Conor’s Comment: The following article first appeared in Powerlifting USA in June 2010 and tells the strange, sprawling story of the original Westside Barbell Club in California. It is part lifting history, part Hollywood folklore and part oral history, with Joe Di Marco’s memories providing much of its backbone. I’ve so often ranted about the lack of powerlifting history online and off-line so I’m going to slowly do my part to get some info out there and where better than a great 2010 Powerlifting USA article on the original Westside. Enjoy!
With special thanks to Joe Di Marco, co-founder of the Original Westside Barbell Club.
No, this is neither a prelude to a chapter in Ripley’s Believe or Not, nor the headline on your favorite Supermarket Tabloid—right under “How an Alien from Mars taught me how to Bench Press”—but it should be. And, yes, I am 100% sober as I write this piece, though learning about parts of it would make almost anyone, even a nondrinker like me, want to take a little “nip” of the Old Crow—just to steady the nerves y’know. The following is all 100% true.
So, what on earth does one of cinema history’s iconic actresses, a symbol of tragic beauty and glamour combined with the likes of the famed “Rat Pack,” not to mention the great Academy Award winning “Raging Bull” Robert De Niro have to do with the Westside Barbell Club, anyway? Well, as Lee Corso of ABC Sports would say, “Not so fast my friend.” Not THE Westside Barbell Club—you know the one in Columbus with the literal army of World Record Holders and the World’s foremost authority on powerlifting, Louie Simmons—but the other Westside Barbell Club, the Original Westside Barbell Club that started in an $8-a-month hellhole garage way back in 1958. This story is about the gestation of a system of strength training that lives on today, pioneered by a bunch of wild living, hard partying non-conformists who lived on and sometimes way over the edge, and whose unique lives intertwined with people and events in history that still touch us today.
Every one of these guys marched to the beat of his own drummer, society be damned.
If nothing else, this article proves once and for all the theory of “Six Degrees of Separation”—you know, the one that refers to the idea that if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.
Huh??? Okay, take a moment to digest this now. Based on this theory, one way or another (and as bizarre as it may sound) Louie Simmons of today’s Westside Barbell Club is somehow, someway, connected to Marilyn Monroe, who was connected to a close friend of one of the icons of the original Westside Barbell Club.
By now, I just may have caught your attention, so read on if you dare.
And by the way, I can also prove to you that the Original Westside Barbell Club’s squatting techniques were taught at another gym long before the famous Broad Street Gym in York, PA, home of Bob Hoffman’s York Barbell Club.
What? The longstanding bitter opponent to powerlifting (at least early on) was the actual inspiration of the original Westside gang? A couple of more facts: that somehow, someway, the great De Niro was deeply connected to the Westside Barbell Club, and was utterly beholden to the Club (or one of its members) for one of his many Academy Award nominations and as a final topper, one of the Club’s first members was intimately involved in the maintenance of the National Security of the United States—despite being continually rousted by the local cops for vagrancy and public inebriation.
See, this is why power history is more—a whole lot more—than just a bunch of grainy black and white pictures of big guys in flimsy singlets (or plain old swim trunks) squatting big weights using nothing more than a thin belt and penny loafers.
Power history, as I found out during my research for this particular article, is but a small part of the epidermis of history itself. It is unquestionably and inexorably linked to the heart of history. Once again, remember the theory of the “Six Degrees of Separation.”
Now, I have always prided myself on knowing my power history, but what I am about to share with you may shock even the most jaded of experts. I know a lot of it shocked me.
Peanuts West Heads for California
As most of you folks may probably know, the Original Westside Barbell Club was the brainchild of William Weiss, a former bodybuilder, who changed his name to “Bill West”—apparently antisemitism was alive and well, even in the liberal enclaves of West Los Angeles—so he could more easily crack the unforgiving shell of “The Business,” i.e. Hollywood, as a comedian and actor.
Young William was quite the jokester, and claimed he had a “Ph.D. from the streets.” He started life in cold and dreary Pennsylvania, and didn’t pick up a weight until he was around 15. And, of course, his own personal epiphany was his first muscle magazine, an old Strength and Health.
