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  Through such bizarre serendipity do fortunes (in every sense of the word) turn.

  Had Oprah Winfrey not dissed burgers, an otherwise ordinary PhD named Phillip C. McGraw would not have been catapulted to the pinnacle of American gurudom. Today, 6.5 million Americans, mostly female, tune in Dr. Phil’s syndicated television show (which is never scheduled against that of his mentor) for life-changing advice on the sublime, the ridiculous, and all points between—everything from whether they should get a divorce to whether they really need that second helping of rosemary potatoes. He has built a reputation as someone who “tells it like it is,” dispensing homespun one-liners and put-downs to advice-seeking guests who, in his estimation, are evading the real issue or making excuses for their behavior. Among his greatest hits: “Get real.” “And how’s that workin’ out for ya?” “Is that the truth or a lie?” “This is gonna be a changing day in your life.” “Are you avoiding reality?” “Don’t think, just start talkin’.” “Are you nuts?” “You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.” “Quit takin’ yourself so damn seriously.” “Now lemme just be honest here.” “Now lemme tell ya something.” “Really” (said with an appropriately incredulous, mocking tone).

  America first met Phil McGraw during Oprah’s regular “Tuesdays with Dr. Phil” sessions, wildly popular weekly gabfests that showcased McGraw’s unforgiving style. (Oprah’s ratings, always enviable, rose another 25 percent when Dr. Phil was a guest.) McGraw spent the rest of his week writing a succession of books that reveal a rare gift for sequelization, even in a derivative, self-cannibalizing genre like SHAM. Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters (January 1999) sold a half-million copies within three months of its release, and later begat The Life Strategies Workbook: Exercises and Self-Tests to Help You Change Your Life (January 2000) as well as The Life Strategies Self-Discovery Journal: Finding What Matters Most for You (October 2001). For those who made it through the journal without finding out what really matters, McGraw soon provided the answer: Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out (November 2001). That, in turn, spawned a series of Self Matters daily calendars and The Self Matters Companion: Helping You Create Your Life from the Inside Out. In between those two series Dr. Phil whipped up Relationship Rescue: A 7-Step Strategy for Reconnecting with Your Partner (February 2000), which led to The Relationship Rescue Workbook (October 2000). September 2003 saw McGraw’s first true brand extension, The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list, with 2.5 million copies in print by the end of its first month in stores. In December came The Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide. Then in 2004 he brought out Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family, beneficiary of a 2.3-million-copy first printing.

  In perhaps the ultimate sequel, Dr. Phil also has spun off his son. At age twenty-three, Jay McGraw, whose chief qualification rests on being the progeny of Phil and Robin McGraw, had a best-selling book in his own right, Life Strategies for Teens. In addition, Jay McGraw is listed as the author of Closing the Gap: A Strategy for Bringing Parents and Teens Together and The Ultimate Weight Solution for Teens: The 7 Keys to Weight Freedom. (The McGraws, clearly, are fond of strategies, keys, and anything that has seven steps.) Can a book by Dr. Phil’s teenage son, Jason McGraw, be far behind? Probably not—Phil McGraw has made a point of turning the SHAM game into a family affair, at one stage teaming with his dad to rake in $1 million per year putting on success seminars.

  All told, McGraw stands at the heart of a multimillion-dollar brand that evokes Martha Stewart/Omnimedia before the fall; he is a one-man corporation, quite literally, having incorporated himself in 2000. The advertising agency he hired in August 2003 to help build his brand, Michigan-based powerhouse Campbell-Ewald, has numbered among its clients such corporate icons as Pier 1, Borders, and Chevrolet.

