I sat listening to his rant, wondering how to deal with it, and decided all I could sensibly do was sit tight until the eruption of anger abated. I tried to analyse what had caused it and came to the conclusion it might have been a fear of being asked to read the offending passage from the Schulberg book, which he would have found a problem because the most extraordinary fact about this remarkable man is that he is semi-literate.
I asked him about his reading difficulties; he said, ‘I study life, I study people and I’m educated on this, but when it comes to reading and writing I’m not. I may be illiterate in that but when it comes to common sense . . . I’m rich.’
The interview lurched to an end with both of us sitting back in our seats displaying the kind of body language that left no doubt about what one was thinking of the other. After the show there was no kissy-kissy, you-were-marvellous-darling farewells. He left with his entourage without a goodbye and I remember feeling, regretfully, that it would be unlikely if we met again.
I went to my dressing room where I sat wondering just what had happened and why. I felt I had been clumsy in my approach to the question about his white friends and further concerned that the outburst it had provoked might alienate a part of the audience who had hitherto adored him. My concern was based on the belief I have that, while Ali’s faith is genuine, he was exploited as a propaganda outlet by people whose extreme views he might have echoed but never espoused.
I was thinking all these things when there was a knock on my dressing-room door. It was my father, who had been in the audience. As usual he came to the point.
‘What do you reckon then?’ he asked.
‘Not much, Dad,’ I said.
‘Nor do I.’ Then he said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’
I nodded.
‘What was up with you tonight, our Michael?’
‘What do you mean? What on earth could I have done?’
‘Why didn’t you thump him?’ said my father.
I looked at him for a full minute, at the angry determination in his face, and then I started laughing.
I did, in fact, meet Ali once more. Seven years later he came to London to promote a movie and we thought it might be a good idea to have him on the show with Freddie Starr, who, at the time, was more famous as an entertainer than someone who ate a hamster. In the years since our Mayfair encounter Ali had won and lost the world title. There were worrying reports about his health. His doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, had resigned four years earlier in 1977, having lost the argument with Ali’s advisors that he should stop fighting to avoid serious neurological damage.
He fought Larry Holmes in October 1980 and was badly beaten. It was revealed after that fight that he had been examined at the Mayo Clinic some time before, when it was noted he was slurring his speech and his mobility was ‘restrained’. Two months after the beating from Holmes, Ali sat down opposite me at the BBC Studios for what was to prove the final, and my favourite, encounter.
First impressions were not good. He didn’t shuffle on to the set, but he was slower and bulkier. The features were bloated, the physique thickened, the voice jaded and slightly slurred.
‘I’m tired, man,’ he said, as he sat down, as if to explain what might follow.
What did ensue was mellow in comparison to our other encounters. The interview had an autumnal quality, a sense that we were both older and more reflective. The fact was we were both on our way out. I was leaving the BBC and moving on, and Ali, for all his talk about continuing his career, was face to face for the first time with his own mortality. He wouldn’t, of course, contemplate retiring. He was talking about the rematch with Holmes.
I asked if he wasn’t concerned about Ferdie Pacheco’s view that he could end up with brain damage. Pacheco had told him, ‘You are going to be a shambling wreck. Go to the gym and see these guys that talk funny, that’s going to be you.’
Ali said, ‘If I had a low IQ I’d enjoy this interview.’ He went on to argue that the very nature of his profession meant he was a risk-taker. ‘Look at my face. Twenty-seven years of fighting and not a mark,’ he said, ignoring the fact that what we couldn’t see and were concerned about was the damage done behind the mask.
We talked about alternative careers. He had just made a feature film, so what about acting?
‘I’ve been acting ever since we first met,’ he said.
He was on the show to promote a film called
Freedom Road
. In it Ali played a slave who went on to become a politician. It wasn’t very good. On the other hand, its première in London was the most memorable I have ever attended. Ali was seated in the front row of the balcony, surrounded by his Black Muslim entourage, and in the row behind sat his special guests, including Daley Thompson and Freddie Starr. Ali kept up a running commentary during the movie, nudging his neighbours or turning to tell us, ‘Watch this scene now, man. This is great.’
