Stanley Siegel, 79, New York talk show host

[Diner]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/arts/television/stanley-siegel-a-riveting-and-irrepressible-talk-show-host-dies-at-79.html
Stanley Siegel, TV Host Who Made Career on Candor, Dies at 79
By SAM ROBERTS

Stanley Siegel, an irreverent New York television talk-show host whose unscripted interviews coupled Jack Paar's raw candor with Oscar Wilde's credo that nothing succeeds like excess, died on Jan. 2 in Los Angeles. He was 79.

The cause was pneumonia, his nephew Richard Propper said.

"The Stanley Siegel Show" was broadcast live at 9 a.m. on weekdays on WABC from a studio in the frowzy former grand ballroom of the Hotel des Artistes on the West Side of Manhattan. Its ratings rose meteorically after its premiere in 1975.

But it fizzled after only five years, having failed to gain exposure beyond metropolitan New York, a victim of too many shifts in programming schedules and maybe of Mr. Siegel's irrepressible personality itself, which could overwhelm his viewers.

Fearless and sometimes tasteless, Mr. Siegel grilled the transgender former professional tennis player Renée Richards about her sex life; challenged Henry M. Jackson, the starchy Democratic senator from Washington State, to tell a joke (it wasn't funny); persuaded Gloria Steinem to kick back and do a tap dance; asked his parents if they really got along; and underwent, on camera, weekly 10-minute soul-baring therapy sessions on a couch with a psychoanalyst (followed by three weekly private appointments off camera).

Marlo Thomas, the actress, nearly stalked off the set after Mr. Siegel pointed out that she was of "the Lebanese persuasion," adding, "In Lebanon, they have a lot of strange religions; all of them hate the Jews."

Another time he physically restrained Timothy Leary, the psychologist and advocate of psychedelic drugs, from leaving after demanding that he say whether the suicide of Diane Linkletter -- whose father, the television personality Art Linkletter, was being interviewed on the show by telephone -- had been connected to her use of LSD.

During an interview with Norman Mailer about his book "The Executioner's Song," Mr. Siegel re-enacted the firing-squad execution of Gary Gilmore, the book's subject -- gunshots included.

"I tried something different and it backfired; I know that," Mr. Siegel said in an interview with The New York Times in 1980 after WCBS, which had picked up his show in the meantime, declined to renew his contract. "But at least I'm willing to take risks. And tell me the truth, you've never seen anything like that before, have you?"

If television executives were skittish about such a hot persona in a cool medium -- he was fired as a newscaster in Green Bay, Wis., after immersing himself in 45 pounds of lemon Jell-O to simulate "the dark, lamentable plight of fruits and vegetables that wind up in some anonymous cafeteria" -- reviewers found him riveting.

Even John J. O'Connor, The Times's television critic, characterized him as "generous, contemptible, thoughtful, abrasive, disarming, insufferable and charming."

The playwright Jonathan Reynolds wrote in New York magazine in 1977 that "Not since that night in 1962, when Jack Paar threw on a pair of dark glasses to hide his tears and made the most dramatic exit the country had yet witnessed on the tube, have I come across a television character as compelling as Stanley Siegel."

Stanley Milton Siegel was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 2, 1936, to Louis Siegel, a banker, and the former Mildred Kaufman. He was a grandnephew of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, stars of the early-20th-century Yiddish theater, and a cousin of both the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and of the comedian Laraine Newman. He is survived by nephews and a niece. An early marriage ended in divorce.

As a student with chronic asthma, Mr. Siegel transferred from the University of California, Berkeley, to the University of Arizona for the drier climate. He graduated in 1960 with a degree in debate.

Mr. Siegel was a freelance radio reporter in Vietnam, covered suburban news for The Los Angeles Times and hosted two programs -- a dance party broadcast in Tacoma, Wash., and a morning show in Nashville -- before WABC hired him as host of "A.M. New York" in the mid-1970s. He nearly quadrupled the show's audience, and his own show followed.

"It's so much better to be a neurotic in New York than in Nashville," he explained. "There they liked me, but they didn't understand me. Here they like me and understand me."

But after his contract was not renewed at WCBS, he returned to Los Angeles.

"His show was never syndicated, so he never became the national phenomenon that he desired or deserved," Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, said.

