[Growling voice] From this day forth,
I will haunt your very breath!
I will be your shadow in the darkness!
[narrator] Hailing from wrestling royalty,
Luna Vachon emerged as one of the squared circle's
most unhinged and unforgettable characters.
When you saw Luna, you were seeing...
a monster come to life.
Crazy, wild, Satanic.
You all can keep your stinking, rotten mouths shut!
Despite being consistently marginalized by a
male-dominated industry, Luna was driven to
push boundaries and redefine women's wrestling.
My mom was the bad girl.
[Commentary] Oh, come on!
If you saw her in an alley, you would want to run away.
Dare to have the balls to do the gimmick that I do and
rip my vocal chords.
I'm here to say what I have to say.
Her volatile persona sprang from a traumatic upbringing,
and a string of personal tragedies.
I don't think it was a very easy childhood.
Having her father having a wrestling company,
wrestlers staying in the house.
She was a pretty, young girl. They took advantage of her.
While working alongside some of wrestling s top stars,
her battles with addiction and mental health
became all consuming.
She's schizophrenic. That's some serious shit.
She would go from like, Oh, thank you so much.
Oh, that's so sweet. To, [growling voice]
What are you doing? What are you talking about?
Of course she was self-medicating.
Sniffing yayo all day, every day.
She would stay up for a month, straight.
Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Making me sick!
The next day, she d be like, I don't, I don't know,
what happened? You don't remember
punching this guy, this guy?
This is destruction.
The camera man just got knocked down.
Betrayed by the world she adored,
one final act of defiance would ignite her self-destruction.
She stood up to Vince in front of everybody.
You know, she didn't want to just be boobs.
She wanted to be a wrestler.
That was it.
That was enough. She... ing had it.
you're in pain, you're hurting so, you turn to other things.
And, you know, up in flames you go.
♪
There are two ways to slide easily through life.
One way is to believe everything.
The other, to doubt it.
Luna Vachon and The Black Harts.
I used to always think wrestling was real.
Like, when you're a kid, you think it s real.
Like, that's what she always was to me.
She was always Luna.
Hi, my name s Van Hurd, and my mom s Luna Vachon.
Ever since I can remember, I was so young,
the Mohawk, the bleached hair, the extensions.
Very, very soon, I will wipe you from this earth!
It was nuts, like, she would show up to my
elementary school with a snake.
I just remember she came to give me a hug and
that snake almost got me. [Laughing]
I was so embarrassed. I hate to say it, I was.
But then, then it was just normal for me.
That was my mom.
I definitely believe she loved wrestling more than
she loved anything in life.
Her passion truly was professional wrestling.
Anything she ever spoke to me about in her deep and
darkest hours was pro wrestling.
I'm David Heath, better known as Gangrel.
I've been a professional wrestler for 34 years now.
Gangrel there. Look at the, look at his teeth!
The first time I met Luna Vachon was at a
Florida Championship Wrestling show.
She came in, she kicked the door open.
She hollers in, Fresh meat, and she points at me.
I look around, I m the only one there.
And then, she just slams the door and walks off.
Now this is you gotta picture, this is a girl with a mohawk,
blood all out of her nose, a tongue like, agh, you know,
she's growling at me. So, I was terrified.
I didn't want anything to do with her
after I met her that first time.
But, we became friends. So much so that we said
we would I would never date you.
I would never go out with somebody like you.
And she says, I would never go out with somebody like
you either. And I go, Good, I m glad we agree on that.
And I don't know, somewhere it crossed the lines.
There's many faces to my mom. Her real name is Gertrude.
And, she used to, like, tell me nightmare stories about
how she had to stand in front of the class and
tell everybody her name was Gertrude.
And then, when they found out that her dad and her uncles
were the Vachon's, and they were like some of the
most hated tag teams ever...
[Cheering]
Oh, the Vachon family are like wrestling royalty in Canada.
I m Mick Foley, often known as The Hardcore Legend.
Luna s uncle was Maurice Mad Dog Vachon.
Her aunt was Vivian Vachon.
Get your hands off of me. Who do you think you are?
Luna s father was Paul The Butcher Vachon.
