The day I met Phil Donahue
Also the day of my first airplane trip and my first interview for a TV audience of millions
When I learned that the pioneering television talk-show host Phil Donahue had died on August 18 at the age of 88, my first thought was of the day he interviewed me for NBC’s Today show in the summer of 1981. It was an important moment in my life, and I considered posting something about it on social media to commemorate his passing, but doing that presented two problems. First, it wouldn’t be right just to say that I met Donahue once when I was a kid; more explanation would be required—more, certainly, than Facebook deserves. Second, as important a moment as our meeting was for me and my future, I don’t actually remember that much about it. But I remember plenty about the circumstances surrounding it. And on reflection, the fact that I can recall so few exact details of that day is in itself telling and perhaps instructive.
Back in 1981, Donahue was taping regular interview segments for Today in addition to his own highly rated show. He wanted to talk to me for one of those segments because I was a child prodigy. I’d learned to read by age two; by three I was typing complete sentences on my dad’s IBM Selectric; by five I was writing original stories, plays and poems; by seven my work had developed exponentially in both length and sophistication and was nearing adult level. This prodigiousness presented many challenges, especially because I lagged behind my peers in other respects—the ability to tie my own shoelaces, for example. Most preschools and elementary schools didn’t (and still don’t) know how to deal with someone like me. Realizing this, my parents reached out to lots of people for help in finding a supportive educational environment. One person they connected with was David Feldman, a child psychologist at Tufts University who specialized in cognitive development and had already begun an in-depth study of prodigies. In 1979, I became part of that study, the initial results of which were published in David’s first book, Beyond Universals in Cognitive Development (Ablex Publishing, 1980; I’m “Child E”).
Over the next seven years or so, David—or “Davey,” as I referred to him—and his then-wife Lynn Goldsmith grew close to my family. They found me interesting in part because of my area of expertise. All prodigies are unusual, of course, but most tend to show advanced skills in similar fields: music, math, chess, sometimes art. Prodigiousness in written language is relatively rare, and thus a source of fascination for the researcher.
Wanting to get more attention for their work, David and Lynn started cranking up the publicity machine, and my family agreed to help. First came a 1979 Boston Globe article about prodigies that discussed David’s research, and in which I appeared under a pseudonym. The call to meet Donahue came next, and it was a major step up, but it wouldn’t be the last; within the next few years, my cute little face could be seen on an episode of PBS’ Nova and in the pages of Smithsonian and U.S. News and World Report. I’d also figure much more prominently in David and Lynn’s book Nature’s Gambit (Basic Books, 1986), this time under the name “Randy McDaniel.”
To talk to Donahue on camera meant going to Chicago, and that meant getting on a plane, which at age nine I’d never done before. Ear-popping aside, it was an exciting journey. My mom was my escort. She’d given birth to me in nearby Evanston, then brought me home to Massachusetts when I was only three weeks old. Neither of us had been back since, and we discussed a return to my birthplace either pre- or post-interview, but in the end there wasn’t time. (I didn’t see Evanston again until I was almost 50.)1
NBC put us up for one night at a Hyatt near O’Hare Airport. I’d never been in one of those either. Glass elevators—so cool! Before the interview (or maybe after), we paid a visit to Lynn Goldsmith’s parents, who had a huge apartment in a ritzy high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan. That people could live like this was an eye-opener. It was a bit like being on an episode of The Jeffersons, only much better furnished.
Then we were off to the Merchandise Mart, where the studio was located. I believe I was one of three people Donahue interviewed. We all sat together at a semi-circular desk in front of which he stood. The other two interviewees were, I think, David and another prodigy, whom I didn’t know. I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl or what his/her particular talent was. I can’t remember any of Donahue’s questions or how anybody answered them, including me. I do remember talking to Donahue afterward in the control room and briefly walking down a hallway with him. I remember his shaggy gray-white hair and thick-framed glasses, and his general air of being pleasantly harried. He was friendly and well-spoken, but his very niceness made me wary. I suspected that it was a put-on and that he wasn’t completely trustworthy. I don’t know how much of that came from him and how much was my own suspicious nature. I loved to talk, but I didn’t enjoy talking about myself; my preference was to entertain others and keep self-revelation to a minimum. For this interview, I was being asked to do something I felt uncomfortable about, knowing that it would be witnessed by millions of strangers. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve blocked out the details.
If I wanted, I could probably find out what we all said; I presume video footage still exists somewhere. I know I haven’t seen the interview in decades. It’s possible that I haven’t seen it since the morning it aired.
However, plenty of other people saw it over time, and that made a difference. I don’t mean that it turned me into a celebrity. Nobody ever stopped me on the street and said, “Hey, aren’t you the kid that Donahue interviewed?” But it did ease the path of my parents considerably as they struggled with my continuing education. Those TV and magazine and newspaper interviews opened a lot of doors. Schools were more accommodating to a child with a media kit, national press clips and the imprimatur of a respected university professor. The high school I attended, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, which had a “house” system of student organization, was so accommodating that they gave me a house of my own (House L, named after assistant principal Henry Lukas) and allowed me to create a custom course of study every year, combining school classes with various extracurricular projects. I started taking classes at Harvard when I was still a high-school junior.
On the whole, this was positive stuff. But every upside has a downside. The media attention made me focus all the more on my “difference” from other people. Sometimes this difference was real, sometimes it was only perceived. Sometimes it helped me, sometimes it hurt. Sometimes I was proud beyond measure of it, sometimes I wanted nothing more deeply than to hide it. Already wary at nine of revealing too much about myself to Phil Donahue, I grew ever warier, even with my best friends. To open up about the oddity of my educational background often felt dangerous, as if someone might find a way to use that information against me. When you’re in your teens and twenties, you want to rebel against conformity, but you don’t want to be seen as an outsider freak either. At least I didn’t. And so, as soon as I felt they couldn’t or shouldn’t help me anymore, I pretty much turned my back on The Gifted Years and stopped acknowledging my past to most people I knew. Being special had been nice, at least most of the time, but I had no desire to stay that way.
If you read this hoping I’d have more to say about Donahue, I apologize. But as I explained up top, my memories of him are dim. In a way, the most memorable part of that experience in Chicago was how drastically it contrasted with all the other circumstances of my life in the summer of ’81. And strange circumstances they were, worth being described, but on some other day.
To be completely accurate, this was my second trip on a plane, but the first one was that flight from Chicago to Boston that I took with Mom three weeks into my life outside the womb, and though I am a remarkable person in many ways, that remarkableness doesn’t extend to having memories of my infancy.