The Pioneers is an on-going series looking at some of the earliest pioneers of professional wrestling as we know it, from the wrestlers to promoters to trainers who helped shape professional wrestling around the world. This article looks at a trailblazer in intergender wrestling and the creation of “bad-ass” women’s wrestlers in pro wrestling, Luna Vachon.
“In a world full of butterflies, it takes balls to be a caterpillar.” Luna Vachon, 2007
For wrestling purists, there’s nothing new you can tell them about Luna Vachon. The raging, maniacal, adopted daughter of Paul “Butcher” Vachon and niece of Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon and Vivian Vachon was an absolute legend in professional wrestling. But when more casual fans discuss trailblazers of the 1990s, far too often Luna Vachon is bumped further and further down the list, oft-forgotten or ranked lower than women even she herself inspired or helped create. If “Stone Cold” Steve Austin became the first “anti-hero” in 1996, then Luna Vacon was the first “anti-Diva,” years before Austin drank his first Steveweiser. But make no mistake, Luna Vachon was as tough as she was fragile, as solid in the ring as she appeared unhinged, and one of wrestling’s greatest tragedies, thanks largely to stigmas and misunderstood sciences that, had they been around then, may have saved her life and her career.
Angelle Vachon
On January 12, 1962, Gertrude “Trudy” Wilkerson was born to parents Rebecca “Van” Pierce and Charles Wilkerson in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents wouldn’t last long together and soon her mother re-married Canadian wrestler Paul “Butcher” Vachon, one half of the Vachon Brothers with “Mad Dog” Vachon. In 1966, Paul Vachon adopted his step-daughter, giving her the last name Vachon, embracing the young girl into his family like she was his own. As Trudy grew up in her new home in Canada, she became enamored by her family’s chosen profession. While Butcher may have been her father, it was the in-ring styles of her aunt Vivian, the “Queen of Wrestling,” who held the American Wrestling Association (AWA) World Women’s title for 651-days from 1971 through 1973 and star of the 1973 film, Queen of Wrestling, that most captured her attention. She adored her aunt and her accomplishments, but she was also drawn to the brutal antics and mannerisms of her uncle, “Mad Dog” Vachon, who used anarchy, violence, and mayhem as his calling card when he encountered both friend and foe. She may have been a Wilkerson by blood, but her entire soul became obsessed with the Vachon family business. “Luna admired her aunt but loved how people respected her uncle’s toughness,” ex-husband Gangrel told Hannibal TV in 2017. “She permanently damaged her vocal cords trying to talk like the Mad Dog all the time. She went above and beyond, trying to be like her uncle. We’d be in a Denny’s, and someone would say, ‘Oh that wrestling [is fake] and boom, she’d be across the table running trying to pull somebody’s eye out because at some point she heard that her uncle had done the same thing.” As soon as she was cleared by her family, she began training with her Aunt Vivian in the squared circle. “First of all, my aunt Vivian Vachon was one of the greatest women wrestlers of all time,” she told CyInterview in one of her last interviews before she passed away in 2010. “She had this unbelievable ability to wrestle more like a man than a woman. She was, anybody that’s not familiar with her can go to any Blockbuster and rent a movie called Wrestling Queen, which is about my aunt and my family and the era of the early 1970s, which were the women in the wrestling then. It was a great time in wrestling. That’s why I wanted to be a wrestler. From the time I was three years old, I had told my parents I was gonna be in the wrestling business and they tried to discourage me because it’s so hard on woman’s bodies. But it was a move that the family had initially not encouraged.”
