In June, the night before Joanie "Chyna" Laurer's memorial, her friends gathered at a Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Porn star Ron Jeremy showed up in Crocs and slurped soup next to an elderly man in a Hawaiian shirt, and Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof wrapped his arm around his sometime-girlfriend, working girl Caressa Kisses. In between bites of pad Thai and curry, they were hypothesizing what had caused their friend's death.
Medically speaking, Chyna died of an overdose of alcohol and prescription drugs. Her body was found on April 20. News broke the next day, 12 hours before TMZ reported the death of Prince, one of several icons, from David Bowie to Muhammad Ali to Fidel Castro, whose memorials overshadowed Chyna's in the last year. Her afterlife has lacked the obituaries and lengthy journalistic inquiries into her legacy that typically follow a celebrity's passing. In death, Chyna was not remembered as a groundbreaking female athlete, although she was the first woman to compete against men in the WWF (now known as the WWE); became the number-one contender, or runner-up, in the Heavyweight Championship; and twice won the league's second-most prestigious title, the Intercontinental Championship, a feat she shares with icons like Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson and Stone Cold Steve Austin. No other woman has won it to this day. She did for wrestling what Joan Rivers did for comedy.
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