PHIL & OPRAH & GERALDO & SALLY & MORTON (MORTON?)

Shrink's couches for couch potatoes

JAMES WOLCOTT

Mixed Media

Buming issues! Studio audiences choking on the smoke of burning issues! And tending the fires are Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, Sally, and Morton (Morton?). Phil and his fellow talk-show hosts maintain an engaged, earnest tone. Irony is a no-no. Civilized wit is abjured because it's seen as a slick cover for one's true awful throbbing feelings. What Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Morton Downey Jr. desire from their guests is a striptease of the self, a shedding of armor that enables the hosts to reach in and rob them of their telltale hearts. Irony seems so effete compared with... burning issues! raw sincerity!— the human heart plopped on a plate.

It might be argued that the first impresario of the psychic strip was Jack Paar, who lowered his guard on the old Tonight Show for much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yet Paar's show also featured regulars (Oscar Levant, Alexander King, Jack Douglas, among others) for whom wit was still the jewel of conversation. They didn't peel; the sweaty catharsis that Paar pursued he pursued alone. No, the true impresario of the psychic striptease, its snowcapped patriarch, was David Susskind, who died last year after several noisy decades of dickering and dithering. It was on Susskind's show that Truman Capote marinated his forked tongue, Mel Brooks riffed brilliantly about being a Jewish son, and Germaine Greer crushed Anatole Broyard to a crumb. But Susskind's coup was recognizing that aberrant behavior makes for clashier TV than celebrity chitchat. Waving his loose sheets of notes, Susskind played amateur shrink to an assortment of crunchy nuts—male strippers, transsexuals, transvestites, white supremacists, black separatists, embittered Warhol superstars, dominatrices and their dog-collared slaves. It was democracy in action, sixties-style, the spectacle bordering on the surreal. Once Susskind refereed a spat between a pack of Elvis impersonators trying to outdrawl each other as His anointed clone.

Sadly, Susskind stayed on TV way past his prime. At the end his eyes ran, his voice quavered, he dropped his notes. One week his own snippy daughter treated him haughtily. David Susskind, once the embodiment of middlebrow thought and culture, became a cutoff, cut-rate King Lear on a well-lit moor. But his legacy lives on in those talk shows hosted by Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, Sally, and Morton (Morton?). A legacy that some might consider a curse.

Phil Donahue

Dashing up and down the aisles on his priestly rounds, Donahue has been at the fire wall of burning issues for twenty years. And what issues they are. An ad in TV Guide had Phil braving such topics as "Women Who Seduce Teenage Boys," "Sexy Male Centerfolds," and "People Who've Had Half Their Brain Removed." The advance of Donahue over The David Susskind Show was to make the studio audience true participants. On Susskind, members of the audience might line up at a lectern to berate the guests, but it was Donahue who first walked among the faithful and made them an integral part of the show. Susskind just wasn't a mingler. Also, where Susskind was an East Coast chauvinist, religiously clipping items from the New York Times and routinely disparaging Hollywood as la-la land, Donahue draws his strength from heartland America. (For years the show was based in Chicago.) And unlike Susskind, who recoiled from feminism as if afraid of catching a rash, Donahue locks himself in a loving embrace with the goals and beliefs of Ms. Aptly enough, the funniest takeoff on Donahue was the Saturday Night Live parody in which Phil (Phil Hartman in a white wig) played host to the ball-busting author of Women Good, Men Bad. The funniest takeoff on Donahue as priestly adjunct to the psychotherapeutic profession can be found in Walker Percy's screwy Lost in the Cosmos, in which a promiscuous homosexual is chided for his immaturity.

DR. J.F. (in her not-mincing-words voice): I think Bill's behavior is immature and depersonalizing. (Applause from audience) I think he ought to return to his steady live-in friend and work out a mature, creative relationship. You might be interested to know that studies have shown that stable gay couples are more creative than straights. (Applause again, but more tentative)

DONAHUE(eyes slightly rolled back, swings mike to Bill): How about it, Bill?

BILL: Yeah, right. But I still cruise Buena Vista.

In the author of Women Good, Men Bad and Percy's Dr. J.F., we meet one of the staples of Donahue, the Yenta Psychobabblist. Carrying a brainload of buzzwords ("communication," "vulnerability," ''evolved behavior"), Yenta Psychobabblists are the soothsayers of secular humanism. They're so uniform in their analyses and prescriptions that I once wondered aloud why Phil had so many of them on. And a friend replied, "Because he's run out of Chippendales dancers." Peut-etre. But I also think that Phil, like a lot of civilians, suffers from credentialism, awarding surplus respect to busybodies with degrees. Really, what credentials do you need to write Women Good, Men Badl Donahue would be better if he were more of a debunker.