Angel Vachon
After starting her training with Vivian Vachon, once the family realized she was in the business for good, they sent her to train further under The Fabulous Moolah in the early 1980s. Trudy Vachon wanted to be a heel and follow her uncles’ vicious paths, but Moolah was against it. “They told me that I was too skinny to be a heel,” she mentioned. While technically sound due to her aunt’s training, she was only 115 lbs. “But I wanted my aunt to be proud of me, so I persevered.” She soon graduated from her training and in 1985, got her first pro wrestling opportunity in Florida with Eddie Graham‘s Championship Wrestling From Florida. Originally debuting as Angel Vachon in 1985, she was soon transformed into a “dirt sheet reporter” style character called Trudy Herd. Utilized more as a backstage reporter/valet, a chance segment with Kevin Sullivan changed everything. A champion of Barry Windham as Trudy Herd, she interfered in a moment between Windham and Kevin Sullivan and ended up taking a huge slap from Sullivan. Initially feeling guilty for overdoing the slap to Vachon on TV, Sullivan was greeted by Vachon backstage afterward. “She was so good,” Sullivan recalled on Hannibal TV in early 2020. “I slapped her, and when we got back to the dressing room, she told me, ‘Is that all you got, pussy?! I’m a Vachon!’ Luna was tough as nails.” On TV, Sullivan was suspended for putting his hands on Trudy Herd, but backstage, the slap awoke something in Trudy Vachon that ultimately set her path for the next decade. When Sullivan went backstage, Trudy Herd was thankful. Feeling the brunt of pro wrestling’s physicality connected her to her family’s hardcore heritage. Instead of complaining or leaving the industry, Trudy Herd instead asked to join Kevin Sullivan’s burgeoning Army of Darkness. She joined the stable and after being renamed Luna by Kevin’s then-wife Nancy Sullivan (aka Woman) – as a play on “lunatic” – the newly anointed Luna Vachon was officially unleashed. She suddenly had the opportunity to combine the wrestling ability of her Aunt Vivian and the barbarism of her uncle Mad Dog in one persona. Now unleashed to become a true Vachon, Trudy changed her entire persona. She fully embraced her uncle’s Mad Dog persona and, renamed Luna by Woman (as in “lunatic”), she shaved her head into a mohawk, a tribute to a fellow Moolah trainee Maxine who was best known as Mad Maxine.
Luna was paired with another female member of the Army of Darkness, The Lock, as a tag-team duo known as the Daughters of Darkness. The pair also worked in Memphis with Jerry Lawler & Jerry Jarrett‘s Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) and in 1986 provided the atmospheric vocals (growls) for thrash metal band Nasty Savage on the track “XXX”. But while Luna’s in-ring career was starting to take off, her personal life was getting darker. Luna had been dating NWA star “Dirty” Dick Slater. Slater was a former NWA United States Champion and 2x Mid-South Television Champion and had jumped to WWF in the summer of 1986. But behind closed doors, Dick Slater was a cruel beast, often physically and emotionally abusing the younger Luna. Her former husband Gangrel recalled in his Hannibal TV interview that she once jumped out of a third-story window of a building to escape one of his rages. In later years, former WWF boss Jim Ross would recall just how bad her years with Slater had affected her afterward. “Self-esteem issues, she was insecure, she was always concerned with how she looked,” he remembered in an interview last year on an episode of his podcast, Grillin’ JR. “She had other issues too. I can’t go into detail because I don’t know all of them. But I can just say that poor Luna would have given Dr. Phil a week’s worth of shows cause she just had a lot of issues that were deep-rooted that occurred in her life long before she came to WWF.” In 2004, Dick Slater was convicted for assaulting a former girlfriend, stemming from a Christmas 2003 attack on an ex-girlfriend with a butcher knife. It was clear that Luna escaped a much worse fate.