Inspired by the gorgeous gals and pristine white sands of Muscle Beach, Bill decided to head west to both find his fortune and reach his peak in the barbell world.
All he wanted to do was to train, make a few bucks, and have fun on the California beaches.
Little did he know that he would affect generations of lifters and bodybuilders the world over well into the next millennium, create whole business ventures and spawn thousands of lines of written text about him and his legendary pals. This then was the great “Peanuts” West.
Bill got his famous nickname “Peanuts” because, frankly, he was so determined to increase his wraith-like physique of just over 100 lb. of bodyweight that he ate the one item that was then cheaply available in large quantities—the good old peanut.
No micellar proteins, MRP’s or pro-hormones back then. Bill simply ate tons of peanuts, drank peanut oil, and consumed gobs and GOBS of peanut butter sandwiches to accomplish this purpose and in a few short months increased his bodyweight to 165 lb.
Peanuts trained as a bodybuilder, but was increasingly becoming fascinated with the human body’s ability to lift heavy weights.
Hitting a wall on his weight gain, Peanuts simply switched to a basic, heavier series of exercises emphasizing the squat and press (bench, incline, and Military), among others. He even entered and did reasonably well in a couple of Olympic lifting meets, elevating respectable numbers including a 285 clean and jerk.
In those days (the early to mid fifties) it was Olympic lifting, bodybuilding and a little something called “odd” lifting, which were sanctioned AAU contests that sometimes involved the bench press, sometimes involved the barbell curl or deadlift and most always involved the squat.
The squat was Peanut’s forte, and he was determined to be the lightest man ever to squat 600 lb.
He learned his squatting techniques—and eventually passed them on to the rest of his crew, both at Muscle Beach and later in his famed Neosho Street Garage Gym—from two of the greatest Olympic lifters of the era, Bob Hoffman’s Golden Boys, none other than Isaac “Ike” Berger and to a lesser extent, Dave Sheppard.
Ike, though representing the York Barbell Club, preferred to live and train in sunny California, at the old Muscle Beach Dungeon Gym, alongside other York greats such as Dave “Moose” Ashman and Sheppard.
Ike was no ordinary Olympic lifter. Competing in the 132 lb. class, Ike “Betcha” Berger (named for his affinity for gambling and the night life) won nine Senior National titles, three World titles, and three Olympic medals—two silver and one gold in the 1956 Melbourne Games. Ike was phenomenally strong, having elevated a strict 270 lb. Military press, 242 lb. snatch and a 336 lb. clean and jerk.
He used power moves quite regularly in his buildup, including lots of heavy, deep squats and bench presses done with a Military pressing grip. And, yes, he was strong there as well, having elevated 500 lb. in the squat and 320 in the bench, all with no equipment. Based on his ability to regularly perform clean grip high pulls with 400+ lb., it would be pretty easy to assume a 500+ deadlift as well.
Ike had a profound effect on Peanut’s training and even his diet.
Peanuts met Ike Berger at the old Muscle Beach Dungeon Gym, when Ike was there on one of his many sabbaticals from training in dreary old York, PA.
Ike was a ladies man, loved the sun, surf, and general party lifestyle of Southern California.
He trained at York because he had to, due to his relationship with Hoffman. He trained at Muscle Beach because he loved to.
He saw in Peanuts someone with great basic potential, and invited him to train with him, Ashman, and Dave Sheppard—another one of Bob Hoffman’s Golden Boys who was himself continually falling out of favor with the grim “Father of Weightlifting” due to his high living and heavy drinking ways.
Sheppard could literally drink anyone—even the Russian weightlifters—under the table and was no slouch on the platform, having earned a silver medal at the 1956 Games. He was a phenomenally strong guy, even nursing a monster hangover.
Strangely enough, one of Sheppard’s many girlfriends was Barbara Ann Thomason, aka Carolyn Mitchell, a former Miss Muscle Beach and aspiring Hollywood actress, one of the first beauty contestants to utilize weights to tone her figure.
