Dear Ann Landers

By Robert Simonson
09 Nov 2009

The Lady with All the Answers star Judith Ivey
The Lady with All the Answers star Judith Ivey
Photo by Carol Rosegg

Two-time Tony winner Judith Ivey is advice columnist Ann Landers in a new Off-Broadway solo show.

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The lady in question in The Lady With All the Answers, the new one-woman show at the Cherry Lane Theatre, is Ann Landers, the advice-giving living institution who wrote a widely read syndicated column from 1955 until her death in 2002. The lady playing the Lady is two-time Tony Award winner Judith Ivey, who has some interesting answers of her own.

"Actually, no," she says, laughing, when asked if she likes one-person shows. That's a funny response from an actress who has frequently flown solo in recent years, in such plays as Women on Fire and Dirty Tricks. "I actually don't like them. It's so bizarre to me. I've literally sat through an evening thinking, 'It doesn't make sense to me. Why are you talking to the audience?'"

This was not her feeling, however, when she read David Rambo's play about Landers, whose real name was Esther "Eppie" Pauline Lederer. "The playwright made it work. You're just immediately in the room with her. It's really about how to bring the audience in the room." Indeed, it's probably impossible for an audience to forget it's in the room when Ivey, as Landers, begins asking questions and calling on raised hands.

The Lady With All the Answers is set in 1975, on a night when Lederer is struggling over a column that will explain to her public that she's getting a divorce. That's right, readers — the ink-stained sage couldn't make her own marriage work. "She was a huge proponent of staying married," explains Ivey. But when Julius Lederer, the owner of the Budget Rent-a-Car company, told her he had been carrying on a three-year affair with a British nurse, his wife had little choice. "She was stunned. They divorced and he married this young woman and had a child with her." When Julius became destitute and ill years later, however, Eppie paid all his hospital bills.

Eppie didn't do too well with her twin sister, Pauline "Popo" Esther Phillips, either. They were so close as young women they married at a double wedding. When Lederer got the job as Ann Landers, there was no secretary. "She was flooded with mail, so her sister came and helped her out for the first two weeks. Popo kind of got a taste for it. She went off and got the idea of having her own column at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she lived. She never told Eppie about it. It just ran." The column was called "Dear Abby." Suddenly, Lederer's unusual job was the family business. "It caused a huge rift between them. She felt so betrayed. And of course, they were competitive."