Wry Martinis (31 page)

The president recalled, “She was always right in there. ‘I got three goals in soccer!’ ‘But how did the
team
do?’ She was …”

“Tough?”

“Oh, yeah, and a great competitor. In all the athletic events and stuff, she was unbelievable. But there was always this message: good sportsmanship, caring, don’t ever humiliate the other guy. She just lived all of that.”

Mrs. Bush’s other pet peeve was self-obsession, or anything even faintly resembling it. During her son’s first run for the presidency, in 1979, she called him after hearing him on television and said, “George, you’re talking about yourself too much.” Alixe Glen, a longtime family friend and aide to the president, thinks that the mother’s lessons may ultimately have cost her son the presidency. “Mrs. Bush hammering that into him—‘I don’t care how many home runs you made, it’s how the team did’—for
so
many years, even as an adult, is what made him unable to brag about himself as president, which many people, myself very much included, feel was part of his demise.”

Despite her intervention in 1979, Mrs. Bush made few calls to the White House. “But,” the president said, “she did have the marvelous one when she called me early on when I was vice president. She said, ‘George, I just noticed how wonderful it is that Ronald Reagan
waits
for Nancy coming off the helicopter and holds her by the arm and is
unfailingly
polite.’ I said, ‘Mom, is there a message in this here? Are you trying to—’ She said, ‘No, I just mean that he
never
walks ahead of her and he
never
is anything other than totally considerate.’ And so”—he laughed—“I got the message loud and clear.”

He also recalled another matter she once phoned him about. While watching Ronald Reagan give his State of the Union address, she noticed
that her son, sitting behind the president, seemed not to be paying attention. “I’ve seen it in print, but it’s true,” the president said, wryly. “She told me I shouldn’t be looking at the papers, you know, sitting, Tip O’Neill and I. That was really funny. I said, ‘Mom, I’m just following the text.’ ‘I know, but you just listen to what he’s saying and then you won’t need to follow it.’ She was great.”

Dorothy Bush’s health began to fail at about the time her son became president. The photographs of her at the swearing-in, on the West Front of the Capitol, show a frail but sprightly woman—deep in prayer, it appears—holding the hand of Marilyn Quayle as the oath of office is administered to her son. Afterward, she watched the inaugural parade as she sat in her wheelchair, pushed up to a window in the Queen’s Bedroom, looking down on Pennsylvania Avenue. Mrs. Ellis recalls, “Things got confusing for her in the last years. The last time she went to the White House, I said to her afterward, ‘Oh, Mother, wasn’t it lovely, the Queen’s Bedroom?’ And she couldn’t remember that she’d been there.”

The family is not sure whether she understood that her son had lost the ’92 election. “I don’t know,” the president said. “I talked to her after, but I couldn’t really tell. I think she probably did. My brothers, they think she did, but I would call her, and ‘Oh, how sweet of you to call, this is the
nicest
thing in my life,
oh
, I’m so pleased,’ you know, and I’m sure she did the same thing to the next cousin who checked in.” He laughed. “But she was awful close to us, to Barbara and to me. She made all of us feel that way.”

Two weeks after the election, Mrs. Bush had a stroke, at her home in Greenwich. The morning of the day she died, Mrs. Ellis called the president, and he left Washington for Greenwich at 8:35
A.M
. on a small Air Force C-20, accompanied by his daughter Dorothy Koch (Doro), who was named for her grandmother. The three of them were “the Bawl Brigade,” Mrs. Ellis says. “We’d sit there holding her hand, then we’d get all weepy and leave the room. She was so adorable, and she was so frail at the end, like a little bird in your hand.”

