Blessed Are the Women of America, for Phil Donahue Is Their Shepherd
This article originally appeared in the January 30, 1979, issue of Esquire. It contains attitudes and sensibilities about sex, gender, and religion that are potentially triggering. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access.
Of the many things this country has received from Notre Dame, most are in some way derivatives of the famous mosaic on the side of the university's library building. It is of Christ with his arms raised in benediction. Students have dubbed it "Touchdown Jesus." These same students, so inspired, have gone on to become some of America's finest pro football players, articulate Catholic scholars, public-spirited lawyers, and aggressive FBI agents. That's an admittedly selective sampling but not an inaccurate one, for many of today's mostly male enclaves have been served well by the school in South Bend, Indiana.
It is ironic, then, that one of these Notre Dame graduates, a mop-haired Irish Catholic from Cleveland who’s drunk beer and copped feels with the best of them, should today be one of America’s most influential feminists. It is ironic that each day more women are educated—about sex, morals, trends, and personalities—by this Notre Dame product, more women peer into his eyes, communicate with him, and thank him than they do any other person—man or woman in the land. Phil Donahue is a more important force in raising women’s consciousness than Gloria, Bella, and Ms. magazine combined.
Phil Donahue is forty-three and may well be America’s oldest altar boy. Daily he examines his conscience and turns it into the best thing on the dial: a subliminal mixture of charm and intelligence, an anomaly in the plastic world of television but a credit to the dominion of Touchdown Jesus.
Each weekday, he ushers 200 women into his midst, while another six and a half million are within the sound of his voice. He tugs at them, hugs them, touches, talks, listens, prods, learns, and shares with them. They reciprocate by making him, as of May of last year, the most popular and highly acclaimed talk show host on daytime television. He is steadily leaving Merv, Mike, and Dinah in the ratings shadows with a show that violates most of the industry’s rules and a clean-cut personality better suited for a religious mosaic than the picture tube.
Donahue—one household word, cut down from the Phil Donahue Show—is not Manhattan chic or dapper downtown Burbank or live from the MGM Grand. Each day it is talk generated from a cinder block studio at WGN-TV in Chicago. The station is an independent owned by Chicago’s Tribune Company and is located on the city’s northwest side, two miles due west of Wrigley Field. Apart from Donahue, WGN airs old movies, Bozo’s Circus, over 140 Cubs games, and reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. Each day at 10:30 A.M., the 200 women arrive there from nearby suburbs and midwestern towns in buses and Toyota station wagons. Just an hour earlier, Donahue himself has driven in from a North Shore Chicago suburb in his brown Chevrolet Caprice.
At 10:45, they are waiting: mostly white, well dressed, of all ages, usually housewives (though there are a surprising number of working women taking the morning off). The women are seated on metal chairs in the Donahue studio, just next door to Bozo. They wait for the wonder of television to begin. Donahue seems not unlike scores of other local talk show programs around the country. Indeed, eleven years ago, at WLWD-TV, in Dayton, Ohio, it was just that, a strictly hometown production. Today, however, the show is syndicated to 154 stations, invading over four and a half million households, including the major markets of New York City, where it outstrips the local and network competition; Los Angeles; and Chicago. It is the most talked-about talk show on daytime television, the most effective bookselling show on the air, having passed the Today show in that regard sometime previously.
You wouldn’t know it to be there. A telephone sits onstage—a technique long since abandoned everywhere else on television— for call-in questions, and wide aisles are cut in the audience so Donahue can field impromptu questions. The show, which is taped for delayed broadcast elsewhere in the country, is fed live to Chicago audiences; only telephone calls, monitored by an associate producer in a booth offstage, are screened. There is only one topic of discussion a day. It may be divorce, abortion, homosexuality, impotence, malpractice, Nazism—any one of an endless and exhaustive pool used to fill 235 fresh programs a year. To add a touch of show biz and variation to things, an occasional Hollywood celebrity (a Richard Dreyfuss or a Steve Allen) appears, also for a full hour, and talks about a lot more than just his current movie.
