From the beginning on Nov. 6, 1967, Phil Donahue’s daytime talk show dared to be different.
His first Phil Donahue Show guest in Dayton’s Channel 2 studio was atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who, Donahue recalled years later, "told the audience that anybody who believed in God was a fool."
Donahue — who died Sunday at age 88 — brought Jane Fonda to Dayton’s WLWD-TV (now WDTN-TV) for his trailblazing daytime show after her visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Donahue was the first talk show to go to death row (1971); show a baby's birth (1977); talk about AIDS (1982); and visit Russia's crippled Chernobyl nuclear plant (1987).
It was considered revolutionary in 1968 when Donahue invited a gay man on the show. People said "the world was going to Hell, and we were leading it there. We took major, major pressure for appearing to celebrate what lots of our viewers thought was an evil lifestyle. We're proud of the history we have," he told me for the 25th anniversary of Donahue in 1992.
After moving the show to Chicago, he devoted an hour to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) in 1982 when just 300 had died and 700 cases were known. It was so new his medical expert repeatedly referred to the disease by spelling it out, "A-I-D-S."
"A significant and serious disease has struck the gay community. And let's see how much sense we can make out of this… We really don't know all the answers," Donahue said introducing the Nov. 17, 1982, broadcast from Chicago's WBBM-TV.
The former altar boy from Cleveland and 1957 Notre Dame University graduate made it big in Dayton in the early 1960s at WHIO as both a TV anchorman and radio host. Callers to his popular afternoon Conversation Piece talk show could speak to guests phoning from anywhere, such as Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan and Malcolm X.
Donahue quit broadcasting for a sales job in early 1967 to get off the night shift and to spend more time with his five young children. His big break came a few months later when WLWD-TV variety show host Johnny Gilbert — best known today as TV's longtime Jeopardy! announcer — moved to Hollywood.
Station manager Don Dahlman offered Donahue a live TV program to bring his Conversation Piece concept to TV, with participation by callers and a studio audience. His dressing room was the same one previously used by Channel 2's TV wrestlers.
As I wrote for the Ohio Historical Society’s Timeline magazine last year: ”Donahue was unlike any talk show. There was no couch, opening monologue, band or sidekick. Donahue devoted an hour to interviewing guest experts on everything from abortion, drug abuse, suicide, impotence and incest to alcoholism, feminism, racism, consumerism, pacifism, Nazism and nudism.”
"And sex," Donahue once told TV Guide. "Sex always works. Always."
Shortly after his debut, Donahue showed viewers an anatomically correct boy doll. "It was like a bomb had gone off. The phone company said every phone in downtown Dayton was paralyzed because everyone was calling our show. I knew then we had the right formula," Donahue told TV Guide.
At the outset, Donahue and his staff “were very concerned about succeeding in Dayton. That was our main anxiety,” he once told me. “In our first ratings period, we got a 50% share and everybody was stunned.”
That included executives at AVCO Broadcasting based in Cincinnati, and stars and staffers of AVCO’s top-rated Paul Dixon Show and Bob Braun’s 50-50 Club in Cincinnati. They were puzzled by the success “of this Donahue guy in Dayton interviewing atheists, homosexuals, war protesters and Nixon bashers,” Donahue told me.
Despite being watched by half of the available daytime viewers in Dayton, it took nearly two years for sister AVCO stations in Cincinnati and Columbus to pick up the show in 1969 before it went national. The show was renamed Donahue in 1974 when it moved to Chicago for 11 years, then he spent another 11 years in New York, until 1996.
Donahue — which premiered a year before CBS’ acclaimed 60 Minutes and more than decade before Cincinnati native Ted Turner launched CNN — earned 21 Daytime Emmys, including six for best talk show, eight for Donahue as best host and a lifetime achievement award, plus a Peabody Award. Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Television Hall of Fame in 1993, three years before ending his daytime TV show after 29 years.
Four consecutive Daytime Emmys (1977-80) not only helped put Donahue atop of the daytime ratings, but his 6 million viewers in 200 TV markets were more than Good Morning America, the Today show or Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in 1979.
He was No. 1 until Oprah Winfrey came along and won the ratings and the 1987 best host Emmy. Winfrey told the New York Times: "If there never had been a Phil, there never would have been a me. I can talk about things now that I never could have talked about before he came on the air."
