Wry Martinis (33 page)

She is single but not unattached. Her companion—she calls him “my gentleman friend”—is a prosperous, well-connected lawyer. They dote on each other, travel together, and synergistically network in the Democratic stables. A month before I went to Chicago, there was this message on my answering machine: “It’s Eppie! I’m in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House. I’m having a very good time with the Clintons. I’m calling everyone I know to show off.”

On the bookshelves in her study are copies of
Miss Lonelyhearts, Balm in Gilead, The Joy of Sex, Portnoy’s Complaint
, and
The Bonfire of the Vanities
. A bust of Lincoln looks down on a desk strewn with photographs, clippings, and correspondence, including a thank-you letter from the Hereditary Disease Foundation in Santa Monica. Eppie explains, “A reader in Michigan wrote and said, ‘I have money but I don’t like my family, what should I do?’ And I said, ‘Give it to the Hereditary Disease Foundation.’ ” He did. The thank-you letter is, as you might guess, effusive.
According to the
Chicago Tribune
, a single column she wrote on another occasion resulted in $100 million for cancer research.

Amid the desk clutter are five bottles of Liquid Paper correction fluid. She writes at home on an IBM Selectric III. She has eight secretaries and two clerks at her
Tribune
office, ten blocks away.

About a thousand people write to her each day. The assistants winnow the letters down to about two hundred, and sort those into categories. She shows me her bundles, piled on a chair near the desk, and asks, “What have we got today?”

Today we have “Bad Doctors,” “Singles,” “Chivalry,” “North Carolina Judge,” and “Jewish.”

I ask to see what they’re talking about in “Jewish.”

She reads, “ ‘Dear Ann, We are Jewish parents whose thirty-three-year-old daughter says that she is a Jewish Christian. Jesus is the messiah and Jews and Christians worship the same god. How do you react to such a daughter? We are both shocked and distraught.’ ”

What’s happening in “Chivalry”?

A recent column featured a letter from a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy who complained that no one on the bus would give up a seat. The men, Eppie says, are writing in. “This one says, ‘They want equal rights? We’ll give them equal rights. These macho women have brought this on themselves.’ ” She pulls out another: “ ‘Dear Ann, I have come up with a simple solution. Why not let the women sit on the men’s laps? This will completely eliminate the seating problem and no doubt bring joy and frivolity all along.’ Signed, ‘Bus Rider in Florida.’ ”

The copy of
Miss Lonelyhearts
on the shelf prompts my next question.

Her answer is, “You have to insulate yourself against what is coming at you. Otherwise, you go right to pieces. I’ve had some letters that are very, very sad. And hopeless. ‘I’m a twenty-seven-year-old and I’ve never had a date, and I probably never will, because I’ve been in a wheel-chair for ten years. I just wish that some nice man could see beyond the wheelchair.’ What do you tell them? What do you
say
to these people?”

She talks about a trip she made to Vietnam in 1967. She had been getting a lot of letters from the boys. “They were not happy warriors, and I decided to go and visit them in the hospital, and that was a tremendous experience. I would sit on the bed, which you’re not supposed to do, and they loved the closeness. They said, ‘Boy, I haven’t smelled perfume in two years.’ And I said, ‘You could be dangerous.’ You know—just to
have a lot of fun with them.” She brought back three hundred phone numbers. “Calling them took me three days. I had notes—‘Leg gone,’ ‘Eye out,’ ‘Gerald Swanson, he lives in Akron, call mother.’ I called up these people. ‘This is Ann Landers and I’m calling from Chicago and I just got back from Vietnam and I saw George. He’s in the hospital. He has a cold, and they didn’t want it to get any worse.’ ” She adds, “A lot of colds. I just was not going to get into any kind of injuries. The telephone conversations I had with these people! I made friends for life.”

It’s getting late—the time of night when you can hear the clocks ticking. She talks about her father’s coming over from Vladivostok. We speculate. What if Abe Friedman had stayed in Russia? Assuming he escaped the pogroms, would she still be there, a babushka, shoveling snow and taking in washing for extra cash? She says she regrets never asking her parents about their parents and grandparents—the only regret she has expressed all evening. Suddenly, she blurts, “Who
cares
? It’s what you are today that counts, not where you came from.”

She says she’s been lucky, adding, “I knew what to do with the luck, that’s the difference. Some people don’t know what to do with it. I recognize an opportunity. But I never envisioned anything as huge as this.”

She has no plans to retire. “I plan to die at the typewriter. Just keel over at the machine.”

Ann Landers will die with her. “I own the name. There will never be another Ann Landers. When I go, the name goes with me. I’ve had offers, and I mean in the millions, for that name, and I’ve absolutely— No way am I going to sell the name. The name is mine and that is me, and when I go the column goes with me.”

It’s after midnight. I’m tired; she isn’t. When I leave, she will deal with “Chivalry” and “North Carolina Judge” and “Jewish” for a couple of hours. She asks the elevator man if the night doorman got the cookies she brought back from dinner for him.

“Yes, Mrs. Lederer.”

Riding down, I miss the quiet and the closeness and the smell of perfume. A few days later, there is a message on my machine: “It’s Eppie. All I did was talk about me. We didn’t get to talk about you.”

