De Angelis: The ‘Love Doctor’ Is In : Television: The KFI talk-show host this week debuts on a morning CBS TV series devoted to advising the alienated.

Barbara De Angelis is sitting in the airy living room of her Southwestern-style home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, confessing to having been a late bloomer.

A self-described “child of the ‘60s,” De Angelis spent the better part of her 20s traveling, meditating and working as an assistant to her then-husband, magician Doug Henning.

“I wanted to save the world,” said the KFI-AM (640) talk-show host, dubbed “the love doctor.” “Then, when I was 30 and 31, I was pretty upset. I was all alone and I had to support myself. I had no idea what I wanted to do.”

She thought long and hard, particularly about her interest in things spiritual.

“I realized I had this great relationship with God and terrible relationships with men,” she said.

So, what’s an outgoing, insightful veteran of the psychedelic era to do?

Why, study psychology, impart what she’s learned and become a media personality, of course.

Give up meditating with the Maharishi in favor of advising the alienated. And make plenty of money in the process.

These days, De Angelis rides to her radio call-in show in a chauffeur-driven limousine, vacations in Maui and recently purchased a spacious, secluded home in Pacific Palisades.

With two best-selling self-help books under her belt, a popular radio program and people lining up to attend her monthly “relationships seminars,” times are good for De Angelis.

And this week, they got even better, with the debut of her network television show, airing daily in Los Angeles at 9 a.m on CBS.

Despite the late start, De Angelis rather suspected things would turn out like this.

“I’ve always kind of known I’d have a show,” she said on a recent morning, sitting on an overstuffed couch in her living room, sipping miso soup. “I just had a feeling years ago. I was in my little apartment in Mill Valley that cost $195 a month. It was 1975 and I was going to school. I was sitting watching Merv Griffin and all of a sudden I got this incredible feeling coming over me that one day I was going to have a television show.”

As host of her own half-hour program, De Angelis, who turns 40 in March, will daily discuss subjects like bachelor parties and why men have them, being too tired for love, and meddling in-laws. Other planned topics include ex-partners who won’t let go, sex after pregnancy, friends of the opposite sex, who controls the purse strings in a relationship, why men hate to be wrong, and dealing with the fear of war.

“It’s the first show on daytime television that’s really dealing with personal growth,” she claimed.

There are no expert guests scheduled. There is only De Angelis and a studio audience, whose members volunteer to bare their souls about the scheduled subject of the day. Before the show, members are selected from the audience to discuss on the air their experiences and problems pertaining to the day’s topic.

Most broadcast therapy programs--such as the early ‘80s show “Couples” in which people divulged intimate details of their marital life and were advised by a psychotherapist--have drawn more flak than fans.

CBS officials think De Angelis’ show will be different in that it does not attempt to solve individuals’ problems or provide on-air counseling, but rather to discuss troubling issues and inform viewers while entertaining them. Lucy Johnson, CBS vice president of daytime programming, describes the show as “taking the talk-show format to the next level--involving the audience directly. . . . It’s not cooking tips or fashion tips. This is just about us and our feelings and our behavior and our relationships.”

The petite, outgoing De Angelis says she is more interested in continuing to hold monthly seminars on “Making Love Work” and writing her third book than in becoming a household name. Her two previous books sport such attention-grabbing pop psych titles as “How to Make Love All the Time” and “Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know.”

Although this is her first foray as host of a network TV talk series, De Angelis is a TV veteran. Over the past few years, she has been a frequent guest on such programs as “Oprah,” “Donahue,” “Geraldo” and “The Sally Jesse Raphael Show,” and from 1987-89 she appeared weekly on Cable News Network’s “Newsnight” as a therapist as well as on KABC-TV’s “Eyewitness News” as a “human relations correspondent.”

KFI Program Director George Oliva describes De Angelis as “informational and educational, without being didactic or professorial in her manner.”

Although she uses some of the jargon of a psychologist and is often referred to by the press as a therapist, the Philadelphia-born De Angelis is not a trained psychotherapist. She received a doctorate degree in psychology from Santa Monica-based Columbia Pacific University, formerly known as the University Without Walls.

“I’m an educator, not a psychologist,” she said. “I teach relationship skills.”

And similarly, her television show will in no way resemble a session between patient and therapist.

“I’m not saying I can fix people,” she said. “This is not therapy on television. Therapy is a long process and it doesn’t belong on television, it belongs in an office. . . . I want it to be like (viewers) have a friend every day.”

Indeed, several audience members at a recent taping described De Angelis in the kind of fond terms usually reserved for good friends.

“She is very tuned in to people and very passionate,” said Marilyn Dion of Orange. “I think the world needs someone like this.”

But won’t studio audience members find it difficult to discuss intimate details on television, before potentially millions of viewers? A television program, after all, cannot provide participants with the comfortable anonymity offered by a radio show.

De Angelis dismisses such concerns off-handedly.

“People easily open up to me,” she says. “I tend to make people feel safe enough. If my energy’s strong enough, it’ll kind of block it out for people.”