Some of that lengthy article.... in case it disappears
Others took a more damnable view of his business practices. "I didn't know of anyone who had a business deal with Phil at the time that felt they came out on top," says David Dickenson, a former friend of McGraw's from Wichita Falls. "It's like playing golf with someone who moves the ball around all the time."
Recalls Eldon Box, at one time a close friend: "I put Phil in a couple of oilfield deals, and everyone pays me but him. Phil is a smart, smart, smart son of a bitch, but he's only out for one thing, and that's Phil."
McGraw denies he owed Box money or was ever in an oil deal with him.
His patients were doctors, lawyers, and bankers and the wives of doctors, lawyers, and bankers. "Phil moved right into the money circles," Box says. "If there wasn't a buck in it, he wasn't much interested."
McGraw says he was always looking for "less traditional" ways to market his professional skills: pain clinics, weight-loss programs, executive recruiting, expert witness testimony. So in 1984, when Thelma Box, an insurance and real estate agent from Graham, Texas, approached him about going into business together, he was ready to listen. Something of a workshop junkie, Box had attended motivational seminars -- Zig Ziglar, Dale Carnegie -- to help increase sales. But as an abused spouse and single mom, she had recently been drawn to workshops that were more about personal growth.
Box had grown to know McGraw and appreciate his skills after her son Eldon hired him to renegotiate a series of bank loans for his faltering oilfield trucking business. "He is the most skillful negotiator I have ever seen," she says. "He has a God-given gift, a combination of charm and charisma that can mesmerize a roomful of people."
She had wanted to start a success seminar for single women, and she wanted McGraw to lead it. McGraw always hated one-on-one therapy. Here was a chance to reach a bigger audience. He agreed but didn't want to limit himself to women, single or otherwise. It would be a life seminar for everyone.
Box had anticipated they would be 50-50 partners, but before they incorporated as the You Seminars, which they later renamed Pathways, McGraw demanded they bring in his father as an equal shareholder.
"Getting his dad involved would give Phil control," Box says. "I didn't want to be a minority owner, but he threatened to do the seminars without me." Box lacked McGraw's credentials, his confidence, his star quality. She believed she had no choice but to agree. McGraw says he doesn't recall any conversation with Box about his father's initial involvement and is equally uncertain about who originated the idea for the seminar. "I had been doing management training in a corporate forum. Thelma was a goer and a doer," he says. "It just sort of evolved."
The program was "my dream" says Box, who claims she designed most of the processes and games, taking many of them from other seminars she attended and tweaking them to her liking. The idea was deceptively simple: Figure out what you want out of life and why you are not getting it; strip away all the lies, the self-deception, the self-defeating games you play; make yourself more accountable, more vulnerable, more in touch with who you are so you can get what you want. Although it sounded New Agey, it really wasn't far removed from McGraw's own therapy practice, in which he developed strategies for people to manage their behavior. But the group dynamic -- 100 people in marathon therapy sessions crying, sharing, and telling their stories -- made it much more powerful.
And so did Phil McGraw. Although Box fed him most of the questions at first, he was a quick study and even quicker on his feet. He would walk to the front of the room, his hands behind his back, glancing without smiling, intimidating with a stare. "His voice was miked, and he sounded godlike," recalls one seminar participant. "I watched powerful men crumble as he questioned them. He knew just the right buttons to push."
McGraw would get in your face, never take "I don't know" for an answer. He forced you to be honest with yourself, to admit your weaknesses so you could see how you kept yourself stuck. It was a cleansing, an emotional lift, a feeling of renewal. For as long as it lasted, anyway.
Over time, Pathways developed a loyal following, and many of the same people, wowed by the change it made in their lives, not only returned for another hit of transformation, but spread the word with near evangelistic zeal.
"When Phil walked out of the seminar room, there were people who thought he was sitting on the right hand of God," recalls Susan Britton, a longtime seminar volunteer and close friend of Thelma Box's. "He has so much charisma, you can't underestimate his power. But to what end for himself?"