All of the Vachon s were, you know,
odd in a beautiful type of way.
Brutal chop to the neck.
So, Butcher Paul Vachon had his moments.
Luna s origins with the Vachon family are rooted in a chance
encounter following a harrowing tragedy on December 18, 1966.
Adopted into the Vachon dynasty,
Luna is instantly enamoured by her new family s
celebrity status.
I'll break her leg!
She wanted nothing more than to join that kind of pantheon and,
and, you know, carry on the tradition.
They tried to talk her out of it.
She did talk about how her family said,
This is really a very hard industry for women.
But, there was no stopping her.
My name is Jeannine Mjoseth.
I used to be known as Mad Maxine, or Lady Maxine.
Well, I'm 6 2. And I've always been athletic.
And I love costumes. I m an extrovert.
I thought, why not use what God gave me to,
you know, really make a splash.
I went out and got a mohawk.
I think Moolah saw money in my mohawk.
[Cheering]
The latest protege of The Fabulous Moolah!
To train at Moolah's was like going,
the equivalent of going to Harvard. I mean, she was...
the place that women went to become
professional women wrestlers.
It is The Fabulous Moolah!
Also training with The Fabulous Moolah,
Mad Maxine meets a teenage Luna,
who's sweet demeanor is worlds away from her alter-ego
follow in her family s footsteps.
She looked like a babyface.
She had this very cherubic, very sweet face.
And, when you would say, You should be a babyface,
she would get so mad.
Because, all she ever wanted was to be, like, a badass heel.
I had a strong sense of trepidation because what I saw
going on at this camp,
the young, underaged trainees,
the little lambs as I think of them, you know,
the naive young women who thought they could
trust Moolah, thought she was like a mother figure,
but then she would take advantage.
I never really seen her afraid of anybody,
but I know when Moolah would walk into a room,
she would just shake and be super nervous and scared, like,
they d been beaten or something like that.
So, I know Moolah held a lot of power over her.
Moolah would say something like,
you're sleeping with me tonight, hun,
or something like that.
So, you know, I just heard a lot of stories like that.
She said that Moolah had sent her out to this guy in the west
and, the guy said he d pay her $500 to take photographs.
She didn't know that you can't just trust people.
And, so she went out there.
The guy attacked her, tried to rape her.
She fought him off.
♪
Obviously, you can't trust a person who's gonna do that
to a 16-year-old girl. It s just, it was appalling.
But she said, you know, Moolah's the only show in town.
You ve gotta train with her if you want to
make it in the business.
Every girl that trained with her has
a Moolah story of some sort.
♪
My name is Kim Sacks.
You might also know me as Penelope Paradise.
Or, better yet, the great and powerful,
beautiful but very deadly, Penelope Paradise.
She had such high hopes, and she wanted so much.
I mean, she wanted to be Hulk Hogan.
She wanted to be, like, the best heel there was.
Luna leaves Moolah's camp behind to join
Championship Wrestling from Florida,
where Kevin Sullivan and his Army of Darkness
are terrifying fans across the state.
Kevin Sullivan was had a great mind.
You had to be able to draw from
the same cities every single week.
And you did that by getting them emotionally invested.
Characters had to be on almost 24/7.
I have done some horrible things in the past!
They were not afraid to get fans upset.
- [Indistinct shouting] - Really upset.
Evil and darkness has always prevailed.
I saw a face...
Kevin had Florida scared to death of him. Just, you know,
Tampa was scared to death of him.
Pandemonium everywhere, baby!
And people thought that he was passing curses on to them.
All this devil stuff, and nobody had
really seen anything like that.
But people were legitimately scared of him.
On behalf of Sports Review Magazine
In December of 1985, Luna makes her debut
as an unassuming journalist, and her character quickly
falls victim to the dark powers of Kevin Sullivan.
♪
My mom coming out as a reporter and then,
Kevin Sullivan came out and whacked her face.
And all of a sudden, she turned into Luna.
You know, she was considered crazy, and crazy and lunatic.
Basically, the same thing, so lunatic, Luna.
And now Luna offered up everything to me.
She stripped herself...
of vanity.
