Beaver Cleavage and his mother, Mrs. Cleavage.
Last week, the WWE Universe saw the return of the Headbangers to Smackdown Live as part of the ongoing tournament to crown the inaugural tag team champions of the brand. Both Mosh and Thrasher will always be remembered most fondly for the work they’ve done as a team, but there was a brief time when the former pursued a career as a singles competitor. The results were…strange.
In the spring of 1999, Headbanger Thrasher suffered a knee injury that put him on the shelf for a few months. To their credit, the WWF decided to keep Mosh on TV, repackaging him as a 1950’s throwback named Beaver Cleavage. The character, named as an homage to the TV show Leave it to Beaver, was one of the more disturbing ones of the late Attitude Era. Coming to the ring with a black and white filter applied on WWE television, not unlike the Vaudevillians today, Beaver was seldom seen without his “mother,” Mrs. Cleavage. The woman who portrayed her, Marianna Komlos, was less than two years older than her “son.”
The relationship between Beaver Cleavage and his mother was rife with incestuous innuendo. It wasn’t uncommon for her to hold him close to her breast, the way a mother might cradle an actual child. She’d offer him “mother’s milk” to help him feel better in defeat. There was even a segment when she patted his lap to clean up a spilt drink, while he stared into the camera and slyly raised his eyebrows to the audience as if to say that he’d intended on getting his mother into that position the whole time. It was unsettling. Luckily, the character only stuck around for one match (much like the subject of last week’s Ghastly Gimmicks). In Beaver’s lone contest, he earned a victory over Christian. The character was written off of television when Beaver Cleavage declared the gimmick a failure during a backstage segment, seemingly breaking kayfabe, and walked off screen.
Shortly thereafter, the man who portrayed Beaver Cleavage returned with a new look, wrestling in boxer shorts. He also began going by his actual first name (no last name required) – Chaz. He still had Mrs. Cleavage with him, although it was revealed that she was not his mother, but had really been his girlfriend all along. Great. The couple began a program in which it was heavily implied that Chaz was physically abusing her, which was as uncomfortable a gimmick as the preceding one. Luckily, when his knee healed, Thrasher returned to supply evidence that Chaz was innocent of any domestic violence allegations by way of G-TV footage that showed his girlfriend applying bruises to herself with makeup. With his name cleared, the former Beaver Cleavage reunited with his former partner and the Headbangers returned to the tag team division. Chaz was dead. Long live Mosh.
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