By JULIE CARR SMYTH
Phil Donahue, whose groundbreaking daytime talk show established an unforgettable television genre, has died. He was 88 years old.
Donahue, the “King of the Daytime Talk Shows,” was the primary to involve viewers in a chat show, often for a whole hour with a single guest.
“Only one guest per show? No band?” he recalled being asked frequently in his 1979 memoir, “Donahue, My Own Story.”
With its format, “The Phil Donahue Show” was clearly different from other interview shows of the Sixties and have become a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was particularly popular with female audiences.
The show was later renamed “Donahue” and launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue's willingness to tackle the hot-button social problems with the day was immediately evident when he invited atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair as his first guest. He later broadcast programs on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, in addition to tons of of other topics.
The show was syndicated in 1970 and ran on national television for the following 26 years, earning the show and Donahue as host 20 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award in 1980. The show featured radio-style calls, which Donahue greeted along with his signature query, “Is the caller there?”
The show's final episode aired in 1996 in New York, where Donahue was living along with his wife, actress Marlo Thomas, on the time of his death. The two had been married since 1980. Donahue had five children, 4 sons and a daughter, from a previous marriage.
Donahue briefly returned to television in 2002, hosting one other “Donahue” show on MSNBC. The network canceled it after six months because rankings were too low.
He was born Phillip John Donahue on December 21, 1935, right into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. When Donahue was a baby, they moved to Centerville, Ohio, where he lived across the road from Erma Bombeck, who later became a humorist and columnist.
Donahue was a 1953 graduate of St. Edward High School, a Catholic boys' school in Lakewood, and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a business degree in 1957. He later rebelled against the church and left it, but wrote in his book that “a little piece” of his faith would all the time stick with him.
After a series of early jobs in radio and tv, Donahue was invited to maneuver a former radio talk show to Dayton television station WLWD in 1967. It moved to Chicago in 1974, where it remained for years before ending up in New York.
The show featured conversations with spiritual leaders, doctors, housewives, activists and entertainers or politicians who happened to be on the town. He said the show's formula for achievement was a glad accident.
“It may have taken three full years before any of us realized that our program was special,” Donahue wrote. “The style of the show had evolved not by genius but by necessity. The well-known talk show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. … The result was improvisation.”
This gave the show a freedom that continued at the same time as it rose to number one in its class.
With his personable style and gray hair, Donahue boxed with Muhammad Ali. He played football with Alice Cooper. His guests gave cooking classes, taught breakdancing and, more controversially, talked about “mansharing”, life as a mistress, lesbian motherhood or – with the assistance of collected video material that led to broadcasts being banned in some cities – how natural births, abortions or reverse vasectomies are carried out.
A stop on the Donahue became a must for major politicians, activists, athletes, business leaders and entertainers, from Hubert Humphrey to Ronald Reagan, from Gloria Steinem to Anita Bryant, from Lee Iacocca to Ray Kroc, from John Wayne to Farrah Fawcett.
Outside of his famous talk show, Donahue pursued several other projects.
During the Cold War within the Eighties, he collaborated with Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner on a groundbreaking television discussion series. The US-Soviet Bridge offered simultaneous broadcasts from the United States and the Soviet Union, allowing studio audiences to ask one another questions. Donahue and Posner also co-hosted a weekly roundtable discussion show, Posner/Donahue, on CNBC within the Nineties.
Donahue also co-directed the 2006 Oscar-nominated documentary film “Body of War.”
Originally published:
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