Self-help • Phillip McGraw
He spent his life behind the scenes. Then he met Oprah.
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Soon he was receiving one thousand letters a week. After his book was released, huge crowds flocked to his signings. More than seven hundred fans came to meet him at a Barnes and Noble in Dallas last spring, some of them standing in line three hours to get his autograph. True, much of what he said was not particularly new. The ten “Life Laws” that he describes (among them: “Life rewards action,” “You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge,” “Life is managed; it is not cured,” and “There is power in forgiveness”) have been around in one form or another seemingly since the beginning of time. “Look, I didn’t create the Bible of living,” he said. “But it was real clear to me that far too many people have ignored the basic principles about how to manage one’s life. They don’t know how to reach—or they refuse to reach—in any strategic way for something better. At one point, I wanted to title the book, What the Hell Are You People Thinking?”
McGraw was raised in northeast Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado. His father tried various careers—at one point, he was a high school football coach; then he became a pilot for an oil company—before he returned to college and received a doctorate in psychology. McGraw decided to follow in his father’s footsteps after his own college football career was cut short because of an injury. After he received his Ph.D. he practiced psychology in Wichita Falls and with his father conducted life-skills training seminars all over the country. Because he had specialized in neuropsychology in his graduate work, he was often called to testify as an expert witness in civil cases involving brain injuries. McGraw loved courtroom work, he said, “because in a trial at the end of the day, there’s a clear winner and a clear loser. You either came up with the right strategy to get what you wanted or something was taken away from you. I loved that. In a clinical practice your patients come in one week and say they feel better, and then they come in the next week and say they’re depressed again. Too many people seemed willing to talk about their problems as a way of avoiding doing anything about them.”
In the late eighties McGraw and his next-door neighbor in Wichita Falls, a lawyer named Gary Dobbs, created a “trial science” company that helps lawyers prepare their cases. Today Courtroom Sciences is a multimillion-dollar operation, filling up a large building in the ritzy Las Colinas neighborhood of Irving. Inside are two mock courtrooms (including one full-scale federal courtroom) where lawyers can test their cases. CSI provides “jurors” (Dallas-area citizens who answer CSI newspaper ads), bailiffs, judges, and even attorneys to act as opposing counsel. The CSI staff then uses closed-circuit cameras, computers, and extensive questionnaires to analyze the jurors as the case progresses to see what arguments work and which ones don’t. CSI also creates sophisticated courtroom graphics and computer animation to help a client’s presentation for actual trial. “We’re here to help lawyers tell the truth effectively,” McGraw said. “This is a science, a way to take the guesswork out of jury selection and to gauge what kind of jurors would be most receptive to your case.”
When the renowned Dallas media lawyer Chip Babcock was hired by Winfrey to defend her in the Mad Cow suit, he immediately called McGraw. When McGraw went to meet Winfrey in Chicago, one of her assistants told him he had exactly one hour with her. “Excuse me,” he said, “it isn’t my ass getting sued. If that’s all the time she’s got, then I don’t want to be a part of this.” Winfrey eventually gave him plenty of time. She even flew to CSI’s offices before the trial to work on her case in mock trials. McGraw ripped into her overly defensive posture—“she came across poorly, in a state of disbelief that she was being sued”—and then helped her develop a presentation that showed her more noble side. According to McGraw, Winfrey loved talking to him so much about how people can motivate themselves to do better in life that she started telling him that the two of them should write a book. But she later told him that he should do it alone. In the Las Colinas mansion that he shares with his wife of 23 years, Robin, and their two boys, he quickly outlined Life Strategies, worked on it five or six hours a night, and finished the first draft in a couple of months.
No one—especially McGraw—could have predicted the response. He recently launched his own Web site, www. philmcgraw.com (it got 20,000 hits in the first month). He has the luxury of turning down dozens of speaking engagements a month, and he just said no to an overture from a television network that offered him his own daily talk show. “How am I supposed to do all this?” he asked. “I’ve still got a day job I love.”
The only thing he’s said yes to is another book—one on relationships that should be out sometime in the year 2000. “Who knows? Maybe this one will flop,” he told me—but he was smiling wryly when he said it. Deep down, Phil McGraw, Oprah’s guru, knows that he’s going to remain a force in the self-help industry for many years to come. “You know, all I wanted to do was pass on some common-sense advice,” he said. “I’m still amazed that it could create so much attention.”
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