You know, she shaved her head and she put all these
kind of veins on her face.
And she interacted with the camera and with the fans and,
in a way that was just monstrous.
I swear she's possessed. That's all I can say.
You know, it wasn't as though she went behind the curtains
after her match and then, all of a sudden,
she's just, you know... Luna.
She carried on the pretense that this was
who she actually was.
[Screaming & laughing]
Well, that's it for Coaches Corner.
With her new career now taking off,
Luna indulges in the extreme excesses of the era.
It snowed every day in Miami, in the 80s,
is basically what everyone said back then.
If my memory serves me correctly,
it was like Quaaludes and
coke and acid.
She pushed every boundary she could come across.
How can you take 100 pills a day?
How do you even get 100 pills a day?
She wanted everything to look like...
you know, everything was beautiful and all roses.
You knew it wasn't, but that's what she tried to
portray to the best of her ability.
I don't think it was a very easy childhood with a,
with a having wrestlers staying in the house.
I mean, she's claimed to have been...
you know, raped and stuff like that.
And I believe there was some...
inappropriate family relations, maybe.
I didn't know Vivian at all. I never met her.
She didn't talk about her very much.
Well, she just said that she was abused by her aunt.
And I mean, she just kind of basically left it at that.
She didn't want people to know that.
Like a little girl can idolize you.
You want to do something, and you want to
be like somebody, and idolize something.
And people will use that against you.
And I think that very much happened to her.
I wasn't there, so I didn't see it.
But with my heart, I believe some of it.
And then, I think it probably set the path or the course for
some of the self-destruction later on in life.
What she called love, that wasn't really love, you know.
Luna Vachon s deranged antics captivated audiences,
but unknown to fans, her over the top persona was born from
a lifelong struggle with mental health outside the ring.
She was studied from the Emory University since she
was 2 years old for depression and being bipolar,
and, and schizophrenia and stuff like that.
So, it was a roller coaster of hooptie hoops and looptie loops.
Luna has this persona of being just tough badass,
but really, she was...
the shyest person in the room.
A lot of people would call her Angele,
or I called her Angele.
That's what her dad would call her instead of
'cause she hated Gertrude or Trudy, you know. [Laughing]
Give it 10 minutes, it's like the Florida weather.
She'd change, she'd be some other personality.
There was like Angel, Trudy, Angele, you know, like...
Then there was Luna.
She was chemically imbalanced. She was definitely bipolar.
In her day-to-day life, you would call her Angel.
And, she spoke with this child-like voice.
You know, and then you could be hanging out with...
her, and she get a phone call and they piss her off,
and then all of a sudden, she's Luna and
she's crazy for the rest of the day.
I mean, one time, we were in Tampa and
Luna and I had to share a room.
And, she got into a tangent, you know,
she just snapped for whatever reason...
One thing led to another and it's me and her from bed to bed.
Lamps are flying.
You would think we were killing each other.
You know, and then now we gotta go wrestle.
Even no matter how mad you get, somebody can hold you and say:
"Okay, you've got to stop".
And you couldn't do that with her.
She would always make a joke like:
"Oh, I better take my little blue pill".
But, she knew if she was really wobbly, let's say...
Yeah. But, like, picking Dicky
wasn't the best... situation.
Dirty Dick Slater.
I hear they call you Filthy Richard in Parts Unknown,
but that's another story.
That was my first stepdad.
I heard he used to beat my mom up.
I never saw anything.
I never even really saw them seen them fight.
I never saw them fight. Ever.
I never saw him lay a hand on her.
I saw her with bruises, after the fact.
And I'm quite sure she did not give them to herself.
And when they split up, yeah, I was like, okay, good.
You know, that's something that's out of her life.
So, I met her at Florida Championship Wrestling.
Terrified of this woman, swore her off.
Bloody nose, scared to death. Fresh meat.
So, next thing you know, I m tagging with a fella
named Tom Nash. We re doing the Black Hart thing.
And it turns out, that Tom knew her from school.
So then, down the road a month or two down the road
or something he goes: Hey, Luna called,
and she wants to go down to training with us.
And I'm like: No!
I don't want anything to do with her.
