Jules Lederer; Budget Rent-a-Car Founder, Ann Landers’ Ex-Spouse

Jules Lederer, the founder of Budget Rent-a-Car and the man known to many as the former husband of advice columnist Ann Landers, has died.

He died of a heart attack Thursday at his home near London. He was 81.

A native of Detroit, Lederer was a natural salesman. He sold everything from pens to hats to logs and newspapers after dropping out of school in the ninth grade.

He met and married Landers--whose given name was Esther Pauline “Eppie” Friedman--in 1939 when he was selling hats at a store in Sioux City, Iowa.

For the first 16 years of their marriage, Landers was a homemaker and an active citizen in the eight towns they lived in. But after they moved to Chicago, she applied for an opening as an advice columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1955 and before long was both rich and famous.

Lederer started Budget in 1960, at a time when the national car rental chains were competing for finite airport business. To avoid that battle, he decided to follow the route of fledgling franchisers such as McDonald’s by franchising Budget offices at locations other than airports. The company charged $5 a day and 5 cents a mile and became extremely popular in the growing leisure and travel business.

When he sold the company in 1968 to Transamerica Corp. for an undisclosed price, annual sales had reached about $100 million.

“He lived in the lingo of business,” said his and Landers’ daughter, Margo Lederer. “He was brusque to the outside world. He was really a street guy.”

The news that the popular columnist and her husband were planning to divorce after 36 years of marriage created quite a stir in 1975. Landers announced the decision in what she said was “the most difficult column I have ever tried to put together.”

“How did it happen that something so good didn’t last forever? The lady with all the answers does not know the answer to this one.”

A few years later in a piece in Ladies Home Journal, Landers said she got the news that her marriage was near the end over dinner.

“I have something to tell you,” she quoted Lederer as saying, “I’m seeing another woman.”

“My, that’s quite a bomb to drop between the soup and the salad,” she said she replied.

He said he had been having an affair with a young woman in London for three years. The woman, whom Lederer later married, was an English nurse he met in a doctor’s office.

After separating from Landers in 1975, Lederer moved to London and worked as a private consultant, handling such projects as the reorganization of Avis’ worldwide franchising operations.

Landers has not remarried and continues to live in Chicago. She did not immediately return calls from reporters seeking comment on Lederer’s death.

In addition to his older daughter, he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, daughter Anthea Lederer, a brother, a sister, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.