“Doro had joined the Brigade in Houston,” on Election Night, the president said. “Then her brothers also became members, all of them. So on this little trip to Greenwich, I have to admit, I could well have been elected president of the Bawl Brigade. ’Cause we were awful close. She was struggling. Boy, she was struggling. I couldn’t tell how much she knew that it was me and Doro there. I like to feel she knew we were
there, and who we were, but Nancy has that very generous interpretation on it”—that Mrs. Bush was holding on until he arrived to say goodbye—“but I couldn’t tell that, to be candid. She just opened her eyes and looked over at us, and Press said, ‘It’s George, Mom, it’s George and Doro,’ and she kind of looked over and there was some glimmer of recognition, but not her typically warm smile. She’d had a stroke, you see.”

The president and his daughter stayed with her for about an hour and then flew back to Washington. Dorothy Walker Bush died at 5:05
P.M
. Mrs. Ellis called the president, and got his secretary, who told her he was in another part of the White House, accepting ambassadorial credentials. “He called back about suppertime,” Mrs. Ellis says.

Was he devastated?

“I’m sure he was. It’s always that fresh sense of loss you have with death, even though you’re expecting it and the person is ninety-one. But I talked to him that night, and, you know, he’s strong. He said,
‘Oh, gee whizz.’
 ”

On the morning before the funeral, the president said that he had no plans to give a eulogy the next day: “God, no, I couldn’t do it. I would choke up. I would be permanently ensconced as a member of the Bawl Brigade. I can’t. I’m
terrible
at those things. I’ve had trouble paying my respects to the fallen soldiers on the
Iowa
, or the dead out of Desert Storm, without getting emotional. I’d love to, but I know my limitations. I even got choked up here at Camp David last night. We had our choir singing. We had a little vespers program with Amy Grant. It was so beautiful, and I found myself choking up. We had a bunch of friends up here, and ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘please hold back the floods.’ ”

—
The New Yorker
, 1992

Eppie Lederer, all hair, cheekbones, and dimples, stands in the doorway of her Chicago apartment. “Hello,” she says, with a bit of a Mae West purr. It feels a little odd saying this about a seventy-seven-year-old great-grandmother, but there is something ineffably sexy about her. Maybe it’s the voice, or the perfume, or the rustle of silk, or the knowing, Listen-honey-I’ve-heard-it-all eyes. Maybe it’s the aura of unshockability she projects. You feel you could tell her something truly dire about your secret life and she’d just nod understandingly and tell you not to worry, she hears from people like you all the time, and she’d give you the phone number of some specialist at Johns Hopkins with a Hungarian-sounding surname who deals with this particular weirdness. At any rate, the woman the world knows as Ann Landers looks younger than seventy-seven, by quite a lot, and she
has
heard it all before.

“The changes I have seen,” she once wrote, “would twirl your turban.” In mid-October she quietly marked her fortieth anniversary of working seven days a week dispensing advice to the lorn, the afflicted, the battered, the diseased, the lonely, and the confused. According to the syndicate that distributes her column, it currently runs in over twelve hundred newspapers, with a total circulation of ninety million.

Ann Landers has brought Eppie Lederer fame, fortune, authority, and power. She uses honorary degrees for wallpaper. Presidents fawn over her, institutes put her on their boards. A plug from her can send a book onto the best-seller list. All this has brought her enemies, too—chiefly gun owners, pro-lifers, and laboratory-rat huggers. On occasion, she has faltered: she has been caught recycling old letters, fiddling with the wording of others, and, in one instance, causing an organ-donation controversy
that resulted in the unfortunate headline “
ADVICE COLUMN MAY HAVE LIFE-THREATENING CONSEQUENCES
.” In each case, she has quickly come clean, and self-administered her trademark “forty lashes with the wet noodle.” If readers disagree with advice she has given, she prints the letters. She has never caused a sex scandal, got drunk (she has never touched alcohol or smoked a cigarette), endorsed products, or done infomercials. “People know I’m on the level,” she says.

