Mike Douglas, born Michael Delaney Dowd, Jr. (August 11, 1925 – August 11, 2006), was an American entertainer.
Douglas was born in Chicago, Illinois, and began singing as a choirboy. By his teens he was working as a singer on a Lake Michigan dinner cruise ship. After serving briefly in the United States Navy near the end of World War II and as a "staff singer" for WMAQ-TV in Chicago, he moved to Los Angeles. There he became a vocalist in the big band of Kay Kyser, with whom he was featured on two notable hits, "Ole Buttermilk Sky" in 1946 and "The Old Lamplighter" the following year. Kyser was responsible for giving him his show business name, and he remained part of Kyser's band until Kyser retired from show business in 1951.
In 1950, he provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney's Cinderella.
In the 1950s Douglas, living in Burbank, California, tried to keep his singing career going, working as house singer for a nightclub and going on the road to stay busy. He preferred not to switch to rock and roll, which limited his opportunities as big band music was declining in popularity. In the leanest years, he and his wife survived by successfully "flipping" their Los Angeles homes.
He next surfaced in 1961 in Cleveland, where a onetime Chicago colleague hired him for $400 a week as an afternoon television talk-show host at WKYC-TV, then known as KYW-TV. The show rapidly gained popularity, and ultimately, national syndication in August 1963 on the five Westinghouse-owned stations. The show was broadcast "live" on KYW-TV in its city of origination, but this practice ended in 1965 after guest Zsa Zsa Gabor used inappropriate language on-the-air. As KYW-TV's owner, Group W, successfully had a station swap with NBC overturned by the FCC. Westinghouse returned to Philadelphia on June 19, 1965 with call letters KYW-TV. Along with the station swap came The Mike Douglas Show which aired its first Philadelphia-based show on August 30, 1965. Even after ownership reverted back to NBC, WKYC in Cleveland continued to carry the program for many years afterward.
Guests ranged from Truman Capote and Richard Nixon to The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits and The Turtles. The show helped introduce entertainers such as Barbra Streisand and Aretha Franklin. After the move to Philadelphia, Douglas also attempted to revive his own singing career, logging his lone Top 40 single as a solo artist, "The Men In My Little Girl's Life" in 1966.
By 1967, The Mike Douglas Show was broadcast to 171 markets and 6,000,000 viewers each day, mostly women at home. It earned $10.5 million from advertisers, while its host was paid more than $500,000. In 1967, the program received the first Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Daytime Television from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Most weeks, Douglas would be joined by a co-host, which included John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and Anne Baxter.
In July 1978, the talk show's home base was transferred to Los Angeles, where it remained until finally going off the air in 1982. A second series, The Mike Douglas Entertainment Hour, ended production in 1982.
In 1982 Douglas hosted CNN's Los Angeles-based celebrity interview show, People Now, taking over the hosting duties from Lee Leonard. He was replaced in December 1982 by Bill Tush.
Douglas became a local cultural icon in Philadelphia, often inviting prominent players from the city's professional sports teams to be guests on his show (he had a particular affinity for the city's pro football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, constantly referring to the team as "Our Eagles", and he could often be seen in attendance at Eagles' home games, especially whenever they appeared on Monday Night Football). He also assisted in mayor Frank Rizzo's campaign against derisive jokes often told by outsiders about the city, acting as chief spokesperson for the "Anti-Defamation Agency" Rizzo had set up for this purpose.
Douglas wrote a 1999 memoir titled I'll Be Right Back: Memories of TV's Greatest Talk Show.
Forty years after Douglas began his talk show at KYW-TV, his granddaughter Debbie Voinovich Donley designed successor WKYC's new broadcast facility on Lakeside Avenue, completed in 2002.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1990, but after surgery he was cancer-free. Douglas died in 2006 on his 81st birthday, at a Palm Beach Gardens hospital in North Palm Beach, Florida. Though the cause of death has not yet been disclosed, Douglas's wife, Genevieve, tells the Associated Press that he became dehydrated on a golf course a few weeks previously and had been treated for that off and on since. "He was coming along fine," says the widow. "We never anticipated this to happen."
He was survived by his widow Genevieve, daughters Kelly and twins Michele and Christine, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
