Phil Donahue, the talk show innovator who changed the conversation and the course of daytime television with the weekday program he hosted for nearly three decades, has died. He was 88.
Donahue died Sunday night at his New York City home following a long illness, his family announced.
Survivors include his wife of 44 years, That Girl star Marlo Thomas. They met when she was a guest on his show — he was a divorced single father living with and raising his four sons at the time — before marrying in May 1980.
Related Stories
The Cleveland native hosted more than 6,000 iterations of The Phil Donahue Show, from the first, broadcast from a Dayton, Ohio station on Nov. 7, 1967, through the last, seen nationwide on syndication via Multimedia Entertainment, on Sept. 13, 1996.
Donahue addressed contemporary and controversial topics and invited his studio audience to participate, carrying his microphone into the crowd. He became adept at interweaving their questions and remarks with his own running commentary.
The issue-oriented approach was novel, and his topics — abortion, incest, artificial insemination, alcoholism, penile implants, homosexuality, same-sex couples raising children and priests’ pedophilia, to name just a few — proved cutting edge, making his show notorious 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 Newsweek writer once wrote.
After meteoric success in Dayton, Donahue moved his program in 1974 to Chicago and then to New York. For a lengthy period in the ’70s and ’80s, he was the most-watched interviewer on daytime TV, attracting about 9 million viewers, most of them female, to each show.
“We grew up with the feminist movement, the consumer movement, the gay rights movement, we grew up with the antiwar movement, with the environmental movement,” Donahue said during a 2001 conversation for 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.”
Donahue had things pretty much all to himself until 1985, when Oprah Winfrey launched her own talk show. “It’s just not possible to overstate the enormousness of her impact on the daytime television game,” he said. “It was staggering.” (She would dethrone him atop the ratings in 1987.)
After he had turned 60 and received 11 Daytime Emmys, Donahue called it quits in 1996, and Winfrey presented him with a Lifetime Achievement honor. “I want to thank you for opening the door so wide, wide enough for me to walk through,” she said. “Had there not been a Phil Donahue, I don’t believe there could have been an Oprah.”
In May, he was among those presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on Dec. 21, 1935, the youngest of two kids. His father was a furniture salesman and his mother, after working as an elevator operator in a department store, was a housewife.
Donahue attended private all-boys schools St. Edward High and Notre Dame. Before he left college with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1957, he did early morning farm reports at WNDU-TV, the NBC affiliate on the South Bend campus.
Donahue said he was influenced in his formative years by the motto of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain: “Give Light, and the People Will Find Their Own Way.” Those words were presented the length of a city block along the side of the Cleveland Press’ downtown building.
“Was that my first stirrings of free speech and the First Amendment?” he said in his TV Academy interview. “I thought I had all the answers then. As I got older, I realized I had a hundred thousand questions, but asking the questions was more exciting than thinking I had the answers. It was a real epiphany for me.”
Donahue landed a gig as a summer replacement announcer at KYW-TV in Cleveland but was laid off when the regulars returned from vacation. He couldn’t find a news job so followed his college sweetheart to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and worked as a bank teller. (He and Margaret Cooney were married in February 1958 and would have five children in six years.)
Donahue returned to the Midwest and was hired as news director (in fact, he was the only person in the news department) at a radio station in Adrian, Michigan. There, he said he “fell in love with journalism. I thought it was the noblest calling.”
In 1960, Donahue left for WHIO, a radio and TV station in Dayton, where he did half-hour morning radiocasts, worked as a street reporter and landed hard-to-get interviews with Texas con man Billy Sol Estes and controversial Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa. Film of his interviews was broadcast on the CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite, but he couldn’t get CBS to hire him.
Donahue found his niche in 1963 when he began hosting Conversation Piece, a weekday 90-minute radio talk show. It employed new technology that enabled local folks to phone in and speak to newsmakers who weren’t actually in Dayton, people like Hugh Hefner, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Ralph Nader and Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.
Not all his guests were famous. “We put a gay guy on in 1964, ’65 … people would stop the car to listen to this. Nothing like that had ever been on,” he said. Donahue also “began to hear what women were thinking about. I put an OB-GYN on the air once, and we couldn’t get to the phones fast enough.” Ratings quadrupled, Donahue said, and he was paid an extra $25 a show.
On 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 7, 1967, he brought a version of his radio show to TV after being lured to WLWD in Dayton. (It replaced a traditional variety program hosted by Johnny Gilbert, later the longtime announcer on Jeopardy!) His first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a controversial atheist whose lawsuit led to the outlawing of prayer in public schools.
The Phil Donahue Show, with the host and his lone guest sitting in folding chairs, didn’t have a couch or a band or a sidekick that laughed at his jokes.
It also aired live in front of a studio audience, a holdover from 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 said. “There would have been no Donahue show without [them]. We put the camera behind the audience and moved the audience up close, first time that had ever been done. Audiences had generally been regarded as nuisances by local television stations.
“We knew we were visually boring. … We knew we had to have personalities who moved you to go to the phone and make a phone call,” he added. Eventually, his callers were “paralyzing the entire downtown phone exchange. People couldn’t reach their doctors, their hospital, it was dangerous. We created a risk to the well-being of the community.”
He realized the largely female audience was an integral part of his success, and many topics were selected for their appeal to women. (He was a member of the National Organization for Women and an ardent feminist.)
“I honestly believe we have spoken more thoughtfully, more honestly, more often to more issues about which women care than any other show,” he said.
Wrote humorist Erma Bombeck, “He’s every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her.”
Beginning in 1979, segments of his show (now called Donahue) were broadcast three times a week on NBC’s Today, and he joined the staff as a regular interviewer. He also hosted NBC primetime specials, including the Emmy-winning Donahue and Kids and the five-part Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal.
And perhaps proving he really had made it, Phil Hartman, white wig and all, did an imitation of him on Saturday Night Live.
He published his memoir, Donahue: My Own Story, in 1979.
At the end of Thomas’ first appearance on his show, she told him: “You are wonderful, and I said it when we were off the air. You’re loving and generous and you like women and it’s a pleasure. Whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky.”
In addition to Thomas, survivors include his children, Michael, Daniel, Kevin and Mary Rose; a sister; and his “beloved golden retriever,” Charlie. Another son, Jim, 51, died in 2014 of an aortic aneurysm.
Donations can be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital or the Phil Donahue/Notre Dame Scholarship Fund.
After receiving his lifetime award at the Daytime Emmys, Donahue seemed at ease with putting his 29-year run as a talk show host to rest.
“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 said. “I’ve never regretted it.”
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
