Phil Donahue, talk host who made audiences part of the show, dies at 88

Phil Donahue, who in the 1960s reinvented the television talk show with a democratic flourish, inviting audiences to question his guests on topics as high-minded as human rights and international relations, and as lowbrow as male strippers and safe-sex orgies, died Sunday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by Susan Arons, a representative of the family.

“The Phil Donahue Show” made its debut in 1967 on WLWD-TV in Dayton, Ohio, propelling Donahue on a 29-year syndicated run, much of it as the unchallenged king of daytime talk television.

At the time, audiences were expected to be seen and not heard, unless prompted to applaud. Donahue changed that. He quickly realized from chatting with audience members during commercial breaks that some of them asked sharper questions than he did. And so he began stalking the aisles, microphone in hand, and letting those in the seats have their say. He also opened the telephone lines to those watching at home.

Across the years — he moved from Dayton to Chicago in 1974, and then to New York in 1985 — he interviewed presidential candidates and Hollywood stars, consumer advocates and feminist pioneers. He also televised a child’s birth, an abortion, a reverse vasectomy and a tubal ligation. He was among the first television hosts to explore the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and the first Western journalist to go to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, after the 1986 nuclear accident there.

And there was sex, lots of it.

He offered no apologies for his frequent traipses down the low road. “This is a medium that rewards popularity, and I don’t want to be a dead hero,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “Besides, it doesn’t do any good to talk if nobody’s listening.”

People indeed listened for a long time, through more than 6,000 episodes that won a total of 20 Daytime Emmy Awards. (He himself won a lifetime achievement Emmy in 1996.) At its peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s, “Donahue” — the title shortened to a single word in the mid-1970s — was syndicated to more than 200 stations around the country, with an average viewership of 8 million. For a while, Donahue also had a regular interview segment on NBC’s “Today” show.

By the mid-1990s, Donahue tumbled to 13th place in the Nielsen ratings for daytime talk shows. As early as the mid-’80s he had been overtaken by the unstoppable force known as Oprah Winfrey. But others came along, too. Hosts such as Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael catered to brows far lower than even those Donahue increasingly sought as his audience. Struggling to keep up, he called it quits in 1996.

Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on Dec. 21, 1935, to Phillip and Catherine (McClory) Donahue. His father was a furniture salesperson, his mother a shoe clerk at a department store.

He attended St. Edward High, an all-boys preparatory school in Lakewood, Ohio, and graduated in 1957 from the University of Notre Dame, where he met his first wife, Margaret Mary Cooney. They wed in 1958, when both were in their early 20s, and had four boys and a girl. They divorced in 1975.

In 1977, he interviewed Marlo Thomas, star of the sitcom “That Girl” and author of “Free to Be … You and Me,” a book with a feminist perspective that gave rise to a series of recordings and television specials for children. The two hit it off right away, and they married in 1980.

Donahue is survived by Thomas; four of his children, Michael, Kevin, Daniel and Mary Rose Donahue, from his first marriage; his sister, Kathy Taube; and two grandchildren. A son, James, died of an aortic aneurysm at age 51 in 2014.

In 2002, Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled.

Throughout, Donahue stuck to his faith in hot topics. “Television’s problem is not controversy,” he said more than once. “It is blandness.” He suggested this for his epitaph: “Here lies Phil. Occasionally he went too far.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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