By day, he’s a mild-mannered art dealer. By night, he’s a madman on the mat.

FARMINGTON – At a boring party sometime in the 1980s, an urbane art dealer took his wife aside and very seriously told her – the woman who had been his high school sweetheart – that he had something to divulge.

By all accounts, she was nervous, startled, apprehensive – even afraid – as married women are apt to be at a time like that.

Then the bomb was dropped. It went something like this. “Honey, I’ve been living a secret life – as a professional wrestler.”

Rob Elowitch (aka the evil Robbie Ellis or the too-good-to-be-true Danny Diamond in the ring), now 63, of Portland, described the event as he drove to Farmington on Tuesday to compete at the Farmington Fair.

The way he tells it, his wife Annette was relieved his news wasn’t worse. The way son Sam, of Farmington, tells it, the enormity of his admission – he had been living a double life for nearly two decades – only hit her after the fact, as reporters, TV news hosts and Sports Illustrated columnists began calling.

He became an international sensation.

And really, the man does break stereotypes. Just ask the folks who watched him on the mat Tuesday.

“The old buzzard (Elowitch) really pounded him,” Joe Nelson, of Temple, said.

“I thought he was good. He’s sexy for an old man,” said Peggy Mosher, of Farmington.

“I liked the wrestling,” said nearly 7-year-old Nicholas Campbell of Wilton, who later got an autographed photo of Ellis.

“The man’s incredibly buff for a 60-year-old,” said Janice Walker of Wilton. “He looked kind of like a 60-year-old Superman.”

Like many young boys, Elowitch grew up, not wanting to be Superman, exactly, but desiring to be something close to it: namely, a pro wrestler. “I went crazy for it,” he said. “But I wasn’t on that track.”

Elowitch was an intellectual, a playwright, who stopped wrestling in college to write his own play and music for his senior thesis at Amherst. He was in love with a woman who, in their high school years, had been less than enthused with his dreams of bloody stardom in the ring. Later, he became the owner of the world-renowned Barridoff Galleries in Portland.

His secret life began one day when he drove down from Amherst to visit Annette, who was studying at Boston University. On the way, he saw a sign advertising pro-wrestling lessons. The rest, as they say, is history.

“It was business trips,” Sam Elowitch said Tuesday, explaining his dad’s excuses for the time he took to compete. A while after telling Annette his secret, he agreed to be on a Portland wrestling card. The next day, the calls came flooding in. He worried his business would founder.

Who’s going to respect an art dealer who spends his free time either in the gym or in the ring, hurling epithets at his opponents before beating them to bloody smithereens? That was his perception – a mistaken one, as he soon found out.

His then-moderately successful gallery quickly gained a foothold on the national art scene, due to the publicity. And critics and collectors were intrigued.

“It made him interesting,” Sam Elowitch surmised of his rise in popularity. “More accessible, less the aloof art dealer.”

His father is also a consummate entertainer, who makes his crowd laugh out loud while he does his dirty work, Elowitch said. “He makes them chuckle. And it allowed him to show some depth outside of the art world.”

Maybe that’s why they keep coming back.