Before the answers to life's questions fit in our pockets, you had to turn the dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be willing to guide you to enlightenment. Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have been in the luxury of to be education. It was a search engine. It was a reliable result.
Donahue greeted From Cleveland. The windshield glasses, the increasingly snowy hairdo, the marble eyes, the occasional pair of suspenders, and the obvious elegance of the “card catalog,” said the manager of “79 Reds,” the stage manager of “Our Town,” a Chevy Motors production. Dr. Ruth was Donahue's antonym, a rung on his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a greasy helmet, dreamed of a jacket-blouse-skirt uniform, and helped us through Germany with the sound of crumpled napkins. Not even eight years separated them, but he was so boyish and so experienced that he studied like his grandson. (He may have reached for his armpit.) Together and separately, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was a talk show, but some new strain where the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — of all kinds — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue's channel of radical development, identity, curiosity, shock, amazement, anger, surprise and controversy, all of which appear to be the show's television jackpot: giving us intersections, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, breathing. When a celebrity steps on the “Donahue” stage – Bill Clinton, say La Toya JacksonThe Judds – they were expected to be human too, to be responsible for their own humanity. For over 6,000 episodes from 1967 to 1996, he let us be in charge of ourselves.
Donahue knew that we—especially women—were desperate to be understood, to learn, to learn, to learn. We call his job a “host,” when really he was closer to a “switchboard operator,” moving the microphone through the audience, running it up, down, around, sticking it here, then here, then there. It was “The Hot Dog Vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man took his steps. He allowed us to do more than ask questions – he would just edit, comment, clarify. Egalitarianism prevailed. Articulation too. Anyone who needed a microphone usually got one.
The show was about things that crossed our minds and things that never crossed our minds. Atheism. nazism Colorism. Birth. Prison. Aggressors. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Calling it a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to the bottom of it, sometimes trying it himself. (Let's never forget the episode where she walked in the long skirt, blouse and cat bow for one of the show's many cross-dressing investigations.) Now it's time to add that “Donahue” in the morning talk show. In Philadelphia, it came at 9 a.m. every day, which meant I could learn compulsive shopping or gender role reversals from the same kitchen TV as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the main themes of the show. There was much to confess, to correct, to confirm, to listen to. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times the expert was Dr. Ruth, a goddess who didn't come to this country until she was 20 and didn't appear on television until she was 50. Ruth Westheimer came to us from Germany, where she started As Carola Ruth Siegel and his life was closed for mocking fiction. His family probably perished after crashing into the security of a Swiss orphanage expected to clean up the Auschwitz death camps. These twists and turns include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, being crippled by a cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood, and three husbands. He earned his doctorate in education from Columbia University and spent his postdoc researching human sexuality. And because his timing was perfect, he emerged in the early 1980s as the amiable vector of an era's craze for gnomish sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding, and obnoxiousness.
His age was Mapplethorpe and Madonna from Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. In his radio and television shows, in many books and a Gamer girl In his column and unusual approach to talk show appearances, he aimed to de-shame sex and promote sex literacy. His feline accent and cheerful innuendo have featured Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences, among other items. (“Hey!” he offers to a young elevator passenger. “Here we Drop.”) Dr. The instructions for Ruth's “Good Sex Game” say that it can be played by four couples; the plate is vulval and contains the stops “Yeast infection”, “Chauvinism” and “Nut Him”.
In “Donahue” he is direct, open, devastating, humorous, clear, sane, serious, alive Professional therapist. Donahue directed the comedy. Active A visit in 1987a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants sex more often than he does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to save the marriage and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then all he has to do is masturbate her. Also, it would be good if he masturbates himself several times.” Spectators can be naked or just curled up. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-pupil war chest and cracks a joke about a teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don't play with yourself or you'll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a child in the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do this until I have to? glasses?” Westheimer chuckled, perhaps noticing the big frown on Donahue's face. It was cold weather that day.
They were the children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, his father sold concepts that people in the garment industry sold. They inherited a vendor facility for people and packaging. When “Donahue” asks audience member Westheimer if she believes her husband practices what he preaches, she says that's why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil, 'Don't listen to him. It's all talk,'' confusing the audience.
But think about what he's talking about and think about how he says it. My favorite Dr. Ruth's word was “pleasure.” This German word conveys what the American language lacks: a sensual opening. He promised to talk about sex to a mass audience, using the right terminology. Euphemisms be damned. People waited up to a year and a half to buy tickets to Donahue they are he can curse them too. But of all Westheimer's words, of all the precise terms he used, pleasure was his most persuasive product, a gift he believed we could give to others, a gift he swore we owed ourselves.
I miss Donahue's reinvented talk show. I miss Dr. Ruth talking about sex. It's somehow fitting that this anti-dogmatic but priestly Irish Catholic man sometimes joins forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to exhort us to examine our bodies in a show of respect, civility and reciprocity. They believed in us, we were all interested, we could be reliable panelists in the discussion of survival. Trauma, meaninglessness, tubal ligation: Let's talk about it! Fear, it seems, did not even occur to them. Or if it was, it was never a deterrent. They went bravely. – And with his encouragement, we came boldly.
Wesley Morris is a critic and magazine contributor for The New York Times at large.