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.
(page 7 of 17)
Eppie rarely mentioned Margo in her column-in later years, she sometimes inserted a "confidential" birthday greeting to her "darling daughter"-but she did write tributes to her wonderful husband and best friend, Jules. Indeed, her carefully paced personal revelations cemented her ties to readers. Eppie and Jules, in fact, didn't see much of each other. "They were physically not in the same city at the same time very often," recalls Charles Laff, a close friend of both Eppie and Jules. "They were both so busy being who they were as individuals, they ceased being who they were as husband and wife."
If Eppie swooned for the powerful and the cultured, Jules was far more down to earth. "You no-good bastard, how the hell are you?" was a favorite greeting. In 1960, with a cousin of Eppie's in Los Angeles, he had started Budget Rent-a-Car, the first cut-rate car rental business, five dollars a day and five cents a mile. "Jules was one of the brightest marketing people you ever met," says Laff, who became Budget's chief financial officer. "He was extraordinarily charismatic." And he was tireless. "He used to brag about his ability to run guys 25 years younger into the ground," Laff recalls. Jules traveled nonstop, often abroad, as he expanded the business to England, Mexico, and elsewhere.
When he wasn't working, he wanted Eppie to relax with him. But she didn't have time. He called her the "general manager of the world," and he was only half kidding. Jules bought a weekend house in Michigan-friends recall that he would appear there with three Dictaphones-but Eppie was too busy, and, besides, she didn't understand why a drafty house in the middle of nowhere could be considered relaxing. She and the outdoors beyond Michigan Avenue didn't mix.
Jules also bought a small house in the mews in London and used it frequently while running Budget. He grew to like it-he preferred it to the show place on East Lake Shore Drive-and he suggested to Eppie that they make the house their home, that she could write from anywhere. But she liked her apartment and her adopted city, in the middle of the country, a place from which she could travel to see her political friends in Washington or to keep a speaking engagement in Los Angeles.
In 1968, Jules sold Budget to Trans-America. He was given a five-year contract, and by 1973 he was out. He had always been a heavy drinker and smoker, but with his reduced business role, both habits grew worse. Eppie, who never drank and who hated smoking so much that she once pulled the lighted cigar from the lips of a rewrite man at the Sun-Times, finally took note of what others had known for a long time. Jules was an alcoholic. She recognized it, she told Martin Janis, a close friend and escort, only when Jules's secretary called and told her that Jules was drunk by ten in the morning.
"How did Eppie handle conflict?" asks another escort in analyzing why Eppie would need to be told what everyone else could plainly see. "She would either dismiss it or rationalize it." She never admitted, he says, that she didn't have the time both to immerse herself in the public life she so loved and to dedicate herself to helping Jules. She miscalculated in thinking that she could manage him as one cog in the complicated machine her life had become.
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