STANLEY SIEGEL HOPES S.D. BRINGS CAREER BACK TO LIFE

SAN DIEGO —  It’s boxing night on “Stanley Live,” KUSI’s (Channel 51) new Phil Donahue-style talk program. In its two weeks of existence, the show, which airs weeknights at 9, has somehow covered subjects from law enforcement to AIDS to nudity to mud wrestling.

This night, host Stanley Siegel has invited two boxers for a demonstration. Siegel reveals to his studio and television audience that the father of one of the boxers is also his trainer. That gets Siegel excited.

“This is a great story, a great family story,” he says enthusiastically. “This is your son?” he asks one of the trainers.

“No.”

Siegel, missing barely a beat, sizes up the situation and reacts like the veteran of live TV that he is. The son is the one on the other side of the ring, he informs us.

Now Siegel gets down to the real nitty-gritty. “Ever get scared in the ring?” he asks, shoving the mike toward one of the boxers.

“No, I never get scared.”

“Ever angered? Does it make you lose your mental posture?”

“I don’t get mad. I get even,” the fighter deadpans. Momentum, Siegel realizes, is running out of the show like sand out of an hour glass.

He focuses on the other fighter, shooting him a human-interest question: “Why do you think fighters are generally so gentle outside the ring?”

“I’ve never heard that,” the boxer says, as deadpan as his adversary. “Actually, I’ve heard it the other way around.”

The boxing program, you sense, will not be Siegel’s finest hour--especially compared with the halcyon days when he hosted the top weekday morning talk show in New York City.

In fact, his career has been mostly downhill since he left WABC’s “AM New York” in 1978.

Siegel burst on the New York scene in 1975 after years of working for stations in cities such as Tacoma; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn. A graduate of the University of Arizona, he worked for five years with several Southern California newspapers, including the suburban sections of the Los Angeles Times.

While hosting a Nashville talk show, Siegel observed Phil Donahue in action and decided he could do as well and began sending tapes to New York stations. Ten months later he landed the job at WABC, ABC’s flagship station.

For a time, Siegel’s off-the-wall antics at WABC, such as a regular on-camera therapy session in which he often spoke about his sexual problems to a psychiatrist, made him the talk of the town. And there was an endless stream of celebrity guests.

In New York, Siegel could chew the fat with the likes of Truman Capote, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Rod McKuen (Siegel told him he wasn’t growing as a poet), Barbara Walters and Georgia state Sen. Julian Bond. He got feminist Gloria Steinem to show her light side by improvising a tap dance.

Eventually, stunts such as calling up ABC board chairman Leonard Goldenson on the air and asking his secretary her opinion of his show drew the wrong kind of attention. “I thought it was a perfectly good idea at the time,” Siegel said. Now he admits he was naive about the way his free-spirited ways would be taken in the corporate corridors.

“After New York my career went into a kind of problem,” Siegel said. After three years on WABC and two years on WCBS, and a syndicated program that did not pan out, Siegel moved to Los Angeles. There he had an ill-fated tour with KNBC news. “I was like a centerpiece on a pool table,” he says of working in television news. “I was wrong for them.”

His 14-month program on ABC’s Lifetime cable service was dropped earlier this year.

He called KUSI owner Mike McKinnon, whose father gave Siegel his first television job while he was a student in Phoenix.

Siegel doesn’t call San Diego--where KUSI’s sign-on to sign-off 5% area viewer share compares to KCST’s (Channel 10) 19% share--a low point in his career. “I feel very stable about (my career at this point). I certainly have not achieved the success I did in New York. No question, it was a high point.

“What’s different is I’m much more focused. I thought I always had talent, but I was never as focused as I am now.” The goal is simple: to be successful. The secret to a good Stanley Siegel show, he says, is that it has to be live and that he have his freedom. He had it at WABC and in Nashville. And now he has freedom and an hour of live TV in San Diego.

Freedom to Siegel means a mixture of low-brow and serious shows--he dropped a scheduled show on the Ku Klux Klan to discuss the aftermath of the recent Edmonds, Okla., post office shooting in light of the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre. He especially likes the idea of “taking the high ground” with a low-brow subject.

“Peter Sellars of the American National Theatre is here in La Jolla,” Siegel says, warming to his topic. “We’re trying to get him on our mud wrestling show. He would be a great judge of low-brow theater, which mud wrestling is. That’s a hell of an idea. If I could get him on the show, that would be sensational. He’s not any better than that. No one’s any better than that. This country wasn’t built on ‘You have to be a snob.’ ”

Siegel, who grew up on Los Angeles’ Westside “with a bunch of secular humanists,” now resides in Coronado. He is fascinated by the patriotism of this beach community, home to 66 retired admirals. At times, while thinking about a program on pornography or sexual surrogates, it gives him pause.

“I say to myself, ‘What kind of questions would (the admirals) ask of these sexual surrogates? Would they put sexual surrogates on?’

“I say, ‘What would their position be on pornography,’ and I say, ‘I don’t think that’s high on their list of priorities.’ ”

But Siegel understands the realities of television. He understands why he does programs on subjects such as sexual surrogates that can be titillating.

Wednesday night’s program was devoted to mud wrestling. Poker faced, Siegel queried two young women, clad in the skimpiest of string bikinis, about the morality of their work while the studio audience screamed hysterically. It was reality.

Siegel’s KUSI producer, Doug Gilmore, understands that kind of reality. He’s not concerned about Siegel’s past. “He’s here. He’s local and he’s now.”