Oprah

One night David Letterman was conducting a one-sided debate with his bandleader, Paul Shaffer, about the New Oprah. I prefer the old Oprah, said Dave, the Oprah we grew up with as kids, the Mrs. Butterworth Oprah. There definitely is a New Oprah. Her hair, once round and shrubby, has become a flipped tip of black flame. Her neck and wrists are bound with ornate gold, her eyes are fitted with designer lenses, her dresses are fancy parachutes aswirl with flaps and billows. She casts a queenly aura—she looks as if she were going to board a barge after the taping and sing Aida. Sometimes as Oprah stands there in all her resplendent finery, a shade of dismay crosses her face and you can almost hear her thinking, What am I doing surrounded by all these sorry-looking people? Because the butts in her bleachers look as if they were herded in from the nearest shopping mall.

Oprah often appears puzzled and distracted as she models her gowns for her fans. Perhaps it's because she guiltily knows that she hasn't done her homework. Of all the talk-show hosts, she comes across as the most ill-prepared. It's as if her show had become simply another glittering facet of the ongoing entertainment experience that is Oprah. She's trying to get by on glitz. The show can still click when she grabs hold of a thrashing issue and shows some tenacity. Too often, however, the New Oprah seems afraid of breaking a precious nail. She's in danger of ending up like the character in the Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine, guilty of "puttin' on airs."

Sally Jessy Raphael

With her trademark red glasses accenting her beamy eyes, Sally Jessy Raphael packages herself as a gal's gal, peppy and fresh-perked. She adapted to TV from radio, where she hosts a call-in advice show for the lonely and confused. She doesn't try for the Big Picture, arms control, etc.; often the theme of her show is People Who Can't Get Laid. But she has what Oprah has lost, the common touch. For example, a show billed as "People Who Videotape Their Sex Lives" turned out to be a gentle probe of the plight of a sheriff named Corky and his wife, Danette. After a would-be blackmailer obtained a tape of the couple cavorting in homemade pom, the footage was splattered across TV screens via Rupert Murdoch's A Current Affair, making them a local and national scandal. (He felt compelled to resign from the force and move his family out of town.) The unstated theme of this show was how difficult it is to pocket even a small portion of one's dignity once you've been trampled on as a media joke. Sally's interview desensationalized the couple and brought their pain to the surface of quieted catcalls. The beat-upon normality of the couple was more moving than the moral posturing of Geraldo Rivera, who can't resist priming the tear ducts (see below). Sally's studio ambience helps. Taped in New Haven, Connecticut, her show boasts the smartest studio audience of all these psychic strip parlors.

Geraldo Rivera

After his empty raid into the cobwebs of A1 Capone's vault, Rivera has opened his own nationwide trauma center. Though he now wears a reassuring grin, he still walks barefoot across burning issues while fulfilling his quota of drag performers and male hustlers. So far the tackiest Geraldo concerned breast obsession, with a special all-bimbo panel starring author Erica Jong, actress Edy Williams, and nonactress Angelyne ("It's so much fun being famous for nothing"). The show began with Geraldo's illustrated historical overview of breasts. He introduced us to "a respected anthropologist [shot of anthropologist walking down street] whose work is unlocking the wonders of human behavior. We chose to ask her about breasts." The respected anthropologist: "When you think about big breasts, all it is is a lot of extra fat around the nipple. I mean, chimpanzees, our very close relatives [shot of chimpanzee scratching itself], have the same nipple. . .but don't have the large breasts that the human female does [ogling shot of disco bimbo in low- cut dress]." Jong tried to take the highroad, making march-of-history sounds about the "worldwide struggle" of women. But for Jong the highroad winds around her own mansion of ego. She informed Geraldo's audience that she's always had lots of men attracted to her although she doesn't have a perfect body. Even so, she was gracious enough to proclaim her "great empathy and sisterhood" with the inflatable Edy and Angelyne, whom the camera cut showed propping up their breasts and exhibiting lots of tongue. They seemed too extraterrestrial to achieve sisterhood with earth women. Geraldo then brought on a Yenta Psychobabblist who proclaimed that nature didn't design women's bodies for men's pleasure—this didn't sit too well with Edy and Angelyne, who shifted buttocks and made breathy protests—and then Geraldo plunked his mike in front of a grandmotherly type who, reading off a note card, said, "I'm a 36D. I was once a bra model, but I lost my job because I was a complete bust." Siddown, Grandma.

