"Check the 'Sorry no's,' " the lady instructs the plumpish blonde secretary at her elbow, "and see if I said 'no' to Chattanooga."
Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer—she is known as "Eppie" to her friends among the world's more important people—is a very busy woman.
She calls herself "an upper-middle-class Midwestern Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa." Her good friend, former Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, calls her "possibly the only resource we have that can cope with the energy crisis." The world calls her "Dear Ann Landers." Besides writing the celebrated advice column, Eppie Lederer is a compulsive civic do-gooder. She is a member of the National Board of the American Cancer Society, the Sponsors Committee for the Mayo Medical School and a trustee of the Menninger Foundation. She has received a Presidential Citation for her work on alcoholism and has been Woman of the Year for six different national organizations. In her 18 years as Ann Landers, answering as many as 1,000 letters a day, writing nearly 7,000 daily columns—the feature is carried by some 800 newspapers—and doing countless radio and television shows, she has amassed a following estimated by her secretary at 60 million. "Let's just say 54 million, dear," she corrects. "Six million more I don't need." (Dick Trezevant, her syndication chief at Field Enterprises, says that she has also amassed a small fortune from investing her column's income, which is "very very into six figures a year.")
The famous wingspread hairdo seen in the picture on her column is complete now; the handsome young man is dismissed from the elegant marble bathroom with a pat on the arm and a "thanks, honey, I really think you did a great job this week." Then, in her sunlit orange-carpeted office, she grabs the phone, interspersing her continuing dictation with instructions to the long-distance operator, "I'd like Dr. Robert Stolar in Washington, D.C." (a dermatologist she consults with "almost every day"). "Bob? Eppie!" she explodes when he comes on the line. "How are you?" she asks, not waiting for an answer. "Listen, I read recently that X rays are dangerous to women taking estrogen...Oh, it depends on how it's done and the quantity? Thanks Bob. Oh yes...anything new in acne?"
Up on acne, she punches the telephone buttons and gets her daughter. "Hello, Margo dear, it's Mother. All the kids in school today? [She holds up three fingers to indicate she has three grandchildren and points to a picture on a coffee table of her hugging three impish, dark-eyed kids.] No flu? Good. Daddy called from London last night, and I told him to bring pantyhose."
It's 11:30 a.m. on the dot, and pursuant to a schedule as precise as an astronaut's she is soon changed from her blue, print hostess robe by Bill Tice into a new beige Norman Norell (raglan-sleeved day dress) and sable jacket. As she sweeps her secretary into the elevator, for a second she changes character. Gone are the five or six set Ann Landers expressions—enthusiastic, bemused, straightforward, concerned, "I care" or "I'll be honest with you." Suddenly a little girl stares out—a girl her father called "owl eyes"—and Eppie Lederer shyly holds up a wrist to display a simple gold charm bracelet with one charm—an elk's tooth and the gold insignia of the Elks' lodge of Sioux City, Iowa. "My dad's," she says softly. "He looked, and was, a lot like Harry Truman. I think that's one reason I loved Harry Truman."
Seconds later she's Ann Landers again—the no-nonsense lady who may call a reader a "weak-livered sap," "Toots," "Chum," or "Poor Dear"—and she is en route to a luncheon at the chic French restaurant Le Mignon. It is for former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Charles Yost, currently president of the Committee for U.S.-China Relations. "Mr. Ambassador," she says in her Midwestern twang, "what are you doing now that is of the greatest interest to you?" Later she comments with exasperation, "Do you know, he couldn't think of a thing!"
At 1:30 p.m. the Landers' schedule calls for her to return to her apartment, change to her grenadine suede pant-suit and white turtleneck, and serve tea to Loyola University psychology professor Father Eugene Kennedy, a consultant. Eppie does it graciously, with a gold tea service and a mischievous twinkle in her eye, sitting the priest under a portrait of her, curvaceous in a low-cut black evening gown. "Eppie, we've got to stop meeting this way," Father Kennedy quips.
By 2:30 p.m.—seeming to have worn out her first secretary and dictating to her second—Ann Landers is speeding in her black Cadillac limousine, equipped with two phones, toward a taping at Chicago's educational TV station WTTW. She is making notes on letters taken from a manila envelope. These are the letters she personally answers. "There are 59 of them in this packet. Usually these letters are the most desperate, their writers are looking for direct answers, no equivocation. They need a 'yes' or a 'no.' And, God willing, you make the right response and can live with it."
