October 1990: IN THE beginning, there was Phil. The others followed and they continue to follow.
!t was in Dayton, Ohio in 1967 and a new form of television was about to be born. Up to that time, television only showed the back of the audience’s heads, and the extent of the people’s participation on a show was to react to a big sign off-camera which said: Applaud!
Enter Donahue. He was called in to replace another show and inherited a built-in audience. And, lo and behold, he discovered this: during the commercial breaks, the audience’s questions to his guests were often more provocative than the ones asked on stage. It clicked: Why not direct the microphone and camera on the audience itself, and prompt them to ask their own questions? Thus was born the most democratic show on television where we the people- who own the public airwaves – actually get to use them.
Since that time 23 years ago, Donahue has logged more than 5,000 shows picking up 11 Emmys along the way. He has spawned a string of talk show imitators who seem to be proliferating by the month, and he has earned for himself an estimated yearly salary of ten million dollars, which is five times more than any of the top prime time news anchormen.
There is nothing he enjoys more these days than being skipper of his boat, “Mugsy,” the nickname of his actress wife, Marlo Thomas. !t was on board this boat that our interview took place. Standing at the helm and with dramatic flair, Donahue turned on his sound system to a booming “Pomp and Circumstance” which ushered us out of the Connecticut harbor en route to New York City.
It was time to find out about this 54 year old Irishman from the Midwest who keeps a needlepoint pillow in his living room which reads: “You can tell an Irishman-but you can’t tell him much!”
Scanlon: Somebody once described you as a cross between Edward R. Murrow and P.T. Barnum. You do seem to combine seriousness with a sense of fun and performance.
Donahue: It is a very exciting job. I can pop off more than Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings can. I can offer my own opinion. I have been booed on more than one occasion by my own audience. I have more elbow room. I do not preside over a sound bite. And I can tell you, there is no greater high than to say good-bye to that audience at the end of the show knowing we spoke to issues nobody saw anywhere else on television. And let me remind you that P.T. Barnum was once Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut!
Scanlon: Some of your shows can become fairly contentious. Was there ever a show when a guest or member of the audience totally angered you?
Donahue: Sure.
Scanlon: And did you ever just “lose your cool?”
Donahue: No, I don’t know if l ever got that far. See, if you are a guest on my show, and you and I get into an argument, it’s not important to me that I win. What is important to me is that the argument is interesting. That’s what I’m paid to do. Now if you encounter me at a cocktail party, I can be as messianic and brow-beating as anybody else to advance my position. But that is not my job on the air.
Scanlon: Sometimes you cover some really off-beat and sensational topics on your show. I’ve heard that you do. a funny introductory speech for your father-in-law, Danny Thomas, which even acknowledges this.
Donahue: Oh, yes . . . well, I say people are always comparing the two of us. And we do have a lot in common. We were both born in cities on Lake Erie. I was born in Cleveland and he was born in Toledo. We both married the most beautiful women in the world. And we both have been blessed to have received many, many honors. My father-in-law was knighted by two Popes. And I was recently named “Man of the Year” by Transvestites for a Better America!
Scanlon: Well, how do you respond to critics who say you should drop the sensational stuff and go for the high road on prime time?
Donahue: I should tell you that the business of attracting a crowd during daytime television today is a tremendously complicated challenge. When you consider, for example, the mosaic that comprises New York City, and then ask yourself, what is it that these people will watch? And I am proud to tell you that some of the nicest moments I have had is in the back seat of a taxicab when a driver, whose name on the license looks like an eye chart, turns around, speaking my language much better than I speak his, and tells me how much he enjoys my program – I am as complimented as I can be!
And I also want you to know that I am proud to be on T.V. at four o’clock in the afternoon. This is a very important time period. And I want to win. I want to do well. And one of the ways you do that is to come up with the best mix you can to insure that while you do your program, you don’t lose your soul and, at the same time, you don’t lose your job.
I think among some of the print journalism critics, there is an unbecoming elitism. They ‘re calling for a BBC type media and our job is to attract an MTV audience. And.all I ask of them is that they don’t be so snooty about daytime television. You’d be surprised at the information that’s in these programs.
Don’t forget, it was a small magazine in Lebanon that blew the whistle on Iran scam. And I’m saying that the next Iran scam has a real chance of being exposed by Phil Donahue or ‘Current Affair.’ I think we’re moving inexorably as each week goes by, closer and closer to the evening news, and they ‘re moving towards us.
