DONAHUE: A HOT ENGINE SPEEDING TO THE LIMIT

Phil Donahue was pacing. Phil Donahue was racing.

He was flinging his arms in the air with such force that you almost felt a breeze. A thousand tiny light bulbs were popping on and off inside his head. He was speaking in great soaring surges of emotion and energy. He was firing up and cooling down, almost shouting, then almost whispering. He was glad. He was sad. He was mad. He was lecturing, probing, dissecting, questioning. He had you on the edge of your seat.

And he wasn’t even in front of the camera.

Donahue was in faded jeans and sneakers, being interviewed in a conference room at NBC’s Burbank headquarters. He was in town taping five “Donahue” segments as a promotional boost for KNBC, one of a whopping 215 stations that carry his syndicated audience-participation talk show.

Here is a man who is great TV even when he isn’t on TV.

“What do I want to do next?” asked the 49-year-old TV phenom, repeating a question put to him. “What do I want to do next?” He stroked his chin, then smiled. Suddenly he was off the swivel chair and his mind and legs were on the move as he revealed his plan for an ambitious global TV dialogue between American and Soviet studio audiences via satellite.

It would be Yank and Tovarich in TV detente, with forward-thinking KING-TV in Seattle underwriting the project. Tentative air date: December.

Preliminary negotiations with the Soviets are already under way. Donahue would be the moderator in America, Vladimir Pozner--an American-born Kremlin “spokesman” who frequently appears on U.S. TV--the moderator in the Soviet Union.

There’s no certainty the deal will click, for yet to be worked out are a few hundred details the size of Mt. Rushmore:

“Will the Soviet audience be handpicked?” Donahue wondered. “Will they be stiff? And what kind of questions will they ask?” He rolled his eyes. “And what about the Soviet translations?” Not only that, but will anyone believe that this isn’t Soviet-manipulated hooey and that white-haired Phil Donahue isn’t a Kremlin tool? Donahue expects to get slaughtered by “the right.”

He loves it. He’s always loved it.

Donahue’s program was born in Dayton 18 years ago, got famous in Chicago and recently moved to New York. That was before this brief visit to Los Angeles, where his spirited, adoring studio audiences numbered 1,000 daily and gave him standing ovations when he jogged in for the pre-show warmups.

New York studio audiences versus Chicago studio audiences?

“There was this tremendous current in the media wondering if the show would change in New York,” Donahue says. “Would New York audiences be different? I said, ‘No,’ that it was an overdrawn media thing. But I got there and I found there is more intense energy there. The New York audience wants you to get to them three or four minutes into the show. That’s a real high.”

For the audience too. Donahue: “When people gather on the sixth floor of the Rockefeller building at 9 a.m., after fighting traffic, after taking the subway, after doing all that in order to assemble to see an event that has my name on it, I really want to make sure they enjoy the thing they came to see.”

There’s not a better hour of TV than “Donahue.” It’s less a talk show than a town meeting, and Donahue is less a host than a populist inquisitor roaming the aisles with a mike. He has no match when it comes to working an audience. He is instantly likable. He pulls. He tugs. He jukes. He juices. He pleads. He gee-whizzes. He feigns innocence. No one can out-”Aw shucks” Phil Donahue.

He is a brilliant devil’s advocate, taking one side adamantly, then taking the other just as adamantly. But he fools no one. He is, on almost all issues, an admitted, cut and-dried, ever-lovin,’ absolutely bleeding heart, make-no-mistake-about-it . . .

LIBERAL!!!!!

“But if I start force-feeding liberal politics on this show,” he said, “my audience will turn against me.”

A handful of viewers in the White House already has. Donahue said that top Reagan Administration figures avoid his show, as if liberalism were a contagious disease instead of a point of view.

He jumped up from his chair, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Can you believe this? I had Jim Bakker’s wife on the show (her husband is fundamentalist TV preacher Jim Bakker), but I can’t get any of Reagan’s top people. Pat Buchanan called me back once. I told him, ‘Pat, these people have handled Sam Donaldson! They can handle me!”’

Softly again: “Is it something I’ve said on the show? Is it me?” Donahue shrugged. “Or am I overestimating my own importance?”

Donahue is more of a journalist than most journalists and more of a showman than most showmen. “I can pop off more than so-called serious journalists can,” he said.

Note the so-called .

He hasn’t forgotten the undeserved heat he got from some of those so-called journalists after co-moderating a televised Democratic presidential debate in 1984. He was a trespasser, an illegal alien from a daytime talk show.

“We have this elitism that exists in journalism that is like no other business,” he said. And who are the media to talk about him, anyway? If you want Donahue’s attention real fast, just playfully suggest to him that there is no show biz in TV news.

“What? You don’t believe there isn’t entertainment in news? Listen, we are moving closer and closer to People magazine. We’re into celebrities, day in and day out. We could be headed toward war, and we’ll still be wondering who Liz is gonna marry next.”

Not that Donahue is exactly Mr. Clean himself.

He didn’t complain last week when KNBC News interviewed him for two self-serving pieces celebrating his Los Angeles visit. Would KNBC also present alleged news stories promoting daytime personalities on competing channels?

Donahue’s show hardly shrinks from playing the celebrity game, moreover, and many of its topics are more sensational than pertinent.

“Call me an egomaniac, call me old but don’t call me a hypocrite,” he argued. “I am not prancing around on a lofty state saying everything should be like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. In the first place, I am not the evening news. And you cannot say, ‘Ain’t that awful?’ five days a week and survive competitively. But it’s a matter of degree. And we seem to be going too far.”

Donahue has now assembled a book called “The Human Animal” covering the same turf as a five-part, Donahue-hosted documentary series of the same name that’s set to air in prime time later this season on NBC.

Both are a distillation of Donahue’s interviews with more than 50 behavioral scientists. “I’ve undergone a lot of changes since this ‘Human Animal’ experience,’ he said. “Wheels are turning that never turned before.”

That is what truly separates Donahue from many journalists who put him down as unjournalistic. The motor is running, the wheels turning.