By all standards, the show should fail miserably. Donahue has no obsequious sidekick; he doesn’t sing, tell jokes, cue the band, or fall into banal chatter with the likes of Shecky Greene, Dr. Irwin Corey, or the amazing Kreskin. He instead sustains a mesh of issues and entertainment, the participation and identification of his viewers, in studio and at home, and delivers a constantly high level of tension and debate. In all, he oddly enough believes that he will not go broke overestimating the intelligence of his American audience.
At 10:50, he walks unannounced into the studio. He comes in from the rear, the same way his audience arrived. They spot him, swoon, and break into loud applause, eyes fastened on him in that celebrity daze normally reserved for Newman, Redford, or Stallone. Nowadays, they come to see Donahue.
Part of it is Donahue’s presence: his charm, the thick, silver-gray hair, the Irish good looks, the wit. He is handsome but not a knockout. His nose is a little big; his eyebrows, too bushy; the mouth, pushed in; he talks with a slight lisp. The whole is much better than the parts, but he does exude a beauty, an athletic grace within the three-piece Botany 500, and few people around him are unaware of it. Yet all that would go for zot if every woman in every chair, and each one watching at home, didn’t think that he was somehow vulnerable, that they could talk to this guy and he would talk back and they would both reveal something about each other.
He immediately warms to them. The audience, he says, is the show’s most precious asset. “Without them, we wouldn’t work. I’d do anything for them.” So he smiles, touches, goes through shtiks to make them feel at ease. “Gee, thanks, I feel like a big star... Glad you're here... I’m so nervous... Any Catholics? [He waves the microphone as a priest sprinkles holy water with his aspergillum.] Just want to make you feel at home... Gosh, you look so much thinner in person... ” On and on, until the audience is glad it’s there. Then he makes his pitch. “When the show begins, help me out. Get into the act. Show me you care.”
And the pitch continues into the broadcast, which opens without any fanfare and almost before the audience knows it. Today he’s invited two lesbian mothers and their six children to talk about living together in a family. The studio audience—these 200 homegrown midwestern ladies—at first is stunned, then troubled, then strangely sympathetic to the two quite ordinary-looking women, whom they find enormously likable, and their children, whom they find incredibly normal.
In minutes, Donahue is running up and across the aisles with his portable microphone, working the cord like a vendor at Wrigley Field, sensing the tension, communicating the concern and bewilderment of his audience to his guests. It is a show that Cavett, Buckley, or Dinah couldn’t begin to handle. It is Donahue at his best.
He nods at a questioner, goes to her with the mike, faces her, holds her hand or puts his arm around her back as she talks. If anyone else wooed and romanced a female audience, he would appear paternal, patronizing, and sexist. Donahue does it as a host, a listener, and thrives because of it.
That is his magic. You cannot watch the show without getting the feeling that you have gotten your question in, that the woman standing up, unrehearsed, unscreened, unprepared, is saying what’s on your mind.
Yet it would be little more than video anarchy if Phil Donahue weren't there to make it work.
He wasn’t plucked from a modeling agency, a backfield, or a canceled situation comedy. Instead, Donahue came up from being a reporter for a string of small radio and television stations, having covered fires, auto accidents, and political primaries, to take over a Dayton talk show. The previous show came complete with audience; Donahue decided to keep it. “They had tickets to the show we replaced, so we had to let them in.” With producers Dick Mincer, a short, businesslike man, and Patricia McMillen, a tall, intense woman who scowls when reminded that she was once described as looking like Farrah Fawcett’s older sister, Donahue worked at his format, discovering that the questions he took from the audience were often better than his own. He did shows in prisons, interviewed gays, widows, atheists, begged an occasional celebrity to come to Dayton, and never shied away from any topic or anyone.
He hopped into a coffin to illustrate the crassness of the funeral industry. He held up an anatomically complete doll and watched the show’s phone lines short out. He met Ralph Nader at the Dayton airport at 1:30 in the morning, drove him to his appointments, and persuaded him to appear on his small-town show. It was one of his first programming coups. Nader appeared another time opposite Edward Cole, then president of General Motors.
