfabe Japanese Kendo Nagasaki, and even weirder turns like the ersatz Elvis of Orion, masks are a perfectly weird encapsulation of a perfectly weird form of entertainment.
Sure, there are pop stars who have tried them on for size, and who’d have guessed that part of the lineage of masks in American wrestling would be shared with the history of modern dance and burlesque? But wherever they’re found, masks are a little bit mysterious, if a tad kitsch. They invite intrigue, and big, bold stories that stretch credulity - that an unknown singer could really be Elvis back from the dead, that the hottest new vaudeville act in town is secretly Russian royalty, and that the burly bloke from the midlands might be a three hundred year old samurai, or he could just be Peter, a bisexual hotelier who needed to get the plumber round.
And if that’s not the heart of professional wrestling, I don’t know what is.
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