In 1988, she competed for Powerful Women of Wrestling (POWW), the follow-up promotion from GLOW’s David McLane. Due to POWW’s alliance with the American Wrestling Association (AWA), she made her PPV debut for AWA’s SuperClash III, in a multi-woman street fight. By the end of the 1980s, she finally left Slater and the United States, heading to Japan to compete for Japan Woman Pro-Wrestling (JWP) and in Puerto Rico, expanding on her physical style in two hard-hitting scenes. In 1989, she began managing a new tag team, The Blackhearts, that had formed in Calgary, Alberta, Canada at Stu Hart‘s Stampede Wrestling. The team featured Blackheart Apocalypse (her new husband, Tom Nash) and Blackheart Destruction (Gangrel). The tag team was looking to break into the U.S. but ultimately ended up in All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) in 1991. In the summer of 1993, she would work with Jerry Lawler’s new promotion, United States Wrestling Association (USWA), where she feuded with Miss Texas (Jacqueline) and won the USWA Women’s Championship. By then Luna Vachon had left Nash and was now dating Gangrel (David Heath). She decided to use her connections in the WWF, through her family, to see if there was any interest in getting David a job with the WWF. Heath would work a few months as The Black Phantom, but ultimately WWF had more interest in Luna Vachon.
The WWF was on the verge of rebooting the Women’s Division after it had been on a three-year hiatus and wanted Vachon as part of it. She joined a class that included Alundra Blayze (Madusa), Bull Nakano, Sensational Sherri, Heidi Lee Morgan, Bertha Faye (Monster Ripper/Rhonda Singh), and others (they almost had Aja Kong too, but the division was shut down once again just days after her debut at WWF Survivor Series in November 1995). Luna was the only woman that worked both in the women’s division and among the men’s storylines. She had memorable feuds with Sensational Sherri (originally over Shawn Michaels) and WWF Women’s Champion Alundra Blayze, while also working as the partner of Bam Bam Bigelow. Despite Luna’s dedication to the sport and company, Luna was too “extreme” for management and too unpredictable to make the Women’s Champion. During Alundra Blayze’s reign as World Champion, she tried to subterfuge the management and offered to “job” the title to Luna at a live event. “I told Luna that I wasn’t going to kick out or anything and that she should just take the belt,” she said in an interview with Pat Laprade and Dan Murphy for their 2017 book, Sisterhood of the Squared Circle. “She sat there and cried, telling me nobody had ever suggested or done anything like that for her. We went to wrestle and, I knew the repercussions I would get later; still, I laid there, but the referee wouldn’t count. It was deplorable.” Luna left the WWF in late 1994, with her last televised match on Monday Night Raw, in a tag match with Bull Nakano versus Alundra Blayze & Heidi Lee Morgan.
Now gone from the WWF, Luna Vachon headed to the independent circuit, but once again, Nancy Sullivan would have an impact on her career. Nancy recommended that Luna check in with a new promotion, Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), that had just broken away from the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) to become its own individual promotion. She made her debut that summer of 1995 as the mystery valet for Tommy Dreamer, who was in the midst of a feud with Raven. Dreamer revealed her as “someone from (Raven’s) past,” a reference to the fact that both had been roommates in Florida and worked together in WWF (when Raven was Johnny Polo). She made her in-ring debut for ECW against Beulah McGillicutty but the following month she would make history. Not since the carnival days did women compete against men in matches, but at ECW Hardcore Heaven in July of 1995, she teamed with Dreamer to face Raven and Stevie Richards, becoming the first woman to wrestle a man on a televised event (although technically the women who faced Andy Kauffman in the late 1970s and early 1980s had brought it back to arenas). She would also have singles matches against Stevie Richards, including a steel cage match at ECW Heatwave two weeks later. That year, Luna Vachon became only the second woman to ever appear on the Pro Wrestling Illustrated PWI 500 list, ranking at #306 (the first was Jacqueline in 1993 at #249).
Her stint in ECW was short-lived and in the spring of 1996, she returned to USWA, where she resumed her feud with Miss Texas, and also resumed working in the U.S. indies, including another rising hardcore promotion, IWA Mid South. In 1997, she returned to Puerto Rico as well, this time with Carlos Colon‘s World Wrestling Council (WWC), to feud with former WWC Women’s Champion La Tigresa. In early 1997, Luna also jumped to WCW, where she began to interfere in matches of her old WWF rival Madusa (Alundra Blayze) when Madusa challenged WCW Women’s Champion Akira Hokuto. She made her in-ring debut at WCW Slamboree against Madusa in May, but by the end of the year, the writing was on the wall. WCW’s experiment with a Women’s Division, which only started in 1996, was over. Luckily, the WWF was looking to bring her back, as they were looking to reboot their own Women’s Division after only shutting it down in 1995.
