Norman Mailer grapples with Muhammad Ali.

by Hugh Gilmore

The one and only time I met Muhammad Ali I also met Joey Giardello, the former middleweight boxing champ from East Passyunk. Joey made a bigger impression on me. That’s because he nearly got me in trouble with my boss down at Penn, Erving Goffman.

I worked for Goffman at the time by spying and eavesdropping on famous people so I could tell him about them. His appetite for that stuff was insatiable and I was trying to make him notice me. I had come under his wing because he had written “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” It was a famous book then. He said, like Shakespeare, that all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. But he meant it for real and he showed the many ways in which we create a sense of self, both societally and personally, by role-playing our way through life.

For saying stuff like that over and over in many books he was given an endowed Benjamin Franklin Chair at Penn, and he ruled supreme. He was so brilliant he got away with being one of the nastiest persons ever allowed to teach students in West Philly. He asked us one day to name the spy-job we’d do for him. I stepped up and said I wanted to spy on my fellow students by observing them in the library commons room. He backhanded me verbally by saying every jackass in the world wanted to go in the library, dorm, or cafeteria. “Get out in the real world, son.”

OK, I thought, I’ll find the real world and penetrate it. But where? I needed a place where people talked. Somewhere I could look to see, Goffman-style, if what they said, and if the characters and personas they presented, were all an act. I’d notice how they prepped for their roles, what props they used, and what stylistic tics they employed to present themselves as “real” though they were merely selling an image.

I decided to study a TV talk show, but simply watching television would not be enough. I’d have to get backstage if I wanted to see how the guests on these shows prepped to create a “self” they’d present. Fortunately for me, a nationally popular television talk show originated here in Philly, down on 3rd Street at the KYW television studio. This show was called “The Mike Douglas Show.” It broadcast live (usually) every weekday.

The show featured an amiable former pop singer (Mike Douglas) as host and offered a standard array of guests: celebrities, performers, authors and politicians. While most of the guests were there to promote or “plug” something they’d benefit by, they pretended they’d just dropped by to see their friend Mike because they were in the neighborhood. It was a perfect example of staged “natural” conversation.

I called the studio, told them I was a young scholar and wanted to visit backstage. I was given a one-day pass. That short tour was interesting, but I needed more than one visit, so I paid attention to how people got past the single security guard at the stage door. His name was, let’s say, Charlie. I chatted with him that day and told him I’d be coming around a lot. The next day I walked down the ramp at the studio, my shirt-sleeves rolled up, wearing sunglasses, and carrying a clipboard, like the real employees. I Think I even wore a pencil behind my ear. I walked briskly toward the entrance saying, “Morning Charlie,” as I went by. It worked. I went backstage to the Green Room, the place where the show’s guests waited to go on stage.

My presentation of a fake self had worked, but was a bit nerve-wracking because I expected to get caught any day. I worked hard, knowing that any day’s notes might be my last. I also carried a dummy notebook in case someone wanted to confiscate my “data.”

After two weeks I got lucky and ran into a young woman I’d worked with in the library when I’d gone to La Salle College (now a university). She was now an executive producer for the Mike Douglas show. When I told her what I was doing she took me around to meet the costumers, makeup people, assistant producers and so on who made the show work.

The guests were new every day, people like Bob Hope, Louis Nye, Captain Kangaroo, William F. Buckley, Robert Klein, Bruce Dern, Amy Vanderbilt, Roy Clark, Ben Vereen, Cicely Tyson, and so on. There were usually three celebrities a day, plus entertainers (singers, cooking demos, fashion experts, so on), and all those people never gave a thought to whether I actually belonged in the Green Room. I became part of the wallpaper. Some weeks I caught all five shows, sometimes only one, usually arriving around noon and staying till about 6 or 7 p.m.

The show and incident I’m talking about here happened during a rare night taping (for later broadcast). It was a boxing-themed special. Mike’s co-host all week had been Rocky Graziano, the former Middleweight Boxing Champ (and subject of the movie based on his bestselling memoir, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” starring Paul Newman as Rocky).

Graziano was a very likeable, funny, lively guy. The other guests that night were Muhammad Ali (taller and wider than a door), his younger brother, Bahaman Ali (taller and wider than two doors!), Tony Zale (another champion middleweight who’d fought three famous title fights against Graziano), and Norman Mailer, who had achieved great celebrity as one of the best boxing writers in the world. Also along was Rocky Graziano’s pal Joey Giardello, the pride of South Philly in his day.

That was all great. Shouts of “Hey Champ!” And Norman Mailer making fistic poses against the boxers. Such energy enters the room when a champion fighter walks in. It was captivating. Handshakes all around, posing for photos beside these great boxers. A lot of fun.

But then: In the midst of all the fuss when the champs arrived, my notebook disappeared. Did somebody take it? Somebody who feared what I might be writing. But who? I looked around. The only person who put on a look of feigned innocence every time I looked his way was Pal Joey. He gave me that “Hey, don’t look at me, kid” look. What could I say? What could I do? The Green Room was full of famous people, all being loud. I stood there in panic, knowing Goffman would eat me alive if I tried saying the dog ate my homework.

-- To be continued next week

Hugh Gilmore is the author of two good beach reads available through Amazon: “Malcolm’s Wine” tells the tale of a father about to avenge the theft of something that belonged to his dead son. He stumbles into the world of stolen rare books when he goes after two redneck meth freaks, a sexy country mama, and a giant, scholarly freak who is jealous of him.“Last Night on the Gorilla Tour” is a twisted love triangle set in Virginia and Tennessee in 1920s. Guaranteed entertainment.