Towards the end of the film, with a white-haired Ali on his death bed, he turned to us and said, ‘This is a real sad scene. So watch carefully.’
Thus instructed, we watched Ali die a death more melodramatic than poignant, and as we did so the breathless silence was broken by a loud fart, which seemed to come from the right of the balcony, then another, which came from the left, and another from directly behind the great man where sat Freddie Starr. A gifted impressionist, one of Mr Starr’s unspoken talents was to make the sound of a person breaking wind and to throw it across a room, thereby avoiding detection. His efforts on this occasion caused consternation on the front row with Ali’s entourage scanning the balcony for the perpetrator of such a dastardly outrage.
Starr’s appearance on the show with Ali was a calculated risk, but we just about got away with it, mainly because Ali was the only man in the world whom Starr would concede was more interesting than himself. On the show Freddie started as he meant to go on. ‘All my family were boxers except my father,’ he said, as he sat down. I fell for it. ‘What’s he?’ I asked. ‘A cocker spaniel,’ he said.
During a section imitating singers, at which he is brilliant, Freddie pulled a black stocking over his face, donned dark glasses and did a Ray Charles impression. I was horrified. There were stirrings among Ali’s entourage in the audience. Ali looked at me, smiled and shook his head.
If he was angry he didn’t show it but he certainly had his revenge later on when, during a break, with Freddie dancing round the studio saying he was faster and prettier than Ali and was going to whup him, Ali stood and whispered to me, ‘Get behind me and grab my arms.’ I did so and he pretended to struggle free as Freddie – who, by now, had convinced himself he was a real contender – was shadow boxing in Ali’s face. Ali said to me, ‘Let go,’ and, as I did, he glided forward and flashed five left jabs around Freddie’s head, each missing him by centimetres. Any punch, had it connected, would have caused serious damage to Mr Starr’s smile. Freddie calmed down after that.
Starr’s demise as an entertainer was particularly sad for those of us who believed he had it in him to be one of the truly great all-rounders. I saw his club act, before his valium addiction addled his talent and confused his personality, and he possessed a virtuosity equalled by only a very few entertainers.
After meeting on the show, Ali adopted Freddie as his new best friend. At one point at the party after the première of the film, Ali was to be seen working the room with Freddie tucked under his arm like a trophy.
Liam Neeson, the actor, told me of being in the line-up to meet Ali and, as the great man approached, thinking of what he might say to him, how he might distil into a few words his true admiration. When Ali finally appeared in front of him and shook his hand all he could blurt out was, ‘Pleased to meet you. I think I love you.’
Ali went on to fight once more. He lost to Trevor Berbick and was punished by a fighter whose presence in the same ring as Ali was in itself the most pertinent indication of the great boxer’s decline. Two year after fighting Berbick, Ali came under the care of Dr Stanley Fahn at the Columbian Presbyterian Medical Center. Dr Fahn diagnosed Ali’s condition as ‘Post-traumatic Parkinsonism due to injuries from fighting’.
He went on to explain Ali’s condition: ‘My assumption is that his physical condition resulted from repeated blows to the head over time . . . Also since Parkinsonism causes, among other things, slowness of movement, one can question whether the beating Muhammad took in his last few fights was because . . . he couldn’t move as quickly and thus was more susceptible to being hit.’
Ali is not the first fighter, nor will he be the last, to have his life blighted by his occupation. We can debate until kingdom come who takes the blame but ultimately, in the case of Muhammad Ali, the real reason he fought for so long was that which made him a great champion: his indomitable courage, unyielding resolve, unquenchable willpower. To expect him to take a careful approach to his life, to work solidly and cautiously towards a pension, is to misunderstand the soul of the prize-fighter. You might as well require a racehorse to finish its days pulling an ice-cream cart as a pensionable occupation.