She later went on to become the 5th wife of Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney, and was later killed in a grisly murder-suicide by her lover, a Yugoslavian actor/pit fighter when Rooney was in the Philippines filming a movie. Remember the theory of “Six Degrees of Separation?” Now we see that Sheppard, connected to Peanuts, who we all know has always been connected to Louie Simmons through his training was in some way also connected to Mickey Rooney and a grisly tabloid murder-suicide which rocked Hollywood?
York Barbell’s Unexpected Influence
So Sheppard and Berger were intimately (and unknowingly) involved in the creation of the deepest roots of the Westside Barbell Club.
For them, training in the sun, surf, and sand in Southern California was like Nirvana.
Ike and Sheppard taught Peanuts the proper way of squatting and if one needed proof, just look at some old photos of the both of them.
Take a look at Ike Berger’s squatting style, both in the clean and snatch—upright, feet splayed out at what looks like a 45 degree angle.
Now look at some of the early shots of Sheppard squat snatching (he was a former world-record holder in this discipline) and then look at any photo of Peanuts squatting. Same thing.
Yep, the patriarch of powerlifting, Peanuts West, learned to squat from two of York Barbell’s finest. Bob Hoffman would have been proud. I told you it would get a little weird here.
Peanuts trained with a lot of other guys at both Vic Tanny’s Gym, on 4th and Broadway in Venice, and the old Dungeon, a hellhole-like cave in the bowels of the earth underneath an old retirement hotel.
The city of Santa Monica had relocated the old outdoor Muscle Beach Weight Pen to this “new” facility, after a scandal involving bodybuilders and underage girls had rocked the gossip columns in 1959.
Even though the charges were eventually dropped, the weights were still sent to the Dungeon, appropriately named due to its Transylvania-like wooden staircase descending into the pit, musty odors, cobwebs and tons and tons of rusting weights.
Some of the weights looked like antediluvian relics from a bygone era, and the benches were nothing more than a dubious mating of old scrap lumber and rusting ten penny nails.
Most of the dumbbells were welded with what looked like a home soldering kit, and from my research, you had to be either very courageous or temporarily insane to do heavy dumbbell work at the Dungeon because the weights could easily break their shoddy welds and literally rearrange your face (and everything else within several feet as well).
There was a legendary pair of 156 lb. bells that resembled small train wheels handled by none other than the mysterious Chuck Ahrens, who hated bench pressing (but could press 405 for 30–40 reps on a whim) and preferred to stick to uber-heavy dumbbell inclines, and dumbbell seated presses, monster triceps work (as in a mind bending 405 lb. for triceps extensions to the nose) and other assorted feats, none which was ever duplicated by anything remotely resembling a human being.
In addition to the gargantuan Ahrens, there was Steve Merjanian of the monster incline presses, Olympic hammer-throwing gold medalist Harold Connolly, and early Weider bodybuilding super star Hugo Labra.
Most trained at both locations and later at a third, which was an alleyway gym in Santa Monica after the Dungeon got too rickety and dangerous even for these guys to be in.
Despite the “No Women Allowed” policy of the gym, the Fabulous Moolah and other early women’s pro wrestling superstars (who weren’t looked at as women by the Dungeon/Tanny guys, obviously) stopped in every once in a while. No one paid them too much attention, as there was plenty of real eye candy just a few feet away on the beach (like Sheppard’s ex-girlfriend, who unfortunately wound up on the cover of every tabloid in Hollywood after her unfortunate demise).
From Muscle Beach to Westside
Peanuts by now was working pretty regularly as a stunt double in Hollywood, doubling for stars like Peter Lorre.
He also was, as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, a “bit” player in some early TV action flicks like The Rat Patrol.
If you look closely, you will see Peanuts as an Egyptian soldier getting crushed by the Red Sea along with Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments and one of the gladiator slaves about to be crucified by the Romans in the Kirk Douglas epic Spartacus.
He was, as stated, enjoying life, lifting, eating his fill and raising hell with the Muscle Beach Gang.
Despite his affable, friendly nature, it was actually his temper and his newly minted friendship with Joe Di Marco that eventually gestated the beginnings of what we know today as the Westside Barbell Club.
Both Joe and Peanuts trained at Tanny’s as well as the Dungeon, now relocated back from the pits of Santa Monica into an old multi-car garage in a back alley.
