One drowned when he was a boy. Another was found dead in a hotel room. A third committed suicide. A fourth died from an overdose. A fifth shot himself in the head. Of six brothers, only one survived to confront the family “curse”.
The Von Erichs were stars of professional wrestling in the early 1980s, entering the lore of Dallas, Texas, alongside the assassination of John F Kennedy, the Dallas Cowboys football team and fictional oil baron JR Ewing. Their story is told in a new film, The Iron Claw, starring Zac Efron and written and directed by Sean Durkin, who describes it as part family drama, part gothic horror and part sports movie.
“I was a quiet kid and I found that wrestling was where I could express myself by going to events and screaming or playing with toys and writing,” says Durkin, 42, who grew up in Britain reading Pro Wrestling Illustrated magazine and watching the sport on VHS tapes. “Wrestlers go in the ring and they express themselves in the highest form, the worst pain and the greatest glory and it’s all very extreme.
“But what I was interested in is that these guys performing these extremes get backstage and aren’t allowed to feel any of it because of old school rules of masculinity, of you have to keep it together and you can’t show your emotion, and so I wanted to explore that divide between those two emotional pathways.”
The movie opens with a flashback to Fritz Von Erich (real name Jack Adkisson), the domineering family patriarch who was a champion wrestler in the 1950s and 1960s. He adopted the persona of a German villain and his signature move – using his hand to crush the skull of his opponents – was known as “the iron claw”.
Fritz became a promoter and in the 1980s owned World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW), the Texas wrestling circuit, one of the major territories before the sport was united under a national banner. He and his wife, Doris, had six sons and, as one who loved not wisely but too well, he wanted them to follow him into the ring.
The screen version of Fritz, played by Holt McCallany, says: “If you’re the toughest, the strongest, the absolute best, the most successful, nothing can ever hurt you.”
Durkin, an admirer of the way films such as Raging Bull and The Deer Hunter interrogate American masculinity, has described Fritz’s approach as a celebration of muscle and power, barreling through emotion, show no fear, show no pain, rise to the top, ends justify the means. Speaking via Zoom from New York, he says: “The place he came from, he believed that making his boys fit this mould was their best route to survival in the world.”
WCCW held most of its events at the Sportatorium, a spit-and-sawdust venue in downtown Dallas. Its gritty gladitorial spectacles were televised internationally. The Von Erichs – three of whom starred in a cheesy Pizza Inn commercial – were entertainers with a high-flying rock’n’roll style. “It was like the seed for where wrestling went,” Durkin goes on.
“It was the first time that a TV show interacted with the wrestling in a certain way and had a certain energy and these guys were rock stars in Texas and certainly in the wrestling world. But tragedy started to strike them in the mid-80s, the same time that the WWF [World Wrestling Federation] was on the rise. One of them, Kerry, made it to the WWF in the early 90s and had some success there as ‘the Texas Tornado’.
“The other brothers didn’t and so it’s very much a rise and fall story but very much focused on this amazing brotherly bond that they had both in and outside of the ring. It’s not a story of sibling rivalry at all; in fact it’s the opposite. They were a very loving, supportive family and had a great time together in the ring and supported each other.”
The tragic fate of the Von Erichs rivals that of the Kennedy political dynasty. Jack Jr, the first brother, drowned in a puddle outside the family home when he was six. The third eldest, David, was found dead at the age of 25 in a hotel in Tokyo – ostensibly from a ruptured intestine but some suspected a drug overdose.
Kerry took his own life at 33 after a motorcycle crash that resulted in the amputation of his right foot, which the Von Erichs kept secret. Mike fatally overdosed on tranquillisers at 23 after shoulder surgery that led to toxic shock syndrome. The youngest and shortest sibling, Chris, killed himself at 21.
His body was found on top of a hill by Kevin, the sole surviving brother, played by Efron, who told Texas Monthly magazine in 2005: “I thought, ‘Oh, man, he’s taken a bunch of pills or something.’ So I put my hand behind him to lift him up and said, ‘Come on, Chris. Stand up, walk around.’ My thumb went into his head. You could’ve put a coffee cup in that hole. There was no doubt —”
He added: “That’s where I got the joke I tell that the last thing that crossed Chris’s mind before he died was my thumb. I know that sounds horrible. I’m sure I sound like a nutty guy right now. But I guarantee you that at one time, there were five more just like me. That’s the way we deal with grief. It keeps you from being a victim.”
