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In March, before the April show, Raven went on TV and declared his intention to come to ECW. "My purpose is simple," he said. "I'm going to get Tommy Dreamer. Tommy Dreamer and I went to camp together. Dreamer was always popular, and I was never popular. This is what happens when you are an only child, with an abusive drunk father who beats on you. No one wants to hang out with you. 'Hey, let's go to Raven's house. No, no his father might beat me up, too.' When I was in camp I had a girl. She was the fat girl at camp. Tommy Dreamer and I fought over this girl. And you know what, Tommy Dreamer? I never forgave you for stealing her, and I promise you, you will feel my pain."
The "fat" girl turned out to be a beautiful woman named Trisa Hayes, who was born March 14, 1969, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She got into wrestling briefly in 1988 in Stampede Wrestling in Calgary, as Brian Pillman's sister. She was dating Pillman at the time. In 1995, while attending a Super Bowl party in Miami with baseball player Ron Gant, Hayes, who had appeared in Penthouse and other magazines, met Raven and told him she wanted to get back into wrestling. Paul saw the magazine layouts, and, on Raven's recommendation, invited her to ECW to be a character called Beulah McGillicutty.
"She was so ridiculously hot and had this innocent, sweet face, and I knew this was the perfect way for Raven to become the all-around heel," Heyman says. "We would have him be abusive toward her, and everyone will want to see Raven get his ass kicked."
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Dreamer was scheduled to face Raven for the first time at the April 8 show. Beulah McGillicutty made her debut as well. She took a can of hair spray and sprayed it in Dreamer's face, and Raven hit Dreamer with the DDT and won the match. They matched up a week later at the arena, and it was a raucous bout, even by ECW standards. A bloody Dreamer laid Raven out on the canvas with a chair and the referee, and was about to give Raven the DDT when Beulah, wearing a schoolgirl outfit, came in and started pounding Dreamer on the back. Dreamer turned around and grabbed Beulah by the ears, picked her up to put her in a piledriver, and of course the schoolgirl skirt was down and showed her pink panties. He turned her to all four sides of the arena and the fans went crazy. Dreamer piledrived Beulah in the middle of the ring, and stood over Beulah and Raven.
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In the strange world of wrestling, strange things happen. Seven years later, Beulah — Trisa Hayes — married Tommy Dreamer. "We were just friends when I first met her," Dreamer says. "I really didn't like her. Most of the greatest stuff in wrestling is stolen. I remember Jerry Lawler piledriving Rick Rude's valet. That is what I wanted to do. That was why we did it. She got over as well on her own. She was trying to be a heel, but she was a hot girl, and this was Philadelphia, and they just accepted her as a babyface."
Women — beautiful women — were a big part of ECW, and there were a number of them who became stars in the promotion besides Beulah. There was Woman, Elektra, Dawn Marie, Kimona Wanalaya, and a former Catholic school cheerleader from Philadelphia native Francine Fournier, who was known in ECW as "Francine, Queen of Extreme."
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The Dreamer-Raven feud took an unprecedented turn when ECW introduced the issue of pregnancy into the storyline, claiming Beulah McGillicutty was pregnant. Beulah made this revelation public while arguing with Stevie Richards — Raven's lackey — in the ring.
"That night was amazing," Dreamer recalls. "When Raven heard that she was pregnant, he turned and blasted Stevie Richards, who was always nice to Beulah, and she said, 'It's not him.' And then she pauses and says, 'It's Tommy's.' The place lit up and it was like a soap opera."
When Beulah said the baby was Dreamer's, Raven pushed her into a corner, grabbed her by the hair and started choking her. Of course, Dreamer came into the ring to rescue Beulah and started pounding on Raven. "As I was beating him up, a fan handed me a blueberry pie," Dreamer says. "I took a big bite out of it, DDT'd him and laid him out, and left wit hthe girl."
The angle went on for a while, and, since Beulah wasn't really pregnant, at some point they had to find a way out of the pregnancy storyline. "Either we are going to have to take her off TV for six months and then come back and says she gave birth, or we are going to have to get out of this," Heyman remembers. "In the meantime, we are going to split Kimona [who once did a striptease on top of the ECW arena to keep the fans happy while the ring was being repaired] away from Raven, because she was becoming a real pain in the ass. We were going to phase her out. We came up wit ha thing with Shane Douglas, to get him into a three-way feud with Raven and Dreamer."
"I have a match with Raven coming up," Douglas said in a TV promo. "Just so everyone understands, I am not Tommy Dreamer's best friend. I want to fight Tommy Dreamer. And I know a secret about Tommy Dreamer that he doesn't want to hear — that Beulah McGillicutty has been cheating on Tommy Dreamer. And I know the truth about the pregnancy. I am going to tell everybody the truth at the arena before my match with Raven." The last thing you heard on TV before the match was Raven saying, "I just found out what the secret is, and I still love Beulah McGillicutty, and I want her back. No matter what you have done, if Dreamer won't accept you, I'll take you back."
Following that, before Raven and Douglas fought for the ECW Championship at the arena in Philadelphia, Douglas, with Beulah, Dreamer, Raven and Kimona in the ring right him, grabbed the mike and dropped the bomb.