McGraw denies that he ever wanted to do television, but years before he appeared on Oprah, he was angling for his own talk show. A Hollywood producer who had attended a seminar filmed a pilot episode telling the stories of three people as they went through the training with McGraw.
McGraw was in all things a performer; part showman, part evangelist, and part genius. "Once he got in the front of the room, it didn't take him long to feel the power," says David Dickenson, who also helped Box organize Pathways. "He loved being godlike and worshiped. The only reason it didn't become a cult is because Thelma wouldn't let it."
No longer content to remain behind the scenes, Box overcame her shyness and decided to work the front of the training room. Her technique was less direct but equally insightful. "Phil wanted people thinking he was the answer," Dickenson says. "Thelma let them find the answers within themselves."
By the late '80s, Pathways had grown wildly popular, outgrowing Wichita Falls and settling in Dallas. Each year more than 1,000 people would pay up to $1,000 to attend "The Weekend" with McGraw and the five-day "Walk" with Box and McGraw.
Yet despite McGraw's reputation as enlightened being, he didn't apear to get along with his father. Theirs was a combustible relationship, two powerful egos wrestling for dominance in the same family and the same business. It didn't help that the elder McGraw kept falling asleep in the training room and was at times more disruptive than helpful. During the training, McGraw seldom spoke with his father, and his contempt for him became obvious. "Come on, here is a guy who is running a relationship seminar, and he doesn't speak to his own father in the training room for years," says one former training assistant. "He didn't walk his own talk."
Though McGraw and Box were partners for more than seven years and friends for more than a dozen, his treatment of her didn't seem much better. On November 16, 1992, Box received a faxed memo from McGraw informing her that he had made a "tentative deal" to sell his interest in Pathways to Midland philanthropist Steve Davidson. McGraw was ready to move on, his father ready to retire -- that's why his father had sold his 1/3 interest, the memo informed her, to a Wichita Falls businessman. Of course the new partners "understand yours [sic] and my relationship and know that I am committed to you as a friend and associate and expect fair treatment."
"Basically, he sold me down the river," says Box, who recalls having heated discussions with McGraw about either selling her own Pathways interest or buying him out in the two weeks prior to the memo. "Phil and I hadn't been getting along. He stopped talking to me, and I knew we couldn't go on that way."
What he had neglected to tell her, she says, is that he had engineered this corporate takeover scheme by actually selling his interest more than a year earlier. On October 15, 1991, he signed a agreement for the sale of his Pathways stock for $325,000.
"I absolutely told her I was selling," McGraw says. "What she didn't like was who I was selling to."
But the agreement stated that the sale was confidential, and a memo from McGraw to Davidson dated November 25, 1991, reiterated that the deal would be kept a secret -- from the public, from Box, even from his own father -- "to minimize the inevitable pain of transition and disruption of support and enrollment."
Only when a disgruntled secretary in Davidson's office faxed Box supporting documents revealing the confidential arrangement did Box realize she had no choice but to leave Pathways. "I had no faith in the new owners," she says. "It looked like Phil had intentionally sold to people who would make it fail."
In early December 1992, the new partners stepped up their negotiations with Box for the sale of her interest at a "disproportionately low price," she says. More important, she would be forced to sign a noncompetition clause, something neither McGraw nor his father was required to do. "Dr. Joe was retiring. Phil was burnt out," Box says. "But Pathways was not only my dream, but my livelihood."
What McGraw had suspected might happen, did happen. The Pathways population divided into two opposing camps: McGraw's and Box's. David Dickenson had aligned himself with Box: "There was a feeling of betrayal because Phil had compromised the integrity of the program. In effect, he helped rip off Thelma and her asset value in the corporation by selling behind her back."
At the Pathways Christmas Party in 1992, Box made her announcement: The world was big enough for two seminars, and she would be starting her own. She would maintain a passive ownership interest in Pathways until 1997, when the next generation of owners finally paid her price.
To this day Phil McGraw has never acknowledged either in his books or on Oprah that anyone other than him and his father owned or gave birth to the idea of Pathways. He does acknowledge that the material from Life Strategies, his first best seller, is taken directly from his seminar work. But nowhere does he mention Thelma Box or her contributions to his success.
