DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today6 we're starting off by remembering Phil Donahue, the pioneering TV talk show host who died Sunday at age 88. We'll listen back to a conversation between him and Terry Gross from 1985, and we'll begin with this appreciation.
"The Phil Donahue Show" began in 1967 as a local series in Dayton, Ohio. It was syndicated nationally in 1969 and relocated to Chicago in 1974, with the show's title shortened to just "Donahue." That was because by then, the talk show host and his unusual format were equally familiar to and embraced by national TV audiences. Ten years later, another Chicago talk show began outperforming him in the ratings, a show hosted by a young woman named Oprah Winfrey whose approach to television owed much to her Chicago predecessor. Donahue moved his program to New York, where he continued his passionate brand of talk show TV until 1996.
Before Phil Donahue, most talk shows were forums for celebrities to plug their latest projects. Donahue did some of that, too, and he wasn't above pandering for ratings. In an effort to appeal to his largely female daytime audience, he did several shows featuring strip club male dancers from Chippendales. But Donahue, like his talk show audience, seemed as interested in listening as in talking, and his conversations were unprecedentedly inclusive and wide-ranging. He took on topics few others would go near. In 1982, while still broadcasting from Chicago, he addressed a very serious topic that still, at that time, was unfamiliar to many people.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DONAHUE")
PHIL DONAHUE: A significant and serious disease has struck the gay community. And let's see how much sense we can make out of this at the outset. First of all, you don't have to be gay to get this. But most of those who are afflicted are members of the gay community. And an alarming percentage of those who are afflicted live in the New York City area, although, again, our guests want you to know that it is not exclusive to New York City. And as with so many things in medicine, researchers and lots of people who are working overtime trying to figure this thing out have - there's a lot of mystery attending it, and we really don't know all the answers. But we do have a good deal of tragedy that has already hit.
Larry Kramer is here. Mr. Kramer is a screenwriter, producer of the film "Women In Love" and lots of other things. And he has - did you - have you lost 17 friends?
LARRY KRAMER: That's right, Phil.
DONAHUE: Seventeen of your friends have died.
KRAMER: Seventeen very close friends, all men under 50 years old, all men at the peak of their usefulness to society, of their creative ability. This is over a two-year period. My 17th friend died two weeks ago.
BIANCULLI: Phil Donahue kept returning to that issue and famously built programs around Ryan White, the young hemophiliac teenager who developed AIDS after a blood transfusion. When Ryan White died in 1990 at age 18, Elton John was one of his pallbearers. Phil Donahue was another.
Even on shows that were much lighter in tone, Phil Donahue would involve his audience - not just the studio audience, where he famously would stroll into the crowd with his microphone to let them ask questions of his guests, but also viewers at home, who could and did call in. It was an early example of the town hall talk show concept, and Donahue kept things moving briskly.
Here he is in 1986 from New York, devoting that day's show to Joan Rivers. She had just broken with Johnny Carson and "The Tonight Show" to agree to star in her own talk show for the fledgling Fox network. Her show wouldn't premiere until the following year, but her move already was seen as controversial. In this clip from Donahue, we hear an audience member ask a question then a caller. Both elicit delightful responses.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DONAHUE")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What do you do for relaxation?
JOAN RIVERS: What? What?
DONAHUE: What do you do to relax, Joanie?
RIVERS: Read. My husband and I get into bed and, unfortunately, read.
(LAUGHTER)
RIVERS: Read.
DONAHUE: Are you there? Hi. Go ahead.
CHER: Hi. How are you?
DONAHUE: I'm good.
CHER: I just want to tell you that I'm really proud of you, Joan. You're a fabulous friend. And...
DONAHUE: You recognize this voice?
CHER: You've been really supportive of me when I needed you. I can't tell you - I'm so happy that I'm going to be able to not have to go on the Carson show to be with you.
RIVERS: Cher, you old b****.
