Dr. Joyce Brothers, On-Air Psychologist Who Made TV House Calls, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: May 13, 2013 102 Comments
Joyce Brothers, a former academic psychologist who, long before Drs. Ruth, Phil and Laura, was counseling millions over the airwaves, died on Monday at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. She was 85.
Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press
Dr. Joyce Brothers engulfed by mail from radio listeners after she kept a suicidal caller on the phone until help could arrive.
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Her daughter, Lisa Brothers Arbisser, confirmed the death.
Dr. Joyce Brothers, as she was always known professionally — a full-name hallmark of the more formal times in which she began her career — was widely described as the mother of mass-media psychology because of the firm, pragmatic and homiletic guidance she administered for decades via radio and television.
Historically, she was a bridge between advice columnists like Dear Abby and Ann Landers, who got their start in the mid-1950s, and the self-help advocates of the 1970s and afterward.
Throughout the 1960s, and long beyond, one could scarcely turn on the television or open a newspaper without encountering her. She was the host of her own nationally syndicated TV shows, starting in the late 1950s with “The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show” and over the years including “Ask Dr. Brothers,” “Consult Dr. Brothers” and “Living Easy With Dr. Joyce Brothers.”
She was also a ubiquitous guest on talk shows like “The Tonight Show” and on variety shows like “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”
She was a panelist on many game shows, including “What’s My Line?” and “The Hollywood Squares.” These appearances had a fitting symmetry: It was as a game-show contestant that Dr. Brothers had received her first television exposure.
Playing herself, or a character very much like herself, she had guest roles on a blizzard of TV series, from “The Jack Benny Program” to “Happy Days,” “Taxi,” “Baywatch,” “Entourage” and “The Simpsons.”
She also lectured widely; had a call-in radio show, a syndicated newspaper column and a regular column in Good Housekeeping magazine; and wrote books.
Dr. Brothers arrived in the American consciousness (or, more precisely, the American unconscious) at a serendipitous time: the exact historical moment when cold war anxiety, a greater acceptance of talk therapy and the widespread ownership of television sets converged. Looking crisply capable yet eminently approachable in her pastel suits and pale blond pageboy, she offered gentle, nonthreatening advice on sex, relationships, family and all manner of decent behavior.
It is noteworthy, then, that her public life began with fisticuffs. The demure-looking, scholarly Dr. Brothers had first come to wide attention as a contestant on “The $64,000 Question,” where she triumphed as an improbable authority on boxing.
Joyce Diane Bauer was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 20, 1927, and reared in Queens and Manhattan. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell, with a double major in home economics and psychology, followed by a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia.
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Dr. Brothers taught psychology at Hunter College. By the mid-’50s, while her husband, Milton J. Brothers, was pursuing a medical residency, she had left the academy to stay home with their baby daughter.
Milton Brothers’s residency paid $50 a month. Joyce Brothers, who had a steel-trap memory, decided to supplement their income by appearing on a quiz show. She settled on “The $64,000 Question,” produced in New York and broadcast on CBS. On the show, contestants answered a string of increasingly difficult questions in fields of their choosing.
Dr. Brothers quickly saw that the show prized incongruous matches of contestant and subject: the straight-backed Marine officer who was an expert on gastronomy; the cobbler who knew all about opera. What she decided, would be more improbable than a petite psychologist who was a pundit of pugilism?
Dr. Joyce Brothers, On-Air Psychologist Who Made TV House Calls, Dies at 85
Published: May 13, 2013 102 Comments
(Page 2 of 2)
She embarked on weeks of intensive study, a process little different, she later said, from preparing to write a doctoral dissertation. She made her first appearance on the show in late 1955, returning week after week until she had won the top prize, $64,000 — only the second person, and the first woman, to do so. She later won the same amount, also for boxing knowledge, on a spinoff show, “The $64,000 Challenge.”
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In the late 1950s, amid the quiz-show scandals (which included revelations that contestants on some shows, “The $64,000 Question” among them, had been fed correct answers), Dr. Brothers was called before a grand jury. In an exercise that was curiously reminiscent of her appearances on the shows, she was peppered with arcane boxing questions to test her authentic knowledge of the subject. She passed handily, and no taint of the scandal attached to her.
In 1956, as a result of her performance on “The $64,000 Question,” Dr. Brothers was invited to be a commentator on “Sports Showcase,” a television show on Channel 13 in New York, which had not yet become a noncommercial station. One show led to another, and before the decade was out she was a television star.
If, in later, years, Dr. Brothers’s public image had acquired the faint aura of camp, it was leavened by her obvious awareness of that fact — and her corresponding ability to laugh at herself in public. (Who without such self-knowledge would have agreed, as she did, to appear on both “The David Frost Show” and “The $1.98 Beauty Show,” a late-’70s Chuck Barris game show-cum-parody?)
But for the most part, Dr. Brothers displayed a far more serious side: More than once, she dissuaded suicidal callers to her radio show from ending their lives, keeping them on the line with encouraging talk until their phone numbers could be traced and help dispatched.
In her book “Widowed” (1990), she wrote candidly of her own suicidal despair after her husband’s death from cancer, and her eventual resolve to go on with her life.