They both had altercations with other members of the gym that caused them to be ejected. Let’s let Joe tell it in his own words:
“I remember the day like it was yesterday. Peanuts was benching with 315 for reps, and some crazy guy drunk on rotgut whiskey started removing the plates while he was pressing. Peanuts said he saw him out of the corner of his eye. Well, plates flew everywhere, Peanuts wound up flat on his back, and when he got up he just decked the guy and kept training. Of course, fighting was a no-no and that got him the axe. Me? Same thing, sorta. Wasn’t too much later that I got booted out. There was this guy visiting from Canada, a big shot bodybuilder, I think he was ‘Mr. Canada’ or something. Anyway, I was doing ‘hopper’ deadlifts—you know, where you bounce the bar off some reinforced wood and rubber pieces for reps—when this guy basically ordered me to stop, like I was some sorta flunky. I guess he didn’t like the noise. Of course, I didn’t stop, and when he came back at me again he had his fists clenched like he was going to hit me, so, I punched him right in the mouth and he went crying like a little sissy to Vic. Vic didn’t like it or him, but rules were rules and I was out, temporarily so, but I had had it with commercial gyms and wanted a place of my own. Right then and there Peanuts and I decided to start our own facility. He wanted his name on it, so I suggested because we were on the Westside of Los Angeles, on the West Coast and all that, we simply name it the ‘Westside Barbell Club’”
— Joe Di Marco, 2010
The $8 Garage Gym
So, the die indeed was well and truly cast. Joe Di Marco and Peanuts were hell-bent on starting their own gym, a facility initially intended to be a simple place to work out, with no commercial interests, but a workout place that would eventually spawn some of the biggest, strongest athletes of the day, and be like a magnet for powerlifters, Olympic hopefuls, and some of the oddest characters this side of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This facility, as all now know, would eventually be the birthplace for a system to be spread worldwide well into the next millennium.
The first “location” of the Westside Barbell Club was in some little Venice garage that Joe and Peanuts rented for $8 a month and, from what I gather, this was too much money considering the surroundings and, shall we say, the ambiance.
The “ambience” evolved into a near O.K. Corral-like shootout between Peanuts, Joe and a couple of Zoot-suiters because Peanuts disrespected them—by petting one of their dogs without asking permission.
Well, discretion got the better part of valor and the boys decided to relocate their “gym” (consisting of a few hundred lb. of weights, a bench, lat pull, incline and squat rack) to a friend, Bill Stewart’s, place—little more than a carriage house.
This engagement ended when Bill Stewart decided to quit lifting because he thought that his life wasn’t worth living anymore—because he turned 30. Remember, this was the psychedelic 60s where turning 30 for some meant enrolling in a nursing home.
Peanuts then rented a home in Culver City on Superba Street and from there permanently relocated to the now famed Neosho Street address.
The early days of the original Westside Club were spent in fine tuning their system of training. Joe was insistent that Peanuts cut his training down from 5–6 days a week to two.
“Peanuts was outta his mind. Powerlifting one day, training for heavy one armed lifts the next, like Steve Merjanian the next, it was a recipe for disaster. It took me about a year, but by then we had our system down—two days a week, Tuesdays from 7 PM to around 11 PM, and Saturdays at noon to whenever. In reality we spent about 8–11 total hours lifting, only we blocked it on the two days which worked fine for me because I was a machinist trying to raise a large family and for Peanuts who was in and out of movie studios. You can’t argue with the results, can you? Pretty soon, the word got out and guys started trickling into the Neosho Street neighborhood twice a week. The neighbors were a bit flustered at first by all of these gorillas wandering around (we trained outdoors a lot in the fresh air) but they soon got used to it. Our little garage gym quickly became the haven for world record holders, Olympic medalists and Olympic hopefuls, and even famous pro wrestlers, bodybuilders and a whole assortment of oddballs and plain old whack job.”
— Di Marco
Jim Hamilton, RAND and Oliver Sacks
One of the “plain old whack jobs” and “charter member” of the Original Westside Barbell Club was a young giant named Jim Hamilton, a guy few of us today ever heard of.
Lifting-wise, he didn’t make a lot of waves, although a 500 lb. raw bench press at 275 and a Military press from the stands of 385 in any era is absolutely nothing to sneeze at.
