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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James Evans, then the chief executive officer of the Union Pacific Railroad, took her on a cruise and reportedly broached marriage. "She was crazy about him," says one friend. But he wanted her to move to New York, and she insisted on staying in Chicago. For a while she dated Warren Bennis, a professor of business at the University of Southern California, but he surprised her and married someone else. She also dated Bill Kirby, a widower who, until his death in 1990, was the general counsel to the MacArthur Foundation.
There was also the handsome Lester Hyman, a divorced Washington lawyer, younger by 13 years, who vetted President Clinton's Supreme Court and Cabinet picks. When he came to visit, she put him in a guest room at 209, and she hinted to friends that their relationship was sexual. (Hyman would not comment on that.) "She was a healthy, normal woman," Martin Janis says. "She was very warm." (Eppie would sometimes surprise her friends with sexual innuendoes. Another escort remembers walking by a vase of flowers in her apartment. A gladiolus was drooping, and she pointed to it and said, "Reminds me of my old boyfriend.")
Eppie's favorite events were dinners in Washington-at the White House, at the State Department dining room. She would sit like a queen, always at a premium table, Janis recalls, and "real big shots-governors, senators, financiers, chairmen of the boards of multimillion-dollar corporations-would come to her. Katharine Graham was one of the biggest snobs ever, and she'd come to Eppie and swoon, ‘Epp-
piiiiieeee!'"
Eppie was "crazy, gaga" over Bill Clinton, says Eugene Kennedy. She thought Clinton smart and handsome. "She was a nut for handsome men," says one friend. Given the booming economy and her support of Clinton's policies, she refused to condemn him for his sexual indiscretions, explaining, "He's human and he needs help." It irritated her that he squandered his talents and played into the hands of his enemies, but what really irked her, she told a friend, was, "Why would he go with somebody as ugly as Monica Lewinsky?" At a Gridiron dinner after the Lewinsky story had hit with full force, the President asked her, "Eppie, do you think I'm going to be all right?" "You're going to be all right, Mr. President," she assured him.
She also admired Hillary, who invited Eppie to a White House sleepover for Chelsea and her girlfriends. They sat around in their pajamas and Eppie gave the girls advice. When people said that Hillary stayed with Bill because it served her political purposes to do so, Eppie said, no, Hillary stayed with him because she loved him-and he her. Eppie slept in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton years and boasted to friends that she did not have to pay for the privilege.
The Clintons were not the only high-level people who asked Eppie for advice. She tossed off a note to Jimmy Carter the day after he won the Presidency, telling him that his choice for Secretary of State should be "Cy Vance"-the man he eventually chose. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, he consulted her. "I'm thinking of running for President," he said. "Do you think it's a good idea?" "I think it's a very bad idea," she answered. "You're too old; you're a conservative; you'll never make it." When Bobby Kennedy was deciding whether to run for President in 1968, he sought her advice. "It's not your turn," she told him. She advised Lyndon Johnson to get out of Vietnam. And when she traveled there in 1967 to visit the troops, she later claimed to have "cajoled" a meeting with General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in the area, and to have harangued him on the wrong-headedness of the war. When she later saw him at a wedding and they danced together, he told her that she was "the very first person to help him understand what was going on in the country."
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