She made the move from wrestling star to mainstream celebrity, thanks mostly to her movie star boyfriend George Clooney. But can she really leave her body-slamming, pillow-fighting WWE past behind her?
Clooney and Keibler at the Oscars.
(AP / Chris Pizzello)
The year is 2002. Stacy Keibler, wearing black Daisy Dukes and a black baby tee, walks on tan spindly legs down what looks like a smokey driveway into an arena of screaming fans. She climbs the steps to a wrestling ring, and slips her right leg between the second and third ropes. Maneuvering from the outside of the ropes to the inside is not the quickest process, and so, in a move that has become her signature provocation, she slowly bends over, giving the audience a good look at her butt, as she slips her torso under the top rope before swinging her famously 42-inch long left leg in after her. She raises her arms and receives her applause as her opponent, Trish Stratus, enters the arena. Stratus — more conservatively dressed in black stretch pants and a long black coat — enters the ring without excessive fanfare, jumping grasshopper-like between the first and second ropes to face Stacy.
"We all realize Stacy isn't an accomplished in-ring wrestler like Trish Stratus is, so what does Mr. McMahon do for his personal assistant?" growls one of the male announcers, reminding viewers of a key plot point in Stacy's wrestling character's storyline: She gets special treatment because she was "hired" as WWE head Vince McMahon's "assistant" after performing a striptease in the ring for him. "Well, he puts her into a bra and panties match-up!"
As Keibler whacks Stratus in the back and she falls to the floor, the announcers keep the "plot" going: "All Stacy has to do to win the 'title' is take off Trish's pants and shirt." Keibler repeatedly picks up Stratus, who is shorter but more ripped, and slams her back-down onto the floor. Eventually she strips Stratus of her shirt, Stratus strips Keibler of hers, and the two are leg-locked on the floor trying to rip each other's bottoms off. Just when Keibler seems to have the match in the bag, Stratus flips Keibler onto the floor so that she's doing a near-headstand between Stratus's legs, and pulls her shorts skyward, revealing Keibler's matching panties. The loser is left face-down on the floor wearing just her matching underwear set and her tan, writhing in fake despair as Stratus skips away — with both her pants and her title.
Ten years later, Keibler is walking the red carpet at the Academy Awards on the arm of one of the world's most famous and lusted-after actors, wearing a shimmering gold gown by Marchesa that debuted on a New York Fashion Week runway just a few days before. She is widely praised as one of the best-dressed women of the night — laurels that normally go to movie stars like Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz over a Best Actor nominee's girlfriend-slash-former wrestling star.
"I was at Fashion Week, saw it on the runway, and was like I need to have that, and that was it!" she tells a reporter on the red carpet from Clooney's side when asked about her outfit. "It was the only dress I tried on." She's finally getting attention for wearing clothes instead of taking them off, for winning one of the world's most-watched evening gown-wearing competitions instead of losing a pretend strip fight.
The gold dress is the latest in a series of flawless, if somewhat vanilla, things she's worn while making media appearances with Clooney as he promotes his Oscar-nominated film, "The Descendants." For much of their courtship, which began last summer, she managed to be memorable without being risky, handling all the inane red carpet questions that came her way like a pro. And while their relationship seems to benefit both of their careers — Clooney upholds his image as a sexy bachelor, Keibler enjoys Academy Awards-level exposure — she faces much harsher scrutiny for the matchup. Not only because she's not Clooney's equal, career-wise, but because her fame is of a certain flavor. She's the former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader who became a star in the horrifically sexist WWE, who placed third in the second season of "Dancing With the Stars" (goodbye wrestling fan sites, hello Us Weekly!), who now dates an A-list movie star and looks awesome in evening gowns.
So now, having made the exceptionally rare transition from wrestling star to mainstream celebrity, her biggest career hurdle may be maintaining her fame if and when her relationship with Clooney comes to an untimely end.
Video edited by Whitney Jefferson.
You could interpret women wrestlers' motivations in a number of ways. Some could be using it to leverage their careers as entertainers to the mainstream (the job of a WWE performer is to act on a stage, after all). You could also see them as strong women of the unusual breed that bridges the gap between athleticism and sex appeal, something Stratus prides herself on. Or you could look at them as the fans and Vince McMahon's marginalized, hypersexualized playthings, some of whom used their role as leverage to land Playboy spreads.
"I think she's easily the best known mainstream female to come from the world of professional wrestling, and probably in the top five best-known wrestlers — including men — over the past, I would say 40, 50 years," says Dave Skolnick, the co-editor and publisher of Wrestling Perspective (which calls itself "the thinking fan's newsletter"). "She can't wrestle [well], but she always had very good presence in the ring." Plus, she's hot and danced well, which is just what WWE's adolescent male fans wanted.
Keibler, 32, was born in Baltimore, where she started dance classes by the time she was five. She went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and later Towson University, where she studied mass communication. She became a Baltimore Ravens cheerleader at the age of 18, but her big break came almost two years later, in 1999, when she won a contest to become a "Nitro Girl" in World Championship Wrestling — basically one of a troupe of fly girls who danced around the ring and looked hot when the cameras panned to them before commercial breaks. Winning the much-hyped contest maximized her nascent exposure, and 4.4 million viewers watched the victory dance she got to perform as part of her prize (which also included $10,000).
Keibler's star continued to rise when the World Wrestling Federation bought the WCW in 2001, and her contract was retained. (The organization became the WWE after a legal battle with the World Wildlife Fund over exclusive rights to the WWF acronym.) The company recognized Keibler's popularity, and elevated her character from a sideline dancer to a valet who "assisted" the male wrestlers. Eventually, in large part due to audience demand, she started wrestling — though fans agree she never had a particularly talent for it.
"She was an anomaly," says Skolnick, who also covers politics for Youngstown, Ohio's daily paper, the Vindicator. The WWE often casts fitness models, "because while they may not have wrestling training — and most of them don't — they have a very nice healthy body so they can maybe eventually move them into wrestling. And there are women who are trained wrestlers who are exceptionally good professional wrestlers, but most of them don't look like Stacy Keibler — they're attractive, but they're not as beautiful as she is."
While Skolnick is probably not the only wrestling fan to suspect Keibler was using the WWE as a stepping stone to mainstream celebrity, Stratus says "that won't get you far" in the organization. "There have been a few girls that have come along and said, oh, well, I can do Playboy. I really believe the fans can pick up on these things. To sign up for this job, you've got to love it because it takes up every moment of your life." (While some female wrestlers in Keibler's heyday went on to appear in Playboy, which had partnerships with the WCW, Keibler turned down two invitations to pose for it.)
Stratus says that she was on the road around 300 days out of the year, doing matches four nights a week. When wrestlers aren't performing or traveling, they're working out and rehearsing their scenes. When they have time off, they go home to do their laundry. The women often did photo shoots between shows, which they'd prep for by going on even more strict low-carb diets.
The most significant time off wrestlers were likely to get was to recover from injuries. "As a performer you are literally taking the falls — the physicality is real. I have a missing knuckle, I've broken teeth, couple of broken bones, a herniated disk," Stratus says. "I think it's so grueling because there's no recovery, there's no down season, there's no off season. When I retired in 2006 one of the reasons was because my body just needed the break." And, for the record, she confirms that yes, being slammed on a table to break it in half "hurts."
