Video: The Detective of Heartache

Psychologist Tom Cottle puts his talk-show guests on the couch

Here's the pitch: a series featuring a psychologist from academe who hears the siren song of Hollywood. Point of view? He treats celebrities, making them feel better about themselves and all of us feel better about ourselves. Who to star? Why, he's already on the tube. Tom Cottle. So sensitive. So caring. So earnest. He'll charm the pants off you. And those eyes! So limpid, so seductive!

Clinical Psychologist Tom Cottle is television's sympathetic shrink. His weekly half-hour talk show, Tom Cottle: Up Close, is syndicated on 50 stations around the country, usually in the daytime hours when the schedule is awash in soap operas. Typical guests include such stars as Liv Ullmann, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Sid Caesar, Phyllis Diller and Milton Berle. But a Merv Griffin he is not; no idle chitchat for Cottle, who oozes edge-of-the-chair empathy as he delves into his guests' hurts, histories, loves and divorces. Their upholstered chair might as well be a couch.

Cottle's curriculum vitae: age, 44. Overachieving child of prominent Chicago parents (father a physician, mother a concert pianist). B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. in sociology from University of Chicago. Former assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. Author of 22 books, mostly about the disadvantaged and disenfranchised: abused children, the elderly, the indigent and the handicapped. His commitment is incontrovertible. So why has he given up teaching to gab with Phyllis Diller about her facelifts? "I feel strongly that this is the way to enlighten people," Cottle insists. "I'm trying to preserve my inquiry into human behavior through new media." Although Up Close is taped in Los Angeles or New York City, Cottle still lives in Brookline, Mass., with his wife of 19 years and their three children, and maintains a small private practice. He is currently working with the Harvard Medical School on a study of the impact of unemployment on families.

In 1979 he was invited by WBZ, the Boston NBC affiliate, to preside over a children's show called Hot Hero Sandwich. That lasted only 13 weeks, but then PBS offered him a talk show in which he interviewed ordinary people about their health and emotional problems. Last September he was signed by Metromedia for a commercial program. Cottle is acutely sensitive to criticism that he has sold out. Says he: "For years I wrote serious books and got no attention. Now that I'm on television, everyone wants to take a crack at me."

Cottle, who spent four years in analysis, usually begins each interview with an exploration of his guest's childhood. He inquires of an aloof Dick Cavett what it was like to lose his mother at an early age. His eyes dew up as Jerry Lewis describes the ache he feels for a departed grandmother. From the past, Cottle shifts (after the obligatory commercial) to the present. He wants Elizabeth Ashley to recount the horror of a back-alley abortion. He leans forward and demands of Daniel Travanti whether he has "the courage to fall in love" with his sultry Hill Street Blues costar, Veronica Hamel. Cottle's sign-off is generally a smarmy show-biz compliment. To Martin Mull: "I feel rather blessed to know a man like you."