The Detective of Heartache

By Richard Stengel

Psychologist Tom Cottle puts his talk-show guests on the couch

Here's the pitch: a series featuring a psychologist from academe who hears the siren song of Hollywood. Point of view? He treats celebrities, making them feel better about themselves and all of us feel better about ourselves. Who to star? Why, he's already on the tube. Tom Cottle. So sensitive. So caring. So earnest. He'll charm the pants off you. And those eyes! So limpid, so seductive!

Clinical Psychologist Tom Cottle is television's sympathetic shrink. His weekly half-hour talk show, Tom Cottle: Up Close, is syndicated on 50 stations around the country, usually in the daytime hours when the schedule is awash in soap operas. Typical guests include such stars as Liv Ullmann, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Sid Caesar, Phyllis Diller and Milton Berle. But a Merv Griffin he is not; no idle chitchat for Cottle, who oozes edge-of-the-chair empathy as he delves into his guests' hurts, histories, loves and divorces. Their upholstered chair might as well be a couch.

Cottle's curriculum vitae: age, 44. Overachieving child of prominent Chicago parents (father a physician, mother a concert pianist). B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. in sociology from University of Chicago. Former assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. Author of 22 books, mostly about the disadvantaged and disenfranchised: abused children, the elderly, the indigent and the handicapped. His commitment is incontrovertible. So why has he given up teaching to gab with Phyllis Diller about her facelifts? "I feel strongly that this is the way to enlighten people," Cottle insists. "I'm trying to preserve my inquiry into human behavior through new media." Although Up Close is taped in Los Angeles or New York City, Cottle still lives in Brookline, Mass., with his wife of 19 years and their three children, and maintains a small private practice. He is currently working with the Harvard Medical School on a study of the impact of unemployment on families.

In 1979 he was invited by WBZ, the Boston NBC affiliate, to preside over a children's show called Hot Hero Sandwich. That lasted only 13 weeks, but then PBS offered him a talk show in which he interviewed ordinary people about their health and emotional problems. Last September he was signed by Metromedia for a commercial program. Cottle is acutely sensitive to criticism that he has sold out. Says he: "For years I wrote serious books and got no attention. Now that I'm on television, everyone wants to take a crack at me."

Cottle, who spent four years in analysis, usually begins each interview with an exploration of his guest's childhood. He inquires of an aloof Dick Cavett what it was like to lose his mother at an early age. His eyes dew up as Jerry Lewis describes the ache he feels for a departed grandmother. From the past, Cottle shifts (after the obligatory commercial) to the present. He wants Elizabeth Ashley to recount the horror of a back-alley abortion. He leans forward and demands of Daniel Travanti whether he has "the courage to fall in love" with his sultry Hill Street Blues costar, Veronica Hamel. Cottle's sign-off is generally a smarmy show-biz compliment. To Martin Mull: "I feel rather blessed to know a man like you."

Tom Cottle: Up Close is sometimes too close for comfort. He probes for psychic bruises and then presses them. His talent is for investigative intimacy; he is a detective of heartache because heartache makes good television. The intimacy can seem enforced and stagy, making him come off as a "touchy-feely" Rona Barrett. His digging occasionally smacks of prurience, and Cottle then resembles a small boy titillated by a naughty word. For example, he inquired of an effervescent Debbie Reynolds: "Let me ask you a naive question. Why did you send your husband Eddie Fisher over to console Elizabeth Taylor?" He also has an annoying habit of asking such unanswerable questions as "Who are you?" When Milton Berle confessed to once wanting to kill himself, Cottle replied: "I know what it means, but what does it mean?"

For Cottle, "celebrities express the feeling of being dehumanized by dint of their celebrity. I'm trying to recapture their humanity." The trouble is that his famous guests, performers by instinct, have a tendency to be psychic strippers. With the merest prodding they will shred the last thread of privacy and reveal intimate aspects of their lives. Cottle calls it the "strangers on a train" phenomenon. Yet his guests expose themselves to a faceless audience of millions, turning viewers into video voyeurs.

Once in a while a guest refuses to play the game. Sportsman and TV Tycoon Ted Turner stalked off the set after Cottle prodded him about his father's suicide and his sister's illness. Turner reportedly described Up Close as "the National Enquirer of talk shows," and refused to give permission to air his segment. But most Cottle guests (who receive talk-show scale of $200 to $400) know the ground rules: show and tell and don't be coy.

By dwelling on his guests' everyday suffering, instead of their ability to sublimate it into performance, Cottle sometimes misses what makes them special. Still, there are times when they surmount his failures. Milton Berle was a study in self-pity while describing the anguish of fathering an illegitimate son, but displayed his comic mastery when he narrated a story of his attempted suicide. Perched at the window, Berle was about to leap. He was discovered by his secretary, who begged him not to jump and said, "Let's order some turkey." Berle looked away, inconsolable, then slowly turned his head and asked, "See if they got roast beef?" --By Richard Stengel. Reported by Marcia Gauger/Boston

With reporting by Marcia Gauger This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.