Dear Ann
An energetic self-promotor, Eppie Lederer was a natural as the wise and wisecracking Ann Landers, advice maven to millions. But her own family problems were harder to solve.
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Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was dying. Earlier in the day, Monsignor Kenneth Velo, the cardinal's executive assistant, had held the phone to Bernardin's ear to take calls from Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton. But that night-Wednesday, November 13, 1996-Velo telephoned the cardinal's friend Eppie Lederer in her East Lake Shore Drive co-op. Bernardin wanted her with him as he succumbed to pancreatic cancer; the monsignor would send someone to bring her to the cardinal's Gold Coast mansion. Eppie threw a robe over her nightgown and a coat over that.
She arrived to find Joe, as she called him, in a deep sleep. She stroked his hand and talked to him, convinced, she later told friends, that he had heard her. Eppie Lederer, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, was the last outsider to see him alive.
Five and a half years later, on a glorious Saturday afternoon in June, Eppie faced her own excruciatingly painful death from cancer alone in her bedroom with no one to comfort her except a hired caregiver. Her only child, Margo Howard, 62, was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives with her fourth husband. Margo has written that she had planned to fly to Chicago the following Monday. Eppie had reportedly discouraged her daughter from visiting to spare her the sight of her suffering. That final day, Eppie's beloved granddaughter, Abra, had flown from Minneapolis to be at her grandmother's side, but she was denied access by the building's doorman for reasons that remain in dispute.
When she died last June 22nd, Eppie was still at the top of her game as Ann Landers, the world's most revered and, she claimed, most widely syndicated advice columnist. Esther Pauline Friedman (her identical twin was Pauline Esther, known as Popo) was born on July 4, 1918, and she lived the American dream. She could pick up the telephone and talk to the President of the United States, a U.S. senator, a Fortune 500 CEO. And they called for advice, for fun. Bill Clinton asked her if he had been ruined by Monica Lewinsky. Walter Annenberg pretended to be a disgruntled reader. Her friends included Walter Cronkite, Warren Buffett, Barbara Walters, Kirk Douglas, and Helen Hayes. Locally, she mixed with the A list-Nikki and Ira Harris, Ben and Natalie Heineman, Cindy Pritzker, Marj and Charles Benton; journalists such as Roger Ebert, Bill Kurtis, Mike Sneed. And she was a flawless friend, counseling them on life's problems large and small. A friend who was sick could count on a daily call. Her fans sensed that she had the real stuff, and she eventually garnered 90 million readers in 1,200 papers and a prime spot in her hometown Chicago Tribune.
And yet, she somehow could never apply the sensible advice she gave others to the closest relations in her own life. Her husband, Jules, left her for a younger woman. Although Eppie and her twin sister, who would become the advice columnist Abigail van Buren, had once been inseparable, they feuded for years and reconciled only late in life. And Eppie's relationship with Margo (who would not comment for this article) was seldom smooth. In the 1990s, Eppie's closest companion, a Chicago priest, was forced to end the relationship because aspects of it troubled Margo.
Like the shoemaker's daughter who had holes in her shoes, Eppie, an adviser to millions, seemed unable to confront problems in her own family. She was obsessed with appearances-she once told the Chicago writer Eugene Kennedy that she wore so much makeup that "nobody knows how I really look"-and she wanted to apply an equally thick gloss to the blemishes of Jules and Margo. She encouraged her readers and her friends to tackle their problems head-on, but when hers hit too close to home and complicated her relationship with her husband or her daughter, she simply averted her eyes.
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