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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She considered it part of her job to advise her friends, as well, and her advice was never wishy-washy. Her friend Rosalind Whitehead, a consultant to medical and health organizations who was struggling with a divorce, recalls Eppie counseling her: "‘No matter what, never say a negative [about your husband].' I listened to her. Over time it was clearly the right thing to do, because [my ex-husband and I] became friends again, but also there is something magnificent about being larger than criticism." Eppie summoned Donna LaPietra, who plans more than her share of fundraising galas, to her apartment for tea. "Her advice to me," LaPietra recalls, "was, ‘You already know too many people.'"
Eppie went way beyond what anyone might expect. When she returned from her trip to Vietnam in 1967, she called the family of every wounded GI she had visited. She forwarded to Father Hesburgh the letters from some of the most desperately troubled people who wrote to her. "With the greatest secrecy she would put that letter in an envelope and send it to me and say, ‘I think we can help this person,'" Hesburgh recalls. He would refer the writer to someone, usually a priest, and Hesburgh says that many of those people were helped. "I'd write Eppie a note at the end and say, ‘Case solved.' She never boasted about this; no one ever knew that it happened."
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In 1982, overbooked as usual, Eppie took a shortcut. A part-timer for the Daily Leader, a small newspaper in Pontiac, Illinois, discovered that Eppie was quietly reusing almost identical letters and answers across decades. The paper's managing editor called the Associated Press to help in its investigation. James Litke, then 30 and a general assignment reporter in the AP's Chicago office, spent weeks at the Chicago Public Library reading "Ann Landers" on microfilm and found additional duplication. The Pontiac reporter also found more. Litke repeatedly called Eppie's top assistant, Kathy Mitchell, asking to speak to Eppie, and got nowhere. Finally, Litke said, "Would you tell Ms. Landers we have conclusive proof of her recycling at least 30 columns, and we want to know if she wants to comment." Three minutes later, Eppie called. She invited Litke to her apartment that afternoon. "She was as charming as can be," Litke recalls. "She recognized in a heartbeat that she was caught."
James Pearre, the Daily Leader's co-publisher, who joined Litke at Eppie's apartment, was less charmed. She claimed that she had been asked by a phone company for permission to excerpt from some of her columns. In looking over old letters and answers, she was struck by how relevant they still were. "She then decided to incorporate some of that material into some current columns," Pearre says she told him. "She portrayed it as limited in scope, not an ongoing process."
Pearre recalls that as he and Litke got ready to leave, Eppie told them that she wanted to show them something. She led them into her bedroom closet and unearthed cardboard cartons of "hundreds and hundreds" of letters she had received from readers when she and Jules divorced. "[It was] fairly apparent to Litke and me that she was attempting to demonstrate to us how loved she was among a very broad cross section of readers and fans."
She gave Pearre her private number. "Please call me at any time," she said. After the initial accounts of her recycling ran, Pearre says, "I called on that line and explained that we had discovered many different examples extending back more years than she suggested was the case. For the first time, her reaction was uncooperative. She said, ‘Jim, this number you called me on is the number I only give to my very close friends, and I no longer consider you a friend,' and she hung up."
Pearre couldn't get over her being "less than honest with us." It rankled that she "preached her homespun morality to people all over North America. . . . What she did I considered unethical."
Should she have been fired? "Not even close," says Litke, although he says she should have identified the recycled columns as such. He thought she handled it in a "really admirable way," not calling in a public relations agent or a lawyer. Jim Hoge recalls advising Eppie, "Come clean, get it behind you, and move on. I didn't have to say, ‘Don't ever let it happen again.'"
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