Milton Brothers, an internist who specialized in diabetes treatment, died in 1989. Besides her daughter, an ophthalmic surgeon, Dr. Brothers is survived by a sister, Elaine Goldsmith; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Her other books include “The Brothers System for Liberated Love and Marriage” (1972) and “How to Get Whatever You Want Out of Life” (1978). Had it not been for “The $64,000 Question,” Dr. Brothers might well have remained a scholar whose publications ran toward “An Investigation of Avoidance, Anxiety, and Escape Behavior in Human Subjects as Measured by Action Potentials in Muscle,” as her doctoral dissertation was titled.
But in an era when few women managed to have high-profile public careers, Dr. Brothers was able to transform a single night — Dec. 6, 1955, the night of her $64,000 question — into more than five decades of celebrity.
The question was a multipart interrogation that caused the show to run 30 seconds long. Her responses, given from an isolation booth, conveyed the agility of her mind, the capacity of her memory and the ferocity of her determination.
That night Dr. Brothers supplied, among other impeccable answers, the name of the glove Roman gladiators wore (cestus), Primo Carnera’s opponent in his heavyweight title defense of 1933 (Paolino Uzcudun) and the name of the essayist (William Hazlitt) who wrote about having seen Bill Neat defeat Thomas Hickman on Dec. 11, 1821.
Joyce Diane Brothers (née Bauer; October 20, 1927 – May 13, 2013) was an American psychologist, television personality and columnist, who wrote a daily newspaper advice column from 1960 to 2013. In 1955, she became the only woman ever to win the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question, answering questions on the topic of boxing, which was suggested as a stunt by the show's producers. In 1958, she presented a television show on which she dispensed psychological advice, pioneering the field.[1][2] She wrote a column for Good Housekeeping for almost forty years and became, according to The Washington Post, the "face of American psychology".[1] Brothers appeared in dozens of television roles, usually as herself, but from the 1970s onward she accepted roles portraying fictional characters, often self-parodies.
Radio therapist Laura Schlessinger credited Brothers with making psychology "accessible".[3]
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Personal life [edit]
Joyce Diane Bauer was born in 1927[A] in Brooklyn, New York to Estelle (née Rapaport)[4] and Morris K. Bauer, attorneys who shared a law practice.[5] Her family is Jewish.[6] She graduated from Far Rockaway High School in January 1944. She entered Cornell University, double majoring in home economics and psychology and was a member of Sigma Delta Tau sorority.[7][8] She earned her Ph.D degree in psychology from Columbia University.[9] The American Association of University Women AAUW awarded Brothers the American Fellowship in 1952, which enabled her to complete the doctoral degree.[10]
She married Dr. Milton Brothers, an internist, in 1949.[11] The couple had a daughter, Lisa. Milton Brothers died in 1989 from cancer.[12] Dr. Joyce Brothers resided in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she died in 2013, aged 85.[2]
Career [edit]
Brothers gained fame in late 1955 by winning The $64,000 Question game show, on which she appeared as an expert in the subject area of boxing. Originally, she had not planned to have boxing as her topic, but the sponsors suggested it, and she agreed. A voracious reader, she studied every reference book about boxing that she could find; she would later tell reporters that it was thanks to her good memory that she assimilated so much material and answered even the most difficult questions.[13] In 1959, allegations that quiz shows were rigged, due to the Charles Van Doren controversy on the quiz show Twenty One, began to surface and stirred controversy. Despite these claims, Brothers insisted she had not cheated, nor ever been given any answers to questions in advance. During a 1959 hearing in the quiz show scandal, a producer exonerated her of involvement.[2][14] Her success on The $64,000 Question earned Brothers a chance to be the color commentator for CBS during the boxing match between Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson. She was said to have been the first woman boxing commentator.[15]
By August 1958, Brothers was given her own television show on a New York station, but her topic was not sports; she began doing an advice show about relationships, during which she answered questions from the audience.[16] She claimed to have been the first television psychologist, explaining to The Washington Post: "I invented media psychology. I was the first. The founding mother."[17] Sponsors were nervous about whether a television psychologist could succeed, she recalled, but viewers expressed their gratitude for her show, telling her she was giving them information they could not get elsewhere.[17]
Brothers presented syndicated advice shows on both television and radio, during a broadcasting career that lasted more than four decades. Her shows changed names numerous times, from The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show to Consult Dr. Brothers to Tell Me, Dr. Brothers to Ask Dr. Brothers to Living Easy with Dr. Joyce Brothers.[18] In 1964 she interviewed and posed for publicity photographs with The Beatles on their first visit to the United States.[2]
Brothers also had a monthly column in Good Housekeeping magazine for almost four decades,[2] and a syndicated newspaper column that she began writing in the 1970s and which at its height was printed in more than 300 newspapers.[1][18][19] She also published several books including the 1981 book, What Every Woman Should Know About Men,[20] and the 1991 book, Widowed, inspired by the loss of her husband.[9]
As a psychologist, Brothers had been licensed in New York since 1958.[21]
Death and legacy [edit]
Brothers died, aged 85, at her home in Fort Lee on May 13, 2013 due to respiratory failure.[1][9] She is survived by her daughter Lisa Brothers Arbisser, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a sister.[2][22] She called herself "the mother of television psychology".[23] She is credited with inspiring "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger and "Dr. Phil" McGraw who called himself "a very big fan of hers" after her death.[2]
Notes [edit]
- ^A Some sources indicate 1928 as her year of birth. An official document (though not a birth certificate) in her personal papers held at Cornell University indicates that her birth date was October 20, 1927.[citation needed]
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