(APPLAUSE)
RIVERS: Oh.
CHER: And I also want to tell you this. You know...
RIVERS: You...
CHER: Of all the people...
RIVERS: You talk about...
CHER: Let me tell you this. Of all the people...
RIVERS: ...An incredible woman.
CHER: ...I know what it's like to be on the hot seat, you know, when you do something that people aren't thrilled with. And it took a lot of guts. And, you know, this is America. Everybody deserves to make their mark, to get their break and then to take it.
RIVERS: I love you so much.
(APPLAUSE)
BIANCULLI: But Donahue didn't rely only on his studio audience and call-in viewers to ask questions and engage with his guests. He was a very good interviewer. He wasn't above probing and challenging his guests. And essentially, he changed the tone and direction of the TV talk show. Like Dick Cavett, whose program went national the same year, Donahue presided over a talk show that was smart and presumed its audience to be intelligent as well. Like Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres - all of whom came after him - Donahue's show was, in a word, civil.
The opposite side of the spectrum was popular, too, personified by the antagonistic and exploitive bottom-feeding shows by Jerry Springer. But Phil Donahue changed TV for the better, not for the worse. Terry Gross spoke to Phil Donahue in 1985, and she asked him why he involved the audience during his program.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
DONAHUE: Well, first of all, I'd like you to believe that I was brilliant enough to sit down and decide to do all these things. Our show, like life itself, evolved. I replaced a variety show in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967 and, in so doing, inherited an audience that had already received tickets for a program that includes song, dance, piano. And also, you got to wave when the camera turned on you. Rather than dismiss the audience, why, we invited them to come in and watch as I interviewed Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
I honestly don't remember how long it took, but after several shows, it was clear that what was happening in the - during the commercials was, in many ways, more interesting and instructive than what's happening between the host and the guest. And on one day, I jumped out of the chair and went into the audience. And it was really - that moment is what - we didn't know it then - what subsequently made the program - what shall we say? - different and, I think, absorbing enough to hold a viewer for an hour.
TERRY GROSS: There are other conventions that you violated, too, like turning the show over to issues instead of just doing fashion shows and dieting.
DONAHUE: Right. That, too, was a matter of survival. We - since our show came from Dayton, Ohio, we did not have the stars that we were accustomed to seeing on talk shows available to us. So - and we had five days a week to fill. And what we discovered very early on was that if the issue was right, you could have a show that was far more interesting with a guest who did not have celebrity stature. And it was 1967. The war was raging, protests. Our cities were burning. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, as had Bobby Kennedy. And suddenly, we found that we were surrounded by some very volatile ideas and conflicts about which the audience cared very deeply. It was our first real exposure to the fact that out there, during the daytime, were a lot of people who wanted more than just games and soaps - women who were concerned about more than just covered dishes and needlepoint; women who were, in effect, saying, please don't patronize us. Just give us the information. We'll make our own decision. And we were off to the races.
GROSS: Were you ever at all disappointed that you were going to be on in the morning, knowing that the morning audience is always called the housewife audience?
DONAHUE: Well, that stereotype existed. The prejudice continued, and, I think, continues today, although I don't think it's as widespread - and nor is it as powerful as it once was.
GROSS: Well, what does that mean in broadcasting terms, when they say it's the housewives who listen? What does that mean to broadcasters or broadcasting executives?
DONAHUE: I think, first of all, it means a woman with hair curlers, perhaps sitting under a hairdryer and reading a movie magazine. It also means a very important marketing target, a person who buys everything that Proctor & Gamble produces, and it also means, sadly, a person who doesn't have much of an interest in politics or much of a vision beyond the front lawn. I really don't think that that overstates the very damaging stereotype that existed within the broadcasting industry at the time, and we were very pleased. One of the things about which we're most proud is that the program demonstrated that those were - that the audience during the day wanted a program like ours for a long time, and we were just fortunate enough to come along and give it to them.