So, but, but, still, I don't know why.
Whatever the forces of the universe, the nature, whatever.
We get in there, she's in the back seat.
he's sitting over here. I m driving.
And then she crawls over, and she starts hitting me.
Like: Why don't you like me? Why don't you like me?
And she's like, she rips my shirt up.
So, I get to the house, the fella s name is Rusty Brooks.
He had a ring in his backyard. And, out of nowhere,
I don't know if she jumped off the top rope or where
she came from, but she latched down and bit me
in the middle of my back. She was on, like a pit bull.
I couldn't get her off.
I mean, I'm like trying to reach.
she's locked in there, went on.
So, I ended up diving through the ropes,
which breaks her off me.
And I got her against this tree [Growling]
And he's like: No, hey, that's Dick Slater's girl!
I go: she's crazy. She bit me! [Laughing]
And he goes: that's Luna, you idiot!
You know, chill out.
So, before that scar healed on my back that's why I always
call her the original vampire because before the scar healed
on my back, we were best friends.
With Luna as their manager, Tom Nash and David Heath
become fixtures on the independent
wrestling circuit as The Black Harts.
Listen, you worry nothing about the snake.
You should worry about the tag team titles because they are
gonna be around the waist of The Black Harts.
Tom had a big crush on her.
And the next thing you know, like, they were married.
He adored her. He did, he adored her.
And he did love her, he did love her.
Tom Nash and my mom were married.
And, Tom used to go to work and then Dave used to show up.
So, that's some shady shit right there.
They got in a few fights and then he accused me
of being with her. And he started talking a lot of stuff.
I know you guys are together. This and this and that.
And, then he swung on me and then I snapped.
I feel really bad.
I puked in the bathroom the next day at the airport
when I saw what I could do to somebody.
The fallout from the fight breaks up The Black Harts.
And shortly after, Luna s brief marriage to Tom Nash
also comes to an end.
I look at her as a, this wildflower on the side road.
You ever seen a beautiful wildflower,
it's just blowing in the wind? If you pick it and you cage it,
it's gonna die. [Laughing] You know?
So, you just should admire it from afar for the beauty it is.
She was a beautiful person, and she had a lot,
a lot of love in her. She just wanted to be loved and
was so misunderstood, you know, so...
Oh, it was great, it was tremendous.
It was at Halloween.
So, I wrestled a steel cage match that night.
Came home, right at midnight. And then we got married.
Yeah, instead of wedding rings we got vampire bites, yeah.
Then I got her here, right there.
Put it on my drinking hand so, I remember not to drink
too much so she wouldn t kill me. [Laughing]
The newlyweds perform together across the globe,
with an eye to eventually breaking into the
World Wrestling Federation.
She was sending stuff in for me to get booked.
She was sending my stuff from Puerto Rico,
what had me and her in it. And then, she got hired.
I'm not gonna lie, I was like...
jealous and stuff like that. I was like, aw.
But I was super, super happy for her at the same time.
And it s Luna Vachon!
On April 4th, 1993, Luna s dreams would come true as
she debuts in the WWF on wrestling s grandest stage,
WrestleMania.
You were watching WrestleMania and all of a sudden,
your mom's coming out with Shawn Michaels and...
they're at Caesar's Palace, they're outside.
And then, her and Sherri Martel get into it.
- Oh, she clotheslines Sherri! - Boy, did she nail her!
Luna Vachon! Picking Sherri up!
I was like, oh, my goodness. She did it, she did it.
That was her dream, and there she is.
She was the first female ever to be on a video game.
The game was called WWF Raw.
We got that whole console just for that game.
And I, Luna Vachon...
I will be the goddess
of the squared circle!
Agh!
All you're doing is trying to make it as a wrestler.
And then, you put it in all the extracurriculars like the drugs,
and the depression, and the bipolar.
Just keep, days, running, and it keeps going fast.
Next thing you know, it s gone.
♪
After 15 years of self-sacrifice and struggling
in the independent territories, Luna Vachon finally reaches
the pinnacle of the wrestling world.
Luna Vachon!
I d see her a little bit.
Sometimes, once a year, once or twice a year.
