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| 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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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.
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?
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.”
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.
Article source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/arts/television/dr-joyce-brothers-psychologist-dies-at-85.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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