Phil Donahue united a broadcaster’s telegenic appeal, an insistent curiosity, and a taste for provocative topics to create a new genre of television – the audience participation talk show – which briefly took over daytime television and sealed his status as a TV pioneer. The broadcaster, who was age 88, died on Sunday, his family said.

No cause of death was given, though his family said he’d “passed away peacefully following a long illness.”
 
But even though he built his legend on cheeky stunts, Donahue often led earnest conversations on newsy topics. From interviewing former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991 as he was running for governor of Louisiana to jousting with conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Donahue dug into hot-button issues with the zeal of an investigative journalist – emulating the kind of mainstream media figures who always inspired him.
 
“I grew up in this game with stars in my eyes,” Donahue said in an interview with NPR in 2021. “I always admired mainstream media types. They went right for the jugular. It appeared to me they didn’t have to be popular. They just had to be aggressive and have their facts straight.”
 
Donahue sat his guests before a large studio audience, stalking through the crowd with a microphone, mixing questions from the onlookers with his own queries and – for a time – questions from callers over the telephone.
 
The former radio announcer lobbed questions with a down-to-earth charm and a flair for dramatic pauses so distinctive that impressionist Darrell Hammond captured it on Saturday Night Live. Another SNL alum, Phil Hartman, actually lampooned him to his face in 1989.

One of Donahue’s innovations was that he spoke to a predominantly female TV audience without talking down to them, highlighting a single topic per show: atheism, abortion, racism.

The host himself said controversy was the key to his show’s survival. “The coin of our realm is the size of the audience,” Donahue said in a 2016 interview with the New York Public Media show MetroFocus. “What will draw a crowd, especially to a visually dull program? And we thought: Controversy. Controversy is what will do it.”

Born Philip John Donahue in Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated from the University of Notre Dame and worked for a radio station in a small town in Michigan. “I could stop the Mayor of Adrian, Michigan in the hallway,” he told NPR in 2021. “I was, like 21 – I may have looked 16 – and it was kind of a first-grade lesson in the power of journalism.”

In 1967, Donahue moved a radio talk show he was hosting in Dayton, Ohio to local TV, and The Phil Donahue Show was born. His first guest was renowned atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair – who had brought a lawsuit against prayer in schools — and a few years later, his show was syndicated nationally, kicking off a 26-year run in daytime television, mostly with little competition.

His mix of hot-button topics with earnest discussion was so successful that it was eventually emulated by everyone from Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, and Morton Downey Jr. to Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey said as much while handing Donahue a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1996, noting, “Had there not been a Phil Donahue, I don’t think there could have been an Oprah.”

Donahue, speaking with the Archive of American Television, said he was always surprised no one came along to really try copying what he did until Winfrey’s debut in 1986. “Along comes Oprah Winfrey, and it is not possible to overstate the enormity of her impact on the daytime television game,” he said. “In many ways, she raised all the boats with her success. If you didn’t have Oprah, you had to have me. And we were a lot less expensive.”

Winfrey’s success led many other hosts to try the format, with some featuring increasingly combative and tawdry subjects, including fistfights onstage. Once considered outrageous himself, Donahue found his show beaten in ratings by more explicit programs and retired from daytime TV in 1996 after more than 6,000 shows.

He wouldn’t return to a regular TV job until 2002 when he hosted a show for MSNBC called Donahue. He tried emulating the fearless truth-telling he always idolized in mainstream journalism, but Donahue lasted less than a year there. He didn’t hold back when telling NPR why it was canceled.

“I was fired because I did not support the invasion of Iraq,” he added. “I thought I was going to be a hit because I was different. Everybody else was beating the war drums. I wanted to get on the air and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Donahue said the firing essentially ended his TV career. He did co-direct a 2007 documentary Body of War and co-wrote a book in 2020 called What Makes a Marriage Last with wife and actress Marlo Thomas.

He married Thomas – a TV star, producer and outspoken feminist — in 1980 after meeting her when she was a guest on his show.

As a portrait of a marriage, it’s bizarre. I’m talking about the dual portrait John Singer Sargent painted in 1885 of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Louis, whose first novel, Treasure Island, had been published two years earlier, is captured pacing in a darkened room. Tall and thin, Louis looks every inch like an “insane stork,” which is how fellow writer Henry Adams described him. Louis stares out beyond the confines of the portrait at us, the viewers, as if to share an idea he’s just had.

Fanny sits barefoot on a chair at the opposite end of the room, all but shrouded, like a piece of furniture, in a golden Indian sari. No fool, Fanny recognized Sargent’s depiction as yet another attempt by an admirer of her husband’s to diminish her. “I am but a cipher under the shadow,” she complained to Sargent.

Camille Peri’s lively and substantive dual biography of the Stevensons, called A Wilder Shore, whisks those obscuring draperies off Fanny and restores her to full personhood. But, Peri aims for something even more ambitious than a feminist recovery of a mostly forgotten wife of a famous writer. In her “Introduction,” Peri describes her book as: “an intimate window into how [the Stevensons] lived and loved — a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.”

“Inspiration” is something of a quaint term these days in lit crit circles and, yet, it’s always been an abiding draw of biographies. Speaking for myself, after reading A Wilder Shore, I’m inspired to do two things: I want to reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s three great works of fiction: Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And, I want to schedule a séance with Fanny to get some one-on-one instruction on how to live more fearlessly as a woman.

Peri opens A Wilder Shore with a scene that could have been written by Louis but, instead, was lived by Fanny: In the summer of 1875, she and her three children and their governess rushed aboard a train in San Francisco to cross the country and catch a ship in New York harbor that would carry them to Belgium.

This was no pleasure trip: To reach their destination the little band rode a wagon through floodwaters, but Fanny was desperate to escape her humiliating marriage to a prospector who lived openly with his mistress. With the little money she’d earned by sewing, Fanny planned to enroll herself and her teenaged daughter in art school.

Hurtling into the unknown put the 36-year-old, still-married mother of three in the orbit of Robert Louis Stevenson — a sickly Scottish writer who was 10 years her junior. It was love at first sight, at least for Louis. Peri says that:

Fanny likely saw their affair as something that could not last. For him, though, sexual intimacy with Fanny was not simply a romp with an older woman. It cemented his emotional commitment to her — a kind of role reversal that is striking for a Victorian man.

Peri details how the bohemian relationship that evolved between Fanny and Louis included other such gender role reversals: The frail “Louis was what the Scots call a “handless” man,” she writes. During the couple’s honeymoon spent squatting in an abandoned silver mine in California, it was Fanny who “out of scraps of wood and packing crates … nailed together furniture.” Of course, the Stevensons’ union caused dismay among Louis’ friends who disparaged Fanny for her age, her American-ness, her short hair and cigarette smoking, and, most virulently, her olive skin.

As convincing as she is about the progressive relationship between the Stevensons, Peri is also clear-eyed about the fact that Fanny still got the somewhat shorter end of the stick. While Louis respected Fanny as his best critic, he also assumed she would handle the mundane household routine and provide nursing care.

Louis’ undiagnosed illness — he chronically coughed up blood — did have the “upside” of broadening the couple’s life through travel in search of a healthier climate. They spent their final years together before Louis’ death in 1894 at the age of 44, in Samoa. Fanny lived on for 20 more years, writing, traveling and attracting male protégés. No doubt her contemporaries derided her for that, too; but, thanks to Peri’s vivid biography, Fanny has the last fearless laugh.