'Mort the Mouth' dead of pneumonia at 68

The belligerent talk host was known for his temperamental outbursts that provoked guests of his 1980s show into shrieking arguments. Nose-to-nose, spittle flying, he deliberately blew smoke into their faces and insulted them with name-calling.

"Off camera, he was very sweet, very intelligent and very close to his family," said his friend and publicist of 15 years, Les Schecter. "He used the cigarettes as a prop. He always wanted to get the guests off their prepared statements."

Downey relished being remembered for his confrontational style but lamented that his legacy was characterized as sleazy.

"If not for him, we wouldn't have trash television," said Mark Schwed, a national writer for TV Guide, who wrote about Downey's program. "He'd get in anybody's face."

But that was a character, he said, not the real Downey.

"As much as people thought he was a complete jerk, he was a really nice guy, softspoken and thoughtful," Schwed said. "But that wasn't his job. His job was to scream at people."

Debuting in the New York City area in 1987, "The Morton Downey Jr. Show" became a hit almost immediately and was syndicated nationally the following year.

"He was a wonderful, wonderful man, wonderful father," one of Downey's four daughters, Tracey Downey, told KABC-TV. "He will be deeply, deeply, deeply missed."

In its heyday, he was known as "Mort the Mouth," a progeny of personalities like Joe Pyne, a one-legged TV host who invited guests on to his show to engage in name-calling matches.

Downey mocked his sometimes bizarre guests as "slime" or "scumbucket" and argued frequently with members of his studio audience, dismissing liberals in particular as "pablum pukers."

One show erupted into a fist fight between civil rights advocates Al Sharpton and Roy Innis.

"Do you applaud him?" Schwed asked. "In a way -- yes. Not everybody deserves to be talked to nicely. It was the end of polite discourse."

Schwed said Jerry Springer, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Chris Matthews all developed their caustic styles in the wake of Downey's success.

"I never saw his television show, but I did appear on his radio program, and he was most gracious," Springer said in a statement. "My condolences to his family."

Downey was a chain smoker for years until he lost his lung and was a member of the board of the National Smokers Alliance, a group promoting the right to smoke.

After his cancer surgery in 1996, he became an anti-cigarette crusader, saying he had been "an idiot" for smoking so much.

In the years after the demise of his show, Downey acknowledged he may have taken his trademark violence and fury too far.

"It got out of control because the producers ... wanted me to top myself every night," he said in the early 1990s. "If I did something outlandish on Monday night, on Tuesday night, we'd have to think of something even more outlandish."

The effort to top himself led to perhaps the biggest embarrassment of his career when he claimed neo-Nazi skinheads attacked him in a San Francisco airport restroom in April 1989, cutting off his hair and painting a swastika on his head.

Authorities could never verify the attack, and Downey's critics pounced, calling it a publicity stunt. They noted he had been in San Francisco to promote his show when it happened. A few months later, the show was canceled.

Five years later, Downey launched a comeback with a new show, titled simply "Downey." It met with less success, and Downey acknowledged he had toned it down.

Still, that didn't stop him from claiming on one episode to have achieved psychic communication with the spirit of Nicole Brown Simpson, the murdered ex-wife of O.J. Simpson.

Downey said he was proud of many aspects of the original show, and called it cathartic for working-class Americans fed up with the troubles of the world.

"It isn't the rich people who come up and say, 'Oh, Mort, you're just great,"' Downey once said. "It's the blacks and the ethnics and the blue collars, those guys with too much hair on their shoulder blades. They want some answers."

Born Sean Morton Downey Jr. on Dec. 9, 1933, the talk-show host grew up in privilege, attending military school and earning a marketing degree and a law degree.

Downey was the son of popular singer Morton Downey and his dancer-wife, Barbara Bennett. He pursued a number of professions including businessman, author and radio host.

The younger Downey was also a songwriter registered with ASCAP as Sean Morton Downey Jr. "The Loud Mouth Theme Song" first performed in 1987. He also wrote "My Last Day on Earth" in 1975, "Lonely Man" in 1975 and "Now I Lay Me Down to Cry" in 1959.

He appeared as an actor in such TV shows and movies as "Tales from the Crypt," "Meet Wally Sparks," "Revenge of the Nerds III," "Predator II" and the new "Rockford Files."

Downey is survived by his wife, Lori Krebs and their daughter Seanna Micaela, 7. He has three grown daughters from former marriages, Tracey, Kelli and Melissa, as well as seven grandchildren.<