Every day at work, it’s the same-old, same-old for Steve Wilkos: Roll into the office around noon, check e-mail, watch a little MSNBC, shoot the breeze, then spend the rest of the afternoon preventing sad, angry, disturbed people from publicly pulverizing one another.
It’s not that different from his former job as a Chicago cop. Except that on “The Jerry Springer Show” — where the 41-year-old, 6-foot-3, 225-pound Wilkos is the onstage director of security — nobody is allowed to carry a gun. Also, Springer pays a lot better than Mayor Daley ever did. And let’s face it: The job, which started out as a moonlighting gig to earn extra money, has made Wilkos a pop-cultural icon. But Wilkos demurs.
“Jerry’s the big star. I’m more like everybody’s friend,” he said recently while we were hanging around in his office before the show’s 3 p.m. taping. And that’s part of the reason he left the police force after 12 years to join Springer full time: too much love and recognition from all the fans. “Steve!” a perp once said to Officer Wilkos, who’d knocked on his door during a domestic disturbance call. “What are you doing here?”
“I would say more people know who I am than George Bush,” Wilkos said, not in a braggy way but a matter-of-fact way, even though it was clearly preposterous. “Do you think people are watching CNN?” he asked, in his low, gravelly voice. “No. They’re watching us.”
To Wilkos — a former Marine and Lane Tech High School grad who grew up the son of a police officer in Chicago — George W. Bush, despite being less popular, is the “best president in the world” (three autographed pictures of him hang on Wilkos’ door) and Springer is the nicest man you’ll ever meet (“he has impeccable manners”). But the luckiest guy in the world? That would be Wilkos himself.
“I love to come to work, I love the show,” he says. He’s surrounded by friends (including four Chicago cops he hired), he works three days a week, with summers off. Sitting on his desk was another $132 royalty check from his appearance in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” And some chiropractor from Atlanta has just called about him doing a commercial (“Will you call him back? That’s a good one,” he told his publicist, on speaker phone.)
Those sorts of opportunities are plentiful and flattering, but none of them beats his appearance, in cartoon form, on “The Simpsons.” “Jerry was on, and I broke up a fight between Homer and an alien,” he says.
Wilkos’ office is crammed with a big desk, a big television and memorabilia from his 11 years on the job, including a museumlike installation of autographed sports jerseys (Luis Gonzalez, Ray Durham, Alex Brown, Greg Maddux) and a framed photo of himself dressed in a Yankees uniform, even though he roots and has season tickets for the Cubs (“Jerry took us to baseball fantasy camp; he’s a Yankees fan,” he said). And there are gifts from Wilkos’ own fans: a somber pastel portrait that makes him look like a James Bond villain (“That was before I laid off the cheeseburgers,” he said), and a couple of paintings — you might call them fantasias — from an Australian woman he’s never met, in which she and Wilkos are entangled in the nude, suspended in space.
Not long ago, Wilkos’ bulletin board featured unsolicited photos of naked female fans, an apparently common come-on. These days it’s covered with photos of his adorable 2-year-old daughter, Ruby, who has white-blond hair and tremendous blue eyes. (He also has a son, Jack, born June 19.)
A family man
“Are you sure you want that to get out?” asked his eavesdropping publicist, referring to the heretofore unpublicized piece of groupie-deterring gossip that Wilkos is — oh, no — a great big family man (which I would have figured out when his pretty blond wife, the supervising producer for the show, walked into the room and said, “What are Ruby’s sunglasses doing in here?”).
But Wilkos didn’t mind. The expression on his tough-guy face, which seems perpetually blase thanks to his heavy-lidded eyes, immediately lights up if you mention his family. And if that means fewer groupies and fewer photos of naked strangers, then so be it.
This wife and baby topic was the only issue that anyone I met seemed to find the least bit controversial, which was a little surreal; we were, after all, in the offices of “The Jerry Springer Show.” Hell-lo-ho.
The clock struck 3-ish — time to start taping — and Wilkos stripped to the waist, pulled on a black Jerry Springer T-shirt, then added his official Jerry Springer bowling shirt. He removed his Rolex watch and replaced it with a cheaper timepiece that wouldn’t be missed much if it got bashed to smithereens.
I was offered a seat in the front row of the packed studio, just a few inches from the back-alley stage set, right next to Wilkos’ empty chair, which he and the other security guards use like the bench during a basketball game: If there’s no action, they park it there for a breather.
