They settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where Gillem began wrestling alligators at Casper's Alligator Farm their three young children, would pose for tourists sitting on the alligators' backs.JOHAN CLEUREN, FRITS DE VREE, in Feeding, 2000 2. They continued touring until they caught malaria and were stiffed by a promoter in Central America. She eventually took over his business, working freelance for circuses, among them Ringling Bros' Barnum & Bailey, where she met and married John Aloysius Wall. She would later say she 'was looking for something easier, so I tried lion-taming', but she worked at a race track and began training as a trapeze artist before discovering Captain Ernest Enger, who taught her lion-taming. Gillem, as the top heel, had no problems losing matches to Johnnie Mae Young, but when Wolfe wanted her to put over his new favourite, the prettier Nellie Stewart, who was only 15. Yet sleeping with him was no guarantee of success. He pimped them out to keen fans and punished those who didn't play along with unfavourable, or no, bookings.

People take advantage of you.'īurke would take half the money his wrestlers were paid and deduct expenses, often leaving them with next to nothing. 'He was a lousy lay but he was a promoter. 'He couldn't get a hard-on,' she told Burke's biographer, Jeff Leen. She spoke frankly of sleeping with Wolfe to get better bookings, despite his sexual shortcomings. Gillem's colourful eviscerations of Wolfe stole the 2004 documentary Lipstick and Dynamite from better-known wrestlers like The Fabulous Moolah. This odd triangle belied Burke's image as an all-American wife as well as wrestler. Gillem spent nearly a decade as Burke's top opponent partly because, lacking Burke's glamour, she played the bigger and stronger heel well, and was athletic enough to put Burke's wrestling over but also because, for most of that time, she was the main, but not only, mistress of Billy Wolfe, who controlled women's wrestling and was also married to Burke. Gillem was, more often than not, the designated loser for the popular 'girls' champion Mildred Burke, arguably the only drawing card in the 1940s for women's wrestling, which was otherwise presented as a novelty, like midget wrestling.

Gladys 'Killem' Gillem, who has died aged 89, spent her professional wrestling career as a heel, but not just any heel.

Alabama female alligator wrestler