She was grinding, she was on the road.
I was with my grandma.
A lot of girls didn't have children.
A lot of the girls did not have children because
or they had 'em very late, after...
their careers were over. Because they I mean, you can't.
She lived in this little pink 1950s trailer that had, like,
this porch addition to it.
And I knocked on her door and, she was,
she had obviously been crying. Her eyes were all swollen.
And, I asked her what was wrong,
and she said it was one of her son's birthday.
And I had I didn't even know she had kids until that point.
She did not talk about her kids, mostly.
My mom hit the road. She had a dream.
And she went and did it.
This man...
makes me hot!
Agh!
A few months later, Luna is paired with WWF star
Bam Bam Bigelow.
While she is regularly appearing on national television,
Luna rarely gets to showcase her in-ring skills.
At that time, there just wasn't lot of emphasis on
women's wrestling in WWE,
or in the United States, as a whole.
So, the women who were really talented in the ring
were often utilized as... managers.
Luna was a real wrestler.
She was a hardcore real wrestler,
and she should never have been relegated to valet status.
I mean, we had 5 to 6 girls on a roster.
That was our roster back in the day in the Federation.
Really?
Hi, my name is Debrah, otherwise...
my wrestling fans know me as Madusa.
- To the outside! - Attack!
There really wasn't a women s division.
There wasn't anything they did really well with the women.
It was a men's committee.
Just men at a round table circle jerking,
not knowing what to do with women.
Why don't we have our names on the frickin paper or
marquis or and it was da-da-da-da-da-da-da and more."
We were and more half the time.
It really pissed us off, you know.
Luna and I did not like that at all.
The saying has always been, that girls have to work
100% harder to just get 10% of the recognition.
90% of the guys were perfect gentlemen, they were fine.
There's always that 10%.
There's always one or two in the dressing room that's gotta
be a smart ass and, you know...
Luna would go around, going:
"My...'s bigger than your... ing... "!
You know, and...
those were things that she did.
I remember being in Canada, and we were wrestling.
And, I said: Luna, you know, at this point,
I don't give a shit. Let me drop the belt to you.
She was like: I can't do that, man. I can't.
I said: Yeah, I'm gonna drop the belt.
What are they gonna do, in fire me?
Okay. Whatever.
I am just so sick of them not doing anything further
with us women, and especially you.
And they don't have the audacity just one time,
in Canada, of all places, won't even drop you the belt?
Really? I said: let's go.
When we go home, we go bah-dah-bing, bah-dah-boom,
here s the comeback. Just quick, you know,
roll me up, 1, 2, 3. She goes: Are you serious?
you'd do that for me? I said: Yeah, let's do it.
I will lay down and give you the belt.
And she just like, ing lost it.
She was crying and she's like: I, I can't do it.
I won't do it. I won't,
I won't let them fire you over something like this.
I remember, I was just laying, getting there for the 3 count.
And she pulled me up and wouldn t do it and I'm like:
let's... ing just do it!
She wouldn t do it. I tried.
She never, ever got the belt. She never had the title there.
Frustrated over the lack of opportunity for
female wrestlers, Luna forges a bond with Sherri Martel,
another skilled wrestler downgraded to manager status.
I stand just like any other good woman, Mean Gene.
I m gonna stand right by my man.
- Sherri, let's go! - Yes, Shawn!
On her way, sensational Sherri!
She loved Sherri. She loved Sherri to death.
They were friends, they traveled together.
They was thick as thieves. [Laughing]
They would come home, like,
Luna would be asleep for like 3 days.
And I'm like, I could poke a stick at her, like,
what is going on here?
I knew nothing about pills or Placidyls or anything like that.
So, when I found out, like, she was taking these pills and
it was Sherri and all that, and confronted her,
it didn't go well. I think it was her darkest times,
in my personal opinion,
where she was out of control, like, beyond like, like...
could have, you know, died any it was like just that bad.
Luna could've been right there at the top, you know.
And there's no reason she couldn't have. It's just...
between the mental deficiencies of whatever
it was that she had, and the drugs...
Their excuse was, they said: It s for her own good.