Phil Donahue works intensely. This is, after all, a guy who did well in theology at Notre Dame, who went up so fast for a pass during an inter-hall football game that he was knocked unconscious and didn’t know who he was until several hours later. He deals with interests and topics related to women, chasing after them with the same purpose and charm that the boys at Notre Dame once exhibited toward co-eds who visited South Bend in sweaters and corsages on football weekends twenty years ago.
With all that scrambling, he hardly had time to get a big head. He was a star only in Dayton. Slowly other stations signed on. (He still prefers syndication to a network slot: “If Pittsburgh drops you, you’re still alive in Cincinnati. On a network, one man can end the whole ball game.”) But it was a slow process. For years, Donahue was still that blue-eyed, too-good-looking guy from Ohio—and no big deal.
He kept at it, making his mistakes in Dayton and correcting them, taking chances and making them pay off, building his audience and establishing his credibility. In 1974, the show, with producers Mincer, McMillen, and Darlene Hayes (all of whom are still with the program), moved to WGN’s Addison Street studios in Chicago. The team continued to add stations but still trailed the ratings of network competitors and existed outside the pale of the bicoastal television industry. (“It still bothers me that you’re not hot until New York or L.A. says you’re hot. We were as good a few years ago as we are today, but nobody noticed. We couldn’t get arrested in Manhattan.”)
A national daytime Emmy award in 1977 helped, but not much. Nothing brought the public eye until Donahue started killing the competition in New York. Critics began to drool. “His daily program reduces the [other talk shows] to the level of Tupperware parties,” wrote Chicago Tribune’s Gary Deeb, the nastiest TV critic in a town notorious for nasty TV criticism. Finally, the Nielsens found him on top. He took another Emmy last June, and today the industry toasts his superiority and marvels at his success.
But it has not been that long a time since Dayton. Watching him is a slap of reality; one feels that Donahue has his ear to the black dirt of the Midwest, that he certainly must drive a Chevy. A self-made millionairess who flashes her $12,000 diamond bracelet is asked how much money she actually makes.
“I don’t know if I make two million dollars or ten million dollars,” she replies.
“You would if you didn’t make either,” Donahue responds.
He goes a little further. “Have you ever had a Big Mac?”
“What’s that?” she answers.
Not that he badgers, harangues, or hectors, though he is capable of all three, but rather that he checks, edits, and calls his guests on their lapses and illogic. He does it all on the basis of his own research, after working closely with the producers. He carries few if any notes—usually a slip of paper on a page of a book or a three by five card cupped in his hand with names and identifications. He probes and picks with his “Yes, but—,” line of questioning. “Everyone agrees with that, but—he says when a guest is being evasive. “We’re all happy for you, but,—,” he says to a guest who claims to have found the answer. “You know I think you’re the greatest, but—he says to a celebrity who’s just said something stupid.
When he does that, he cements his audience’s favor more than in any other way, exuding a feeling that the ridiculous and the sublime will not pass unscathed, affectation and pomp will be exposed, the out of touch will be put in touch.
It is not uncommon for people to come off better than normal on his show—Burt Reynolds reveals that he’ll always be in love with Dinah Shore, Dinah admits that it wasn’t easy to break off with Burt—and it is not uncommon for people to come off worse. Teddy Kennedy guests to push his health care plan, complete with graphs and props, and he seems surprisingly stodgy and evasive. Seldom does he look Donahue in the eye when responding to questions, and, worse yet, seldom does he answer a question—“That’s all well and good, Senator, but how much will it cost?”—without preamble and qualification. To Donahue, Kennedy was “speaking in tablets. I was really disappointed with him. I hope it was my fault,” he said afterward.
Yet people wouldn’t be attracted to Donahue if his chief ability was to put guests on the defensive. William Buckley does that with ease and without ratings. Stanley Siegel does it in New York—where he failed to beat Donahue head on head—and looks like an idiot.
Without being evangelical or pedantic, the moral ingredient found in Donahue is as distinct as if the image of Touchdown Jesus were burnt into the rear scrim. He insists it isn’t his job to tell anybody how to live, but the concern is there, a conscience formed by the good Holy Cross Fathers in South Bend, the need to expose sleaze, laziness, hypocrisy, glibness, dirt, dishonesty, racism, sexism, and pretension.