—
The New Yorker
, 1995

Formative Years

It was the eve of the 1975 Harvard game, and two days after Generalissimo Franco had finally, after one of the most protracted deathbed vigils in history, given up the ghost. Three Yale students climbed a three-story fire escape and made it up onto the catwalk of the billboard that still looks down on Broadway, urging new generations of Yalies to smoke, drink, eat and bank. They had brought with them a gallon of black paint and two rollers with which they wrote across the billboard in enormous letters:

The cops arrived just as they reached the bottom of the fire escape and arrested them. After frisking them, they lined them up against the wall, just as in the good old days. At this point, a burly sort of sergeant stepped forward and said, “Okay, which one of you guys is Franco?”

I don’t want to ruin the story—a habit I picked up as an English major—but as an objective correlative of my era at Yale, it’s pretty good. It works (I can hear Mr. Thorburn saying) on
all
levels: the perpetual misunderstanding between gown and town; the jubilation of my classmates at the death of fascism in the face of a far greater ethic: Beat Harvard. By 1975 Yale was much less uptight than it had been when I arrived, and they became heroes for a while, these three.

September 6, 1971, was gray, humid and horrible. Apart from the disorientation brought about by Orientation Day, I remember an extraordinary
fear of the place and of the people, professors and classmates. Many of my peers must have felt the same fear, to judge from the number of visits I made to see them at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. By the time I graduated, I was familiar with the Thirty-Day ward, as well as the Ninety-Day ward, and knew some of the doctors by their first names.

I will not be using
we
or
us
here. The dangers of the first person plural were made unwittingly and excruciatingly clear by Joyce Maynard, who matriculated with the class of 1975, but who left before graduating and eventually turned up in Vermont with J. D. Salinger.

Miss Maynard wrote an article for
The New York Times Magazine
in the spring of freshman year entitled “Looking Back at Eighteen.” It was a well-written, sensitive piece about Growing Up with the JFK assassination, Vietnam, Nixon, the killings of RFK and Martin Luther King; all the rest. A subsequent piece in the “My Turn” section of
Newsweek
argued that
we
were all looking for heroes; and a third piece, which appeared in a fashion magazine under the title, “The Embarrassment of Virginity” was about how her freshman year roommates—while she chose herself to remain chaste—used to stay up all night swapping abortion stories, birth control pills and tales of Lucullan sexual repasts that seemed a letter from
Penthouse
than Vanderbilt Hall.

This was only the third year of coeducation. There weren’t nearly enough women at Yale and the really sharp-looking ones had been made paranoid by the hormonal effrontery of the more than “one thousand male leaders” that President Brewster had alluded to in a recent speech. The King was crucified for that statement, and so was poor Joyce Maynard, for her defense of virginity and for her observations on behalf of her generation. She had said nothing especially controversial or offensive in any of her articles. It was the
we
’s that did her in.

A generation likes to be spoken about—but not spoken for.
Co-opt
was one of the buzz words then (as in “The Movement has been co-opted by registered Democrats”), and I guess everyone felt as though his
Weltanschauung
had been co-opted by Joyce Maynard, because they (we) all came down on her pretty hard. Before a year had gone by, an article ran in the
Yale Daily News Magazine
entitled “The Embarrassment of Joyce Maynard,” a clever but nasty little bit of invective in which the author likened her to one Consuela de la Profunda Oscuridad, publisher of an insolvent Madrid periodical of the early 1800s known chiefly for her theory that the military power of the Iberian people depended on the traditional chastity
of Spanish women. A few months later she left Yale and did not return. And that was the last time anyone in my generation ever used that goddam pronoun; unless it referred to a specific group of less than six people.

Another casualty of the period was Erich Segal.
Love Story
had opened recently at the theaters, and the nation had its hankies out. His best seller had made him terribly famous, but at Yale his name invited ridicule. I give you the following, from the same issue of the
YDNM
. It ran beneath a wonderful caricature by Joel Ackerman, after David’s “Death of Marat”: “By dispelling the notion that to be a success in such diverse fields as track, popular writing and scholarship one has to be discerning and tasteful, Segal has given the student hope for a life after Yale.” He was denied tenure and left for Princeton, where I’m sure he does not miss Yale. He gave a very good course, The Satires of Juvenal, Latin 49b.

At any rate, there was the Course Catalogue to contend with those first few days—the Blue Book: 412 pages of rules, descriptions of majors, and listings of courses. Concerning the first there didn’t seem to be much problem: only troglodytes flunked out, and since Yale did not admit troglodytes, no one flunked out. QED. Actually, two F’s meant you were encouraged to spend a semester away from New Haven reordering your priorities, or however the dean put it; but two F’s were hard to come by, unless you really asked for them. Dope was okay. No one was kicked out for smoking pot or dropping acid (coke was still more or less unheard of). The rumor was that New Haven cops had to notify the campus cops if they were going to bust any students, and that the campus cops always notified the student in time for him to clean out his room. I suspect this was nonsense. During the balmy evenings of that Indian summer of ’71 the smoke was so thick, in my entryway at least, that it once set off the fire alarm, causing an amok evacuation of McClellan. Soon people learned to ignore the fire alarms on the Old Campus, and they would go off all the time, unheeded. The campus cops got even by taking longer and longer to turn them off, until one of Yale’s first lessons had been learned: accommodation. But I don’t think anyone was ever busted. There was a sense of immunity and impunity behind the walls of the Gothic fortress.