What Jim Hamilton was known for was his involvement in the super secret Rand Corporation—a U.S. government-funded think tank that has, for the last 60 years, been the go-to organization for decision makers, be they Wall Street finance gurus or the Pentagon.
Trying to launch a new satellite? Want to start a coup in Burundi!? Call the Rand Corporation. Need some specialized consulting in sophisticated computer applications and mathematics? Call Jim Hamilton, Westside Barbell Club member at the Rand Corporation.
Jim was one of the corporation’s youngest members, a math whiz kid, a former Ford Foundation Scholarship winner who was hired on at the age of 21, and who actually had his own private office in the Pentagon.
While under different circumstances, he may have launched a fantastic career in high-tech, and been the next Bill Gates (way before Bill Gates), sadly, his life ended at the tender age of 37.
Despite his brilliant mind and seemingly limitless future, Jim was a true child of the psychedelic 60s, imbibing in a whole array of recreational drugs.
Add a boatload of liquor and dump truckloads of greasy burgers, and Jim’s system was totally shot before the age of 30. Some say it was a miracle that he lasted as long as he did.
He was a decent all-around lifter before a motorcycle accident crushed one of his legs and basically left him as a bench-only lifter, and he was a big proponent of the belly toss bench as an assistant movement. He could also incline press well over 400 lb., which he did on the Tuesday workout.
When President John F. Kennedy got assassinated, Jim was under strict orders to immediately fly back for the state funeral.
Problem was, Jim was scared of flying and the Westside guys had to get him totally liquored up and literally dressed him to get him on the plane. When he arrived in DC, he was poured into a business suit and escorted to the funeral.
Jim could have easily been one of the early 600 lb. bench pressers if not for his lifestyle.
He was accosted many a time by the authorities for vagrancy as a result of his “hippie-like” disheveled appearance, and none of the cops knew that the National Security of the USA was often dependent on this owlish-looking, liquored-up street bum who looked more like he came from a soup kitchen than the bowels of a think tank and who could, by the way, lift a ton of weight, even when he was totally bombed out of his gourd.
One of Jim’s best friends, and another Westside member, was the Englishman, Dr. Oliver Sacks.
Dr. Sacks, thankfully, did not suffer the same fate as Jim, but became one of the world’s foremost experts in Neuroscience and later an award-winning author.
In fact, one of his books, Awakenings, was eventually made into a movie starring the great Robert De Niro, and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Dr. Sacks, despite his scholarly background and lengthy educational pedigree, was a dyed-in-the-wool powerlifter, and a dang good one. In fact, he was one of the few lifters in the early 60s to squat over 600 lb., which he did regularly. In fact, in a recent e-mail which I received from him, he waxed philosophical about his lifting:
“Dear Ron, thanks for your letter. During my time at UCLA (1962–65) I trained at various places—on Muscle Beach, in Venice; in the great Santa Monica gym; and as a member of the Westside Club, in Peanuts’ garage, which was fitted out for heavy lifting. I have squatted with 650 lb. in 1961, a California record then, and once tied with Dave Ashman, the Olympic heavyweight lifter, with a 575 front squat. My close friend Jim Hamilton, a mathematician, was a very powerful bench presser too.”
— Oliver Sacks, MD, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Columbia University, 2010
Dr. Sacks’ power career was cut short by two events—one bad and one good. The bad, an unfortunate ocean swimming accident which wrecked his back, but the good, his appointment as head of Neurosurgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York basically left him with little time to train.
He reduced his bodyweight to a more healthy level and trained sporadically, but always with his memories of the glory years training at Westside intact.
The Club began to grow, little by little, but it was still a garage gym out on Neosho Street in Culver City where, twice a week, the neighbors were treated to a symphony of iron clanging and shouting as Peanuts pushed, cajoled and threatened more and more weight from everyone.
“Peanuts was himself a decent lifter, but what he excelled in above all was his ability to motivate and train people. It was like magic, you were spotted by Peanuts with his now famous ‘Touch’ System and you broke every max under the sun. We had bodybuilders driving from Santa Monica and Venice and as far away as downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena who had perfectly good gyms to train in just to be trained by Peanuts.”
