Wry Martinis (32 page)

She submitted her extravagantly sourced answers. The editor in charge of the column called her up and sputtered, “You can’t use these people’s names! They’ll sue us!” Marshall Field, the publisher of the
Sun-Times
, telephoned her a few days later and said, “Good morning, Ann Landers.” The column was an immediate success. She stayed with the
Sun-Times
until 1987, the year she bolted across the street to the
Tribune
.

Her sister Popo, recognizing a good thing when she saw it, followed her into the advice-column biz a scant three months later. This did not do wonders for sibling relations. Indeed, Eppie and Popo did not speak for years. Creators Syndicate says that “Ann Landers” appears in about twelve hundred papers. The Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes “Dear Abby,” claims a suspiciously similar number of papers. Both companies adamantly refuse to provide a list of their client papers. As for the principals, they wisely refuse to discuss the rivalry, preferring to rise above. By way of calming the tempest in this particular teapot, suffice it to say that the two nice Jewish sisters from Sioux City, Iowa, eventually kissed and made up.

What a kinder, gentler time the fifties seems! The letters that flooded in to Ann Landers then were, for the most part, about acne, or not having a date for the senior prom, or having an inattentive husband. But there were others, too.

In her first year, Eppie published a letter from a young man who wondered how to get Mom and Dad to accept his romantic partner. Homosexuality, of course, was still locked away deep in the closet, behind the winter overcoats. She suggested family counseling. The publisher of the
St. Joseph, Michigan, paper refused to print the column, and told the syndicator that he would run a front-page notice explaining that “Ann Landers” would not appear that day because it dealt with a subject not fit for family reading.

Recalling the episode forty years later, she is still indignant. “I called the publisher up and said, ‘This is a human problem, and that is what I do.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to print it.’ I said, ‘Fine. Then everyone in St. Joe is going to buy the
Detroit Free Press
to see what you won’t print.’ I called the
Free Press
and told them to get ready for a lot of extra sales”— throaty laugh—“because I know human nature. They’re going to buy the other paper to find out what it is, this ‘isn’t fit for family reading,’ I said. Well, that was the last time I had to do something like that. From then on, boy, that St. Joe paper printed every damn word I wrote.”

That was then. Earlier this year, she got into trouble with gay readers for recommending that the longtime boyfriend of a bridegroom’s father not attend the impending nuptials if his presence would be an embarrassment. “Well, my God,” she says, launching into a riff based on sackfuls of fulminant mail that that bit of advice had brought. “‘What do you mean, “embarrassment”? This is his partner for seventeen years and you want him to leave him home? Are you crazy?’ It was amazing to me how much flak I got for that.” She agrees with her critics. “Unfortunately, I did not show the gutsiness I should have shown,” she concedes, administering herself a lash with the wet noodle.

Despite the changes that have sent her turban twirling over the past forty years—she’s gone from bad breath to AIDS, from spoiled brats to machine-pistol-wielding ten-year-olds, from a puff of pot to crack babies (about 15 percent of the letters she gets now are drug-related)—she still sounds somewhat reassuring. “The problems basically have not changed in forty years,” she told me. “The basic problems are family problems. This is No. 1. It’s always been that way, and I suspect it’s always going to be that way.”

D
EAR
A
NN
L
ANDERS
:

Last May my husband asked me if he could wear one of my house-dresses while painting the kitchen. He said it would be more comfortable. I said OK. He did look awfully cute, and I told him so. Ever since that time he has been wearing my dresses and wigs and makeup when we
are alone. He has asked me to call him Linda when we “play girl friends” as he calls it.… I can truthfully say I don’t mind.… Is there anything wrong with it?

Happy Woman Who
Loves Her Husband

D
EAR
W
OMAN
:

My opinion is of no consequence. The only thing that matters is what you think, and apparently you think it is just fine.… Just make sure the doors are locked and the shades down. And say hello to Linda.

“Now,” she says after the waiter assures her that the crab cakes are on their way. “What about you?”

This is a legacy from her father, Abe, who once told her, “You never learn anything while you’re talking.” But there is nothing to learn from me, other than my yearning to wear a housedress and Manolo Blahniks and have my wife call me Lulu, so we talk some more about her, about a few issues of the day, and about people who have figured in her very public life.

