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The day Phil Donahue and I kept our clothes on

By Jeff Jacoby

Published August 27, 2024

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In its obituary for Phil Donahue, the "long-reigning king of daytime television" who died last week at 88, The Washington Post charted the arc of his career. "The Phil Donahue Show" began in 1967 on a TV station in Dayton, Ohio, with a controversial guest — the crusading atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

Before long Donahue was broadcasting from New York and his nationally syndicated program had millions of loyal viewers.","Over the years," noted the Post, "he interviewed late night host Johnny Carson, pop star Elton John, boxer Muhammad Ali, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, comic filmmaker Mel Brooks, and tennis rivals Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Some of his more controversial guests included Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's architect; novelist Ayn Rand; Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke; and adult-film star Harry Reems." His most frequent guest was Ralph Nader, but I presume he would have said that his most significant guest was the actress Marlo Thomas, whom he interviewed in 1977 and promptly fell in love with.

They exchanged vows three years later. When he died, their marriage had lasted 44 years.

"Over time, Donahue's ratings began to slip. To boost them, the Post recounted, he "experimented with stunts and increasingly prurient or titillating subject matter." Which was how I came to be at the WNBC studios in New York one day in 1994.

I was invited to take part in a show featuring Spencer Tunick, a photographer known for his shtick of photographing naked people en masse in public.

At the time, Tunick was just getting started and Donahue, then in his "increasingly prurient or titillating" phase, put him on the air, together with a couple of models, a filmmaker who was making a documentary about the photographer … and me."

"You can call it anything you like," I answered. "But labeling a gimmick 'art' doesn't make it more than a gimmick."

"After a while the cameras turned off and the show went to a commercial break. Everyone except Tunick and the models — a man and a woman — was ushered off the stage. When the break ended and the cameras came back on, the models stripped and Tunick began posing them and snapping pictures. After seven or eight minutes of photographing the naked couple, the segment ended, the studio audience applauded, and Donahue wrapped up the show.

It was all quite silly, but it did give me a fine story with which to regale friends. When the show finally aired months later, all the nudity was obscured with floating blue circles, which only compounded the silliness of the whole thing. The episode was doubtless welcome publicity for Tunick, who is still going strong, but it did nothing to arrest the downward trajectory of Donahue's show, which ended in 1996.

Donahue struck me as a genuine and appealing personality. I didn't know it at the time, but he and I had some things in common: We both grew up in Cleveland, both attended religious schools, and both had fathers who were furniture salesmen. My single encounter with him was admittedly inane, but I'm glad I had the experience. There was no rancor or harshness in the man. May he rest in peace.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."

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