"I have seen him on Oprah, and it is amazing," says Dickenson. "The phrases and the terminology and the quaint sayings -- that's right out of the program. He always wanted people to believe that the seminar came from him. His fear was that he would be exposed as not being the guru he put himself up to being."
Box suggests he take his own strategy to heart: Life Law No. 4: "You cannot change what you do not acknowledge. Get real with yourself about life and everybody in it."
....
"Both Phil and Oprah are very skilled at emotional education," McGrath says. "But the man is also doing therapy on TV, and that raises some real ethical concerns."
Dr. J. Ray Hayes, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at University of Texas Medical School in Houston, is more blunt. "People who try to fix people on TV are committing malpractice. Any competent therapist knows you must have a personal relationship with someone in order to treat them. Otherwise the intervention is just entertainment."
But it's precisely his entertainment value that makes McGraw such a hot property. His TV persona is anything but cuddly -- the style that builds trust between therapist and patient and is most conducive to change. "He doesn't have a good relationship style," McGrath says. "He's a bottom-liner; he loves to win. He's an attorney doing therapy. That's not the way to work with people's vulnerabilities."
But America loves that kind of "command and control" performance, someone with the absolute answers to life's uncertainties. "It's a spectator sport to watch someone be humiliated," McGrath says. "It's entertaining, it's good TV, but whether or not it's helpful is debatable."
McGraw insists he does more than merely entertain. "I don't confront just for the sake of confronting," he says. "I listen, I weigh, I respond with what I believe is the truth, whether they want to hear it or not."
And what's the truth about his life? How have the life strategies he's divined for others worked in his? He started out a workaholic, he says, neglected his wife, his infant son, absorbed with making money and building a career. "That was a real bad time for me," he admits. But one of his life laws is, life is managed, not cured, and right now, he says, he's managing just fine.
When Thelma Box watched McGraw on Oprah, she couldn't believe he was still using on her program many of the same ideas and techniques they had developed in their seminars together. So she phoned McGraw, asking whether he would send Oprah through the training or at least mention her seminar, now called Choices, on television. "I am still trying to change the world, one heart at a time," she says.
McGraw seemed receptive, she says, telling her they should schedule lunch to see where things might go. Things never went anywhere. They never had lunch. But Box thought she understood: "Phil has a real big need to make people believe he is the only person who can do what he does."
Life Law No. 1: "You either get it or you don't. Become one of those who gets it."
As the credits roll, Oprah and Dr. Phil stand side by side, facing the camera.
"I want to thank all my guests," she says. "We have books under the chairs for you -- you all need to read them if you are having trouble with your relationships, or wanting to make your relationship better, read his book. There is incredible information in that. I have a lot of respect for Phil; he is one of the smartest -- one of the smartest people I know." She looks up at him. "You are up there in the top five of the smartest."
McGraw puts his arm around Oprah and humbly bows his head. "Well, that's a good place to be."
"He is also going to be starting somewhat of a tour, because I told him to stop signing the books and just start helping the people," Oprah says.
Faint applause.
"He is going to be coming to your cities with seminars. I know you will be in Dallas..."
These weren't the seminars that Thelma Box had imagined, but rather seminars in the Tony Robbins sense of the word -- big, flashy affairs at pavilions holding thousands of people at $87 a pop. The stuff cultural gurus are made of. McGraw completes Oprah's thought. "I'll be in Dallas on May 20 and Chicago June 17."
Oprah becomes excited, animated. "I'm going to try to talk him into more cities," she says. "Maybe it will be Phil and the rock tour. We'll get a band. Check Oprah-dot-com to see if Phil will be doing full-day seminars in your city."
"It was all your idea," he says.
"It was my idea," she says, smiling.
It's obvious that McGraw gets it where Oprah is concerned. He's willing to give her credit for originating an idea, unlike he has with Thelma Box. Maybe going on Oprah can change your life after all.