  McGraw needs no help in the promotion department. His own skills are unquestioned, even when ranked against those of other members of the breed. Much like his mentor, Winfrey, McGraw stages themed episodes for his shows in a way that’s guaranteed to create buzz while also underscoring his central significance to the goings-on. The TV show thus gives him what marketers call “golden visibility,” as well as an ideal platform for selling his wares. To help promote The Ultimate Weight Solution, he sequestered thirteen obese volunteers in a Beverly Hills mansion, gave them a weeklong crash course in the relatively complex program at the heart of the book, then made their trials, tribulations, and degrees of “ultimate” success a part of his show for the next year. (A master of holistic, across-the-brand promotion, McGraw also created interactive Web logs and other ingenious wrinkles to allow viewers to share in the experience, either as interested observers or at-home participants in the weight-loss challenge.) As reported in Business Week, when McGraw was asked how to solve America’s thorny obesity problem, he replied simply, “Everyone needs to read my book.” He also writes a newsletter, Dr. Phil: The Next Level, available at $24.95 for twelve issues. On DrPhil.com, he sells videotapes and transcripts of his shows at $29.95 and $7, respectively. At Dr. Phil’s Online Store, a fan can buy a Dr. Phil baseball hat, a weight-loss “Booty Camp” T-shirt, an “I Love Dr. Phil” nightshirt, or a coffee mug dominated by a photo of the maestro’s own mug in that trademark hand-on-chin pose. Industry sources estimate that McGraw pockets $20 million a year. It’s the mark of his success that he recently sold his 50 percent stake in CSI—by all accounts an enormously profitable venture with day rates exceeding $25,000—because he no longer has time to devote to the company.

  It was not always thus. Growing up in Oklahoma and Kansas City, Phil McGraw and his three sisters moved at the whim of a nomadic father. When Phil was twelve, his father quit his job to go back to school, and the family income came courtesy of a daily fifty-two-mile paper route. The elder McGraw earned a degree in his late thirties and became a psychologist, but in the meantime young Phil had become a restless, temperamental slacker. One semester at the University of Tulsa, which he attended on a football scholarship, McGraw managed a GPA “like .6 on a four-point scale,” he later told CNN. “But I could catch a football and knock you down and so that was kind of my identity.” It was a time of boozing and bar fights for McGraw, who once admitted that he’d “fight a buzz saw” if he had the chance. He finally earned a PhD in neuropsychology from the University of North Texas, but by 1988, he would later say, he had grown fed up with whiny patients who sought coddling he was unprepared to provide. He gave up his practice, and he and a fellow burnout, trial lawyer Gary Dobbs, created CSI. A decade later came the mad cows, and Oprah.

  The same contentious demeanor that made Dr. Phil, by his own admission, the world’s “worst marital therapist” somehow made him the perfect guru in a culture drowning in the moral ambiguity and projected blame of the Victimization movement. Today’s viewers get frequent glimpses of this when McGraw berates guests for being lousy husbands or parents, being “too fat,” or otherwise not facing up to their self-made foibles. “A lot of people do have tragic childhoods,” he said in one interview. “But you know what? Get over it. . . . Do something and get back in charge of your life.”

  On the other hand, McGraw isn’t above exploiting Victimization when it suits his purposes. An announcement on his Web site in the summer of 2004 sought adults who are “scarred for life by strict parents,” an unambiguous rendering of the so-called disease model of hapless behavior. This victim-based thinking turns up again in his preface to his son’s book Closing the Gap, in which he writes, “If you’re a parent, grandparent or teenager, you are infected with a very serious disease. It is not a disease of biological origin, it does not attack the tissues of your body, but it is a disease—an acute social disease which attacks the fiber of your family. The danger is real; it is right now and it spans the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual realms.” Straddling the fence between Victimization and Empowerment, McGraw describes o
besity as a “disease of choice” that “can’t be cured, only managed.” Such reasoning encourages his overweight followers to buy his book, but it also gives him an ironclad excuse should his weight-loss plan fail to deliver the hoped-for results.

  OVERREACH?

  Many of Phil McGraw’s professional peers take issue with the manner in which he delivers his advice. Though Dr. Michael Hurd generally likes the way McGraw engages his guests and “draws them out,” he recoils from McGraw’s abrasive way of rousing to a finish. “You have to realize, it’s about showmanship,” Hurd told me, “but therapy shouldn’t take a backseat to showmanship. People shouldn’t get beat up in the process.” Hurd and other critics wonder whether those moments—which, indisputably, make for great television—send McGraw’s guests home with a profound sense of shame and embarrassment rather than lay the foundation for progress on whatever issues they had to begin with.

