Advise and Conquer

CHICAGO —  Infidelity, incest, domestic violence, adult bed-wetting, panic attacks, obnoxious children, animals in the toilet--Eppie Lederer has seen it all for 40 years.

In 2,000 letters a day from all over the world, people heave their weirdness or tragedy or confusion into the mail room of the Chicago Tribune, where it enters the world of Ann Landers.

Two men open the envelopes and sort the letters into categories, and then take them to a staff of four women upstairs. Once a day (when Lederer’s in town), her chauffeur brings over new columns--written on a typewriter--and takes a stack of mail back to Lederer’s palatial apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. She reads them in her specially contoured bathtub, she reads them at her desk, she takes a shopping bag full of them with her whenever she gets on a plane.

When she’s traveling anywhere in the United States, a box of letters is delivered every day by express mail, a box of travail, disease, despair and amusement. Seven days a week Ann Landers dispenses advice in 1,200 newspapers, and that has made her one of the most influential people in the world.

The advice is usually pretty pithy and down-to-earth:

“A father who diapers his daughter until the age of 12 has a geranium in his cranium.”

Getting advice from Eppie / Ann is like talking to a neighbor over the back fence. You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t want a direct answer--you’re crazy, you’re right, you’re making too big a deal out of it--from someone happy to give you the news. She has a quintessentially American, live-and-let-live philosophy, a way of simplifying the most tortured situations into familiar platitudes. “Would you be better off with him or without him?” or, as she has titled her new retrospective book, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!” (Villard Books).

For 40 years, she has confidently told people what to do. Her mail is an index of American sociology. Her famous surveys have told us that most women prefer cuddling to “the act,” that many of us would not have children if we had it to do over, and that most people think you should hang your toilet paper so it runs over the top rather than against the wall.

With the notable exceptions of her own divorce 20 years ago and the death of her mother-in-law, Lederer has given no indication of her personal troubles over the years, or even if she has any. And yet, readers know what she thinks about almost anything. And they seem to like her: Despite declining newspaper circulation, the volume of her mail has stayed the same.

“The gun nuts are on my case,” she says. “I am pro-choice, so the pro-lifers are on my case. And that’s about it. Those two groups don’t like me very much. And it doesn’t matter to me. I have my position and that’s it, I’m not going to back down.”

Dames and Degrees

She wears 4-inch heels, and the loft in her hairdo adds another 2, which combine to make her somewhat less than tiny. The hair is perfectly in place, the chin and neck are noticeably wrinkle-free, and the back is very straight. Lederer turned 78 on July 4, and is in excellent health.

“I am, knock on wood.”

She talks like that. Her speech is full of old-fashioned slang, as when she describes people as “classy” or calls her assistants “dames,” as in: “Any of you dames got a copy of Time magazine?” (She was referring to a recent issue. The issue that did not list her as one of “America’s 25 most influential people.” Not that she cares. None of them had a copy, she says. None of them actually reads Time, she says.)

Her living room is so big the grand piano looks small. There’s an envelope-shaped needlepoint pillow on the sofa that says “Ann Landers Chicago Ill.” with a return address: “The Jesuits.” Every surface has its share of tchotchkes--porcelain flowers, silver bibelots, crystal shapes. Each wall is hung with elaborately framed pictures: paintings in the public rooms (including a grand portrait of her), cartoons in the back hallway.

Her favorite collection is in her office--framed honorary degrees. She has 33 of them, from big ones like Meharry Medical College to small ones like Barry University in Miami.

Lederer never graduated from college, which she regrets. She left after 3 1/2 years at Morningside College in her hometown of Sioux City, Iowa, to marry Jules Lederer in 1939. She was 21, and gave birth to her daughter, Margo, the next year. (Thrice-divorced Margo--her last husband was actor Ken Howard--has three children and three grandchildren.)

For 16 years, Lederer was a happy homemaker and active citizen in eight different towns, while her husband built up Budget Rent a Car. Eventually they moved to Chicago, and at the age of 37 she applied for an opening as an advice columnist at the Sun-Times and before too long was both rich and famous.

As everyone knows, Lederer has a twin sister who is also a well-known advice columnist, Dear Abby. Ann Landers was born Esther Pauline Friedman, and Abigail Van Buren was Pauline Esther Friedman, and they were called Eppie and Popo. They dressed alike until they married--on the same day, in matching gowns, to men who were best friends. They grew up Jewish in Sioux City, where their father, a Russian immigrant, owned movie theaters.

Lederer became an advice columnist first, and the story is that her sister helped her with the mail a few months into her first year as Ann Landers and then started her own column. There was a chill between them for several years (neither talks about it), but they worked it out and have long been back to being best friends.