— Di Marco
The Club Grows
A perfect example of this was George Woods, the 1968 and 1972 Olympic silver medalist in the shot put. Prior to the Olympic trials of 1968 in Lake Tahoe, Woods’ upper body strength (for a man 6 foot plus and close to 290 lb.) was subpar—he could barely incline 290 and apparently had trouble bench pressing 400.
After several months of specialized training at Westside with Peanuts, Woods not only inclined over 400, but dead-stop bench-pressed 485 and push pressed from the stands over 440 lb., all which made for a hall of fame career in track and field.
Woods credited powerlifting at Westside for phenomenal success with the iron ball—he was the undisputed king of the indoor shot, setting world marks that lasted for over 20 years.
It was still just a garage gym, but it was shortly about to be put on the world map by an up and coming new member. One of the of the regulars of the club was another USA track and field great, Harold Connolly, former gold medalist in the hammer in 1952.
In early 1964, he approached Peanuts and Joe Di Marco about a new young track and field phenom, bursting with energy and raw strength, who wanted to join the club. “We said it was okay, as long as he used our system.” [Di Marco]
George Frenn Puts Westside on the Map
Well, the young man joined, and used Peanuts’ and Joe’s newly minted system, with a few wrinkles of his own.
The new member was none other than the iconic George Frenn, and the Westside Barbell Club was never the same afterwards.
George inspired literally thousands of young men (including myself) to take up the sport and was also famous as a U.S. Olympian, and multiple world-record holder in track and field.
George, despite his historic achievements in powerlifting, was first and foremost a track athlete, and then a powerlifter.
He was the first (and only) powerlifter to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated.
He actually spent as much or more time on the “power” movements of the Olympic lifts like clean grip and snatch grip high pulls and trained the bench press only infrequently, as excessive upper body bulk tended to hinder his flexibility in the hammer ring.
He was, nonetheless, virtually untouchable in the squat and the deadlift, where he broke countless world and American records in the 242 lb. class and regularly beat superheavies in those two disciplines.
He never let anything or anyone interfere with his training.
One of the more famous incidents involved him squatting over 600 lb. and deadlifting close to 600 in a meet with his broken leg in a cast after a weird accident in the hammer ring.
Peanuts and George decided that this would be the perfect time to work on his bench press, which he did with gusto, but it didn’t stop him from performing the other lifts either, even with one leg in a floor to knee cast.
Frenn came from a fairly well to do family and had at one time some illustrious houseguests “popping in” to visit him, like Rosey Grier, former member of the LA Rams “Fearsome Foursome.”
They would play piano for hours and gossip.
As he became more prominent in the track world—he traveled the world over with the USA track team—he met a lot of famous people, including famed movie mobster Edward G. Robinson and Peter Lawford of the famed “Rat Pack” of the 60s.
An Englishman married to the Irish “first family” of America, the Kennedys, Peter Lawford was a charming bon vivant who loved socializing with anyone famous, including athletes.
Frenn and he both enjoyed Jazz, especially the great Errol Garner, who was a favorite of Frenn’s.
Joe Di Marco related one of Frenn’s casual comments to him and the guys, made in the late 60s regarding Lawford about a little something that happened a few years back, well before he was a member of the club.
Now, this is technically hearsay, but everything—and I mean everything—that Joe has related to me in doing this research has been spot on, so I believe this as well. You be the judge.
According to George Frenn, “One fateful night in August of 1962, Peter Lawford called George Frenn and said in a state of drunkenness: ‘They got her—she knew too damn much.’”
Marilyn Monroe and Six Degrees of Separation
The HER was none other than screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Why Lawford called Frenn is still unknown, but he was in a state of panic due to his unwitting involvement with the golden goddess and (of all people) the President of the United States.
Frenn and Lawford allegedly partied a bit and would talk on the phone from time to time.
This time, it was no casual bit of gossip.
Lawford was the last documented person to speak to Marilyn Monroe before her untimely suicide and the man who introduced her at Kennedy’s Democratic Convention when she sang “Happy Birthday Mister President.”
