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.