"I'm going to tell the secret. Beulah McGillicutty is cheating on Tommy Dreamer."
"Who is he?" Dreamer asked.
"Oh, it is not a he, Tommy Dreamer, it is not a he," Douglas said.
Then Kimona Ran over to the mike and yelled, "It's me."
The place was in an uproar. Kimona walked over to the corner where Beulah was standing, and Beulah rabbed her and gave her a passionate kiss as they fell to the canvas. They were rolling and kissing on the mat when Dreamer picked them both up, with the fans chanting, "ECW! ECW!"
Dreamer was holding both of them by the hair, one in each hand.
"What do you say, Dreamer?" Douglas asked.
"I'll take them both on, hardcore," Dreamer declared, and he planted kisses on both women, with the fans roaring their approval at this scene.
Little did anyone know that the lesbian kiss nearly proved to be the kiss of death for ECW.
"We built up that lesbian kiss," Heyman explains. "Just as Beulah comes out, she grabs her by the face, the screen freezes, the show ends, and we put across the screen, 'To Be Continued,' which had never been done in wrestling before. None of the station managers knew where I was heading with this. This was in the days before the Internet, where everything you are going to see on TV winds up on the Internet. It wasn't as widespread. They didn't know what was coming. They aired the cliffhanger of what happens next. They don't realize what happens next. They think one of the girls is going to get hit by a chair or something. That is what ECW is all about, right? So when the next episode arrives at the station, they didn't even really pay attention to it. All of a sudden late Friday night they are airing the show, and someone in the control room says, 'Hey, we got a lesbian kiss going on here.'
"One by one these station managers are calling up and saying, 'We can't air this.' The backlash was devestating. We got thrown off everything. Joe Talnoid, the station manager at MSG television network, had his right-hand man, Paulie Arnold, call Steve Karel and said, 'We are canceling your contract, you are off MSG. You have violated our content standards.' Once MSG threw us off, then nearly everyone followed suit. We got thrown off about 90 percent of our stations.
"We lost everything but Philadelphia, and maybe Wichita, and a few other stations, and everyone else threw us off, no matter how much we were paying," Heyman recalls. "Some stations let us back on pretty fast, but others didn't. MSG didn't let us back on for six months. I had to find other stations. I had to go to TV 31. WE had to shop our show around after MSG threw us off. We lost Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo."
Heyman, who was often ahead of the cultural curve, was caught off guard by the reaction to the lesbian kiss. "I didn't see that coming. I knew it would be controversial. I figured it would cost us a couple of stations. I couldn't believe the reaction. This was under the Clinton administration. This wasn't a repressive era. Female homosexuality was not seen on television yet. But we ended up getting it all back."
As Beulah was an integral part of this storyline, so were mant women in ECW. The promotion made much use of the women as sex symbols in various roles, from valets to wrestlers. There was Woman, Beulah, Francine, Kimona, Dawn Marie, Electra, Lita, Missy Hyatt, Tammy Lynn Sytch, and Jazz, among others.
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The collaboration certainly created a buzz for both promotions. "It was good for both," Ron Buffone remembers, "It was good for the talent because they got a chance to showcase their talent. It was good for World Wrestling Federation because they got a chance to show us, and it was good for ECW, because it brought ECW into the mainstream."
The cross promotion took a big step at the February 24, 1997, Monday Night Raw at the Manhattan Center in New York. Heyman, Raven, Tazz, Tommy Dreamer, Beulah, the Dudleyz, the Eliminators, Sandman and the Blue World Order appeared on the show.
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Heyman also wanted to fire Bill Alfonso, but Fonzie, as he was called, was very popular with the ECW wrestlers. He managed to save his job by putting on a memorable match — man on woman. "We all loved Fonzie and didn't want to see him go," Dreamer says. "He had a great match with Beulah McGillicutty and it saved his job."
The match took place on As Good As It Gets, on September 20, 1997, at the ECW Arena, and it was a bloody brawl. At one point, Alfonso's face was bloodied as Beulah beat on him in the corner. Alfonso then beat on Beulah in the corner. Later both of them were outside the ring, and Beulah threw Alfonso over the steel guardrail. Then, with Alfonso lying head down, hung over the ropes in a corner, Beulah took a chair and laid it across Alfonso's face. She ran to the other corner and then ran back and slid feet-first into the chair on Alfonso. The fans went wild, chanting "ECW! ECW!" Later Alfonso tried to bodyslam Beulah but she took his legs and caught his head, flipping him over on his back. She lay on top of the bloody Alfonso and got the pin and the win.
"Beulah McGillicutty was involved in five of the most intense minutes in ECW when she had that match with Bill Alfonso," Heyman recalls. "They beat the crap out of each other. They had a phenomenal match. Here's Beulah, who was not a wrestler, and here's Bill Alfonso, who was 135 pounds and a former referee, and these guys had an amazing fight, and to this day, if you ask me to name one of the hardest-hitting battles in ECW, it ranks right up there with anything else I have ever seen."