Scanlon: You know, it’s been said that the Irish have a natural predilection for politics and some people say “United States Senator Phil Donahue” has a nice ring to it. Have you thought about it?
Donahue: Well, Mike Wallace interviewed me on “60 Minutes’ about that. It must have been six years ago, and I indicated casually that I’d like to be in the Senate. And that comment has sort of followed me since. I can tell you I am a political animal. I enjoy it. I am fascinated by it. I am a C Span junkie, I watch the Senate and the House a lot. And the House looks more interesting to me than the Senate. The House is more like the Donahue Show!
You’ve got 435 people-some very real pressures to get on with it. I identify with the House, because I have this challenge every day of my professional life on the Donahue Show. You know, you put a microphone in front of some people, they may take three days to make their point, and you’ve got to keep breathing on them. You have to do it in a way that’s not hostile and distracting. But you’ve got to conduct this orchestra or you ‘re going to have a couple of cello players and trombone players who are going to run away with the piece. And that same kind of atmosphere permeates the House. The Senate appears to drone on and on. I have come to admire people who can deploy an economy of words to make their point.
A lot of people float a battleship of words around a rowboat of thought. But on the issue of public service, I have to ask, how electable are my politics anyway? I don’t believe in capital punishment. I’m pro-choice. I’m for gay rights. I do not think the United States of America should have bombed the city of Tripoli at night where old people and children are sleeping. We tried to assassinate Khadafy. That’s against the law and 77 percent of the American people applauded the idea.
Scanlon: Now I want to ask you about your youth. You mentioned in your biography that when growing up in Cleveland you were “proud to be Catholic, and better yet, proud to be the best kind of Catholic, an Irish one.” What kind of Irish identity was there in your family?
Donahue: Well, I didn’t realize it then, but as I look back now, there was something very special about the feeling of being Irish Catholic, remembering the enormous contribution that the Irish made to the Catholic Church and school system.
It just seemed to me that everybody in the Church with any power at all, was Irish with the bewildering exception of the Pope. So not only was I Catholic and a member of the One True Church, but I was the best kind of Catholic, an Irish Catholic.
Scanlon: And was there any kind of Irish culture in the home?
Donahue: Well, I am Irish on both sides. My mother is a McClory and there are Kiernans and McGintys in my line too. But I should say that my grandmother on my mother’s side was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And I know my father’s father was born in the States. I am tempted to conclude that we might be potato famine Irish immigrants.
It’s certainly clear that going back to my grandparents, I may be a third or even fourth generation American. And I honestly don’t recall any particularly Irish feature of my own household or any strong political chauvinism expressing itself in any public, political way when I was a kid. Nobody ever briefed me on Irish geography, for example, and I was not given a sense of Northern Ireland. To me Ireland “was a little bit of heaven that fell from out of the sky one day” –very much about fantasy and leprechauns and “sprinkled with stardust.” Except the most vivid memory I have, regarding my ethnicity and my childhood was St. Patrick’s Day. I recall feeling very lucky and almost sorry for those people who weren’t Irish and didn’t have this wonderful music which we had. And then too, for a 12or 13-year-old, nobody else in my experience as a child had an entire day and a parade that drew so much attention. I was sure the Italians and the Poles had certainly their share of celebration, but I’ll guarantee you, it wasn’t televised and you didn’t get off school for it. I remember one particular March 17, I played the big bass drum in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in downtown Cleveland.
Scanlon: So it’s clear you never felt like an outsider.
Donahue: No, I felt everybody else was outside. I have no memories of prejudice because of my identity-a position no doubt earned for me by the broken heads of my Irish ancestors in the labor movement and other places. Nobody ever called me a Papist or Harp. I’m a very lucky guy having been raised in what I perceived at the time with a mainstream ethnic and religious identity.
Scanlon: Sounds like you came from a kind of perfect Midwest “Americana” setting. You had a house?
Donahue: I sure did.
Scanlon: A little lawn?
Donahue: A backyard and a front lawn. Three meals a day. And every time Our Lady of Angels had a baseball game, my uniform was absolutely clean and so were the socks!
Scanlon: A happy youth.
Donahue: Yes.
Scanlon: And then you were accepted at Notre Dame University.
Donahue: The first greatest milestone of my life-I mean with the possible exception of first communion.