They said they were always worried about her
mental health, you know. They said: "It's for her own good.
Yeah, don't do drugs.
For real.
She probably chose her extracurricular activity into
the drugs because of wanting just to forget.
And it's like a facade.
Sometimes when you get so soaked up and...
just caught up into it all, and you get lost.
And she always would try to kill herself.
She did it a couple times.
You ever see her wrists, there were big scars.
It s weird, like, you look at your mom, like,
why did you do that? You know what I mean?
Why would you do that?
Despite her personal struggles, Luna Vachon is recommended
to burgeoning indie promotion, ECW,
by her longtime friend Nancy Sullivan, aka, Woman.
The ECW fans really embraced Luna.
They had a way of...
seeing through the imposters and spotting the real deals.
And they saw in her somebody that they could invest in
emotionally, who could mix it up with the guys.
And no one doubted that she could kick Stevie Richards ass.
And here comes Luna!
She was the queen of extreme, that was no bullshit.
She was in her element. [Laughing]
And Richards, face first into the steel again.
And Luna s loving it!
She had a lot of fun in, in being a woman
versus a man in the cage. And being the first
she liked being the first at a lot of things,
at pushing the barriers and stuff like that.
[Cheering]
Comes down across Richard!
1, 2, and Luna makes history!
Winning the first ever inter gender cage match!
I loved teaming up with Luna. There's a photo of us, like,
holding onto a steel cage and snarling.
She could go anywhere in the world,
and she could entertain.
And she could hold her own with anyone.
And I'm including the men when I say anyone.
she's a devil in disguise!
In the late 90s, the WWF s shift to increasingly
provocative story lines would see Luna Vachon as a perfect
addition to the roster, and she eventually rejoins the company.
However, she's once again relegated to a supporting role.
Now, just to have women as valets and stuff like that and
being stifled, and not being able to work,
it would piss me off.
you'd want to wrestle when you're a wrestler, right?
While Luna s pairing with Gold Dust eventually leads her
back into the ring, she clashes with the
WWF s new direction for women s wrestling.
To make matters worse,
Luna is set to lose a high-profile match
against Sable, a model groomed for wrestling s
super stardom who has no experience in the ring.
Luna! You little bitch!
[Cheering]
Sable wasn't a wrestler.
And, and Sable was a beautiful woman.
I mean, she probably still is, I don't know.
But, you know, she didn't want to walk around with a scratch,
or a scar, or a bruise, or, or anything like that.
That wasn't what her gimmick was.
At WrestleMania XIV, Luna succeeds in making
Sable appear as a future women s champion.
And now let's get it on! Double that take down!
Here they go!
she's pulling hair! No fair, she's cheating!
Oh!
there's an enormous amount of pressure that goes into having
a match with somebody who is relatively inexperienced.
- [Cheering] - No way!
Power bomb! Sable power bombed Luna!
And so, when you take a veteran like Luna,
you are basically saying: We trust you to make
this person look the very best they can.
- Sable with a TKO! - [Cheering]
- [Match bell] - Unbelievable!
She gets through the match and everything...
and Luna's like super stoked that she got her through,
happy for the girl, you know, come back and
she's happy for her. Luna comes back in,
and she sees Vince McMahon there and they're clapping.
She thinks that they're clapping at her and telling her:
"Great job, gal, you did it, you get it"!
They were looking over her, it was Sable behind 'em.
♪
You know, I tried talking to her: "Luna, what's wrong?"
And she just broke down in tears.
"Nobody appreciates what I did". It hurt her.
You know, she wanted to be acknowledged for being
something other than strange. She wanted to be acknowledged
for what she could do in the ring.
And on that night, you know, we call it the grandest stage of
them all, they had this barn burner of a match and
it really hurt her that she was not...
noticed for it.
Sunny came to Luna.
And I think Sunny came to Luna in a nice...
"Oh, don't worry about it". She's like: [Snarling]
So, she, she: "Get away from me"!
And Sunny wouldn't get away from her so,
I remember she just came up, threw her through a
put her into a production box, and just kept hitting her on
top of the head, saying: "I'm not punching her face,
I'm not punching her face".
