Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pockets, we used to have to turn a knob. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be there and ready to guide you to enlightenment. In a stroke of luck, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by Be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trustworthy result.
Donahue welcomed it from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, the increasingly snow-white hair, the marble eyes, the occasional pair of suspenders and the obvious friendliness said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “stage manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town’.” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She wore her hair in a butterscotch helmet, she liked to wear a uniform of jacket, blouse and skirt and came to our aid over Germany with a voice made of crumpled tissue paper. Less than eight years separated them, and yet he was so boyish and she was so experienced that he thought she was her grandson. (Perhaps it reached his armpit.) Together and separately they were civil servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but a new variant in which the main attraction was not the celebrities. People – every kind of them – lined up to see other people being people, to experience Donahue’s radical brand of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, indignation, surprise and controversy, all visible in the television jackpot of the show: excerpts for us to react, take it all in, nod, gasp. When a celebrity made it onto the “Donahue” stage – say Bill Clinton, La Toya Jacksonthe Judds – they were expected to be human too and responsible for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, in more than 6,000 episodes, he allowed us to take responsibility for ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we—women especially—were eager and desperate to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host,” although the way he did it, running the microphone through the audience, up, down, racing around, holding it here, then here, then over here, was more like a “telephone operator.” “corresponded. It was “Hot Dog Vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man came into play. He left us to do more questioning than he did himself – he just edited, interpreted and clarified. There was egalitarianism. Articulation too. And anyone who needed the microphone usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our minds and what had never occurred to us. Atheism. National Socialism. Colorism. Birth. Jail. Rapist. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to the bottom of it, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let’s never forget the episode when he appeared in a long skirt, Blouse and bow tie for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now it’s time to add that “Donahue” was a Morning Talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived at 9 a.m. every weekday, which meant I could learn about compulsive shopping or changing gender roles on the same kitchen TV as my grandmother during the summer.
Sex and sexuality were the main themes of the show. There was so much that needed confession, correction, confirmation, and listening. For this, Donahue needed an expert. The expert was often Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t arrive in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t end up on TV until she was 50. Ruth Westheimer came to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life went down the drain as it made fun of fiction. Her family most likely died in the Auschwitz death camp after she was taken to the safety of a Swiss children’s home to clean. The twists include training to be a sniper for one of the military units that would later become the Israel Defense Forces, being maimed by cannonballs on her 20th birthday, researching a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She received her doctorate in education from Columbia University and spent her postdoctoral years researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the start of the 1980s, an affable carrier of an era’s enthusiasm for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterful branding and evil.
She was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. In her radio and television broadcasts, in a number of books, etc Playgirl Her promiscuous approach to talk show appearances aimed to free sex from shame and promote sexual competence. Her feline accent and funny innuendos have influenced Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences, among others. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “Here’s where We Get out.”) The instructions for “Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; The board is vulvar and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism,” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue” she is direct, explicit, diverting, humorous, clear, sensible, serious, lively. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. To a visit in 1987a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to maintain the marriage and her husband wants to do this all the time, “she should masturbate him.” also just restless. So Donahue reaches into his war chest of parochial school and students and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells 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 until I need it?” Glasses?” Westheimer chuckles, perhaps noticing the large couple on Donahue’s face. That was the cold day it was open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; His father was in the furniture business, her father sold haberdashery, which is what is known in the clothing industry. They inherited a sales facility for staffing and packaging. When a “Donahue” viewer asks Westheimer if her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she replies that’s why she never takes him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil, ‘Don’t listen to them.’ “It’s all talk,” which makes the audience laugh.
But think about what she talked about – and think about how she said it. My favorite words from Dr. Ruth was “pleasure.” From the German dialect, the word conveys what it lacks in the American language: sensual development. She vowed to talk about sex to a mass audience using the correct terminology. Damn the euphemisms. So people waited up to a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue.” She could also condemn them. But of all that Westheimer put forward, of all the terms she used with precision, pleasure was her most compelling product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we would give to ourselves owed themselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s somehow fitting that this anti-dogmatic yet priestly Irish Catholic occasionally teams up with a carnal, happy Jew to further the exploration of our bodies while showing respect, courtesy and reciprocity. They believed in us, that we were all interesting and that we could be trustworthy discussants in the discourse about life. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds. Or if so, it was never a deterrent. They went bravely. – And with their encouragement we came boldly.
Wesley Morris is a general critic for The New York Times and a contributor to the magazine.
