Phil Donahue’s Neutral Wardrobe Kept the Focus on His Subjects

The hoary tabloid axiom “if it bleeds, it leads” played no small part in the decades-long career of Phil Donahue, the pioneering host of “The Phil Donahue Show,” who died on Sunday at 88. Mr. Donahue spent three decades exposing subjects difficult for many Americans to confront — homosexuality, atheism, civil rights, consumer protection and abortion among them — to the disinfectant light of daytime TV.

Central to Mr. Donahue’s success was his physical appearance. A conventionally handsome man with a boyish cast to his features, he had a perpetually merry look of bemusement and a virile, Kennedy-esque thatch of hair that grayed and then whitened as he aged in front of viewers in their living rooms. The aura Mr. Donahue conveyed was that of genial, avuncular family doctor who distracts you with innocuous banter as he rips off the bandage.

Mr. Donahue deliberately played to that look with an on-air wardrobe that occasionally veered toward dapper — vested three-piece suits, wide ties, broad ’80s lapels — but was seldom, if ever, flamboyant. No “groovy” Merv Griffin shirts or turtlenecks for him, or the loud jackets and pastel polyester suits that were Johnny Carson’s sartorial signature. By comparison, Mr. Donahue’s style was resolutely neutral: He wore good clothes that fit his trim frame neatly but still seemed unremarkable, as though bought off a rack at J.C. Penney.

When at times Mr. Donahue shed his jacket, it was to roam the studio aisles with his shirt sleeves rolled up, wielding the mic like a baton and putting it and the authority into the hands of audience members, whose questions he once remarked were often better than his.

“Donahue’s subjects were often sharp, but his presentation was soft,” Wayne Munson, the author of “All Talk: The Talk Show in Media Culture,” said in an interview. Mr. Munson’s 1993 book took aim at a cultural form that, reviewers noted, blended interpersonal exchange and mediated spectacle and that would ultimately, as few then predicted, give way to all the yapping now consumed on social media.

With his quiet clothes, Mr. Donahue wore a mantle of niceness that helped further distinguish him from slick predecessors like Alan Burke, a spiky early talk show host with a Freudian goatee, a taste for tweed jackets, a knack for zingers and the dubious habit of planting ringers in his audience to challenge guests. Mr. Donahue’s appearance and demeanor, by contrast, suggested his was never to be the authoritative voice of God but that of a neighbor who might ask to borrow a weed whacker.

In entertainment, as in politics, nice of course is often a posture, a form of costume worn or shed according to need, including by Mr. Donahue. “What most surprised me about him is that he was far more at ease in front of the TV cameras on air than in person,” said Elena Seibert, a portrait photographer in Manhattan, who once photographed Mr. Donahue for the cover of The Los Angeles Times Magazine.

In the portrait, Mr. Donahue — the winner of 20 Daytime Emmy Awards and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor — is seen in his tidy home office dressed in faded jeans, a Notre Dame cap and a novelty sweater.

“He was nice, but not warm when not in control of the situation,” Ms. Siebert said. “He even admitted that was true. I think he looks at ease in the photo, but I had to work really hard for that.”

Blue eyes twinkling brightly from behind horn-rimmed glasses, Mr. Donahue indeed seems distinctly awkward in the casual setting, uncomfortable without the backdrop of a studio, a microphone in hand or, most tellingly, the edgy subject matter he capitalized on to offset the calibrated niceness.