Marlene Wagman-Geller

         Anyone who owns even basic cable is familiar with the twins best known as the Property Brothers, the gurus of renovation. Possessors of romance novel good looks and charisma to spare, they are reality TV’s shining stars. However, in the past generation, there were twin sisters who dominated newspaper columns, and fixed troubles much as Jonathan and Drew resurrect homes.

     The women who launched the advice column into the modern era had lives as extra-ordinary as any found in their voluminous mail. Esther Pauline, nicknamed Eppie, and Pauline Esther, nicknamed Popo, Friedman, were born to Russian, Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa, on Independence Day, 1918. Until they were twelve, they believed all the hoopla surrounding the event was in their honor. Their father supported his wife and four daughters peddling chickens from a wagon, and in a classic New World success story, wound up the proprietor of a chain of movie theaters and burlesque houses.  The sisters were so inseparable they shared a bed, played the same instrument, (violin) and performed the Andrew Sisters’ duets in Yiddish.

         When the dimpled dynamic duo graduated from high school in 1936, their yearbook said it all. Next to Popo’s picture was the message “Always with Eppie,” and next to Eppie’s was “Always with Popo.” They enrolled in Sioux City’s Morningside College where they wore 50s-style matching raccoon coats and co-wrote a gossip column, “Campus Rat,” which carried a single byline. They studied psychology, but as Eppie admitted, they “majored in boys.” On occasion they would attend a party, clad in the same outfit, with a shared date. They dropped out in their junior year when they married on their birthdays in a fantastic double wedding that included 700 guests, three rabbis, a bridal party of 22, and mounted police. To no one’s surprise, they wore identical dresses, veils, and hairstyles. Pauline married Morton Phillips, heir to a liquor fortune; Eppie’s groom was Jules Lederer, who later founded Budget Rent-a-Car. After a double honeymoon, the twins were forced asunder when they followed their respective spouses to different cities. 

       In 1955 the Lederers moved to Chicago, where Eppie donned the mantle of an affluent housewife and mother of Margo. She defined herself not as a twin, but as a wife, one so enamored of her role she had the words “Jules’s Wife” stitched into the linings of her fur coats. It was Eppie who initially forged the path that would define both women’s lives.  She was a fan of a column in the Sun-Times “Ask Ann Landers” and when she discovered its columnist, Ruth Crowley, had died, entered a competition to become the new Ann. (The name Landers was in tribute to a friend of Crowley.) The twenty-nine candidates were given a set of identical questions and for her responses, Eppie, a master puppeteer, pulled strings.  For the letter concerning legality, she contacted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and for the other- dealing with the issue of interfaith marriage- she turned to Reverend Theodore Hesburg, president of the University of Notre Dame. The incredulous editor assumed she was just name-dropping, but after authentication phoned her, “Good morning Ann Landers.”

         Eppie, buried under a barrage of letters, asked her twin for help. Pauline, desirous of a life more meaningful than could be derived from mah-jongg, embraced the opportunity. However, after three months Lederer’s editor prohibited her from farming out the advice. Bitten by the writing bug, Pauline decided to follow in her sister’s footsteps-as she had followed her into the world after 17 minutes- and clad in a black Dior gown and mink, with chauffeured Cadillac around the corner, Pauline applied to the San Francisco Chronicle. The housewife’s sole qualification for the advice column: she had always been “a wailing wall without portfolio.” The editor was so taken with the responses and chutzpah she returned home to a ringing telephone. Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel (“Then David said to Abigail ‘Blessed is your advice and blessed are you’”) and Van Buren for its old family, presidential resonance. She was overjoyed at her new position, but Esther did not share her enthusiasm and cut off relations with her twin for several years. She viewed her sister as the writer of Column Rat. A 1958 Life Magazine called their rivalry, “The most feverish female feud since Elizabeth sent Mary Queen of Scots to the chopping block.” Several years later they reconciled at an event and ran off to the ladies’ room to gossip. For their 30^th anniversary, they travelled around the world with their husbands and had an audience with another advice dispenser: Pope John Paul II.

