Mommy's Boy

Dad has never heard of him , but Mike Douglas, host of the most popular show on daytime TV, is the A11-American Mommy's Boy. Each weekday, more than 6,000,000 housewives in 171 cities set up their ironing boards in front of the TV set to watch their idol; and this in turn has attracted such a crush of advertisers that the 90-minute program this year will bring in $10.5 million in sponsors' fees. While many TV shows have to round up studio audiences off the streets, the Mike Douglas Show claims a 14-month waiting list for tickets, and performers are standing in line to do a guest shot.

What makes Douglas so appealing? Gulp hard. "I want to make as many persons happy as I can," he says. He's that kind of guy. Arrow-straight, true-blue, sincere as all get out. He asks his guests to show snapshots of their kids, and the ladies at home beam. He adds: "I don't smoke, I don't drink, I get home every night. I'm a square." The view from across the board is something approaching mystical adoration.

Homespun Hippie. Actually, Douglas, 46, is a square with sharp edges. By "always keeping in mind the people of Cedar Rapids," he avoids the kind of blatant plugging and inside show-biz patter plaguing the late-night talkathons. As a result, his viewers consider him one of them, a kind of homespun hippie who can parry with Stokely Carmichael or trade one-liners with Jack E. Leonard. Though the caliber of guests only occasionally rises to a Bob Hope, it is also true that Douglas' program has become a profitable showcase for new talent. The producers boast that Comic Bill Cosby got his first national TV break on the show and that Barbra Streisand did her bit there a year before Funny Girl. A good deal of the show time, however, is devoted to warmed-over smorgasbord: Arthur Godfrey demonstrates his recipe for beans de luxe, Cassius Clay trades a few playful punches with Douglas.

To all this, Douglas always adds a touch of spice. A deft, breezy interviewer, he pumps a starlet about her rumored romance or quizzes the Rolling Stones about rag-mop hairdos. On another occasion, he startled Guest Hubert Humphrey by casually commenting that "the President says you can make a speech as easily as you take a breath." The Vice President muttered, "Did the President say that?" After a long pause he added: "Then it's true."

Likely Successor. Douglas, who was born Michael Delaney Dowd Jr. in Chicago, prepped as a vocalist on TV's Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge in 1950, and host of an afternoon radio show called Hi, Ladies! In 1961, when the call came to take charge of a new daytime talk show in Cleveland, he was singing in a Los Angeles saloon by night and studying to be a real estate agent by day.

Since moving the show to Philadelphia two years ago, he has been so successful that some showfolks are touting him as a likely successor to Johnny Carson--if and when. This season he will invade nighttime TV with four one-hour specials; the first will be "Mike and the Young People," a variety-talk show about youth, with such guests as Hubert Humphrey, Jerry Lewis, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope," Robert Kennedy and Bishop James Pike. With that kind of lineup, the ladies will have to start doing their ironing in the evening.

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