You’re really not allowed to sit here unless you promise to “react,” meaning stand and chant Jer-Ree! Jer-ree! Jer-ree!, and a few other things I won’t repeat and would never actually say, when a guy named Todd wearing a headset tells you to. In addition, you must “smile with the audience and be happy,” as one producer put it. Which might sound like a breeze, until you discover that what you really feel like doing during the show is crying or, for that matter, running for your life when, say, a churlish young female guest in an extremely short skirt, who has gotten the impression that you have cast aspersions on her virtue, jumps out of her chair and comes flying through the air with the intention of clobbering you.
To the rescue
Had this very thing not happened to me, which it did, I probably never would have appreciated just how good Steve and his fellow security guards are at their jobs. They prevented a big mean man (who might benefit from psychoanalysis and/or some time in jail) from pummeling his boyfriend, who wanted to break up and seemed to believe that the “Springer Show” was the best time and place to bring it up, as did a woman who was sleeping with her boyfriend’s boss. (Stripping, mooning and a couple of “pole dances” by both guests and audience members took place, as if these activities had anything to do with hammering out the delicate issues at hand.)
Never mind that all these people wouldn’t have needed protection had they not been baited, like tigers at the circus. The point is we all got through it pretty much unscathed physically.
After the show, Wilkos and the six other security guards had their photos taken in cowboy outfits to promote a rodeo publicity stunt. Then he headed back to his office to have some lunch between tapings.
“I don’t think people realize how hard this job is — I would say it’s one of the hardest shows on TV,” Wilkos said, chewing a Subway sandwich, which he washed down with big gulps of Dr Pepper. “It’s so much more than just breaking up fights. You have to watch out for the audience, people onstage, the camera angles. And for Jerry — the first thing is you don’t let the franchise get hurt.”
But while protecting the franchise, you can get hurt yourself. Wilkos, who lifts weights and does 30 minutes on the Stairmaster when he can, has undergone two back surgeries, torn his groin and suffered a concussion when someone clonked him over the head with a chair. “I didn’t know I had a concussion, though,” Wilkos said, with a laugh. “I just drove home from work.”
His publicist, who was eavesdropping again, piped in: “But you could walk around any corner as a cop, and there could be someone with a gun,” she said, protecting the franchise in her own way.
Which was true. But now that I’d seen the show live, I was actually more concerned about the job’s emotional toll — watching the sad, frankly gladiatorial spectacle day after day.
“Hey, I was a Chicago cop. I’ve seen a lot worse,” he said, matter of factly. “If you come on the show, pleasantries are not going to be exchanged.”
When I wondered why anyone would want to come on the show in the first place, especially considering the very good chance that they’ll face a certain amount of humiliation in front of millions, he was philosophical.
“A lot of these people are from small towns. They’ve never been anywhere. Some of them have never been on an airplane. We send a limo, they get to stay in a hotel. This is the first time in their lives that anyone has made them feel special.”
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‘I was shocked’
After so many years on the job, Steve Wilkos is hard-pressed to name the most memorable moments on “The Jerry Springer Show,” even though the producers routinely attach the words “Unbelievable!” “Shocking!” and “Outrageous!” to their promotions.
That said, a few incidents stick in Wilkos’ mind.
The time his pride was tested by a pair of 130-pound guys from Ohio, who were fighting over a girl. “But nobody told us that they were All-State wrestlers. … They really started throwing us around.”
Or the time his sense of chivalry was tested. “This transsexual named Hilary started swinging at a couple of audience members. With women, you don’t handle them the way you would a man. And my mind was looking at a woman. But she was as strong as I am. . . . That fight fell offstage and into the hall-way. It took a while.”
And the time his credulity was tested: “These two young, very attractive women were just going crazy fighting over the same guy — that’s pretty common. But they were really going at it. And when they brought the guy out, I couldn’t believe it. He was maybe — maybe — 5 feet tall and very schlumpy. I was shocked. I thought, ‘There must not be any guys where they’re from.’ “
Or the time he had to protect a guest from Springer himself: “This guy from Utah, who had a bunch of wives. … He was a racist and he didn’t like Jews. He was a big guy, and he started baiting Jerry, saying stuff about his mother. . . . It’s the only time in 12 years I’ve seen Jerry upset. I had to step in between them. . . . I think Jerry was very happy that I stepped in.”
In the end, though, Wilkos never gets to know how things end up — who lives happily ever after.
“Once the show’s over, I never see them again,” Wilkos says, without a trace of sentimentality.
— Emily Nunn
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ernunn@tribune.com