    The twins, though cast in the same role, penned very different responses to thousands of people seeking succor. Long before the advent of the Internet, and prior to the televised Dr. Ruth, Dr. Laura, and Dr. Phil, the Dear Abby column was a forum for the public discussion of private problems and appeared in 1,000 newspapers from Brazil to Thailand. Paulina, through her persona, became a beloved cultural icon and was invoked on shows such as Three’s Company, Dexter, and Mr. Ed. With her comic yet sympathetic voice, she wrestled the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20^th century present. Dear Abby Are birth control pills deductible? -Bertie. Dear Bertie: Only if they don’t work. Although politically left of center, she still knew when to bend, “Dear Abby: Our son was married in February and they had a baby in August. Can an 8 pound baby be this premature? –Wanting to Know. Dear Wanting: The baby was on time. The wedding was late. Forget it. She also willingly expressed views she understood would garner protests. She stated in a 1998 interview, “Whenever I say a kind word about gays, people throw Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and other parts of the Bible to me. It doesn’t bother me.”  In her time away from the world of newsprint, Pauline shared her home with the husband she called her ‘rock of Gibraltar,’ two monkeys, son, Edward Jay, and daughter, Jeanne, currently the voice of Dear Abby. One exchange with her reader stated: Dear Abby: Between you and me, I think the people who write to you are either morons or they’re just plain stupid.”- Henry. Dear Henry: Which are you?” Pauline’s life proved she was neither.

 Although her bouffant hair earmarked her as a woman of the 1950s, in 1976 she confided to People Magazine that she had recently seen an X-rated movie. She admitted her sister had also wanted to see the film, but she refrained from doing so for fear of being recognized. When Eppie asked how she had got away with it, Pauline responded, “I just put on my dark glasses and my Ann Landers wig and went!”

           In contrast to those who wrote for advice, Eppie wrapped herself in the name Mrs. Morton Phillips as snugly as she wrapped herself in her fur coat.  In a nod to her line of work, she displayed an antique Italian confessional in her bedroom.  She ruled her advice kingdom from one of Chicago’s most exclusive buildings on its most exclusive blocks, a 14 room, 5,500 foot co-op. It boasted unobstructed lake views and featured an entrance hall so vast Jules dubbed it “the bowling alley.”  She counted among her friends Cary Grant, Neil Simon, and Henry Winkler and on her walls hung photographs of the columnist with the famous: Pope Paul VI, Harry Truman, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana. A workaholic, she took to answering letters while in the back seat of her chauffeured Cadillac limousine that displayed the license plate AL 1955, the date she had begun her column. The Jewish immigrants’ daughter from Iowa transformed to such a power player that President Clinton called to ask if Monica Lewinsky had ruined him. Other friends included Walter Cronkite, Warren Buffet, Barbara Walters, Kirk Douglas, and Helen Hayes. A 1978 World Almanac survey named her the most influential woman in the United States. She was proud of her accomplishments and said, “I would rather have my column on 1,000 refrigerator doors than win a Pulitzer.” Conservative in her habits-she never drank or smoke-her public expressions of annoyance never got much stranger than “Oh, banana oil!” However, on one occasion she might have uttered one far less reserved. After decades spent advising Nervous in Nevada and Desperate in Denver, she needed her own solace when Jules fell in love with a younger woman and absconded to a new life in England. She broke the news in what Eppie described as her most difficult column: “The lady with all the answers does not know the answer to this one.” She used her column as the venue to inform readers that her 36 year marriage was over. She left a third of the page blank in honor of “one of the world’s best marriages that didn’t make it to the finish line.” She received more than 35,000 letters of support.

      Eppie, who owned the rights to the Ann Landers’ name stated, “There will never be another Ann Landers.” She passed away in 2002 in her lake view home at age 83 from cancer. Her sister had once received the letter, Dear Abby: Do you think about dying much? No, she replied, “It’s the last thing I want to do.”  Suffering from Alzheimer’s, she followed her twin eleven years later. It was time for the angels to have their own Mother Confessors.