On a recent Merv Griffin show, a twenty-three-year-old woman appeared to talk cheerfully about a hard-core adult movie she’d just directed. The only person with the urge to question her vocation was another guest, William Buckley. “What happens when you run out of positions?” Buckley asked, and the reply moved him to write in a column: “The lady laughed, Merv laughed, the singer laughed, and the time was up, and everybody swent home, just as if they’d heard from someone who’d made a success starting up a chain of doughnut shops.”
Dinah’s living room chatter or Merv’s cocktail patter doesn’t play on Donahue not only because Donahue personally wouldn’t have let the cheerful porn director off so easily but because his other 200 guests would have grabbed the mike and gotten in their licks.
“I don’t feel obligated to walk down the center of every issue,” Donahue says. “But at the same time, I think it’s really important not to preach. It’s arrogant, and in a pragmatic sense, it’s not good television. But I reserve the right to express myself, and I feel compelled to bring a guest who speaks in grand terms down to earth. I’m not trying to pronounce my moral values on society. Nobody’s that smart. Besides, it’s more complicated.”
He is a man who has had complications. He is still trying to unravel the knots in his personality tied in the years of his Ohio, Roman Catholic upbringing and in eight years of all-male schools. Much has been made of his Mr. Low Key, Nice Guy, Super Pop, Liberated Male image. But he hasn’t always been that way.
In truth, he is a survivor of a broken marriage, one that disintegrated after seventeen years and five children. He admits to being an absentee father, a workaholic, a ladder climber so intent on professional success that he neglected his private duties and sacrificed family joys.
“People came up to my wife and said, ‘Isn’t he wonderful? Do you know how lucky you are?’ But I wasn’t always so wonderful. There were a lot of times she thought she was very unlucky. I bring as much excess baggage to a relationship as anybody.”
In 1975, after an on-again, off-again separation and after he’d moved the family from Dayton to Chicago, he and Marge Cooney Donahue, the girl he’d married right after college, were divorced. There was no high drama, no malicious squabbling. He retained custody of his four boys—Michael, Kevin, Daniel, and Jim, now ages fifteen through nineteen—and his wife took their only daughter, Maryrose, thirteen, moved to New Mexico, and has since remarried.
In the meantime, Donahue became a national celebrity and an oft quoted authority on single parenting. The condition first obsessed him, but now he grows weary of the attention and the implied credit. “I hate to have my home pictured as Ponderosa East,” he says, and insists on more family privacy. “My boys sometimes tell me it’s a pain in the neck to be the sons of a celebrity. They don’t want their big shot dad coming to their little league game and hogging all the attention.” To make amends for the years he ignored them, he now tries to spend more quiet time with them.
His money makes that easier. The program now brings him an estimated income of $500,000 a year from his salary combined with a percentage of the program’s gross revenues. He has the money to afford live-in housekeepers and travels freely with the boys. Yet he is suspicious of too much of anything. Two of his kids work in grocery stores after school; one of them works in a gas station; they drive the Caprice when he doesn’t. They know, as Donahue’s friends and associates sense, that the old man is in a lot of ways more conservative on his own than on the air.
There are just a lot of things he can no longer let pass. He abhors affronts to women and feminism. This sensibility pervades every interview, from questioning newscaster Paul Harvey about why he thinks women belong in the kitchen to asking est guru Werner Erhard why most of his trainers are men. He presses representatives of business, medicine, science, sports, religion, and media about why they treat women like they do and if they’re changing. He does it because he knows intimately and is moved by the concerns of his audience.
“I’m for the women’s movement. I’m fascinated by it. I think it’s good for us, and I don’t think it’s going to go away.
“Years ago, the whole male media was absorbed by the cosmetics of the early movement— ‘Boy, they must be unhappy. Most of them just can’t get a man’—and there was a lot of humiliation thrown around.
“Now, we’ve gone from that to, ‘I’m not a women’s libber, but—.’ The ‘buts’ are things like believing in equal pay for equal work, and a lot of other areas which have almost become clichés. And the ‘buts’ are increasing in number.