According to Peter Lawford, Marilyn’s unrealistic notions about becoming First Lady caused her to embarrass herself with both Kennedy brothers.
Her letters and telephone calls to them had become both tedious and horribly dangerous, both to their marriages and to national security.
Unlike Tiger Woods, who “limited” (if you can call it) his dalliances to cocktail waitresses, strippers and the like, the Kennedy’s were allegedly fooling around with the world’s #1 sex symbol.
There was every good reason for JFK and RFK to break off the relationship with Marilyn permanently.
What allegedly became so troublesome was Marilyn’s supposed rage at JFK’s rejection of her and the fear that she was able to strike at both brothers.
Many have posited that Marilyn Monroe was in a position to bring down the U.S. Presidency.
She was extremely knowledgeable of John F. Kennedy’s marital infidelities and other very sensitive private matters. She had his personal notes and letters and was privy to Kennedy’s involvement with famed Mafioso Sam Giancana.
On the night of Marilyn’s death, it is believed that Peter Lawford went to Marilyn’s house.
Purportedly in a state of panic, Lawford called brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy and explained what had occurred.
Shortly after, Lawford phoned a whole array of close and casual friends, among which was George Frenn of the Original Westside Barbell Club. Unbelievable, but true.
The thing to ponder is the sentence structure of Lawford’s slurring words to Frenn: “They GOT Her—she knew too much.”
The word “got” implies something other than the official cause of death for Monroe—an accidental overdose of the barbiturates, Nembutol and Chloral Hydrate.
It implies something so sinister as to boggle the mind, and this theory has been bandied about for close to 50 years—simply that Marilyn Monroe was murdered.
The word THEY is equally sinister: was it referring to the Mob, eager for payback to the Kennedy brothers for their ruthless persecution of them, or the CIA?
No one will know for sure, and if Frenn was alive today, he wouldn’t tell a soul. Like I said, “Six Degrees of Separation.” The legendary Marilyn Monroe, connected to the Rat Pack’s Lawford, connected to Frenn and finally connected to the grandmaster of the modern Westside Barbell Club, Louie Simmons. Totally and unquestionably weird.
From Muscle Power to Louie Simmons
Frenn and Peanuts were now the face of the club, officially, as Joe Di Marco, though still involved with the club, was getting busier and busier raising his six kids and running his machine shop.
In the late 60s, George got a gig writing for Joe Weider’s then-Muscle Power magazine as the “Powerlifting Editor.”
Weider was in the midst of his historic “muscle war” with Bob Hoffman of the York BBC and needed a vehicle to promote, one that Hoffman wanted little to do with.
This vehicle was the infant sport of powerlifting which Weider saw as being much more broad based than Olympic lifting, and because of its inherent roots to bodybuilding, he also saw it as a way to sell even more of his Crash Weight Gain 7, Super Pro-101, Enertol and weights.
Frenn, ever the iconoclast, took to this job like a duck to water and it wasn’t long before the Westside Barbell Club had an international forum.
Topping this off, Weider sponsored the first international powerlifting event that basically featured the Westside Barbell Club versus a team of British lifters including such luminaries as Ron Collins, Precious McKenzie, Bob Memery, and Mike McHugh.
Frenn squatted 819 at that meet, and later pushed that record up to the historic 853, in a picture which launched a thousand powerlifting careers.
He wrote some great articles for Weider back then like “Wrap up or Shut Up”—a progressive article on the use of wrapping and early supportive gear, “Westside Barbell Secrets of Squatting”—in which the Westside box squatting system was finally put in print and was read the world over.
I remember that issue well; I was a college student on vacation in Mexico with family and brought along a copy of that magazine on the train to while away the dreary hours.
Well, it simply mesmerized me, as it obviously did another individual in Ohio—Louie Simmons.
Louie will tell you that this particular article, above all, inspired him to try and box squats in his own training and, later, name his own gym in honor of the original club.
In 1972, George Frenn made the U.S. Olympic team going to Munich, and it was about this time that the Original Westside Club broke up and the guys went their own separate ways.
The incident that sparked this was the breakup of Peanut’s marriage, and his subsequent descent into the hellish depths of drug addiction.
