 
In the Ring with Rena by Jeff Weinstock photos by Jeff Katz I lost her at hello.
Or maybe it was in the instant when she told me, “I’m extremely protective of what I say.” Good fences might make good neighbors, but they make lousy interviews.
So wary was Rena Mero the first time we spoke, you’d have thought she was being deposed. Between a constraining court settlement and an upcoming autobiography whose impact she wants to preserve, Mero offered me no more than she’d give a census form.
Even after a second interview went surprisingly well, and Mero was pleasant and cooperative, you sense that her earlier guardedness may not have been simply tactics. But after peering deeper, I realized there’s enough in her past to merit some touchiness.
A teenage bride who never completed high school, Mero became a battered wife, and eventually a widowed young mother. Sounds like an index of Jennie Garth roles, but instead this improbable prelude led to Mero’s three-year stint as Sable, the brawny bombshell of the World Wrestling Federation. The role made her the biggest draw in the show, a TV-ratings cinch. It brought her wealth, fame, opportunity, and another thing she had never had: a lot to lose.
“Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?” from Hannah and Her Sisters
I don’t get wrestling, the way I don’t get karaoke or Kevin Costner. I don’t get people who get wrestling is more to the point. They say it’s not a sport, it’s a show. From what I can tell, it’s not a sport and it’s not a show.
But even I got Sable. Big blond hair. Dynamite body. Thigh-high black boots, hot pants, bikini top. She was Wonder Woman crossed with Farrah.
It was a big accident the way it all started. When her husband, Marc Mero, joined the WWF, Rena attended the contract signing. WWF chieftain Vince McMahon took one look at her, christened her Sable, and signed her on as a valet, escorting Marc to the ring. Soon, she was made Marc’s manager, the only discernible difference between the two jobs being that her get-ups got racier.
At one show, the WWF writers rigged up a mock catfight between Mero and another female manager. The crowd ate it up. To take it further, McMahon arranged a women’s wrestling division. At the time, there had been little interest in women’s wrestling; until then, there had been no Sable. The boxing equivalent would be if a ring girl strapped on the gloves.
Mero’s popularity as Sable effectively installed her as the female champion. Cable numbers zoomed, magazine covers multiplied, talk-show invitations backlogged.
Mero’s unease with her character’s direction had begun long before she went public. “When I first started out as Sable,” she says, “I wore an evening gown, and I wore it for almost an entire year. So I was not always this sexual character. I said for a long time that I had been feeling very uncomfortable with the things I was being asked to do. But when your boss tells you that you have to do this, you have to do it. And it’s not just your boss; you’re signed to a contract that says that you will do what they tell you to do. But when they finally came to me and said, ‘Now we want you to appear naked on TV,’ I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
Still even worse-received was Mero’s objection to losing her bra in the ring because she didn’t want to be topless in front of an audience made up of so many children.
“It wasn’t just one thing,” Mero says. “It was a continuation of things, and it progressively got worse. You reach a point where you just say: ‘I can’t go any further. This is not where I want my career to go, and I’m not willing to do this anymore.’”
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“It’s just mind candy, that’s all it is,” a friend explained. “When I come home from a long day at work and I’m pissed off at the world, I just watch a little wrestling, I feel a little better, and then I go to sleep. And I like watching the hot women on the show, too.”
Last summer, after more than a year of strained relations with the WWF, Mero sued in an effort to be released from her contract. The suit describes wrestling as “obscene, titillating, vulgar, and unsafe,” and relates how Mero was asked to take Sable into territory that she could not tolerate: being stripped of her bra during a match, engaging in a lesbian scenario. She said she was being victimized off-stage as well, by jealousy that manifested itself in feces being placed in her gym bag, the scrawling of a beard and mustache on her picture in the lobby of the WWF offices, and physical threats from other wrestlers.