How much money the column earns her: “Oh, I wouldn’t answer that. You know that. But when I started to do this I was not interested in the money. I was married to a man whose wealth supported me very well.”

Her sister’s column: “I just don’t discuss her in any piece on me. And there have been a lot of good pieces on her, and my name doesn’t come up, and I think that’s the way it should be.”

Politics: “I make a concerted effort to keep politics out of my column. You can’t tell from my column whether I’m a Democrat or a Republican.”

David Brinkley: “A master at letting other people talk.”

George Will: “He can’t resist the temptation to tell you how smart he is.”

Ted Koppel: “I’ve always thought that he would make a terrific lawyer.”

Geraldo Rivera: “Oh, he’s so trashy.”

Guns: “The proliferation of guns in this country is unreal.”

The National Rifle Association: “I have nothing more to say to these people.”

Interracial marriages: “One subject I have not dealt with in a column, because the roof would fall in, and I don’t need that.”

Marijuana laws: “Ridiculous. I don’t want it legalized, but I don’t think you should have to go to jail for ten years if you get caught smoking a joint.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: “A great woman. A great woman. Big woman. I was amazed when I met her. I mean, she’s
huge
. She asked a lot of questions, which I found interesting.”

Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Living in Wisconsin, I would run into him and he would grab me and hug me. And I couldn’t bear it. Because I disliked him intensely.”

Nixon: “Same thing with Nixon. He would always greet me very warmly, and I couldn’t bear it. He never got it.”

Joseph Kennedy, Sr.: “A monster. Duplicitous, mean-spirited, anti-Semitic.”

Meeting President Kennedy in the Oval Office when she went there as the national chairman of the Christmas Seals campaign against TB: “He was so attractive. A knockout. Sex appeal oozed from his every pore. He was the womanizer from Hell. I mean, this guy had women all over the place. In the swimming pool, the locker room. Of course, he had a bum back, for one thing, and the women had to do all the work.”

Teddy Kennedy: “A superb senator. Superb. Standing up for all the right things.… I know, Chappaquiddick—and being drunk is no excuse, and he was plenty drunk that night, plenty drunk. But he certainly— If you can redeem yourself from a thing like that, he has done it.”

Ronald Reagan: “A sweet guy. You know, he’s totally gone. I had a letter from Nancy just a few weeks ago, and she said, ‘I feel like half a person.’ ”

Nancy Reagan: “People used to make fun of the Nancy gaze, but she really meant it. They really were so in love with each other that they had no room in their hearts for their children. This is one of the sad things.”

Hillary Clinton: “I like her enormously She’s badly mistreated by the press, badly mistreated.… She doesn’t deserve this.”

Bill Clinton: “I don’t think he’s fooling around anymore. Nor do I think he will. I read that Hillary threw a lamp at him. I read that. Did you read that? You know something? I think she did.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton: “They make their own fun, those two. They make their own fun.”

Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, etc.: “Not much fun there.”

Her friendship with Father Hesburgh: “The greatest unfertilized romance in the history of the world.”

The Catholic Church’s problem with priests who can’t keep their hands off the altar boys: “Terrible. They just move them around. They don’t throw them out. Now they’re getting a little smarter, because they’re getting sued. I think, with these problems, eventually the Church is going to have to let the clergy marry.”

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen: “Do you remember him? He was a friend of mine. He was charismatic beyond belief. I first heard him speak when I was living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I went backstage to meet him. He looked at me and said, ‘The metaphysics of a dimple is more profound than simple.’ I said, What is going on here with this guy?”

Her visit with him in Washington: “He opened the door at this gorgeous home, great big St. Bernard, like a country gentleman. Living in this estate with this wonderful dog and a Lincoln and driver. I said, ‘Not bad for a fellow who took the oath of poverty.’ And he said, ‘Well, Esther’—he called me Esther, which I thought was interesting—‘I’m not an order priest, I’m a diocesan priest, and I didn’t take the oath of poverty’ I said, ‘Good for you. You did it right.’ He had converted Clare Boothe Luce, and people thought maybe this was going to happen to me, and when I told them I was going to visit him they said, ‘Uh-oh, be careful.’ I said, ‘This is not going to happen. I’m Jewish for life.’ ”

On meeting Pope John Paul II: “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.” Laughter. “They’re very antiwomen.”

