Phil Donahue, the talk show pioneer who changed the conversation and course of daytime television with the weekday show he hosted for nearly three decades, died. He was 88.
Donahue died Sunday night at his New York City home after a protracted illness, his family said.
Survivors include his 44-year-old wife, That Girl actor Marlo Thomas. They met while she was a guest on his show — he was a divorced single father raising his four sons at the time — and married in May 1980.
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The Cleveland native hosted over 6,000 incarnations of The Phil Donahue Show, beginning with the first broadcast from a Dayton, Ohio station on November 7, 1967, and ending with the last, which was aired nationwide on syndication via Multimedia Entertainment on September 13, 1996.
Donahue addressed current and controversial issues, inviting his studio audience to join while carrying his microphone into the crowd. He grew skilled at blending their inquiries and remarks into his own running commentary.
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The issue-oriented approach was innovative, and his issues — abortion, incest, artificial insemination, alcoholism, penile implants, homosexuality, same-sex couples raising children, and priests’ pedophilia, to mention a few — were cutting-edge, making his show both known and popular.
“One sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who had a child by artificial insemination,” a columnist for Newsweek once remarked.
Following his dramatic success in Dayton, Donahue relocated his program to Chicago in 1974, followed by New York. For a long time in the 1970s and 1980s, he was the most-watched interviewer on daytime TV, drawing approximately 9 million viewers, the most of whom were female, to each show.
“We grew up with the feminist movement, the consumer movement, the gay rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the environmental movement,” Donahue explained in a 2001 interview with the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. “The last part of the 20th century, the time in which I was able to go out there in public on television and feature the people who had the most to say about these very compelling issues, had my name on it.”
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Donahue had it pretty much all to himself until 1985, when Oprah Winfrey debuted her own talk program. “It’s just not possible to overstate the enormousness of her impact on the daytime television game,” he told me. “It was staggering.” (She would dethrone him at the top of the ratings in 1987.)
Donahue retired in 1996, after reaching the age of 60 and receiving 11 Daytime Emmys, and Winfrey honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. “I want to thank you for opening the door so wide, wide enough for me to walk through,” she told me. “Had there not been a Phil Donahue, I don’t believe there could have been an Oprah.”
In May, he was one of those honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on December 21, 1935, as the youngest of two children. His father was a furniture salesman, and his mother, who had worked as an elevator operator in a department store, was a housewife.
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Donahue attended the private all-boys institutions St. Edward High and Notre Dame. Before graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1957, he worked as an early morning farm reporter for WNDU-TV, the South Bend campus’ NBC affiliate.
Donahue stated he was influenced in his formative years by the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain’s motto: “Give Light, and the People Will Find Their Own Way.” Those phrases were displayed for the length of a city block on the side of the Cleveland Press’ downtown headquarters.
In his TV Academy interview, he asked, “Was that my first stirrings of free speech and the First Amendment?” “I believed I had all the answers. As I grew older, I discovered I had a hundred thousand questions, but asking them was more exhilarating than believing I knew the answers. It was a true awakening for me.
Donahue got a job as a summer replacement announcer at KYW-TV in Cleveland, but was let go when the regulars returned from vacation. He couldn’t get a career in news, so he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his college love and worked as a bank teller. (He and Margaret Cooney got married in February 1958 and had five children in six years.)
Donahue returned to the Midwest and was hired as the news director (and the only person in the news department) at a radio station in Adrian, Michigan. There, he stated that he had “fallen in love with journalism.” “I thought it was the most noble calling.”
In 1960, Donahue moved for WHIO, a Dayton radio and television station, where he handled half-hour morning radiocasts, worked as a street reporter, and landed difficult interviews with Texas con man Billy Sol Estes and controversial Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. His interviews were filmed and shown on CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite, but he was unable to secure a job with the network.
Donahue discovered his calling in 1963, when he started hosting Conversation Piece, a weekday 90-minute radio talk show. It used new technology to allow locals to call in and speak with newsmakers who weren’t in Dayton, including Hugh Hefner, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Ralph Nader, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.
Not all of his guests were famous. “In 1964 and 1965, we put a gay guy on and people would stop their cars to listen. Nothing like it has ever aired,” he explained. Donahue also “started to hear what ladies were thinking about. I put an OB-GYN on the radio once, and we couldn’t get to the phones quickly enough.” Ratings doubled, according to Donahue, and he was paid an additional $25 every program.
On November 7, 1967, at 10:30 a.m., he carried a version of his radio show to television after being enticed to Dayton’s WLWD. (It replaced a typical variety program hosted by Johnny Gilbert, who eventually became the long-time announcer on Jeopardy!) His first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a prominent atheist whose case resulted in the prohibition of prayer in public schools.
The Phil Donahue Show, which included the host and a single guest sitting in folding chairs, lacked a couch, a band, and a sidekick who laughed at his jokes.
It also aired live in front of a studio audience, a throwback to Gilbert’s show.
“I realized during the commercials that these people were asking better questions than I was, so about the third or fourth show I went out in the audience, and it saved us,” Donahue recounted. “The Donahue show would not have existed without [them].” We put the camera behind the audience and pushed it closer, which was the first time this had been done. Local television stations often saw audiences as a nuisance.
“We recognized our lack of visual appeal. We knew we needed personalities that inspired you to pick up the phone and make a call,” he continued. Eventually, his callers “paralyzed the entire downtown phone exchange.” People were unable to reach their doctors or hospitals, which was perilous. “We put the community’s well-being at danger.
He recognized that his predominantly female audience was critical to his success, and many topics were chosen specifically to appeal to women. (He was a member of the National Organization for Women and a strong feminist.)
“I honestly believe we have spoken more thoughtfully, more honestly, more often to more issues about which women care than any other show,” according to him.
According to comic Erma Bombeck, “He’s every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her.”
Beginning in 1979, bits of his show (now known as Donahue) were aired three times each week on NBC’s Today, and he became a frequent interviewer. He has hosted several NBC primetime specials, including the Emmy-winning Donahue and Kids and the five-part Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal.
And, possibly to demonstrate his success, Phil Hartman impersonated him on Saturday Night Live, complete with white wig.
He released his memoir, Donahue: My Own Story, in 1979.
After Thomas’ first appearance on his show, she told him: “You are fantastic, and I mentioned it after we were off the air. You are caring and generous, and it is a delight for you to be around ladies. “Whoever is the woman in your life is extremely fortunate.”
Thomas is survived by his four children, Michael, Daniel, Kevin, and Mary Rose, as well as a sister and his “beloved golden retriever,” Charlie. Another son, Jim, 51, died in 2014 from an aortic aneurysm.
Donations may be sent to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital or the Phil Donahue/Notre Dame Scholarship Fund.
After accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Daytime Emmys, Donahue seems at peace about ending his 29-year career as a talk show presenter.
“Having to go in there every day and jump out of a cake and make sure you have a nice crisp clean shirt and all that, it was wonderful while it lasted, but I think we chose the right time to walk,” he told me. “I’ve never regretted it.”
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