Long tIme Show Host and Backer of LGBT Dead at 88, Phil Donahue
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| Phil Donohue...New York Times |
Phil Donohue was a friend when we had few friends and no legal rights. He used his audience involvement show to ask questions about gay issues and brought guests knowledgeable about the subject. Both cons and pros.
His death was confirmed by Susan Arons, a representative of the family.
“The Phil Donahue Show” made its debut in 1967 on WLWD-TV in Dayton, Ohio, propelling Mr. Donahue on a 29-year syndicated run, much of it as the unchallenged king of daytime talk television.
Almost from the start, “The Phil Donahue Show” dispensed with familiar trappings. There was no opening monologue, no couch, no sidekick, no band — just the host and the guests, focused on a single topic.
At the time, audiences were expected to be seen and not heard, unless prompted to applaud. Mr. Donahue changed that. He quickly realized from chatting with audience members during commercial breaks that some of them asked sharper questions than he did. And so he began his practice of stalking the aisles, microphone in hand, and letting those in the seats have their say. He also opened the telephone lines to those watching at home. Electronic democracy, as some called it, had arrived.
Few subjects, if any, were off limits for Mr. Donahue, who was said to have told his staff, “I want all the topics hot.” It mattered little that at times the subjects made some viewers, and local station managers, squirm. His very first guest was guaranteed to stir controversy: Madalyn Murray O’Hair, at the time America’s most famous, and widely unpopular, atheist.
Across the years — he moved from Dayton to Chicago in 1974, and then to New York in 1985 — he interviewed presidential candidates and Hollywood stars, consumer advocates and feminist pioneers. He also televised a child’s birth, an abortion, a reverse vasectomy and a tubal ligation. From inside a maximum-security prison in Ohio, he examined the American penal system. He was among the first television hosts to explore the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and the first Western journalist to go to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, after the 1986 nuclear accident there.
And there was sex, lots of it — more and more as the years passed. Not every conversation qualified as lofty discourse, not with Mr. Donahue donning a dress and stockings to study cross-dressing, or interviewing lesbian go-go dancers, or exploring the merits of dressing up like a baby for sexual pleasure.
He offered no apologies for his frequent traipses down the low road. “This is a medium that rewards popularity, and I don’t want to be a dead hero,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “Besides, it doesn’t do any good to talk if nobody’s listening.”
People indeed listened for a long time, through nearly 7,000 shows that won a total of 20 Daytime Emmy Awards. At its peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s, “Donahue” — the title shortened to a single word — was syndicated to more than 200 stations around the country, with an average viewership of eight million. People waited 18 months for studio tickets. For a while, Mr. Donahue also had a regular interview segment on NBC’s “Today” show.
Graced with pleasing looks, his eyes a vivid blue and his thick hair a slate gray turning to white, Mr. Donahue posed questions that were deliberately provocative, sometimes to the point of shameless. “I would be afraid I’m going to die if someone told me I had leukemia,” he asked a dying child. “Aren’t you?”
His appeal to women was unmistakable. He treated them like the adults they were, and on many days they made up 90 percent of his studio audience. “The average housewife is bright and inquisitive,” he said in 1979, but television had treated her for too long “like some mental midget.”
Mr. Donahue was an ardent feminist as far back as the late 1960s. Critics detected a healthy measure of self-satisfaction about him. But admirers tended to agree with Nora Ephron’s assessment in her 1983 novel, “Heartburn.” “If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue,” she wrote, “he would never have wondered what women want.”
By the mid-1990s, Mr. Donahue had fallen victim to a fatal disease for any television star: low ratings. Once unassailable, he tumbled to 13th place in the Nielsen ratings for daytime talk shows. As early as the mid-’80s he had been overtaken by the unstoppable force known as Oprah Winfrey. But others came along, too. Hosts like Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael catered to brows far lower than even those Mr. Donahue increasingly sought as his audience. “My illegitimate children,” Mr. Donahue called those interviewers. Struggling to keep up, he called it quits in 1996.
Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on Dec. 21, 1935, to Phillip and Catherine (McClory) Donahue. His father was a furniture salesman, his mother a shoe clerk at a department store.
The family was steeped in Roman Catholicism, and religion loomed large for him, ultimately becoming a negative influence. He left the church, dismissing it as “sexist,” “racist” and “unnecessarily destructive,” feelings that imbued many of his shows.
He attended St. Edward High, an all-boys preparatory school in Lakewood, Ohio, and graduated in 1957 from the University of Notre Dame, where he met his first wife, Margaret Mary Cooney. They wed in 1958, when both were in their early 20s, and had four boys and a girl. But the marriage fell apart and they divorced in 1975; Mr. Donahue said that his workaholic tendencies were partly to blame.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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