Scanlon: You say in your biography: “In 1953, there were two ways for an Irish Catholic boy to impress his parents, his neighbors, and his girlfriend: become a priest or attend Notre Dame.” I think that has a real resonance for many young men who grew up in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s.
Donahue: Getting accepted at Notre Dame was a tremendously elevating, thrilling experience. It’s hard to really overstate how lucky I was. When I was getting ready to go into high school, it was apparently decided that St. Ignatius, the Jesuit high school, would probably be just a little too challenging for little Philly.
The Jesuits came to the business of education with the thesis that you get the “creme de la creme” of young Catholic men, you educate them, or as my father-in law, Danny Thomas, says: “Irish Catholics don’t raise their kids, they push them up.” And theJesuits do that. And the thesis is get the most gifted young men, educate the hell out of them, and they’ll go out and achieve and be promoted and rise to the CEO status and various other power positions in the marketplace of America bringing the Catholic influence to the modern world.
Well, it looks like I was not destined to go to St. Ignatius. With God apparently watching over me, I was destined to be in the very first graduating class of a new school, St. Edward, where I was taught by the Holy Cross Brothers.
By the time I graduated, the Holy Cross Order, which had founded the University of Notre Dame, decided to accept everyone from this first graduating class. And little Philly was accepted. And I was scared to death. I knew it was with considerable sacrifices that my parents were sending me to Notre Dame.
My father was a retail furniture sales man, and l don’t know how he did it, but he did it. And I brought to the academic challenge of freshman year total fear and apprehension. But I got through and actually was able to convince myself that maybe I wasn’t so dumb after all.
Scanlon: Who was the football coach during your time there?
Donahue: I was there for Frank Leahy’s last year. In my freshman year we won 9, lost 0 and tied 1. By the time my senior year came around we won only 2 and lost 8-so that the Notre Dame football program collapsed before my very eyes. But Paul Hornung, who was my classmate, still won the Heisman Trophy on that 2-8 football team. He is the most extraordinary single male athlete in my lifetime. The guy was incredible and he proved it at Green Bay, Wisconsin with the Packers.
Scanlon: Now while you were at Notre Dame, you say in your biography, you attended Mass three or four times a week and theology was one of your favorite subjects. But you have also been known to be quite outspoken about the Church.
Donahue: I have been a very public critic of Holy Mother Church over the past two-and-a-half decades of my life. I think much of what we have in the Catholic Church today is not divinely inspired at all. I have been out loud in my criticism of the Church’s un-Christian treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics.
I am outraged as are, in my opinion, countless other Catholics, Irish and otherwise, in the United States and elsewhere, at the Church’s medieval policy of assembling several strangers who sit around a table and decide whether or not the decision that I made to marry in 1958 was valid, and after the payment of a fee, will more often than not condescend to judge that this marriage never existed at all and grant an annulment-leaving me with the interesting responsibility of trying to explain to my children that the union out of which they were born never existed at all. Jesus would be appalled at this.
Scanlon: Let me interject here. I do want to explore this. Obviously, this is a key point.
Donahue: It’s not my only grievance.
Scanlon: No, I happen to know that. But before going further I want to ask how you think people in the Church have reacted to some of the public criticisms of the Church which you have made in the past?
Donahue: Well, I don’t think it’s complicated. I am willing to risk sounding arrogant and say I believe that in any statement regarding divorce and remarriage, I speak for more than 50 percent of the Catholic faithful. And I also happen to think there are a hell of a lot of Catholics out there who wish I would just shut up. There are significant numbers of Catholic faithful who cannot abide the public criticisms of Holy Mother Church. There was a phrase for this when I was a kid. It was called the “giving scandal.”
Scanlon: What has prompted you to be outspoken in this area?
Donahue: For the same reason I didn’t shut up when I was raising my kids. I loved them and I criticized them a lot. Nobody ever accused me of not loving them. I think the good Lord did not send me to the University of Notre Dame to come out and then quietly make my way through life, kneeling down with my head bowed in silent prayer. I think the responsibility of today’s Catholics, in the midst of the tornado-like changes within the institutional Church, has the responsibility now, more than ever, to speak out. I think silence is more damning than criticism.
