Virginia Graham; Pioneer of Daytime TV Talk Shows

Virginia Graham, the gravel-voiced talk show queen of the 1960s whose programs were the precursor of much of today’s daytime TV entertainment, has died of complications from a heart attack. She was 86.

Graham, best known for “Girl Talk,” a nationally syndicated interview show aimed at women that ran on ABC for seven years ending in 1970, suffered a heart attack Dec. 11 and died in a New York hospital Tuesday night, her granddaughter, Jan Bohrer, told Associated Press on Wednesday.

“She was ahead of her time,” said John Dalton of the Museum of Television & Radio in Los Angeles. “An early precursor to Barbara Walters.”

Graham, who could be abrasive and attractive at the same time, didn’t mind being described as a “big blond.” She was a large woman with bouffant hair and red-lacquered fingernails.

“She went to the hospital with a full manicure and pedicure,” Bohrer said. “We joked that if she knew we had to take off some of her nail polish, she would be furious.”

Graham never shied from asking guests embarrassing questions. She could ask Merv Griffin, for instance, if he paid for room service in his own hotels, then turn to Dolly Parton with a comment about being “so busy I’m chewing suppositories.”

“We would put people together who would never sit next to each other at a dinner party,” she told an interviewer in 1993. Betty Friedan would be paired with Hermione Gingold, Margaret Truman with Jolie Gabor. One commentator described the show as “an Algonquin round table for the Aqua-Net set.”

Graham believed the show succeeded because it was able to “generate sparks from the friction between women, the way Boy Scouts rub sticks together.” She said her strength was her “peripheral vision--I saw everything that was going on.”

The broadcast pioneer started in radio in the 1930s as host of “Weekday.” She was a hostess on the syndicated “Food for Thought” from 1956-61. “Girl Talk,” a blend of news, entertainment, celebrity interviews and female-oriented features much like the current ABC show “The View” with Barbara Walters, debuted in 1963 on ABC. Graham was its ringmaster for all but the last of its seven-year run. (She was succeeded for one year by Betsy Palmer.)

After “Girl Talk,” Graham starred in another talk program, the “Virginia Graham Show,” for a few years. More recently, she made television appearances on the “Roseanne,” “Rosie O’Donnell” and “Later With Tom Snyder” shows, and had her own syndicated call-in radio program.

Graham also subbed frequently as the host of such NBC shows as “Strike It Rich,” “The Big Payoff,” “Today” and the “Jack Paar Show.”

Born Virginia Komiss in Chicago in 1912, Graham earned a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago at age 18 and later a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University.

She married theatrical costumer Harry Guttenberg, who died at age 80 in 1980. The two moved to New York, where Graham became a scriptwriter and radio voice of cooking specialist “Betty Baker,” a subsidiary of Betty Crocker.

In 1947, she and 13 other women started the Cerebral Palsy Foundation.

A television movie about her life aired on the TNN network in 1989, called “Virginia Graham: Never a Dull Moment.” She has written several books including the yet-to-be-published “I Love Antiques, but I Don’t Want to Be One.”

In addition to Bohrer, Graham is survived by her daughter, Lynn Bohrer, who has a cable access show in Manhattan, and a grandson, Stephen Bohrer.