There are those who need to examine the part they played in observing his downfall and wonder if they could have persuaded him to quit sooner than he did. But then again, Ali told Dr Fahn that he thought the damage had started in the third fight with Frazier in Manila, some time before the first manifestations of slurred speech and a physical slowing down. Moreover anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Ali would attest to the implacable quality of his willpower.
Arguably, the athlete who was boxing’s greatest figure is also the sport’s biggest tragedy. The lesson for boxing is that if a fighter as great as Ali can be affected by the sport, then no one is safe. We didn’t meet again after 1981. In 2000, when Ali was voted Sportsman of the Millennium, I was asked to present him with his award at the BBC TV Centre. I refused because I didn’t want to encounter at close quarters that once glorious man now wrecked by a terrible illness.
I felt, wrongly perhaps, I couldn’t celebrate that which had brought about his downfall. The fact is, as the years went by, I grew to admire and like him more and more, and never more than on that last occasion we met when I observed him dealing with his diminishing faculties with faultless courage and humour. I wanted to remember him as he once was and as he described himself: ‘When will they ever have another fighter who writes poems, predicts rounds, beats everybody, makes people laugh, makes people cry, and is as tall and extra pretty as me? In the history of the world and from the beginning of time, there’s never been another fighter like me.’
Nor, I venture, will there ever be.
25
EMU AND MEG RYAN
When asked to define the talk show I said it was an unnatural act performed by consenting adults in public. That was at the beginning of my stint and now, looking back on more than six hundred shows and nearly two thousand guests, I see no reason to change my mind. It is an unnatural act because the basic premise is so daunting. The guest is told that the simple task is to sit opposite the interviewer and chat about themselves and, providing the interviewer showered that morning, and bothered to do the research, there is no reason why it should be anything other than an agreeable experience.
All you have to do, they tell you, is relax. What they don’t tell you is how to relax when the band starts playing and you walk on in front of five hundred witnesses in the studio and millions watching at home, with a microphone stuck into every orifice and the lighting generating sufficient heat to give the sweat glands a nudge.
I always felt a great deal of sympathy for the guests as they walked on, particularly the first-timers. You could see the concern in their eyes; sense their confusion at finding themselves in a strange environment. With very few exceptions every guest would take a while to settle, to relax into a working partnership with the host. My first job was to convince them they were going to enjoy the next hour of their life and it would take me only a couple of minutes to discern whether or not the interview was going to work.
A talk show is a consensual act between host and guest and if one or the other won’t play, then the result is a disaster, and I have had my fair share of those. It says something for the nature of the job that, at the end of a lengthy stint interviewing some of the most famous people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you are mainly remembered for calamities rather than triumphs.
If I am to list my disasters in terms of those that provoke most street reaction, then it would be the Emu in first place, followed closely by Meg Ryan.
The Emu occurred in 1975 in a show that starred agony aunt Anna Raeburn, Billy Connolly and Rod Hull and his pet. I feared I might be attacked but was quite unprepared by the ferocity of the creature on Rod’s arm. There were warning signs in the make-up room where the bird sat on Rod’s knee and divided its time between snarling at me and leering at the make-up girl.
It has long been my belief that people who make a living by sticking their hands up the backsides of emus and other creatures, not to mention dolls, are not like the rest of us. Also it is strange how we, the victims, tolerate their behaviour. I remember one performer – I will not mention his name – who, with a puppet on his hand, spent his entire time in make-up touching the girls in intimate places. Had I done the same I would, quite rightly, have been locked up. In his case, all the girls did was giggle and say, ‘Naughty boy,’ as if it was some living mischievous pet stroking their bums and worse.
Of course, it only works if you believe in the artifice and I have been as guilty as any in falling into the trap. For instance, when I interviewed Miss Piggy I convinced myself that I was in love with the Pig and she would leave Kermit and share my dressing room at the BBC.