'Cause she knew if she hit Sunny in the face,
she'd be fired.
Poor Sunny never knew what hit her, yeah.
It was kind of crazy.
But it was just Luna being really hurt and lashing out.
Nobody talked about mental health, but like,
at the same time, that was her gimmick, too.
So, like, was it a show? I can tell you it wasn't.
I think it was, it was all the same.
There was no line. It was blurred lines, you know.
Luna, Angel, Trudy, mom.
No one spoke about that shit, you know what I mean?
About people's mental illness or whatever.
They saw and they were scared, and they just didn't.
That was it.
Her just being not accepted in this business,
to a level where she thought she deserved it because...
'cause of her skills and her, as a worker,
and what she brought to this business.
let's meet our contestants,
in the first ever Miss Rumble 2000 contest!
WWF s creative direction for women s wrestling is
increasingly at odds with Luna s desire to showcase
her in-ring prowess, making a final showdown
with CEO Vince McMahon inevitable.
When the Attitude Era started, it was just all sexuality.
I couldn't believe even Luna
was putting up with that shit, really.
Cause she was so old school like me.
She definitely felt pressured.
She didn't feel pretty, you know.
Now that you got models around you, it can't,
it can't feel good.
Did she say, Come and get it?
About right here is where they ll start hitting that
pause button on the tape.
They wanted Luna to take her top off and she said:
"You spent all these years making me ugly,
making me ugly, and now you're asking me to..."
And she stood up to Vince in front of everybody.
I guess what you see is what you get, okay.
you're asking my opinion, I don't know.
They didn't fire her out and out for refusing to
take that off and standing up to him.
I think they waited like a week or two and
then they used that as the excuse to fire her.
After a number of backstage incidents and escalating
erratic behaviour, Luna is released from the
WWF for the final time.
[Luna growling]
When she got fired, came home.
She goes: I'm in the bedroom, vampire.
I actually just shook my head and kind of laughed
when I seen this. So, in cocaine,
she had written out: you, Vince.
[Laughing] She goes: Watch!
And she just started, like. So, then I'm like, "Oh".
And then it was just downhill after that.
♪
I mean, an easy night, an easy -going night it could be...
I don't know, couple 8 balls, 10 hits of ecstasy.
Something like that. [Laughing]
I didn't understand her need to like, gotta have more,
gotta have like: "I gotta get more, let's go get more".
I'd be like: "No"! You know?
That's ultimately what drove us apart.
He was smart enough to get out. That's how bad it was, yes.
I remember him telling me that.
Saying he didn't have a choice.
He had to. Otherwise, they d both be dead.
When we d talk, she would talk about getting
back together sometimes. I said, just, We can't.
So then, I think what I did was,
I ran away as far as I could to California.
Unfortunately, I got married and
it wasn't the right thing to do.
Like, just, just, just went and did everything
I could not to come back.
She was in a lull, and she was like trying to be normal.
She didn't, she wasn't wrestling.
She was a waitress.
And, there was a time Luna showed up at my house.
She, like, is beating on the door.
I open the door, she runs past me,
and she's got a gun in her hand.
I don't know where she got the gun.
I don't know what, you know, is somebody chasing you?
What, you know? And she's just talking crazy.
I had to get the gun away from her.
And, and I still never knew what happened.
But she was frantic, and she was crazy, you know,
so I could never have anything like that around my kids.
I was like, Luna, you know, I got these kids and I
I mean, I'm not gonna beat around the bush.
I said, I can't you're not stable enough.
And I was like, It s just not gonna work.
She wasn't in control of her entire life.
And so, there's this real feeling of gratification that
comes from being able to hold a crowd in the palm of your hand.
Man, Luna s sick! She's going up top.
Like, maybe you don't have it all together...
the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day,
but for that 15 minutes you're in the ring,
you are completely in control. And that's a powerful feeling.
The biggest challenge that all of us who love it face
is trying to find something that makes us feel
the way we felt when we were in the ring.
And, I don't know if Luna ever found that thing.
We didn't talk that much 'cause I was in...
culinary school.
I was in Texas, she was in Florida.
I remember her...
driving a tow truck.