Lifestyles of the R & F

Her driver-butler brings some tea in a gilt-edged cup and a plate of goodies. “Have some of my grandmother’s strudel,” she says cordially. “My housekeeper makes it. It’s very low-cal, by the way.”

Her major eccentricity is being a night owl. She doesn’t get up until noon at the earliest, and works until 2 a.m.

She has breakfast, reads three newspapers (the Chicago Sun-Times, where she worked for 33 years, is not among them), does a half-hour of exercises every day, and then gets to work.

Three nights a week--four if it’s something special--she goes out. In Chicago, her usual escort is a Jesuit priest, whom she refers to as Father Costello. “Particularly a formal affair, you don’t want to go alone,” she says. “He’s much younger than I, and he’s very, very handsome. He’s great fun. . . . He’s an excellent dancer.”

When she’s not out with the dancing priest, she has a “gentleman friend” in Washington, whom she will not name. But other sources have seen her--for example, at the annual Gridiron Club dinner--with Lester S. Hyman, a 64-year-old divorced attorney and former head of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Her other great friend is another priest, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the president emeritus of Notre Dame University. She told the New Yorker that their relationship was “the greatest unfertilized romance in the history of the world.”

Lederer rarely says anything negative about anyone except the “gun nuts.” Her ex-husband is a good example. In 1969 she wrote a paean to “this unselfish, supportive, responsive man,” on the occasion of their 30th wedding anniversary. Six years later she wrote “the most difficult column I have ever tried to put together.”

He’d told her that for three years he’d been having an affair with a young woman in London. Her response: “The marriage is over.” She’d smelled the coffee, and it was time to throw it out.

If she wept and threw some of the porcelain tchotchkes, she’s never said. It was over, and her attitude--publicly, at least--is that it’s better to look forward than back, carry on and all that optimistic stuff.

Wet-Noodle Treatment

When Ann Landers makes a boo-boo, Lederer says so and administers “40 lashes with a wet noodle” or admits she “really laid an egg.”

One of her recent mistakes was when she told a woman who had been molested as a child by her grandfather that there was no point in telling everyone in the family.

“I’m getting letters saying, ‘Are you crazy? Everybody should be told,’ and they’re right. I’m reversing myself on this.”

She backed off her opposition to divorce when she got one, and she was always tolerant of homosexuals, but has changed from thinking they choose their sexuality to believing that being gay is genetic. She’s opposed to same-sex marriage, although she favors legal rights for insurance, inheritance and adopting children.

Some of her mistakes have not appeared in the column, however. In that New Yorker article, for example, writer Christopher Buckley asked for her impressions of various famous people. On Pope John Paul II, she said: “Looks like an angel. He has the face of an angel. His eyes are sky-blue, and his cheeks are pink and adorable looking, and he has a sweet sense of humor. Of course, he’s a Polack. They’re very anti-women.”

Uh-oh. Big boo-boo. She apologized quickly, but never really explained why she said it.

Is this just old-fashioned Chicago slang? “Yeah. It’s part of the language,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

Nobody seemed to care that in the same New Yorker piece she called Roseanne “a psychopath.”

In 1982 she got into trouble for recycling old letters. She thought that since the problems were the same, the readers wouldn’t care if “Irving’s wife” became “Millie in the Bronx.”

What many readers don’t realize is that Lederer answers some letters even if she doesn’t publish them, and letters with a time factor are answered before they appear in print. When she visited troops in Vietnam in 1967, she came back with long lists of families to call, and she has arranged (in some cases paying for it herself) free medical care for people whose appeals moved her.

Soldiering On

So, one goes to the receiver of all our miseries to ask: Are we going to hell in a handbasket?

“No. Society has become somewhat more permissive. I don’t think we are in any danger of collapsing, I don’t see the Roman empire, the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome. It’s just different. And that’s OK.

“I think the human animal is a survivor. There are going to be changes, but we’re survivors. The good guys are gonna win. The gun nuts are going to keep yelling and screaming, but they aren’t going to make important changes in the way we live.”

(The “gun nuts” and the “pro-lifers” in the form of representatives for the National Rifle Assn. and the National Right to Life Committee declined to comment for this article. Nor did the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council or Focus on the Family have anything to say about her.)

She no longer gives speeches, but she’ll never give up the column. When she dies, the name Ann Landers will be retired, because she owns it.

Her housekeeper comes to the door to tell her that Father Costello is waiting downstairs.

“Did you lay out my clothes for tonight?” Lederer asks.

“Yes.”

“What am I wearing?”

“The polka dots.”

“I love that one. Wonderful!”