But prior to its official relaunch, she debuted as the new valet for Goldust, who had recently left his longtime manager Marlena (Terri Runnels) to become the even more outlandish The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust. In 1998, Goldust began partnering with Marc Mero, which ultimately led to Luna Vachon not getting along with Mero’s valet, Sable. In a case of life imitating art, the animosity between Luna and Sable grew faster than their on-screen hatred did. As Sable’s popularity as WWF’s ultimate sex symbol increased, Sable began to treat the other women differently. “I wanted to help her initially, but she told me that she didn’t need to learn how to fall, as she was going to become champion anyways. She started to believe she could wrestle anybody!” Luna mentioned in an old WWF interview. “[Sable] had not paid her dues, or trained. I grew up protecting the wrestling industry. I was used to the old school mentality, not the entertainment one.” As the feud headed into a mixed-tag match at WrestleMania XIV in Boston in 1998, Sable refused to learn how to take any ‘bumps,’ insisting she didn’t have to. It didn’t help that Luna was also threatened with unemployment if she hurt Sable in any way or damaged one of WWF’s hottest properties. “Sable wasn’t a wrestler until I made her one,” she recalled in the WWE interview. “A real wrestler can wrestle a mop, and make it look like the mop is kicking their ass, and that’s what happened that night.” But despite working a miracle with the untrainable Sable on WWF’s Grandest Stage of Them All, it was Sable that got all the glory – not just from the audience but backstage too. “She beat us, and when we got to the back, there was champagne and confetti, and everyone wanted to celebrate with Sable,” Luna remembered. “I kept walking until Owen Hart came up to me and told me I had just put on the match of my life. It meant a lot to have someone like him say that to me.” She would feud off and on with Sable for the next year, briefly allying as part of Sable’s group The Oddities, before she turned heel again on Sable, finally challenging Sable unsuccessfully for the WWF Women’s Championship at the 1999 Royal Rumble (thanks in part to the “obsessed fan” Tori who interfered).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRHocJclaJI
She would continue to compete with the women of the slowly improving WWF Women’s Division of the Attitude Era, facing the likes of Ivory, Tori, and her old rival, Jacqueline. She even competed in intergender matches on Monday Night Raw – her first was a squash over Matt Knowles (former ECW & ROH star HC Loc) in March of 1998, followed by another squash over Gillberg just before her 1999 Royal Rumble match against Sable. That September, she faced then-WWF Intercontinental Champion Jeff Jarrett during the latter’s feud with Chyna. Luna won by disqualification. By the end of the year, she was finally paired with her real-life husband Gangrel, as his valet and occasional tag team partner. She would continue to feud once again with Jacqueline over the WWF Women’s Championship, but in early 2000, she was released once again by the WWF. Her last match for the WWF was in mixed tag team action with Gangrel against Jacqueline & Prince Albert on SmackDown! on February 8. Luna Vachon had always been known for her erratic behavior backstage, but after one particularly bad incident, WWF felt it was just better to sever ways with Luna. It was an action that Jim Ross feels would have been handled differently today had the industry understood mental illness – after all, Luna was bi-polar, an illness she most likely had been suffering for decades, amplified by her abuse from Dick Slater and hard lifestyle that she used as a coping mechanism. “I didn’t have any issues with her one-on-one,” Ross recalled on his podcast last year. “She would apologize and cry and come to my office at TV and try to talk through it.” But after an intense argument with Blackjack Mulligan and Marc Mero backstage, Ross was given the orders to release Luna. “If that same scenario would have happened,” Ross said, “and we could have identified her issues, we would have gone to HR and said this young woman needs some help.”
