Sally Jessy Raphael worked hard to give her all to her career and her famliy.
The beloved daytime talk show host spoke with PEOPLE recently, opening up about navigating her storied career. Of being a working parent in journalism and entertainment, Raphael tells PEOPLE, “Well, there weren’t many of us.”
“Most women in the 50s were stay-at-home moms. And so a working woman was either single or interesting. It was difficult. It was an all-male world,” she continues.
“They got paid much more than I ever got paid, and you never met another woman,” she adds of her male colleagues. “There just weren’t women out there. Even in Puerto Rico, I was the only woman doing radio and television. I was the morning woman, but I didn’t think of myself as a woman. I just thought of getting a job and earning some money. So that’s the way [I did it].”
Of balancing parenting her children — daughters Andrea and Allison from her first marriage and son Jason from her second — during a time when there weren’t many women in the workplace, Raphael admits, “It was hard.”
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“Thank heaven I had a husband who didn’t mind being a house husband way back then, and he looked after the children,” she adds of late husband Karl Soderlund.
“But I worked, many times three jobs. In Miami, I worked the morning show, AM Miami, then I worked at noontime interview show and then I worked a nighttime classical music station. I knew nothing about classical music. But three put it together into some kind of salary.”
When Raphael did come to daytime with her beloved talk show, Sally, it would be men who’d end up making up a good bulk of her audience.
“They do a thing when you’re on the air to find out who’s really watching. And gay men were there, but the largest audience were straight Black males,” she reveals.
“I have never been able to figure that out. However, every time I walked past a group of Black males, they all say, ‘Hi, Sally,’ so I know it’s true. And they’re more likely to ask for a hug than White males or White women, so goodness knows.”
Raphael revels in the fact that at 90, “You really have no one to please.”
“You don’t care what you wear. You can wear anything. You don’t care what you say. You can say anything,” she says. “Not caring about people and what they think is the best thing for getting older.”
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