“Yet I still see a reluctance to identify with the movement and mostly from a woman who’s married, two kids, mid-thirties. A lot of them think that feminists are telling them that if they got married when they were twenty-two, had kids while the husband went off to work, drove a station wagon with the wood on the side, and had a split-level house in the suburbs, that after they’ve done all that, feminists are looking them in the eye and saying, ‘Baby, you’ve been had.’
“The important thing to remember is that feminists haven't said that, but that’s the way so many women interpret them. What’s interesting is the response, which is usually anger. If that so angers you, then your anger tells us more about you than you may want us to know.”
It is an ongoing dialogue. The movement, women in and outside of it, engage Donahue throughout five hours a week of extraordinary talk. And with his shaggy head and darting mike, he pushes and probes among them.
“There is nothing patronizing about my relationship with my audience. I do enjoy the company of women. But one of the revealing things that happens is that they ask me, ‘How do you stand it with all these women?’ I can see the self-loathing, the whole suggestion that women aren’t interesting. When I hear things like that, I think of all the feminists who’ve been trying very hard to make the point about how our male-dominated culture smashes the spirit of women.
"It’s hard to make that point. You get to where you sound like you want all women to run air hammers and fly airplanes and abandon their children. That isn’t it at all. It is simply a matter of choices and relationships which include real choices for both men and women.”
Daily he spreads that word, keeping his head screwed on, knowing from whence he came. He has made mistakes.
On a show about dentists and dentistry, he took a question from a woman in the audience who spoke authoritatively on the subject.
“You must be the wife of a dentist,” he remarked.
“No, I am a dentist,” she said.
He wilted. He has had his embarrassments. Another involved an interview with Anne Gaylor, a proabortion author:
GAYLOR: Most people who appear on this program have their books held up. My book could not be held up because it is proabortion. Right?
DONAHUE: No, that’s not true. I said I didn’t want to show your book because I thought the title was—
GAYL.OR: The title was offensive to the Catholic Church.
DONAHUE: Okay, all right. Let me just tell you the title of the book. You’re right, you’re right. I asked you not to show the book. I engaged in a very blatant form of censorship.
GAYL OR: You’re right. It was censorship.
DONAHUE: The title is Abortion Is a Blessing. And I said that if you hold this book up, you’re going to create such a shock wave that we’re not going to get anything else done in here.
GAYLOR: I suggested I do it at the end of the program, and you said no to that. Right?
DONAHUE: I thought the title would be unnecessarily offensive to a lot of people. That’s what I mean. Why is it that you have to be so incendiary with your rhetoric?
GAYLOR: Because I have conferred in over 12,000 legal abortions, including a twelve-year-old girl, a fifteen-year-old.... I know abortion is a blessing. You won’t let me say it!
DONAHUE: Okay. Well...
GAYLOR: Feminism has a long way to go on the Phil Donahue Show.
It was a tense, electric moment—live television, Donahue on the defensive, the suggestion that his old hang-ups haven’t all been stripped away. But if it was an embarrassing moment, you wouldn't know it from Donahue himself. Instead of burying the can of film, he replayed it in a later show along with letters scolding him for being rude, conceited, sexist—the whole gamut of sins committed as a talk show host and as an American male.
But his detractors are amazingly few, and some of his most ardent supporters are from a tough crowd.
“I’ve watched Phil over a period of ten years move from a position of curiosity about the women’s movement to downright advocacy,” said Gloria Steinern. At a testimonial in Chicago marking the tenth anniversary of the show, she added, “Phil is the only person who could get me to come to an unratified state.”
Another booster, the author of Free to Be... You and Me, one of the most highly acclaimed TV specials and a successful book, is actress Marlo Thomas.
Ms. Thomas is now the woman in his life. Their relationship is an item, one neither person discourages, and they travel frequently to be together. They are both instantly recognized. “I still find it hard to get used to,” he says. “I think, ‘Geez, a kid from Cleveland with Marlo Thomas on his arm.’” He is asked if his dating Mario was a career move.
He smiles, aware of the gossip.