Luna Vachon’s mental illness – particularly when on the manic side – helped drive her wild persona. “Lunacy has its privileges” she once said to Slam Wrestling in 2008. But in a time where bi-polar was still grossly misunderstood and mental illness sensitivity was low, she was often mocked backstage by other wrestlers for her condition. “The only people that really understood me were the Canadians,” she recalled to Slam, citing Owen Hart and Bret “Hitman” Hart as her two greatest confidantes in the WWF when things were low – they seemed to be the only ones who understood her pain. But now she was once again gone from the WWF and within a year, both ECW and WCW would fold under the competition with WWE, leaving only the U.S. indies as an alternative. Slowly and slowly, Luna Vachon moved away from pro wrestling. With her life in disarray, in 2004, she became a Born Again Christian, hoping a renewal of faith would help her demons. In 2006, she and Gangrel divorced but remained close friends.
In the fall of 2007, Luna Vachon officially retired from professional wrestling, last facing Jessicka Havok in Cleveland All-Pro Wrestling (CAPW) on August 5, 2007. “You know, Luna was one of my idols when I was growing up and was one of the reasons why I became a professional wrestler,” Havok, who now competes for IMPACT Wrestling, recalled in 2020. “I liked her style. She was rough and tough and wasn’t your typical diva persona. When I got to wrestle her in that hardcore match a few years ago in Cleveland All-Pro Wrestling it wasn’t what I had expected and I didn’t have that great of a time because she was able to overpower me in ways I had not expected.” In November of 2007, Luna officially announced her in-ring retirement. She left pro wrestling to become a truck driver in Florida.
Despite finding religion, Luna was still fighting her personal demons. And in 2009, tragedy continued to strike. After starting the year on a positive note – in April she received the Ladies Wrestling Award at the Cauliflower Alley Club – she would later enter rehab to kick her substance abuses. The rehab was paid for by the WWE as part of their outreach program in their Wellness Policy program. She completed the program in June of 2009, but, just as she seemed to be finally happy and free from the darkness of professional wrestling and substance abuse, her life took another tragic turn. Over Christmas that year, a terrible fire burned her house down, destroying a lifetime of wrestling memories and memorabilia. Former WWE Superstar Mick Foley had convinced TNA/IMPACT Wrestling to bring in Luna Vachon in 2010 to work with Tommy Dreamer once more, reigniting their alliance from ECW in the 1990s, as a way to help her rebuild her life, but sadly, Luna refused, insisting she was retired. Over the next few months, Luna’s condition worsened and she relapsed, returning to drug use. On August 27, 2010, Luna’s mother entered her home to find Luna Vachon dead. She had overdosed on oxycodone and benzodiazepine. It was a sad final chapter for a troubled soul who had fought her whole life just to be accepted, in a fantasy world created by her adopted family when she was three years old. In the end, Vachon continuously sought to find the joy she felt as a young girl, safe in the arms of her father, “Butcher” Vachon, her uncle, “Mad Dog” Vachon, her aunt, Vivian Vachon, or her godfather, Andre the Giant. As she told Slam Wrestling in 2008, “I sleep in a bed covered with kids pillows because there’s still a little girl left inside of me.”
Luna Vachon in 2008 (Photo: WWE)
Rejected by her peers for her mental illness, bombarded by an increasing insistence of beauty over substance, bound by an honor and desire to maintain the Vachon family legacy, Luna Vachon’s life ended in a heartbreaking tragedy. But her career became a blueprint for women that’s still felt today, with such maniacal characters as Jessicka Havok, Rosemary, Su Yung, Abadon, and Max The Impaler all carrying on Luna’s wicked, wicked ways, and intergender wrestling a common occurance on the indie scene. In 2019, Luna Vachon was posthumously inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as part of the 2019 class in the Legacy wing. After years of self-doubt, Luna Vachon was finally recognized by her peers for her influence on the industry and dedication to being true to herself. “In a world full of butterflies, it takes balls to be a caterpillar.”
Photo: WWE
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