  Criticism in this vein may be somewhat naive, in that shows like McGraw’s, notwithstanding the patina of professional integrity, are more about theater than therapy; they provide viewers with a slightly elevated, SHAM-inspired twist on the likes of Jerry Springer. Accordingly, there are accusations that where McGraw’s TV show is concerned, his own trademark mantra “Get Real” takes a backseat to “Get Ratings.” In September 2004 McGraw outraged working mental-health professionals and children’s advocates when, during the course of a prime-time special, Family First, he came dangerously close to predicting that a nine-year-old boy was destined to become a serial killer. “There are fourteen characteristics of a serial killer,” McGraw told little Eric’s somber parents on the air. “Your son has nine. Jeffrey Dahmer had seven.” To drive the point home, McGraw then treated the show’s thirteen million viewers to a split-screen image of Dahmer’s face next to Eric’s. Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, denounced McGraw’s stunt as “unethical” and later told the Washington Post, “You don’t do that for ratings. This is a human being.”

  Similar accusations come from a pair of spokeswomen for the obese—374-pound Sally Smith, editor of Big Beautiful Woman magazine, and 400-pound Maryanne Bodolay, executive administrator of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Longtime fans of Dr. Phil, the women were thrilled to be invited to appear on his show, though they did plan to challenge McGraw on his belief that obesity is, in essence, a bad habit. To set up the on-air segment, McGraw’s producers sent Smith and Bodolay on an undercover mission in Las Vegas. A hidden camera followed them to a mall, a fitness center, and a buffet restaurant, with the producers hoping to preserve for posterity (and especially for the viewing pleasure of McGraw’s audience) instances when strangers harassed the women. Except, the women would later allege, something went horribly wrong: No such harassment occurred. Nobody bothered Smith and Bodolay as they went through their paces. Not a single caustic remark was picked up via covert taping.

  That would have made for lousy television, so—the women contend—McGraw’s producers primed the pump. Smith says she knows for a fact that one man was paid to “make a rude comment.” In any case, when the footage aired in November 2003, viewers saw onlookers snickering at the women and making snide remarks as they went by. Onstage, McGraw identified Smith and Bodolay simply as a pair of obese women, “Sally” and “Maryanne,” withholding their professional credentials to speak on behalf of their constituencies. To their dismay, the segment deteriorated into a freak show at their expense, with their former idol refusing to engage them on serious issues, instead using them as convenient props for his bracing, opinionated repartee. A few weeks after the show aired, producers invited Smith and Bodolay to make a return appearance; ratings had been terrific. (The two women, needless to say, declined the second invitation.) McGraw later denied that the show was a setup, and members of his staff declined comment. (I had hoped to discuss this and many other topics with McGraw himself, but he declined to be interviewed for this book.)

  On the other hand, it’s clear that many among McGraw’s legions of fans take him very seriously. To them, he is The Unimpeachable Dr. Phil, an authentic oracle of modern living. They’ll compare notes on how they’re applying Self Matters in their own lives, or share a moment of laughter at the day-care center or watercooler over some memorable, instructive moment from the previous day’s show. They’ll fill the message boards on DrPhil.com with their personal epiphanies, earnest pleas for help, and snappy one-line put-downs of one another in the parroted voice of their mentor. This growing discipledom becomes an added problem, say McGraw’s critics, now that his manic pursuit of brand extension has led him to stray far beyond his core competencies. His 2003 diet book is the most notable illustration, but others include his sermons on talking to kids about the gruesome events in Iraq and his down-home financial advice in the March 2004 issue of Good Housekeeping. The Good Housekeeping piece came three months before McGraw reassured an interviewer from Business Week Online, who had inquired about his growing reach, “I’m not going to tell you what to do with your 401(k). That’s not my long suit.”

