Sally Jessy Raphael

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Sally Jessy Raphael (born Sally Lowenthal on February 25, 1935 in Easton, Pennsylvania) is an American talk show host, best known for the eponymous Sally talk show she hosted for two decades.

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[edit] Early years

Raphael was born in Easton, in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico. She earned a BFA from Columbia University in New York City.

[edit] Career

[edit] Journalism

Following her graduation from Columbia University, Raphael became a media correspondent for the Associated Press and United Press International.

[edit] Talk Show

Raphael hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet which ran from Monday November 2, 1981 to 1987, but is most famous for hosting the television talk show, Sally Jessy Raphaël show (later shortened to simply Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from 1983 to 2001.

"Talknet" was still in the embryonic stage when Raphael came to the attention of its producer, Maurice Tunick. He gave her a trial one-hour run in Washington on WRC one Sunday afternoon in August 1981. Before her involvement with "Talknet," Raphael's radio career was largely a succession of failures that had her regularly packing up and moving on. She once bragged that she had been fired 18 times. Sometimes it was the station changing formats; more often it was the station getting sold or changing languages on her. One reporter once described her as the "Dear Abby of the Airwaves," though was quick to note Raphael had never taken a psychology course, never read an issue of Psychology Today and had only rarely sought counselling herself.

She freely admitted once that her own personal beliefs and prejudices influence her broadcasting style, and that her Roman Catholic faith colored her reactions to her guests. In 1985, she told a reporter: "There is very little that is unbiased about me. I am very proud of my biases. This is not anything but a difference in style. ... I'm much more biased than Phil Donahue is."

She was best known to TV viewers for her red-framed glasses, and the Kleenex tissues she handed out liberally to crying guests on her television show. She once said she was a great admirer of rival television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue. "We're not really in competition," Raphael told Parade Magazine in 1987. "Oprah and Phil have 60 minutes. They're much more of a star than I am. My guests aren't celebrities, unless there's a 'people story' behind it, as when Patrick Duffy (of "Dallas") came on to talk about the murder of his parents. Oprah and I are very close friends. I think I make one one-hundredth of her salary." On later shows after around 1998, Pat Ferrari a very popular after care specialist would come onto the show mainly at the end to talk about the events that have happened. She would quite often pick on one 'bad' male who had been cheating on his wife or something like that. Pat, has sent many guest off the show for being rude.

In later years, her show moved toward topics such as my daughter dresses like a slut, nudists appearing unclothed before her studio audience, unwed mothers who did not know the father of their babies, and wild, sexually-active teenagers who were sent to boot camp; in this regard, her show had become reminiscent of shows hosted by Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. At its core, her show had not previously touched such topics, going for less controversial subject matter.

Raphael spoke out in the press against the change to more raunchy material, but she continued the show, insisting that she would rather be on television with lower ratings than end her career entirely. When her talk show became one of the lowest-rated talk shows in syndication by the early 2000s, the show was eventually canceled by the production company in charge of distribution.

In 2002 Raphael was one of only three people named on both industry publication Talkers magazine's 25 greatest radio, and 25 greatest television, talk show hosts of all time lists[1].

As of 2005, she hosts a daily radio show, Sally Jessy Raphael on Talknet (previously called Sally JR's Open House), on the Internet, and recently she has transferred the format to local radio. At one time the show was heard on nearly 300 stations across the nation, including the top markets. She recently did a sample show for WLIS/WMRD, Middletown-Hartford, Connecticut, and recorded 9 hours of material for WHJJ, Providence, Rhode Island. After these trials, the show was picked up by WVIE, Baltimore, Maryland, as the parent station, and is being syndicated among other AM stations in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Mid-West, in addition to at least one station in Arizona. The show is still accessible on the internet (although WVIE has since dropped the program), and began coverage on XM Satellite Radio's America's Talk channel on November 19, 2007. The name "Talknet" is a revival of the name of NBC Talknet, the now defunct radio network that carried her previous radio show from 1981 to 1987.

Raphael's last show on "Talknet" was in September 1987. She was removed from the radio roster, and Steve Allen was brought in with a daily program. She had been on "Talknet" from its start for a six-year run. She began contract negotiations with NBC many months earlier, but when Westwood One acquired NBC Radio Networks, including "Talknet," the negotiations stalled and Raphael fell through the cracks.

[edit] Personal life

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Raphael has been married since 1962 to former restaurateur Karl Soderlund[2], who also doubles as her manager. Soderlund gets credit for maintaining her career's momentum. "I'd tell her she had three days for a pity party after a firing," Soderlund once told a reporter, "and then we'd have to get going to the next place." Soderlund was advertising manager at a Puerto Rican radio station when Ms. Raphael met him. She became the commodity in their partnership, and he became the broker. "She has more talent than I do," said Soderlund.

Sally Jessie Raphael was a guest at Barbara Bush Senior's 16th birthday celebration. At the party, Sally smashed young Barbara's sheet cake with her face, wedging her now-famous red eyeglass frames deep into the cake. Sally still speaks fondly of this little known memory.

She has parented eight children, six girls and two boys. Some of them were adopted by her and her husband.

In 1992, her adopted 19-year-old son Jason "J.J." Soderlund, was in two separate car accidents over a 6-month period. In the January accident, Soderlund's car crashed into a tree in Putnam Valley, N.Y. Raphael had told the audience of her television talk show that he had suffered a brain injury. In June of that year, Soderlund was driving north on the Taconic State Parkway in Dutchess County when his car collided with one driven by Victoria Corbo, 39, of New York. He was critically injured but later regained consciousness after six days. He underwent a seven-hour operation for two broken legs and a broken jaw. He needed 56 stitches on his face. Raphael had been at his bedside 10 to 12 hours a day and managed to miss only one television taping.

Mere weeks after the Soderlund accident, her 33-year-old daughter Allison Vladimir (from her first marriage to Andrew Vladimir) died in her sleep, reportedly from a mixture of alcohol and pain medication she had been taking for a back injury. Allison's body had been found in her mother's bed-and-breakfast inn in Bucks County, Pa. A friend had found Vladimir at Isaac Stover House, a three-story Victorian mansion near the Delaware River. Vladimir was one of two daughters of Raphael and her former husband, advertising executive Andrew Vladimir. Raphael bought the 150-year-old mansion, 40 miles east of Philadelphia, in 1986.

After these two incidents, Raphael was grief stricken and abruptly suspended production of her television show.

Raphael currently resides in Dutchess County, New York, with her husband. In 2000, she told Larry King home was the farm. "You know, the farm is grounding. We raise our own vegetables. I have cows and horses and chickens and things, and I worry about preservatives, but I don't eat my pets. And we have fresh eggs."

Her professional name was derived from three other family members: she chose the middle name Jessy after her father, Jesse Lowenthal, and her adopted daughter who she named Jessica (nicknamed "Jessy"). Raphael is Sally's son's first name.

Raphael once responded to reports that she is a victim of botched plastic surgery. "I had oral surgery because I had a bridge rebuilt in the left side of my mouth," she said. "Because they had been working on the mouth, they did some work on the lower part of my face. But I have not had a face lift, and I've never had liposuction."

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