Peanuts, ever a ladies man (even when married) had some extracurricular dalliances while out of town.
One fine day, one of those “dalliances” wrote him a rather explicit letter which his wife intercepted while Peanuts was out.
Upon reading it, she simply pinned it to the door of the bedroom for Peanuts to see—with a butcher knife.
Peanuts was told by the guys in the gym to lay low, and he took them to heart and simply disappeared for a spell.
By now, the guys at the club were into other things in their lives and the Westside Barbell Club of Culver City ceased to exist.
George bought the equipment and relocated it back to his parents home in North Hollywood, but it was never the same after that.
Peanuts drifted for a long time, losing a lot of weight, and becoming more and more embroiled in the octopus-like tentacles of drugs.
Sadly, he died alone and on the beach in 1986, some say the victim of an overdose. He was buried in a modest grave.
Were it not for the diligent efforts of another great California lifter, Bill Ennis, he would have remained lost.
Bill organized a fund raiser for Peanuts so he could have a proper headstone and organized a memorial service for him in 2005 attended by many of California’s great powerlifters.
The Westside Name Lives On
But the torch had been passed. George Frenn trained with a lot of folks after the club evaporated, including a young man from Ohio, and taught him the system of box squats, belly toss bench press, and assisted deadlifts.
This young man, Roger Estep, went on to break world records in the squat and total and to train with another group of lifters—the wild bunch of New Martinsville, WVA, including Luke Iams, Rickey Crain, Chuck Dunbar, Paul Sutphin and Jack Wilson.
Louie Simmons had named his club after the original in 1986, and used some of the basic theories of box squatting plus a lot of Eastern European methodologies to formulate what we now know as the highly successful modern Westside Conjugate System of training, with followers and adherents in practically every country of the world with a gym and a set of weights. The Westside Barbell name is alive and well, again.
George Frenn’s Final Years
George Frenn caused some controversy when he was one of the torchbearers for the Inaugural Gay Games held in San Francisco in 1982.
Some viewed it as his “outing” himself, while others just saw it as “George being George.”
Years later he would admit to Sports Illustrated that this was “the biggest mistake of my life.”
Frenn agreed to participate at the request of organizer Tom Waddell, a friend and fellow Olympian.
“I always had been a loner and done whatever I wanted, so I said yes,” he told SI. “All it did was wreck my reputation,” he says.
This controversy rages even today.
In 2006, George died, sadly by his own hand. Suffering from depression for many years, his demons, which accounted for his wild mood swings through the years and his many wild and unexplained outbursts finally caught up with him.
Despite all of this, he was honored by many, including Louie Simmons, who wrote a touching message in his online obituary guestbook.
“It is with deep regret the passing of George Frenn. He was a teacher and motivator of mine in the 1960s and the early 70s. He inspired me with his lifting, throwing, and most of all his knowledge he freely passed on in the old Muscle Power Builder magazine. Before George Frenn there was no one like him, and after his passing there will never be another like him.”
— Louie Simmons, 2006
Neosho Street, Years Later
The traffic around Neosho Street today is quiet.
Most of the young newlyweds who bought starter homes there in the early 60s are long gone, having moved to more upscale neighborhoods in Marina del Rey and Manhattan Beach, or to the McMansions in Orange County.
Some who bought for cash or paid their small mortgages off before the prices skyrocketed out of sight are still there, older, children of the 50s and 60s stubbornly clinging to memories of yesteryear—The Beatles, flower power and the psychedelic 60s.
A few, when questioned, may even remember the times over 40 years ago when their little neighborhood was invaded twice a week by a succession of giant men, inhumanly strong, who performed feats of unbelievable strength and marched to the beat of their own, peculiar drummer.
No one would have believed that the men in this garage gym could have touched the lives of millions of people, and in turn were touched by some of history’s most famous (and infamous) people.
Peanuts West… George Frenn… Jim Hamilton… Len Ingro… Bill Thurber… Pat Casey… Billy “Superstar” Graham… Joe Di Marco… Bob Tate… Oliver Sacks, MD… the ORIGINAL WESTSIDE BARBELL CLUB.
Source Powerlifting USA, June, 2010, 33-38.
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