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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Many of Eppie's friends found the auctions crass, and they fault Margo for having orchestrated them. Some say it was as if she wanted to sweep away her mother's belongings, get what she could for them, and move on with her own life. At least one old friend, who wonders why she never received any memento from Eppie's apartment, recalls that Eppie always said that each of her closest friends would get a piece of her art. "I'm kind of amazed," she said sadly. Margo explained to a reporter for the Associated Press her decision to auction her mother's possessions: "Because of who she was I thought that people who wanted to have that kind of connection to her should have the chance," adding that the proceeds would go to her mother's estate and to support research into multiple myeloma, the cancer that had attacked her spine. One of Eppie's closest friends rubs his thumb and forefinger together to indicate his idea of Margo's motives for dispersing Eppie's belongings.
Once the sale is closed on Eppie's apartment, it will surely be gutted and renovated. As the years pass, the memories of the vibrant woman who once held such sway will fade, even though her success was beyond what anybody could have imagined for the daughter of an immigrant family from Iowa.
* * *
Eppie's father, Abe Friedman, settled in Sioux City with his wife, Rebecca, and started by peddling chickens from a horse-drawn wagon. Soon, however, he traded up to owning movie and burlesque houses and pioneering the sale of popcorn, which he recognized as the most profitable part of the business. Eppie and Popo grew up in comfort. There were two older sisters, but their father doted on the twins, Eppie in particular. Their mother was somewhat reserved, but Eppie had a happy girlhood. The twins were extraordinarily close-they even slept in the same bed. They were also spoiled, mischievous-once, while their grandfather dozed on the sofa, they cut off his long beard-and lightly educated. They dropped out of their hometown Morningside College to marry in 1939 in a double ceremony-with matching gowns and veils and a double honeymoon at Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel.
Popo married Morton Phillips, the heir to a family liquor distributorship, among other thriving businesses. Eppie's new husband was a penniless but energetic ninth-grade dropout, a handsome Detroit boy named Jules Lederer. She followed this chain-smoking, Scotch-drinking workaholic through a string of Midwestern towns and tiny houses as he honed his extraordinary skills as a salesman. There wasn't much money, but Eppie found enough to have her nose fixed. (Popo left hers as is. She said that her husband loved the way she looked, an indication of the envy and ill feeling that nearly destroyed the sisters' relationship.) The Lederers' daughter, Margo, was born in 1940. For a time, Jules went door-to-door demonstrating pressure cookers, and Eppie sometimes went along to wash the dishes. Edna Brigham, who met the Lederers as young marrieds in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, recalls Jules as "sunny, affable, full of enthusiasm, the greatest salesman." Like Jules, Eppie was bursting with energy, moxie, gregariousness. She knew that there was much more than pressure cookers and motherhood in her future.
She discovered Democratic politics in Wisconsin and, with Brigham, helped elect the first Democrat from their district. "We wrote radio scripts and went door to door," Brigham recalls. In a tough contest, Eppie was elected county Democratic chairman. That was the heyday of the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, and the two women campaigned against him. "I think we were too dumb or too naïve to realize that it could be dangerous to oppose Joe McCarthy," recalls Brigham. "We just went at it as if we knew what we were doing."
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