  “It’s not clear he’s staying within the limits of his expertise,” Peter M. Barach, a psychiatry instructor at Case Western Reserve University, told Business Week. When I interviewed Barach, he told me, “A mental-health expert who cultivates this degree of following has a responsibility to ensure that he’s always on solid ground.” In 2004 Neal David Sutz, an Arizona mental-health activist, petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to rein McGraw in by mandating a more prominent disclaimer than what is presently displayed during the show’s closing credits. Noting that guests are required to sign a waiver form in which they acknowledge that Dr. Phil’s advice is not to be construed as “therapy or a substitute for therapy,” Sutz sought to have McGraw more forthrightly describe his show as entertainment rather than counseling. This, of course, is not the impression one gathers by observing the heavy-handed way in which Dr. Phil dispenses his advice to frazzled, often helpless guests. As of this writing, the FCC has taken no action on Sutz’s complaint. Questioned on the point by Time magazine—“Do you consider the show therapy or entertainment?”—McGraw hedged. “I consider it to be education,” he replied, in part. “It’s very different from therapy and much more than entertainment.”

  McGraw may be overreaching in an entrepreneurial sense, too. Some of his more serious-minded peers questioned the marketing program for nutritional supplements bearing Dr. Phil’s name, timed to coincide with the launch of The Ultimate Weight Solution. McGraw had given his stamp of approval to Shape Up!, a line of weight-loss supplements, bars, and shakes created by his former CSI colleague Gary Dobbs. A class-action suit later filed against McGraw and Shape Up! alleged that the ads for the products made dubious nutritional claims. As Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in an October 2003 column for the New Republic Online, “Dr. Phil’s Shape Up! Chocolate Peanut Butter bar contains 3.5 grams of saturated fat and 340 milligrams of sodium. A Milky Way contains 5 grams of saturated fat, and 95 milligrams of sodium. . . . Adjusting for its smaller size, the Milky Way Lite bar has the same calories per gram as Dr. Phil’s Shape Up! Chocolate Peanut Butter bar.” Easterbrook drew the logical conclusion that “Dr. Phil’s Shape Up! Chocolate Peanut Butter bar is a candy bar.” In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Dawn Jackson, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the American Diabetes Association, voiced concerns that McGraw was “preying on the vulnerability of people trying to lose weight. We all know there is no quick fix or magic pill, and this could give them false hope.”

  Though McGraw has expended considerable effort defending the product line, by some reports he quietly ended his endorsement deal with Shape Up! in mid-2004. Repeated calls to his office for confirmation went nowhere.

  All of this hints at the most intriguing and potentially troubling aspect of Dr. Phil McGraw: his megalomania. “McGraw is a harsh, charismatic man of high intelligence and higher self-regard,” one of his (unauthorized) bio
graphers, Sophia Dembling, wrote in a July 2004 column for the publishing-industry Web site Mediabistro. His seldom-mentioned first wife, Debbie Higgins McCall, agrees. She told me that during their marriage, which lasted from 1970 to 1973, McGraw insisted on being informed of her every move, even requiring her to phone him before she left the house—this, while McGraw himself was leaving the house to see other women, she alleges. As recounted by Debbie, McGraw’s response at being confronted about his infidelities is particularly intriguing, as it represents an ironic harbinger of what would become, decades later, one of Dr. Phil’s signature lines. “I told him I knew he was fooling around on me,” Debbie told me, “and instead of denying it, he basically told me that’s how things are, and I needed to just get over it.” (McGraw has publicly sidestepped the question of adultery but not explicitly denied it.)

  This notion—that rules are made for others—forms a pattern in McGraw’s life. Early in his clinical career, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists reprimanded him for giving an office job to a female patient who later accused him of similarly intimidating behavior, as well as sexual harassment. He was ordered to retake his licensing exams, undergo counseling on professional ethics, and submit to a physical and psychological exam. McGraw’s critics also have observed that CSI was an amoral enterprise at heart; it was not the firm’s job to find “the truth,” but rather to help clients put their best foot forward in court and, in a very real sense, to manipulate juries. Members of McGraw’s own production staff complained to Dembling and coauthor Lisa Gutierrez about their boss’s brusque, bullying manner around the set.

  McGraw does not deny that he “loves a good fight,” but his ex-wife goes a step further. “He takes a difference of opinion personally,” Debbie told me. “And especially, anything anybody points out that’s a negative about him, he interprets as jealousy. Whatever’s wrong is your problem, not his.”