The late humorist Erma Bombeck, his neighbor in the Centerville suburb of Dayton, told Newsweek in 1979 that Donahue was "every wife's replacement for the husband who doesn't talk to her. They've always got Phil who will listen and take them seriously."
He mixed the hot topics with cool celebrity guests: Johnny Carson, Aretha Franklin, Bill Clinton, Harry Belafonte, Sally Field, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Sammy Davis Jr., Burt Reynolds, John Denver, Ted Kennedy, Jerry Lewis, Mike Wallace, John Wayne, Muhammad Ali, best friends Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, and Marlo Thomas, whom he met on the show in 1977 and married in 1980, five years after divorcing college sweetheart Marge Cooney.
What really worked for Donahue was his audience. Donahue quickly discovered that the 200 people in the studio, mostly women, asked better questions than he did. They got equal time on the show, as Donahue ran up and down the aisles with a wireless microphone, busier than a ballpark beer vendor on a hot Sunday afternoon.
In his early years, when he still took live phone calls, he’d frequently ask, “Is the caller there?” When I interviewed him by phone I couldn’t resist opening the conversation by asking that same question.
At the height of his success, Donahue contributed reports to the Today show (1979-82); produced a five-part NBC prime-time series, Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal (1986) based on his The Human Animal book; moderated a Democratic Party presidential debate with Ted Koppel on PBS (1984); broadcast a week of shows from the Soviet Union (1987) and did two Soviet-U.S. Space Bridge citizens' summit shows with American and Soviet audiences linked by satellite on from Seattle (1985) and Boston (1986) with Soviet journalist Vladimir Pozner.
With the Donahue parent company based at WLWT-TV, Donahue occasionally brought his show here. The old Riverfront Coliseum (now Heritage Bank Center) was packed in 1985 for Donahue’s one-on-one with Pete Rose after breaking Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record. He did a show in 1988 from Hamilton High School about nuclear waste cleanup at Butler County’s abandoned Fernald plant.
“I was wondering if you’d recognize me,” he told the crowd of about 600 for the Fernald show. “When I got off the airplane at the airport, some guy in bib overalls looked at me and said, ‘Hey Martha! It’s Nick Clooney!’ “
As Donahue's daytime ratings slipped against Winfrey, Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera and others in the 1990s, he did a weekly Posner & Donahue show for cable and syndication. After leaving daytime in 1996, he tried cable again with a nightly MSNBC show 2002-03, but was dropped for his opposition to the war with Iraq.
Donahue told me in 2002, when he returned to speak at the University of Dayton, that he had been asked to run for a U.S. Senate seat. He “surely gave it some thought,” but didn’t want to spend the necessary time seeking campaign funds. He’d rather help his wife, Marlo, raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital founded by entertainer Danny Thomas, his father-in-law.
He was 60 when he quit doing 6,000 Donahue shows over 29 years. After blazing the path for Jerry Springer, Maury Povich and so many others, he struggled to stay on the high road while the competition wallowed in the 1990s "Trash TV" gutter.
Viewers "don't want to see politicians. They want to see naked ladies. You're being challenged on every front, in terms of the visual, the fighting with Springer, the (body) guards. The audiences are being prepared on these other shows. We never told an audience member what to say. I mean there are people being told to cry, being told when to cry, when to scream, you know, it's all manufactured," he reflected in the Television Academy interview
"A little voice kept saying to me: 'They heard you speak already, so sit down.' " he said in 2002. "It was time to leave."
When his show was ending in 1996, I wrote this for the Enquirer:
“For 29 years, Phil Donahue traded shots with the best of them: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali, John Wayne, Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, Billy Graham, the KKK and Nazis.
“But there was one opponent he couldn’t dodge, the one that did him in: the TV remote control.
“ ‘Audiences have a little hand-held, battery-operated instrument that will zap you in a flash,’ he told me in 1992, when he celebrated the 25th anniversary. ‘So the naked lady has to jump out of the cake at the top of the show.’
“As more and more nearly naked ladies, male strippers, transvestites, prostitutes and pin-up models jumped onto rival daytime talk shows, Donahue lost the ratings battle in the genre he created. Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you helped kill the Don of daytime TV. Your fascination with sleazy, sensational daytime talk shows made it impossible for Donahue to survive.”
The Donahue show ended in 1996, but his trailblazing legacy lives on. Phil Donahue changed the faces of television.
Parts of this story appeared in the Ohio Historical Society’s “Timeline” magazine in spring 2023.