“Between me and Marlo? I understand the interest. If I weren’t dating her, I’d be curious to know who was. She means a lot to me, and more than that, it’s a private thing. As far as professionally, well, it sure hasn’t hurt.”
But he finds it hard to get big-headed, with or without Ms. Thomas on his arm, now that he is on top of the tube. “We’ve worked very hard for this attention. It’s a little premature to get sick of it. I’ll bear up.” Now that the whole world is watching, he is trying not to be Superhost. He refuses to abandon his format, forget about his audience, ignore the guidance of his mostly female production staff, or lose track of what he has been doing for eleven years.
If he has any strength, it is in knowing his frailties. He realizes he can't be too smart, read every book, know all the answers, or do it alone. He needs the judgment of his staff and their sense of what will play and what won’t. His office is a cubbyhole in the middle of theirs, so he yells a lot, and they yell back. He makes a lot of mistakes, and they tell him about them. He asks them for their tolerance.
I cannot say for sure what it really is or what the characteristics might be, but there is something about the makeup of somebody who has grown up in an area roughly west of the Hudson and east of Las Vegas. It is as vague as the contours on the map my geography teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan, pulled down from the top of the blackboard. The Midwest was always green and flat, uncluttered by capricious shorelines or untrustworthy mountain ranges.
I grew up with a hundred guys who looked just like Phil Donahue. Most of them look younger than they are, more innocent, and drawn not to pinkie rings and puka beads but to crew neck sweaters with shirt collars poking out like daisy petals. Archie and Jughead comic books come to mind.
The first time I met him, I gave him a lift back to his Chicago studios, and he sat in the front seat of my nine-year-old Mercedes-Benz telling me why he gave up his Mercedes. He’d had a 220, the small sedan, and he was “determined to roll over one hundred thousand miles on it.” But the repair costs were killing him—“the guys with the metric wrenches see you coming.” And when his oldest boys became drivers, he decided for upkeep and insurance reasons to trade in the Mercedes, at 94,000 miles, for his current brown Caprice. “The dullest car in America,” he said.
I cannot say for sure what his appeal really is; there are guys who measure that sort of thing by the galvanic responses in the palm of your hand. I cannot say how Donahue’s looks, his attitude, his diction, or his birthplace make a difference. But I wonder when Carson, who now thinks we all live somewhere near the Santa Monica freeway, last worried about his transmission.
Donahue would be the first to say that he is not a Carson, that he is not a great intellect or a great wit, a great entertainer or a great prosecutor. He began as none of these, yet has managed to become some of each. He is now “vain and insecure enough” to enjoy the applause yet to remain as casual as his slightly pigeon-toed stride and the faded jeans and sweater he wears to work. He is the father of five and the son of a furniture salesman. He was in Dayton too long to forget. So he signs autographs, poses for pictures, goes through the thousands of little amenities that have become a bother to personalities half his size. Phil Donahue still listens.
In so many ways he is also in a public confession booth, as he bares his soul, his past sins, his secret inclinations and vile leanings, to the millions of women before him. He is not in mock therapy on a propman’s couch, not sincere only for the camera, not a communicative cocktail party lecher offering a shoulder of understanding in exchange for a hand beneath the skirt.
“There are really three stages of commitment,” Donahue explains. “There’s the fun stage, where you go out and say I love doing this. Then there’s stage two, where you become totally intolerant of everybody who doesn’t agree with you. Then there’s the third stage: the sudden realization that you’re not going to make much of a dent. That’s the phase where the saints are made: people who hang in at that point—instead of peeling off and living under a cartop in New Mexico—people who struggle.
“I’d like to be known as someone who’s recognized his own imperfections, his own feather against the Rock of Gibraltar, and, despite his minuscule contribution, hung in there.”
It has been hard. He is learning, struggling, sometimes groping. And if a guy from Ohio and Notre Dame can do it, there is hope for the American Male.
So he stands at the door of the studio after each program, not unlike, by his own admission, the pastor after church. He’s removed his jacket, his vestment, and offers his hands to each departing member of the audience. They touch him, hug him. He smiles and thanks them and says he hopes they had a nice time. He remains until the last of the flock has passed, each one assured, each one blessed.
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