I do think I have the responsibility to monitor my style and my rhetoric. I think my Notre Dame education obliges me not to be gratuitous and personal, and I don’t think I have been. I think we’ve got a Pope who is not going to change. He came out of Kracow and his values are pretty much established, and it’s probably not realistic to expect any significant policy changes during his papacy. But I will avoid any kind of personal commentary about the human being who happens to head up the Vatican today, and I have no doubt, you know, that he is going to heaven.
If you criticize the United States government, then you have a concern for civic affairs. But if you criticize the Catholic Church, you have a “hang-up.” We used to call this an “ad hominem” argument. It’s a very effective, very angry, and I think cruel, verbal way to force somebody to shut up. You know this is the Church that sponsored newspapers and diocesan periodicals that really meanly attacked me. The criticism of the right wing of the Church can be vicious and almost self consciously passionate. For many Catholics – I don’t think the majority but for a significant number of Catholics – there is an axiom that anybody who criticizes the Church is bitter. You can’t criticize the Church unless you’re selfish and in need of psychiatry.
Scanlon: What are some of the other grievances you were alluding to?
Donahue: One of the things I came much too late to see as a canard that was patronizing and excused poverty and hopelessness was the oft-repeated phrase from the pulpit: “The poor we will always have with us.” That used to enrage me when people said that. I always wanted to say, yes, and adolescent males with erections we will always have with us, as well.
Let’s be more compassionate about them, and understand that whatever sins you imagine them to be committing, feelings of horniness and sexual maturation are normal in adolescents, and you want to celebrate this, and allow these young men to understand it. That will promote responsible behavior. Not all this “Don’t, Shouldn’t, Can’t, Mustn’t, Wrong, Sinful, Nail-in-the-hand-of-Jesus.” The whole sexual theology of the Church, I really think, has significantly injured a lot of people. You know practically the only sin you could commit when you were a teenager was the sex thing.
It didn’t cripple everybody, no doubt about that. But I certainly think there is a legacy of the walking wounded out there who were victimized by this very narrow sperm egg, barnyard theology that made an awful lot of adolescents feel lousy for what we understand now to be very normal feelings. I think it’s very important to give an honest, candid review, and thorough examination of the consequence of traditional Catholic sexual morality.
If we had allowed adolescents to understand, embrace and accept the normalcy of being horny, the normalcy of wondering what was under that angora sweater, we would have promoted more responsible behavior. And I believe we would have had fewer divorces and less horny guys trying to find out who they are at age thirty-five and forty.
Scanlon: But haven’t things changed since the 40’s and 50’s when you were coming up and as one gets older isn’t there some sense of wanting to “put down the sword” a little?
Donahue: You say “put down the sword,” that’s an interesting metaphor. How many women are out there in third, second, and first world countries who are working very hard to be faithful to the Church’s theology of sexuality-and avoiding birth control and having children that are brought into a culture that is in no way prepared to accept them? And how many gay citizens have been bashed physically and abused in many other ways because the Church has essentially legitimized homophobia with its treatment of Dignity and its expulsion of members of Dignity from St. Patrick’s Cathedral?
This was done with the advice and, I think, consent of certainly the Vatican and, to be sure, not all, but certainly a percentage of the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church and it is the Church’s greatest contemporary sin. And by declaring that they hate the sin, but not the sinner, just doesn’t wash with me. So against this background, whose sword should be laid aside here? I mean what’s important to us? I recognize there’s an enormous need within the heart and soul of millions of Catholics to have the people who are always criticizing just sit out for a minute. Try and keep your mouth shut. And let’s see if we can’t all figure out a way to get back to the loving comfortable Church of our childhood where the girls dressed up in white dresses and the maid crowned the statues of the Virgin Mary. And parents stood proudly while watching their off spring confirmed and sing in the choir at midnight Mass. There’s a longing for this. And every time this damn loud-mouth Donahue sounds off, it seems to kind of walk on the face of this lovely memory. And here he is doing shows on people who throw midgets in bars for entertainment; and he has guests like Madalyn O’Hair, the atheist. I should not be surprised that there are more than a few Catholics out there who wish that I would just shut up and go into treatment.
Scanlon: But what about the spiritual connection? I have friends who have told me that in rejecting the Church and rejecting what they consider its paternalistic hierarchy, they somehow ended up throwing the baby out with the bath water-the baby, in this case, being the spiritual connection they once enjoyed.
