| Sally Jessy Raphael | |
| Birth Name: | Sally Ray Lowenthal[1] |
| Birth Date: | 25 February 1935 |
| Birth Place: | Easton, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Talk show host |
| Years Active: | 1959–present |
| Spouse: | |
| Children: | 3 |
Sally Lowenthal (born February 25, 1935), better known as Sally Jessy Raphael, is an American former tabloid talk show host known for her program Sally (originally called The Sally Jessy Raphael Show).[2]
Lowenthal was born on February 25, 1935, in Easton, Pennsylvania. She attended and graduated from Easton Area High School in Easton. She also spent time in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where her father, Jesse Lowenthal, was in the rum exporting business and her mother, Zelda Lowenthal (aka Dede Lowry), ran an art gallery. She has a younger brother, Steven Lowenthal.[3]
She spent some of her teenage years in Scarsdale, (Westchester County), New York, (adjacent and north of New York City), where one of her first media jobs was at the local AM radio station, WFAS. In the late 1950s, the station had a program by and for junior high school students and Raphael had the opportunity to read the news on the air. She later attended the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and went to the Caribbean / West Indies islands to attend the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Raphael studied acting under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner at New York City’s noted Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.[4]
She took her mother's maiden name of Raphael as her professional last name and plucked the theatrical surname of Jessy from her father's family to use as a distinguishing middle name.[5]
Following her subsequent graduation from the Columbia University on Morningside Heights in northwest Manhattan borough of New York City, she became a news correspondent, covering Central America because of her Puerto Rican heritage and connections for the two major competing American news-gathering syndicates of the time, Associated Press (A.P.) and the United Press International (U.P.I.), also thanks in large part to her ability to speak both English and Spanish fluently and to easily translate and switch between the two. She also obtained considerable experience in the media in Puerto Rico, where she worked in both radio and television. One of her first jobs was hosting a TV cooking show. While working in radio, she met the maan who became her second husband, Karl Soderlund, who was the general manager of a radio station there that hired her. After he was unfortunately fired, the two left Puerto Rico to work back on the continent in Miami, Florida (with its heavily bi-lingual Hispanic population). While Raphael was on the air as a radio announcer in Miami, she met and became friends with local talk show host there Larry King (1933-2021), who later became nationally famous and legendary with his late night wide-ranging radio interview program on the Mutual Broadcasting System in the 1970s and early 1980s, and later on cable television in the mid-80s for three decades on CNN (Cable News Network).
Raphael's broadcasting career was not an immediate success. She told numerous reporters over the years that she bounced around from station to station in both Puerto Rico and the United States, working as a disc jockey, news reporter, and the host of a show where she interviewed celebrities. She worked at 24 various stations, and was fired from 18 of them. In the early 1980s, she was asked to do a call-in advice show on WMCA in New York City. In the late 1980s, she even guest starred as herself in The Equalizer TV series in the episode "Making of a Martyr".
Raphael's husband Karl Soderlund assumed the role of her manager, and was a partner in her two biggest successes. She hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet that ran from 1981 to 1987, but she is best known for hosting the television talk show The Sally Jessy Raphael Show (later shortened to Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002. "Talknet" was brand new when she came to the attention of producer Maurice Tunick. According to David Richards of The Washington Post, Tunick had auditioned a number of potential hosts, but hadn't yet found the right one. Tunick gave Raphael a one-hour trial run on NBC's Washington, D.C., affiliate, WRC, in August 1981. Before going on the air, she decided that rather than doing a political show, she would give advice and discuss subjects she knew a lot about, such as relationship problems. Soon, her advice show was being heard on over 200 radio stations, and she developed a loyal group of fans.[6]
One of those fans turned out to be talk show host Phil Donahue (1935-2024), who happened to hear her show one night and liked how she related to the audience. His encouragement led to a tryout on television, where producer Burt Dubrow gave her a chance to be a guest host on his talk show. She was not very polished, but people who had loved her radio show were very positive about her being on TV. Her non-threatening and common-sense manner appealed to Dubrow, who believed she would gain more confidence as she got some TV experience. By mid-October 1983, she was given her own show on KSDK-TV in St. Louis. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show was only a half-hour, but it was the beginning of her successful career as a talk show host.
Raphael became known to television viewers for her oversized red-framed glasses, a trademark that began entirely by accident. The source of her famous red-framed glasses goes all the way back to her first broadcast news job. Raphael had difficulty reading the teleprompter and, with five minutes before air time, quickly went to a store across the street from the studio to purchase a pair of reading glasses. The only one she could find was a red pair. While her bosses disliked them, the audience seemed to think they looked good, so she kept wearing that style.
By 2000, both Raphael and The Jerry Springer Show were in decline. As one media critic observed, Springer's ratings were the lowest they had been in three years, but Raphael's ratings were the lowest they had been in 12 years. Raphael was already having problems with her syndicator: she believed that USA Networks Inc. was more interested in doing promotion for Springer, whose show was more popular than hers, and for Maury Povich, who had recently left Paramount Television to join USA's syndication arm, than they ever were for her own show. She celebrated her 3,500th episode in early 1998. By March 2002, it was announced that, after an 18-year run, her show was being cancelled. In 2002, Raphael was named by Talkers Magazine to both their 25 Greatest Radio Talk Show Hosts of all time (#5), and the 25 Greatest Television Talk Show Hosts of all time (#11). She was one of only three personalities to make both the radio and the TV lists.[7]
From approximately 2005 to 2008, she hosted a daily radio show, Sally Jessy Raphael on Talknet (previously called Sally JR's Open House), on the Internet and in syndication to local radio stations. The show's flagship station was WVIE, broadcasting from Baltimore, Maryland, and the show aired on numerous AM stations in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, in addition to one station KWFM in Arizona. The show also aired on XM Satellite Radio's America's Talk channel from November 19, 2007, until its end eight months later. The name "Talknet" is a revival of the name of the old NBC Talknet, the now-defunct radio network that carried her previous radio show from 1981 to 1987. She abruptly ended the Talknet program July 7, 2008.
On November 10, 2010, Raphael, along with former famous national talk show hosts Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams, were invited as guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show.[8]
Raphael offered to induct the controversial conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021), into the Radio Hall of Fame when he was voted into the Hall in 1993. Surprised by the offer, Limbaugh accepted, only to see Raphael use her speech to speak out against the vote and excoriate Limbaugh. The following day, longtime radio news commentator Paul Harvey used his radio program to defend Limbaugh, who was privately hurt by Raphael's betrayal. In an act of retribution, one of Limbaugh's staffers slipped a picture of Raphael without her makeup or trademark glasses (taken from one of Raphael's staffers, as both hosts worked in the same studio at the time) onto Limbaugh's television program without his knowledge.[9]
Raphael was married for the first time in 1956, to Andrew Vladimir; they divorced seven years later.[10] [11] They had two daughters, Allison and Andrea, and two grandsons, Max and Kyle. Allison died at the age of 33 on February 2, 1992; her death was ruled an accidental overdose because of "combined effects of several prescribed drugs and over-the-counter medications."[12]
She married Karl Soderlund in 1963.[13] He later became her manager. They have one adopted son, Jason, and three foster children.[13] They were married for 57 years until Soderlund's death in 2020.[14]