Mr. Siegel later appeared on cable television shows, including "America Talks Back" on Lifetime and "Stanley on the Go," a travel show on RLTV on which he was as unabashed as ever, and which remained on the air until Mr. Siegel's death. ("We were going to bury him with a microphone," said Mr. Propper, his nephew.)

"I'm being me all the time," Mr. Siegel once said. "In the words of Albert Einstein, great spirits are sometimes met by the violent opposition of mediocre minds."

(c) 2016 The New York Times Company

[Bryan Styble]

Thank you ever so much, Sir or Madam "Diner", for posting this !

I knew Siegel a bit, but had no idea he was ill. Indeed, I'm all but certain that I've seen at least one edition of RLTV's "Stanley on the Go"--the one where he transited the Panama Canal--SINCE his January 2nd demise. (Marginal cable nets like RLTV are meagerly-staffed, and thus aren't great about keeping track of their talent, alive or dead.)

I first stumbled onto Siegel in 1980 when he was hosting an obscure local Los Angeles show on KCOP/Channel 13, with a bare set that consisted of two dividers as a backdrop, and but two stools for seating. Siegel used to disparage the production by apologizing to his guests that "this is definitely minimum-wage talk show", a line I've stolen (with his permission) for my own commercial newstalk call-in radio work.

His KCOP program only lasted months*, but convinced me that Siegel was one of the two** wittiest, knowledgable and interesting television hosts I've ever watched. So when he popped up again on the rebranded Lifetime cable network in 1984--before it went "female targeted" in the late '80s--with "America Talks Back", a call-in show that featured Jimmy Carter as Siegel's first guest, I made it a point to contact him, hoping he'd be interested in a profile I wanted to write for TV Guide.

He agreed, and it was quite convenient, inasmuch "America Talks Back" originated from the Alan Landsburg Building on the north side of Olympic Blvd., just east of Bundy Drive, and only blocks from my West L.A. home. Roy Cohn, Jerry Falwell and Father Bud Keiser, all now deceased, were guests on the show I sat in on, and watching playback in his dressing room with Siegel immediately after they wrapped was one of the most interesting hours of my life. Siegel taught me that afternoon that even the most talented can be brutal in evaluating their own work. And what he said after hearing my analysis of his work was so gratifying that I transcribed the tape, framed it and soon hung the attributed quote on my living room wall: "I have to say, Bryan, you really understand television."

As such, I wasn't surprised when Lifetime "went in another direction", as they often say in broadcasting, and cancelled the show. TV Guide ended up never publishing my piece--even though the editor insisted he liked it a lot--because he didn't consider Siegel sufficiently nationally prominent.

A few years passed after the cancellation of "America Talks Back", and I wondered what became of Siegel, so I started calling around Hollywood. A producer I was referred to at KNBC was a pal of his, and gave me his home number in San Diego, where he had relocated and was doing a small show on a little-watched UHF station.

When I rang him up, I was of course flattered he immediately remembered me, and he offered the most cryptic response when I inquired, "So what happened--how come a guy who had a terrific national broadcast on cable and for years various local shows in both New York and Los Angeles is now working at a San Diego UHF outlet?"

Siegel paused for a moment, and replied, "Well, I'll tell you, Bryan--the hardest thing in this business is to get back on top after you've dropped off for some reason." I didn't have the nerve to ask him to explain, and have wondered ever since precisely what he was alluding to.

Then, in 2009, when Siegel was doing a local travel show for a San Francisco station, I needed some advice regarding a career decision in San Diego where I ended up after Seattle, so I called him up in the Bay Area to get his perspective. He sounded as young and spunky as ever, even though he was well over 70, and gave me fine and appreciated counsel.

But no matter what he might have advised, I would never have emulated what may be his most memorable segment from the old KCOP show: the time he applied a hand-crank opener to about half a dozen cans of dog food, for a comparative taste test by the host.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
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* But fortunately at least one terrific edition of it is preserved in monochrome on YouTube, where Siegel had a bunch of punk fans on, along with famed rock documentarian Penelope Spheeris.

** The other would be Chicago's Bob Sirott, whose "Fox Thing In the Morning" on WFLD/Channel 32 in the 90s and early 2000s is the finest television show I've ever seen (or worked on, as I was honored to serve as one of its newswriters 1999-2000).