GROSS: Were you advised not to do that, though? Were you told, look, Phil, wise up? You know, they don't want to hear about issues. You got to do celebrities and...
DONAHUE: Absolutely.
GROSS: ...Cosmetics.
DONAHUE: That advice continued for quite a while. As you may know, we did not burn the town down immediately. We did well in Dayton, Ohio, but the thought of syndicating our program was really an absurdity. We had no desk, no couch, no band, no Phyllis Diller, no funny sidekick. We had really none of the conventions. Our program was also very visually dull. We had no spinning wheel. We were surrounded by programs wherein contestants were dressed like chicken salad sandwiches, or a man said, come on down, and you had all kinds of excitement and the possibility of winning a car - or, in those days, maybe $5,000. Against this kind of energy, it was a - it took, at the very least, some hutzpah. It made us very nervous. I have to say that I was nervous myself.
Well, when we finally syndicated in '69, we got into three markets and then six and then four and then eight and then five. We started and stopped and started again, and on those occasions when we would get flat, we had a lot of pressure to throw pies, as you might say, to juice the show up, to make it more interesting. There was also a lot of resentment about - a lot of resistance to the notion that the attention span of the viewer would be long enough to hold one guest for an hour. As you know, the book about television or the audience today is make sure you do it in six minutes and then bring somebody - bring on the talking Pekingese, and we disproved them.
BIANCULLI: Phil Donahue, speaking to Terry Gross in 1985 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1985 interview with Phil Donahue, who hosted a popular and influential TV talk show for decades. He died Sunday at age 88.
GROSS: You hadn't really considered much about feminism in 1967, when you started doing the show. Looking back now, when you look at your early days of hosting and compare it to your way of doing it now, do you think that you were doing anything then that you'd now think of as being patronizing or chauvinistic?
DONAHUE: I'm sure that I did. I was raised in a - pardon my voice. I've got a crick, and it'll go away in a moment. I was raised in a world where men led, and women served. All of the people in my childhood who had any authority at all were males, including the priests and the - who said Mass, while I served - the adult nun who taught me a woman was not permitted on the altar, while I, a child, was permitted to serve Mass.
And I think that I discovered probably too late that these experiences leave a legacy which do not depart from the soul very easily, and to this day, I think I'm struggling with those early experiences. I just had the good fortune of having a professional life that allowed me to meet people like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and others, who said, among other things, that children in this culture get too much mother and not enough father. When they said that, they made me very nervous indeed because it was certainly true in my case. And I think, to this day, I have a tendency to perhaps - I think patronizing habits die a very slow death, and I know that I'm capable of that behavior now and then. I'm not as bad as I used to be.
GROSS: You're sometimes called TV's leading feminist or morning TV's only feminist or things like that. And I wonder if you have any ideas about why women on TV don't seem to be able to identify themselves as feminist. Sometimes, I think that for a woman to identify herself as a feminist who's in broadcasting, it's seen as something that might compromise her professionalism.
DONAHUE: I suppose you could say I've never thought about it. Your question provokes the possibility that it is easier for a male to be a feminist than a woman. You get - at least you get the possibility that you'll be - that your daughter will be exposed to ideas that you want her - that remind her that it's important that she be an independent person, forsake the "Cinderella" fairy tale, be capable of accommodating her own needs on her own, in the event that she makes a bad choice in terms of a relationship or a marriage. And at the same time, you get whatever comfort might come from the fact that a male is making these points, since all the years of most of us in my age group have featured males in positions of authority. Interesting possibility. I don't know.
I think the point should be made that the fact that I am considered to be this leading male feminist is itself indicting. I embraced the politics of the feminist movement a long time ago for selfish reasons. First of all, I have a daughter. But I certainly can't claim to have the academic credentials or the informed historical perspective of feminist politics that a lot of other people who don't happen to have the good fortune of having a talk show might have.
