Host Mike Douglas sang as Prince Charming

Posted:
Aug 11, 2006

TV talk show host Mike Douglas, whose talents included providing Prince Charming's singing voice in the 1950 Disney feature film Cinderella, died early Friday on his 81st birthday.

Douglas died at 5:30 a.m. in a hospital in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, wife Genevieve said. She said that he had been admitted Thursday, but was unsure of the cause.

A former big-band singer, Douglas had an afternoon show from 1961 to 1982. As Prince Charming, he sang "So This Is Love" on the Cinderella soundtrack.

Douglas had been treated on and off since becoming dehydrated on the golf course several weeks ago. "He was coming along fine, we thought. It was really a shock," she said. "We never anticipated this to happen."

Along with his big-band and ballad singing, the Mike Douglas Show featured musicians, comedians and politicians, including seven past, present or future presidents.

"People still believe The Mike Douglas Show was a talk show, and I never correct them, but I don't think so," Douglas wrote in his 1999 memoir, I'll Be Right Back: Memories of TV's Greatest Talk Show.

"It was really a music show, with a whole lot of talk and laughter in between numbers."

Most of the syndicated shows were 90 minutes long. Douglas hosted about 6,000 shows.

About 30,000 guests appeared on The Mike Douglas Show over the years, said Tom Kelly, co-author of Douglas' memoir.

"One big key to his great success was he had his ego in check. He always let the guest have the limelight," Kelly said.

"He was a fine performer. He could sing, he could do comedy, he did it all, but he always gave the guest the spotlight."

Douglas was "an outgrowth on the 1950s mentality of politeness," said TV historian Tim Brooks, executive vice-president of research for Lifetime Television Network.

"Even when America was getting kind of angry in the 1960s and 1970s, his show was sort of an oasis of politeness," Brooks said. "It got you away from some of the turmoil in life."

He was born Michael Delaney Dowd in Chicago on August 11, 1925. In his teens, he started his career as a singer and entertainer for supper clubs and radio shows. He became the staff singer at radio station WKY in Oklahoma City.

During the Second World War, he joined the Navy and served on a munitions ship.

Afterward, he was a featured performer on radio show Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge, which moved to TV. Kyser gave him his stage name. Walt Disney heard him singing and asked him to provide Prince Charming's singing voice in Cinderella.

His 1940s hits with Kyser included "Old Lamplighter" and, in 1946, "Ole Buttermilk Sky" (he was credited on the Columbia record label as "Michael Douglas"). In February 1966, "The Men in My Little Girl's Life" gave him another spot on the pop charts (it reached a surprising #6).

"In the old days, I was often confused with Merv Griffin," Douglas once recalled. "We were the same height, the same weight, and we were both Irish tenors."

Realizing that rock and roll was making his style less easy to sell, Douglas looked for a way to reinvent himself professionally.

Douglas briefly hosted Hi, Ladies!, a daytime show on Chicago TV station WGN. In 1961, Westinghouse Group W program director Woody Fraser hired him at a Group W station in Cleveland, then KYW, to host a talk and entertainment show.

The program began syndication in 1963, but its small budget and Cleveland's lack of appeal for potential guests limited its marketability. The Mike Douglas Show moved to Philadelphia in 1965 and Los Angeles in 1978.

In 1966, Group W replaced Douglas with John Davidson, a younger singer. The Mike Douglas Show remained in syndication under Douglas' retirement in 1982 to North Palm Beach, Florida.

Douglas spent much of his free time playing golf, but guested on several talk shows. He appeared as himself on three episodes of The Rosie O'Donnell Show from 1996 to 1999.

Although he was diagnosed in 1990 with prostate cancer, surgery was successful.

Mike Douglas married Genevieve Purnell in 1944. They had three daughters: Kelly Anne and twins Michelle and Christine. Douglas also had a brother, Robert, and a sister, Helen.