Chris’s death is omitted from the film because Durkin felt it would be too much for audiences to bear. The director reflects: “One of the things that drew me to the story originally was that it felt like a Greek tragedy and in the wrestling world there’s very much a mythical element of storytelling in people’s backgrounds and what is truth and what isn’t. As a film-maker, I was very drawn to the structure of Greek tragedy and embracing this idea of a curse.
“Do I believe that the curse is a real thing? No. But I do believe in the psychology of a curse. If you take the word curse out of it, if you’re from a family where bad things have happened in the past and you’ve had a series of tragic things happen, when something goes wrong in your life, it is very easy to believe that you are going to follow the fate of the people who came before you. That’s the psychology of the curse that is real, even if the mythological nature of the curse is not.”
Kevin, who was famous for performing barefoot, is the only brother to have lived beyond the age of 33. He moved to Hawaii for a time and now lives on a ranch outside San Antonio, Texas. His sons, Marshall and Ross Von Erich, became a professional wrestling tag team. The film depicts Kevin breaking the vicious cycle and coming out stronger and wiser on the other side.
Durkin continues: “He’s very successfully managed to make a new life. One of the things I was struck by in my early research was how open he is about speaking about the tragedy and about his feelings and how hard it was in his darkest days and his own flirtation with suicide.
“A part of why he was able to sort of start over and build a beautiful new life is because he was able to go there emotionally and look at everything honestly and the movie is very much about that: if we don’t grieve and deal with that, these things will come back to haunt us. Ultimately Kevin dealt with it and has been able to to start a new life. In real life he’s very wise and very open. He’s a very beautiful man and it’s wonderful to spend time with him. He’s just got this calm, wise energy about him now.”
In press notes for The Iron Claw, Kevin, now 66, is quoted as saying of Fritz, who died in 1997: “I loved my dad. He was really hard on me and my brothers, but I think that’s a Texas thing. My dad’s father was hard on him too. We adored him though. We adored my dad.”
And Kevin says of his brothers: “We were incredibly close, maybe closer than anyone you’ve ever met. We were brothers-in-arms in a way, because it’s us and them, especially with all that fighting.”
John Spong, a senior editor at Texas Monthly who wrote the 2005 article, argues that talking of a curse in terms reminiscent of the theatre of wrestling can obscure the truth of each brother’s sad song.
Spong says by phone: “It was interesting that Fritz would always talk about the Von Erich curse, which is one of the things that was always so difficult to read or hear because that’s staying in character: to suggest the powers of good and evil that they present as battling it out in a wrestling ring are actually what happened to the family. To me that’s not talking about whatever the real problems would have been and there would have been different problems for each son.
“That’s one of the things that’s so hard to think about because whatever the other plot is, whatever the characters they’ve adopted or tried to act out, it was two parents that had six sons and one died as a six-year-old and then there were five left and beginning 20 years on or so they started dying one by one until there was only one left. To pay attention to that misdirection of the curse or the bad luck or whatever is to not absorb one of the most tragic things I’ve ever heard about.”
The Von Erichs’ story embodies the ethos that the show must go on. It is, after all, a show following a script. For Durkin, that is part of the attraction. He comments: “Wrestling is never about the outcome, it’s about the performance, the same way that if you go to see a play, the outcome is decided. The actors have learned their lines. They know what’s going to happen.
“We know we’re watching a story unfold. But what we don’t know is how good their performances are going to be or how we’re going to feel during the performance and what the actor is going to bring out in me as a viewer and the emotion it’s going to strike. Wrestling is exactly the same.”
The director adds: “Wrestlers are judged on their performance and the way that they connect to their audience and how they make people feel who are there to see them. The film explores that journey and how success is based on both technical talent of wrestling but also how good are you on the microphone? How well can you get the audience on their feet? What can you make them feel?
“I wanted to explore that side of it, the real performance art of wrestling, and also the beautiful choreography of wrestling. Wrestling is like the ultimate combination of dance and sport and performance; it’s quite a rare combination and I wanted to shed some light on that from an artistic standpoint.”
The Iron Claw is out in US cinemas on 22 Decmber and in the UK on 9 February