A
World Almanac
poll once named Ann Landers the most influential woman in the United States. A few years ago, a Cornell professor spent four years computerizing, summarizing, and analyzing every column she had written, and came to the same conclusion. Her willingness to grapple with social taboos just as they are about to burst out of the national closet has given her a credibility, even a certain aura of progressiveness, when in fact her values are generally straight-down-the-middle American. Through four decades of change, she has remained tolerant, traditional, cautious, and concerned more with the consequences of behavior than with its inherent morality. She was against the Vietnam War but visited the troops. She is an ardent feminist, but believes that a mother’s place is with her children during their early years.

Her apartment overlooks Lake Michigan. She gives me a short tour, high heels clicking on parquet. In the library, there’s a Dali bust of J.F.K. and the framed front page of the
Des Moines Register
of July 4, 1918 (“
HUNS FAIL IN COUNTER BLOW
”), the day she was born. Beneath this, also framed, is an odd tchotchke: one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s handkerchiefs. She does not think it is from that night at Ford’s Theater. I’m tempted to linger and contemplate the significance of having on your wall the
mouchoir
of the fruitiest First Lady in American history, but we’re off to the living room, which has a nearly photographic Picasso self-portrait, and then we move on to the Tudor dining room, all dark paneling and mullioned windows and escutcheons. Somehow, we find ourselves in the master bathroom, an arresting chocolate-and-red eighteenth-century Italian-mosaic-tile fantasy installed by the apartment’s original owner. “A nut,” she pronounces.

Time to leave for dinner. Bobby, Eppie’s chauffeur, is waiting downstairs with the Cadillac limousine to take us around the block to her usual dinner
haunt, the International Club, on the mezzanine of the Drake Hotel. Ignoring my protests, she had insisted before I left home on sending Bobby to fetch me at O’Hare. Bobby had further been instructed, despite vehement objections from me, to wait outside the Drake while I showered, and then to convey me the five hundred feet to the entrance to her apartment. It was like visiting an attentive, rich grandmother; and I might as well confess, at the risk of impaired journalistic integrity, that I enjoyed every minute of it.

At the restaurant, the maître d’ fusses over her and leads the way to her usual table, designated by a brasslike plaque inscribed “
MRS. EPPIE LEDERER
.” She orders escargots and crab cakes and water, and I ask how she came to grow up in Sioux City, Iowa. Her parents, fleeing czarist pogroms, had emigrated from Vladivostok, by way of Manchuria, in 1908, indigent and speaking no English. Her father, Abe Friedman, started out peddling chickens in the Midwest and ended up owning, as she puts it, with affecting lack of boastfulness, “every theater in Sioux City except the Orpheum.” His twin daughters, Esther (Eppie) and Pauline (Popo), born in Sioux City on July 4th, 1918, eventually became, as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”), the most widely circulated advice columnists in his adopted land. In the words of Yogi Berra when he was informed that a Jew had been elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, “Only in America.”

In 1939, Eppie married Jules Lederer, a salesman who later started a company called Budget Rent A Car. (Money has never been a worry, and therefore never a motivating factor, in Eppie’s life.) They had a daughter, Margo (she is now a freelance writer, has three grown children and three grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts). They moved to Wisconsin, where Eppie’s volunteer work soon got her elected chairman—even now she does not use “chairwoman”—of the Eau Claire County Democratic Party; and in 1955 they moved to Chicago. That year, she became famous.

The original Ann Landers was a nurse whose column ran in the
Chicago Sun-Times
and was syndicated in about two dozen newspapers. When she died unexpectedly, Eppie applied for the job, along with about thirty other aspiring advice columnists. They were all asked to answer an identical set of hypothetical letters from readers. The first set out the dilemma of a woman whose walnut tree was dropping nuts onto her
neighbor’s property. They had exchanged words about it. Who owned the walnuts? Eppie had been an assiduous networker during her years as a Democratic Party official. She called up her friend Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and put the question to him. The answer was that the neighbor could do anything she wanted with the walnuts except sell them. The next question was from a worried Catholic who wanted to marry a Protestant. Eppie turned to her friend Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame University. Hesburgh advised that the marriage could proceed, but only if the Protestant agreed to raise the children as Catholics. And so on.