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Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pockets, a dial had to be turned. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be there, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of luxurious good luck, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the lighting. He was the search engine. She was a reliable result.
Donahue was a native of Cleveland. The windshield glass, the increasingly snowy mop of hair, the marble eyes, an occasional pair of suspenders, and obvious genius said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “stage director in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town’.” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step on his straight ladder. She wore her hair up in a caramel-colored helmet, liked a jacket-blouse-skirt uniform, and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice like crumpled tissue paper. They weren’t even eight years apart, but he was so youthful and she was so experienced that he seemed like her grandson. (Maybe it reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. Their forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction overlooked celebrities. People, of all kinds, lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, awe, indignation, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s television jackpot. : cuts to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity arrived on the “Donahue” stage (Bill Clinton, for example), Toya Jacksonthe Judds: they too were expected to be human, to be responsible for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, it allowed us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we, especially women, were eager, desperate to be understood, to learn, learn, learn. We call his job “presenter” when, in reality, the way he did it, passing the microphone around the audience, running up, down, around, sticking it here, then here, then here, was more like a “switchboard operator.” He was “a hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man intervened. He let us ask more questions than he did: he simply edited, interpreted and clarified. Egalitarianism reigned. Articulation too. And anyone who needed the microphone usually got it.
The show was as much about what we had in mind as it was about what had never crossed our minds. Atheism. Nazism. Colorism. Delivery. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to the bottom of it, sometimes trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode in which she made her entrance in a long skirt, blouse and bow in pussy for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now it’s time to add that “Donahue” was a tomorrow talk show. In Philadelphia, I arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about impulse shopping or changing gender roles from the same kitchen TV as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the main themes of the program. There were so many things that needed confession, correction, corroboration, hearing. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a blessing who didn’t land in this country until she was 20 and didn’t land on television until she was 50. Ruth Westheimer came to us from Germany, where she started out as Karola Ruth Siegel and settled in as her life spun around and made fun of fiction. Her family most likely died in the Auschwitz death camps after she was taken to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. Twists include sniper training for one of the military teams that would become the Israel Defense Forces, mutilation by a cannonball on her 20th birthday, research at Planned Parenthood in Harlem, a single mother and three husbands. He earned his doctorate in education at Columbia University and dedicated his postdoc to researching human sexuality. And because his timing was perfect, he emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece brands, and the unsavory. .
Theirs was the era of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. In his radio and television programs, in a lot of books and in a playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk show appearances, she aimed to purge shame from sex and promote sexual literacy. His feline accent and cheerful come-ons launched, among other things, Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” he offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where us get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Good Sex Game say that up to four couples can play it; the board is vulvar and includes stops on “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism,” and “Goose Him.”
In “Donahue”, she is direct, explicit, dissipating, humorous, clear, common sense, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who was in charge of the comedy. In a visit in 1987A caller needs advice about a husband who cheats on her because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what he should do is masturbate him. And it’s okay for him to masturbate a few times too.” The audience is engrossed at the sound of a pin or perhaps just restless. Then Donahue reaches into his war chest of parochial school students and pulls out the joke about the teacher telling third graders, “Don’t play with yourself or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid in the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it as long as I need to?” glasses?” Westheimer laughs, perhaps noticing the big torque on Donahue’s face. This was the cold open for that day.
These two were sons of salesmen; her father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the textile industry called notions. They inherited a facility for selling people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer if her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says that’s why she never takes him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil, ‘Don’t listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which makes the audience laugh.
But consider what he talked about and consider how he said it. My favorite word of Dr. Ruth’s was “pleasure.” In the German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks in the American language: sensual display. He promised to talk about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn euphemisms. People waited up to a year and a half to get tickets to “Donahue,” so they I could also condemn them. But of all that Westheimer proposed, of all the terms he used with precision, pleasure was his most compelling product, a gift he believed we could give to others, a gift he swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. In some ways it is fitting that this anti-dogmatic but priestly Irish Catholic would join forces, on occasion, with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility and reciprocity. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be reliable panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: let’s talk about it! Fear does not seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. They went bravely. —And with his encouragement, we bravely arrived.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and an editor for the magazine.