Why she hangs out with so many Catholics: “I don’t remember my father having any Jewish friends. They were all goyim. He seemed to gravitate to the Gentiles, especially the Catholics.”

The North Carolina judge who announced that raped women could not get pregnant because “the juices don’t flow”: “Did you ever hear of anything so crazy?”

The British Royal Family situation: “It’s so sad.”

Roseanne: “A psychopath.”

The dessert tray: “Forget about that. I’ve got a divine lemon-meringue pie at home.”

She leads the way to the study in her apartment, through corridors hung with drawings by her grandchildren and editorial cartoons in which she is mentioned. Her study is crammed with four decades of trophies: keys to what seem to be most American cities and some foreign ones as well; a huge collage of more than a thousand logos of papers that carry the column, including the
Oneonta Star
, the
Calgary Herald
, and the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal;
and a host of photographs of her standing next to famous people. The shot with President Jimmy Carter shows him clasping her in a rather intimate clinch. (“He wasn’t just lusting in his heart,” she wisecracks.) Here she is with Walter Annenberg (“wonderful dancer”), with Hubert Humphrey, with Reagan. A framed triptych of Ted Hesburgh shows him on the day he began at Notre Dame, during the middle of his reign, and on his last day, cleaning out his desk. It is signed, “To Eppie, L but no K, Devotedly, Ted.” The “L” stands for “love,” the “K” for “kisses”—a long-standing joke between them. Among the dozens of honorary degrees hung on the wall, she points out a photograph of Hesburgh and her, both in cap and gown, after receiving honorary degrees from St. Leo College, in Florida. The priest is planting a big wet K on her cheek.

She has lived alone in the apartment since 1975, which is when she split up with Jules, her husband of thirty-six years. When the reporters found out that Ann Landers, who for twenty years had been advising couples to stick it out for the sake of the children, was getting divorced, the result was—surprise!—a full-court press stakeout downstairs.

She wrote about the divorce in the column, telling her readers that she wanted them to hear it from her and not from the
National Enquirer;
and that she and Jules had had a wonderful relationship but had now decided to go their separate ways. The column was shorter than usual. She asked editors to leave the rest of the space blank, in honor, as she put it, of a great marriage that never made it to the finish line. She received thirty thousand tear-drenched letters of support from her readers.

“What happened was,” she says in her sharp Midwestern voice, “he had another dame.” An eyebrow arches, the right dimple deepens like a
Florida sinkhole. “He told my daughter about it, but he didn’t tell me. And this went on and on. Finally, my daughter told him, ‘This is a pretty lousy thing you’re doing here’—he was keeping this woman in our apartment in London. ‘I’m going to give you thirty days, and if you don’t tell her I’m going to tell her.’ On the thirtieth day, she called him up and said, ‘Well, thirty days is up.’ But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. So she called me and said, ‘When Daddy comes home for dinner, ask him if he’s got anything he wants to tell you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ So I did. And he said he’s had this other woman for three years. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said. And I said, ‘I’m glad you told me. The marriage is over.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, quite surprised. ‘Maybe we can work something out.’ I said, ‘No. No way’ He asked me to give him a few months to move out. I said, ‘I’m not going to give you a lot of time, but I’ll give you some time.’ Finally, it occurred to me that he wasn’t going to move out. He was just hanging around hoping I’d change my mind. Five weeks went by, and he’s still there. I said, ‘Look, Jules, I don’t think you’ve got the message. I’m going to Athens in two weeks to get an honorary degree. When I come back, I want you out of here.’ I went out and bought two dozen pairs of black socks, two dozen pairs of brown socks, two dozen handkerchiefs, a dozen shirts, and a dozen pairs of shorts; wrote down the number of the doctor, the drugstore, and the cleaning establishment, and a suggestion for a laundress. They know
nothing
about this. And I said good-bye and good luck. And that was it.”