Back when Eppie Lederer was still alive, Jerry Herman called and said he wanted to turn the life of Ann Landers into a musical. She wouldn’t hear of it.
“Mother,” said Lederer’s daughter, Margo Howard, “had these terrible visions of Carol Channing prancing around some stage, playing her.”
Based on the record — and surely few Americans ever left a fuller published accounting of their opinions on matters great and thoroughly inconsequential — Lederer of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive would have greatly preferred the way she finally made her theatrical debut Thursday night at San Diego’s classy Old Globe Theatre in David Rambo’s aptly titled biographical drama “The Lady With All the Answers.”
No sequins. No schlock. No dirt. No emotional ballads. No crass theatrics. No tacky confrontations with Popo, that quote-happy identical twin with the quick-study technique who started the copycat “Dear Abby.”
Just the readers. And the columns. And the sheer, incalculable force of Lederer’s own indomitable personality.
Lederer had plenty of theatrical flare. How else would she have talked her way into a columnist’s job at the Chicago Sun-Times with no experience and yet persuaded Americans to send her some 34 million letters (by the calculation of her biographer, Tribune writer Rick Kogan)? Her unparalleled career included the Tribune as her home newspaper, and the jump across Michigan Avenue in 1987 made headlines around the country.
This, after all, was a woman who could get 14,000 people to put pen to paper to discuss the way a piece of toilet paper should rightfully hang. A woman who typed “homosexual” when few family newspapers had ever printed the word. And a woman who, in 1971, got an estimated 1 million letters sent to Capitol Hill in favor of a pending cancer-research bill. President Richard Nixon had little choice but to sign it in Lederer’s presence.
Lived by strict rules
But Lederer, a proud Iowan, also had strict rules of personal engagement. She paid enormous attention to appearances. And she liked her life out of her columns. Playwright Rambo, a hopeless fan from small-town Pennsylvania, couldn’t help but keep to her standards.
He didn’t exactly start from a place of neutrality. “When Ann Landers died,” Rambo said in a pre-show interview, “I realized that she was the one who had given me the vocabulary to understand the revolutions going on in the outside world.”
No wonder Howard gave him the rights to the columns. “His bona fides were good,” Howard said. “He absolutely loved the old girl.”
That much is clear. In “The Lady With All the Answers,” Lederer gets a one-woman celebration of her cultural import, set entirely in her apartment — with even the famously creative bathtub located discreetly offstage.
Broadway actress Randy Graff made herself look so much like Lederer, the columnist’s own daughter appeared intensely startled Thursday night as she sat in an intimate, 220-seat theater-in-the-round, watching her mother come a tad creepily back to life. But although the highly skilled Graff offers a complex, richly textured performance — with enough affection to charm and just enough tart to cut the sugar — she’s not really the star of this show.
It’s the darn letters. Many of the famous ones are here: “Would it be possible for me to be buried in my 1937 Dodge instead of a casket?” “I like to do my housework with no clothes on. . . . “
What could be more apt? Such is the dirty little secret of the advice biz. Pick the letters well, stick ’em in print, and people will flock to the column. After all, nothing is more soothing for the ego than reading about someone else’s crisis. Oprah Winfrey and her post-Landers ilk, you could argue, merely take those Ann Landers-type letter writers and stick a camera in their faces.
So what made Lederer so great? She knew how to pick the missives and dispense with them with equal measures of linguistic precision and human compassion.
Rambo is interested only in the glory days. In his play, which is set entirely in 1975 at Ann Landers’ zenith, Lederer essentially wanders around her apartment and talks about her columns to her readers — or in this case, the audience. It may sound forced in print, but this savvy device actually is Rambo’s ace in the hole.
If you can swallow the conceit (and the opening-night audience had no trouble), it’s the most natural thing in the world for Ann Landers to ask for a show of hands on how long people have been married, or ask how many audience members would marry the same spouse if they could do it over, or get people to ponder why 82 percent of married people told her that their sex life declined after they walked down the aisle. Thursday night’s audience members did what Graff told them with such instantaneous and enthusiastic obedience, you’d think their own mothers were making the commands. Clearly, nobody was seeing an actress in the room. Lederer would have been delighted.
Few readers of this newspaper would be surprised at the loud buzz of cultural recognition that greeted a play filled with Landers’ old columns and responses — at least when you are talking about audience members of a certain age.
People are curious
But although Rambo’s gentle biography is the kind of material you’d expect from an authorized version — Lederer’s complex husband, Jules Lederer, is presented very sympathetically, and Howard, who appears by phone, is a saint of a daughter — it’s also true that, outside Chicago, the details of Lederer’s life are not well-known. And clearly, people are curious.
That will create a hunger for a warmhearted play surely destined for Chicago and beyond. (Rambo says there are numerous nibbles but no firm plans yet.) There should be some more work done.
Rambo’s writing is too tentative at present — the interactive device that works so well is presented with self-conscious tentativeness. And we could use more narrative complexity. Lederer says in the show that she’d rather see her column on a thousand refrigerators than win a Pulitzer Prize. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe her entirely.
Still, if we needed any reminder that Landers was both an incomparable cultural barometer of regular American cultural practices in the later half of the 20th Century, and a savvy semi-fictional creation deftly mixing establishment authority and progressive compassion, this highly entertaining, frequently moving play is now here to provide it.
To get some narrative tension into the mix, Rambo savvily sets his play on the very night Landers is trying to write her famous column announcing her own divorce. That device comes at a credibility cost in reality: Given that she had just discovered her husband’s infidelity, that surely was not a night in which Lederer would have been inclined to reminisce in such a breezy fashion.
But we find ourselves willing to let that pass. It’s a moment of vulnerability that’s dramatically necessary for a play about a columnist who had so much to say with surety about other people’s problems. Clearly, Rambo had a delicious paradox in mind: The lady with all the answers didn’t know what to do with the elephant in her own front room. The lady who moved with the times wouldn’t — couldn’t — make “an arrangement” with the errant man she loved. She decided instead to buy him some new underwear and to push him out the door.
Yet for better or worse, it quickly becomes clear that Rambo didn’t have the heart to push the point; his palpable affection for Lederer wouldn’t permit such a betrayal.
A problem solver
In the world of this play, at least, those famous 2 inches of white space left by Landers (and newspapers across the country) “in honor of a fine marriage that didn’t make it to the finish line” meant that this was a lady who actually did have all the answers. Even for her own problems.
In the theater, at least, Rambo makes a surprisingly good case. Lederer, after all, was equal measures idealist and realist, an unchanging authority figure also familiar with personal reinvention.
And as Graff’s pretend Ann Landers was reading that entire divorce letter to her pretend Margo over the phone at the end of the evening Thursday, Eppie Lederer’s real daughter could be seen in her seat, wiping away tears.
As Howard’s real mother once smartly observed, we all need someone to listen to our side of the story.
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cjones5@tribune.com