Geraldo isn't all fun and frolics. The next day the topic was child abuse. Understandably, Geraldo was in a j'accuse mode. ''Look at these abuse pictures..." he said as the screen flashed shots of bruised bodies. "They make you want to scream bloody murder." But child abuse is so ghastly-appalling that it doesn't need this pornographic layer of pulp exploitation to make us feel distraught. And how does one deal with the severe mood swings that Geraldo's trauma center induces? One morning it's bubbleheads and their breasts, the next morning it's children who have been raked through hell. Our clue to how to respond is whether Geraldo is wearing his happy face or his frown face. Both faces are pushy.

Morton Downey Jr.

By contrast, this character is always wearing his game face, a professional-ugly scowl. That scowl is his passport to controversy. With his corona of cigarette smoke, his pool-shark, pony-player sense of swank, Downey inhabits the stale hustle of Sweet Smell of Success. As in Sweet Smell, there's a heavy, sordid hint of mental rot, of a greasy brown paper bag inundated by ants. How much of this greasiness is for effect is hard to say. Downey certainly knows how to milk turmoil to the max. He's the psychic healer of talk-show hosts, plunging his bare hands into the guts of vital issues. (Squirm, baby, squirm.) But like a psychic operation, Downey's act is a gory fake, mucking him up to the elbows in rubber guts. An early screaming match featured Seka, America's leading battery-operated pom star, who left the studio in a snit after much badgering. Downey wasn't upset—he loves walkouts. Sometimes he initiates the speedy exit, unclipping a guest's mike and chucking him out of the studio, blowing a sarcastic farewell kiss.

Originating from New Jersey on superstation WWOR, Downey's show devolves from The Joe Pyne Show, a cult favorite in the sixties. Joe Pyne was an ex-Marine with a wooden leg who ripped into hippies and war protesters, telling them to get a haircut or die. The Pyne show emanated from that same bizarro realm of West Coast reaction that gave us Dragnet (Jack Webb's Sgt. Friday giving disappointed-father looks at hippies in headbands flashing him the peace sign). In California, Pyne's pitbull approach has been revived by the inane Wally George, who is also the father of actress Rebecca De Momay. (Since her career is hotter than his, maybe he should change his name to Wally De Momay.) What Downey has done is take the Pyne/George act east.

Like Wally George, Downey packs the house with no-neck Bubbas who seem to have been shipped into the studio in cages and crates. When the Bubbas stand to jeer at Downey's chump targets, their shirts ride up, exposing dough-boy radials of flab, bullet holes, stitches, tattoos. It's a guided tour of the soft underbelly of juvenile detention. But don't get me wrong—these kids are great Americans. Cannon fodder the country can be proud of. Through tonsil exercise and powerful gestures Morton whips these mental midgets into a vigilante force nightly— not that he needs a posse. He's a oneman SWAT unit. Where Donahue is Mr. Empathy, striving to understand, Downey is The Equalizer, packing a closed mind and a rapacious mouth. (A gaping mouth is the show's logo.) His show is a high-energy, low-I.Q. circus in which boneless wimps and liberals are fed into the big maw. Downey may even become a camp craze among couch potatoes the way Pyne did among hippies, by turning conservative reaction into a dinosaur stomp—a rebel yell from the primordial bog. (Hippies loved Peter Boyle's dumb caveman grin in Joe, too.)

The problem with even campy muck is that at some point it turns to crap, and sticks. In a debate about capital punishment for juvenile offenders, for example, Morton's position was: Fry their meat! To buttress his case he allowed a guest to show a photograph of a nude girl who had been raped and murdered, a wooden stick protruding from her anus. It's at a moment like this that you wonder what ever happened to taste, decency, and the F.C.C. That poor girl, having no self left to strip, could only be exploited for her corpse. David Susskind stooped to a lot of things, but not this.

I s there an end in sight to these strip I parlors? Doesn't seem so. There's I even a series kicking around called People in Crisis, on which a bearded shrink practices insta-therapy as a studio audience supplies rah-rah atmosphere. Which means the Yentas are now getting their own shows. Egad. Yet this also suggests that the trend is beginning to thin itself out through self-imitation and may soon reach the final drops. Until then, Morton can make like Godzilla, destroying cardboard cities in a fiery swath as Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, and Sally huddle on higher ground. Tumult isn't boring. But oh what one would give for even an approximation of wit.