"By far the overwhelming problem," Ann Landers explains, "is the old-fashioned one of being married, the simple problem of trying to live together. I used to think that no matter how bad it was, you guts'd it out; then I began to see some very good second marriages, with children who were more content and less nervous." Her friends say one reason her opinion changed was her daughter's painful divorce and happy second marriage.
Where her attitudes haven't changed, Ann Landers makes clear, is on what she calls "loose sex." "What does the girl get out of it—someone to sleep with—in return for doing his laundry, his cooking, his housework."
At 2:40 p.m. she arrives at the studio, kibitzes as the makeup girl touches up her eyeshadow, and replies to interviewer Jim Day's question about her preferred introduction with "One of the names I don't like is 'Ms.' " Then she lays the ground rules: no questions—"if you don't mind"—about her twin sister, Abigail Van Buren, who writes the "Dear Abby" column. "Her syndicate doesn't like it. It's not that we don't speak, like you've probably heard. We had a double wedding, and every year we and our husbands go away together for our wedding anniversary.
"Why don't you ask me about my energy? That's the thing I guard most. That would be a good question." Later, when he asks it, she beams: "That's a fascinating question! I made up my mind at 15 that I'd never smoke or drink. I figure God gave me a healthy body, and I should do everything to keep myself fit. I don't think I look 55 years old; God knows I don't feel 55 years old."
Leaving the station, Ann Landers urges her elderly black chauffeur Jerry through yellow lights turning red ("Atta boy, Jer!") toward the NBC studios in the Merchandise Mart. She has two scripts that she must tape for her daily radio show Ann Landers on Everyday Living, plus a spot ad for her newspaper column.
At 4:21 she's finished, but Jerry hasn't even been able to maneuver the limousine around the block as instructed, so she sprints the six city blocks to her Sun-Times offices. ("It's good for your heart.") She has scheduled a 4:30 p.m. "philosophy session with my girls." When she arrives she scampers up two flights of escalators to beat the schedule by one minute flat. "Wore you out, huh?" she gloats to her straggling 30-ish secretary. The "philosophy" session is a question and answer period which keeps the five women on Ann Landers' staff, who answer the routine letters, in touch with experts.
Yesterday's session was with HEW Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Today's is with Dr. Henry Betts, of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, who ministered to the late Joseph P. Kennedy after his stroke. The first question comes straight from a reader's letter: "Can paraplegics have sex?" Dr. Betts carefully explains that under certain conditions they can.
A half-hour later—in black sequins and a chinchilla wrap—Ann Landers appears at a surprise 35th wedding anniversary party for fellow Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet and his wife Essee, before going on to a dinner honoring Ebony magazine publisher John Johnson and his wife.
At the end of the day, she is back in the elegant apartment overlooking Chicago's Gold Coast, padding about barefoot with a glass of skimmed milk in her hand. Her breakfast is laid out in the kitchen; the servants have gone home. It is 10:30 p.m., which could be a lonely time for a lady whose husband of 24 years—a successful real estate man with business interests and a house in London—is often abroad and whose only child has a busy life of her own. But she has the ever-present manila envelope of desperate letters.
She settles into her king-size bed and pulls out the top letter. It's from a homosexual complaining about Ann Landers' oft-repeated opinion that homosexuality is abnormal. "Well, the American Psychiatric Association may have taken the label 'sick' off homosexuals, but as far as I'm concerned, nothing doing," she declares. "They're still sick, and that's coming from someone who was among the first to publicly crusade for homosexuals to be allowed to live the way they want." She scribbles a similar response to the anonymous letter writer, which will be typed and mailed next day.
Many letters are from troubled teens: "I'm black and my boyfriend is white. We are really in love. What difference does it make what the color of our skins are?"
"A lot, honey," Ann Landers jots on the top of the letter and says aloud, "I'm really opposed to interracial and interfaith dating, not because it's wrong—it's not. But only the exceptions wind up happy." Then a whooping laugh breaks through. "You know, I sneaked a few dates with a gentile boy at Morningside College—Al Buckingham, the captain of the football team. After all, it was a Methodist school, and there weren't a lot of Jewish boys in Sioux City."
Some letters bring smiles as she notes down a typically pithy Ann Landers' response. A few come close to piercing the armor of cool detachment she has carefully forged to protect her most private self after sharing the terrible problems of millions of people. Mrs. Jules Lederer and Ann Landers are no longer rushing through their commitments, running past people. Here in the quiet of Eppie's bedroom, Ann reads each letter aloud, softly, reaching out to the faceless teenagers and frantic adults who need her.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
