At East Carolina University, she studied French and planned to teach. They graduated together—he a year late, she a year early. The night before commencement, they learned that she was pregnant.
Instead of teaching, she took a job in D.C., at the law firm Covington & Burling, where she became a paralegal on intellectual-property cases. She started at the firm six weeks after giving birth. On the drive to work each morning, she sobbed. Vince set out to start a career as a wrestling and stunt promoter. He often had big ideas and an inability to profitably pull them off. He booked Muhammad Ali for a disastrous wrestling bout in Tokyo. He arranged an Evel Knievel canyon jump, but Knievel’s parachute deployed early, causing him to pathetically float to the ground; Vince lost a quarter-million dollars. In the mid-seventies, Vince drove McMahon, who was pregnant with Stephanie, to a courthouse to declare bankruptcy. On the way, their car broke down. They arrived in a tow truck. Their house was auctioned off, and their car was repossessed. They owed nearly a million dollars.
They eventually emerged from debt, and McMahon inserted herself more into Vince’s business ventures. In 1979, as the author Brad Balukjian recounted in his book on wrestling, “The Six Pack,” they leased the Cape Cod Coliseum, a small arena in Massachusetts, and moved into a house nearby with purple shag carpet. They hung a painting of Linda near the entrance. At the arena, McMahon made hundreds of meatballs to serve to V.I.P.s.
By then, Vince had reconciled with his biological father, a successful wrestling promoter. In 1982, he sold the McMahons his business for a million dollars. They called their company Titan Sports. (It was renamed the World Wrestling Federation, or W.W.F., and then renamed again after a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund.) McMahon initially worked as a glorified office manager. She handled travel arrangements, did the accounting, and oversaw the company magazine, writing schlocky prose under the pen name Linda Kelly. When money ran low, she stopped paying for water coolers. She had an instinct for business. Wrestlers operated as independent contractors, and this allowed the McMahons to avoid paying benefits. McMahon, who had absorbed the importance of I.P. in her legal work, recognized that there was big money in licensing rights, and wrote I.P. ownership into the wrestlers’ contracts. “It is an intellectual-property company, no different than Disney,” Eric Bischoff, who ran a rival wrestling outfit, told me. In 2023, the W.W.E. merged with U.F.C. in a deal that valued the company at nine billion dollars. “That’s largely because of the intellectual property that they own and control,” Bischoff said. “And that was Linda’s vision.”
A key insight of wrestling is that, as in politics, people like being angry among similarly angry people. Wrestling villains are called “heels.” There have been Heil Hitler-ing Nazis and aspiring flag burners, and a heel who wore a cap and gown into the ring and recited poetry. Wrestling fans sense that they are looked down on by the cultural élites, but the art has always been appreciated by those who make their living plying the popular id. Zohran Mamdani is a fan, as were Bess Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and George H. W. Bush. In 1957, Roland Barthes got into wrestling. “What wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice,” he wrote. “The baser the action of the ‘bastard,’ the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives.”
Linda McMahon was indirectly responsible for wrestling’s biggest transformation. Wrestlers had always operated under a code of silence, known as kayfabe, that forbade acknowledging that the entire thing was scripted. (The term is, probably incorrectly, thought to derive from a Pig Latin version of old carny slang for “be fake.”) Wrestlers were expected to stay in character in public at all times. Authorities regulated wrestling as a sport; this meant taxes, regulations, and safety laws. In the mid-eighties, McMahon broke the code by lobbying state governments to instead treat it as theatre. Its performers, she testified, were like “the circus or the Harlem Globetrotters.”