So it's really, I think, a sign of this enormous struggle that after all this work that these women, many of whom were out there early getting whistled at and having their sex preference questioned and who were really being derisively treated by a largely male press, look up 20 years after this wave has already been underway and discover that their No. 1 male - or that one of their leading male supporters is Phil Donahue.
I'm not mock humble at all when I say that I didn't wake up one morning and decide to be a feminist. It's been a very difficult struggle. It's very hard to walk away from all the free services that women have provided me all my life. My mother never missed a meal, and I went right from her to a wife who never missed a meal and also dutifully raised five children while I went out and did what you did in the '50s. I got promoted, and I was a workaholic. And now I realize that in that process, I was not a party to shared parenthood. And I think that the losers in that case were my children.
GROSS: You've written in your autobiography a couple of years ago about how during your first marriage, you know, you were much more conventional in your attitude towards gender. And I sometimes think about how your first wife must feel now hearing all this talk about Phil Donahue, Mr. Feminist, when she was married to, you know, pre-feminist Phil Donahue and saw...
DONAHUE: Right.
GROSS: ...The earlier side of you.
DONAHUE: I think she probably feels - I think it's a painful thing for her. I made it clear who I was and who I wasn't in my autobiography. It'd be better if someone else said this, but I think it's a reasonably honest review of who I was and wasn't in the early days of our marriage, in the early years of our marriage. What has happened, I think, is that media has, I think, in a kind of short circuit way, presented me as the single father who this, who that. Single fathers get a lot more attention than single mothers. Single mothers are supposed to be wonderful. Single fathers are little boys lost that you just kind of want to love. And isn't he struggling to do a nice job? What a wonderful guy he must be.
I really feel pretty good about my single fatherhood, having presided over the household while my sons were going through high school. But I do not deserve the award of Father of the Year. I was scared. I really didn't - my father was a fellow who worked 9 to 9 selling furniture. So while he loved me and was a very civil, gentle, insightful man, he was, because of his workaholism, an absentee father in many ways. So I really didn't have a whole - I was a very, very uneasy single parent. And while I did struggle through it, and I'm very grateful for the relationship that I enjoy with my children today, I wasn't what you would - I wasn't the father that my billing might suggest today.
GROSS: There have been local stations that have blacked out some of your programs, either portions of it or they've played a rerun instead of carrying...
DONAHUE: Right.
GROSS: ...The regular show. And I guess some of the subjects have been showing an abortion, showing a birth. Do you approve of them doing it? Do you think that that's - well, obviously, you don't. But do you think it's an example of, you know, democracy in action or the opposite?
DONAHUE: I do. No, I do. I think this - I think the syndicated method of distribution of program material is the most democratic. We paid our dues for this. Not being on a network means that one vice president can't while he's shaving on a Tuesday morning decide that we're finished. Peoria can cancel our show, but I'm still on the air in Indianapolis. At the same time, individual stations can make a decision about what they may or may not want to broadcast. While it is true we have a contract to provide a program to them, they have no obligation to broadcast it. They are responsible for what goes off the top of their tower, and they retain the last, final word on whether this or that program airs. I think that's as democratic as you get in our business.
On those occasions when someone cancels our show, I do call them. I mean, I think - I make it clear, look, you're the customer, and if you and I are going to have a fight here, you're going to win. It's your station. But please let me appeal this. We wouldn't have sent you this program if we thought it wasn't of broadcast quality. And then I attempt to engage them in a dialogue about why they did it and why we did it. I think it serves to let them know that we're not cavalier about people canceling the program, and the next time they think about it, at least they'll know that we're watching them.
BIANCULLI: Phil Donahue speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. The pioneering TV talk show host died Sunday. He was 88 years old. After a break, we remember actress Gena Rowlands, who died last week at age 94. And Justin Chang reviews the new film "Close Your Eyes." I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JASON MORAN'S "BLUE BLOCKS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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