Sex, Lies, and Headlocks Read Online Free PDF

in New York, WOR (Channel 9), he parlayed the arrangement into a lucrative two-city foothold.
    With his father’s New York connections, it was only natural that Vincent would also gain the exclusive contract to book wrestling shows at the Garden.
    By then, Vincent’s two boys were living in a mobile home seven miles out of Havelock, under the names of Rodney and Vinnie Kennedy Lupton. Because Havelock revolved around the Cherry Point Air Station, they, like many of the local boys, considered Marines aloof intruders, and the Marines in turn tended to view the town people warily. While families of military officers were allowed to use facilities on the base, such as the pool and athletic courts, locals like the Luptons had to watch with their noses pressed against the fence. The mutual suspicion was in large part fueled by race. The only African American people that several longtime residents could remember living in Havelock at that time were the local sanitation contractor and his family, and they lived far out in the woods. When black Marines started trickling in, the native kids would hang out at the local drive-in, The Jet, waiting for them in the hope of starting fights.
    Douglas Franks, a native who stayed in Havelock after many of his contemporaries left, says: “If we thought there would even be a whiff of trouble, we’d dress for combat in blue jeans, cut-off shirts, and big boots.”
    Franks remembers Rodney as someone “who didn’t have to work at his charisma. It came naturally.” Vinnie, on the other hand, tried to earn his stripes hanging out at The Jet. “He tried to be one of the gang kids, but he never quite made it,” says Franks. “He was a wannabe.”
    By Vinnie’s accounts, the atmosphere in the trailer home he grew up in alternated between moments of normalcy—as when they all watched The Jackie Gleason Show together—and frightful violence. In an interview with Playboy , Vince alleged that his stepfather started beating him when he was six with a pipe wrench. “My stepfather [was] a man who enjoyed kicking people around,” he remarked. “It’s unfortunate he died before I could kill him.”
    McMahon described his mother as “a real performer, a female Elmer Gantry,” saying that she was “very striking” and had “an excellent voice”when she sang in her church choir. However, he also said that he was long estranged from her and hinted that the reason was sexual abuse. “Was all the abuse physical, or was there sexual abuse, too?” Playboy asked him.
    “That’s not anything I’d like to embellish,” he replied, “just because it’s so weird.”
    In separate interviews, two of his longtime acquaintances remembered Vince describing his childhood as so troubled that he once even flirted with the idea of drowning himself by walking into the sea along the Carolina coast.
    Vincent James rarely talked about the boys he’d left behind in North Carolina. He’d become a stylish man who liked his limousines and his running reservation at the New York steak house Jimmy Weston’s, where he’d go after a show at the Garden. He’d invite a dozen or so friends there, and they’d eat and drink on his tab late into the night.
    In Washington, he ran things from a neat and proper suite on the seventh floor of the majestic Franklin Park Hotel. He also remarried, to a sophisticated native of south Florida. The couple wouldn’t have any children of their own, but his new wife, Juanita, insisted that her husband get to know the children he already had. So in 1957, Vinnie and his older brother got their first look at their father when he came to visit them in Havelock. One can only imagine the two boys, 12 and 14, dressed in their best clothes to meet the father they’d only vaguely heard about, standing in front of the six-foot-five man with a kind, jowly face and a pocket full of jangling change. “I immediately fell in love with him, “Vince once told New York magazine.
    But Vincent