Donahue: You know if I didn’t care about the baby, I wouldn’t still be talking about it. I think the opposite of love is not hatred-it’s indifference! I have flirted with a negative indifference about the Church which essentially says: “The Church is irrelevant, I’m not going to waste my time, it’s always going to reflect the power structure of the culture that it serves, it’s always going to be closed in on itself and all male in its hierarchy.” Although I do say, God bless the significant number of worker priests and nuns who are out there-no doubt about that. But yes, I have flirted with the idea that I’ve got a lot more to worry about now than the Catholic Church and just bid it farewell. I do think about that.
Scanlon: I guess I’m intrigued here more with your strident tone . . .
Donahue: You have the responsibility to tell me when I was strident. That’s a serious word. And it’s very telling because I hear it a lot. I am not upset with your question. Please don’t think that. It’s an important observation. There are people out there who cannot accept the smallest criticism of the Catholic Church without identifying it as strident.
Scanlon: Well, maybe it has something to do with your high profile. You ‘re identified in the public eye as a very famous Irish Catholic and when you speak out, it feels louder and has more power than the average citizen. I’m still interested in what motivates you to do this?
Donahue: I think our discussion on this issue is leaning too much to a curiosity about what would motivate me to speak this way in public than it does in promoting a dialogue about the issues that are raised.
Scanlon: Well, I must say there are those who have suggested with some cynicism that you are outspoken in order to ingratiate yourself with the liberal media community and that somehow you want to present yourself as being totally independent of the old, restrictive, conservative institution of the Church. “That’s the pay off for him,” I hear them say.
Donahue: I assure you, if you ‘re looking for ways to ingratiate yourself, criticizing the Holy Roman Catholic Church is not one of them. As to pay-off, was there a pay-off for me when I bussed my kids in the mid-sixties to an inner-city Catholic school? Was there a pay-off for this? Yeah. I would hope so. The pay-off was to at least begin to arrest a social phenomenon which we saw as the Catholics raising another generatiOn of racists. And whether or not your kid got a good Catholic education had much less to do with money than it did the location of the school where your son or daughter happened to be a student. So that in the white wealthy suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, where our kids were in school, we had new buildings, carpets on the floor, overhead projectors, and brand new textbooks. But at St. James School in downtown Dayton in the Black area, where we bussed our kids, the plumbing in the men’s room leaked, the plaster was falling off the ceiling, there were no rugs on any floors, and the books were 1940-type books with Cardinal Spellman’s imprimatur on them-the same Cardinal Spellman who threw holy water on the helicopters in Viet-Nam. And we, who were bussing our children, concluded that the Catholic Church’s problem was not money. The Catholic Church’s problem was an equal distribution of the money that it had.
You know, bussing in Centerville, Ohio was a little like flashing in Centerville, Ohio. So you tell me, what was the pay-off for us to bus kids?
Scanlon: Now I hope I’m not getting too personal, but may I ask where you stand now in terms of prayer and spiritual connection?
Donahue: Well, I don’t bless myself before taking foul shots in basketball anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that in a lot of ways we’ve been unfair to God. We essentially created a God who was up there saying, “You better pray to me or I’ll show you what trouble really is.” You see, I think God is up there saying, “Stop talking to me, talk to the person next to you.” We made God insecure – a person who had to be adored all the time.
Now I also believe that we will always have religion with us. I don’t ever want to live at all, and I don’t want anybody I love, to ever live in a culture that disallows prayer. I think it’s a central, important feature of the human experience. It does not follow that it ought to be for everybody, and I resent the arrogance of those who would evangelize me or anybody else. That’s the beginning of the arrogance that gives us war, and in the extreme, the Crusades. As long as you think you’ve got God and I don’t-it’s possible you would be moved to some unholy behavior. And, we’ve got to recognize that, in the name of the Prince of Peace, we can no longer go out and slaughter innocent people.
And I think the arrogance that comes from religion is the beginning of that.
With this, Donahue takes his place at the helm and steers his boat under the Brooklyn Bridge, past the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and out to where the Statue of Liberty sits in the harbor. “This is my favorite way to come to New York,” he says. And then, with the same playful sense of the dramatic that started the trip, he smiles and turns up the music. This time it is Ray Charles singing, “America, I’m talking about America, God shed his grace on thee.”
From journalist, to talk show host, to a man with a burning curiosity about people and ideas – to showman!
Donahue embraces it all.
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