She was hanging out with these bikers, outlaw bikers.
I don't know why.
She never even met my daughter 'cause I don't think
she thought she was good enough.
And that's that mental illness, you know?
I talked to Luna for a final time just a few weeks
before she left us. I was so surprised because
she told me she was in a good place.
It came as a shock.
Oh...
I was flying to, to do a chef dinner in Ohio,
from Connecticut. And, my grandma called and said
that my mom had, she had just found my mom dead.
That had to have been a rough time for her.
You never want to see your kids, you know,
die before you do.
I heard she choked, but then I also heard it was a...
overdose. The wrong mix of things.
It could have been either one, honestly, I don't really care.
She's not here anymore, that sucks.
You know, I don't really care how she died.
On August 27, 2010,
Luna Vachon s battles with addiction and
mental illness finally came to an end.
We've lost so many people in this business.
You know, not just from drugs and pills and steroids,
but I mean, from mental health, from just...
I truly believe that there could have been
a lot of help for a lot of...
talent in our business.
We need to do better, as an industry.
I remember just my heart aching.
You know, I was, I was really hurting.
And, really, I really adored her.
I thought that her family and her fans
would appreciate a eulogy of sorts.
And so, I d like to read this a little bit, if I could.
I said: In a world full of butterflies,
it took balls to be a caterpillar."
I love that quote from Luna and in a way,
I can't help but hope that this life was but a chrysalis of
sorts for her, that for a woman who never seemed completely
comfortable in her own skin, this life was just a prelude to
becoming the beautiful butterfly God always
meant for her to be.
But that would be too easy and so anti Luna.
There are enough beautiful butterflies out there already.
Maybe we should be able to appreciate the beauty of the
caterpillar without needing or wanting it to change
for our viewing pleasure.
Maybe Luna was perfect just as she was.
Maybe she was exactly who she was supposed to be.
She never thought she was pretty enough to be a wrestler.
She never saw herself as beautiful.
If you look at her eyes, they're green.
She had the most beautiful eyes.
If you looked into 'em, you know.
But people just seen this Luna!
They see this character and this, this persona.
But they never seen Trudy or Angele or, you know,
looked in there and seen the innocence that's really
in there, the innocence lost. People say:
"How did you stay together so long"?
And then, and then I go:
"If you really want me to be honest,
I think I was just worried nobody else could
even take care of her". I love her so much,
but like, should we have been together that long? No.
Were we self-destructive and explosive and...
and everything? Yes.
But, I feel a lot of guilt for her passing, you know.
And, like I feel like I wasn't there to take care of her,
like, you know. Maybe it was selfish on my end.
It probably was selfish, but I don't think
we both were gonna make it.
We both would have ended up in a dark fate. And...
and I'm sorry, you know, tell her sorry for that too
'cause I miss her.
You know, I'm sorry for being selfish like that.
You know, to not have a funeral,
I think that was one of the hardest things for me to accept.
When Luna passed, if it was Luna's choice,
she would have had like... [Sighing]
A team of Harley Davidson's pulling down the
streets of Tampa with her casket.
And, you know firecrackers and fireworks and
sparklers shooting out of it.
And everybody would know.
You know, they were all gonna come see her final hurrah.
No, she wouldn t have wanted that.
that's not her style. She was private.
She wanted to be left alone. She was good.
Luna would have loved today s women s wrestling environment.
She would have loved the physicality.
Thrown out of this! Ah!
Through a table!
She would have loved that she would get to work with some of
the best wrestlers in the world on a nightly basis.
Yeah, I, I think she d be really happy to know
how far women s wrestling has come.
Well, boom!
She was such a colourful character.
She added so much to everything she was a part of.
And she was great in the ring.
there's nobody like her.
She was original, that's for sure.
If Luna were here today and she was talking to you, like,
if she was behind my shoulder with her hands on my shoulder,
she would look into the camera and go:
What the... s wrong with you?
Why did you wait til I was... ing dead
before you did anything about me?
I should have had this done when I was alive.
You could have come over and you could have talked to me.
You wouldn t have this little bitch imitating me.
that's what she would have said.
♪