There was no one too famous, too rich or too important to escape Eppie Lederer’s advice–even when she wasn’t officially on duty as Ann Landers.
Boxes of private letters that will go on the auction block this weekend — and it seems Lederer saved every scrap of the correspondence she received and made copies of all the correspondence she sent — suggest her column was only the half of it.
Days after the 1976 presidential election, Lederer dashed off a note dispensing — what else? — advice to the newly elected president, “Jimmy,” as she addressed him, about who should be his secretary of state. “Cy Vance … He is head and shoulders above anyone else whose name has been mentioned.”
After seeing John F. Kennedy Jr. speak to Oprah Winfrey in 1996, Lederer told him not to say “You know” so much and to practice by watching videos of himself on television to improve his performance, as she had done.
Two years ago, she wrote to her twin sister, Pauline Phillips, better-known as Abigail Van Buren, the author of the Dear Abby column.
“Popo, dear:” she wrote, “As you know I am a regular reader of your column, and you are almost always right on. In today’s column — Sunday — you missed the boat. … For a sit-down, black-tie dinner, the single woman’s invitation should ALWAYS say AND guest.”
This weekend, five months after Lederer’s death at age 83, practically everything left in her wake that family or friends did not claim is going to auction. From her vast East Lake Shore Drive apartment — “Fourteen rooms? Fifteen rooms? No one ever counted,” joked her daughter Margo Howard — comes a collection that demonstrates the eclectic interests of the advice columnist.
The auctions will be held Saturday and Sunday in Elgin, Ill., at Bunte Auction Services, and Sunday in San Francisco at Butterfields Auctioneers, which is conducting its event live at the auction house and on the Internet.
Thousands of items will be sold: her lime green, silk-covered Italian neoclassical settee, her Louis XV-style walnut Steinway, her pair of Chinese carved ivory lanterns, her 18 place settings of gilt French Renaissance flatware. Her collection of owls, from $5 souvenirs to $1,000 crystal statuettes sent to her as a symbol of wisdom, will go. So will her ball gowns with matching purses, five typewriters, and her 1992 navy blue Cadillac, with 56,000 miles on the odometer and its signature plates “AL 1955,” for the columnist’s initials and the year she began her column, which was published in the Chicago Sun-Times until she moved to the Tribune in 1987.
But the auction also will include boxes and boxes of letters as well as photos that give glimpses of the woman so many people felt they knew through her advice column, and illuminate her influence with the rich and famous.
President Ronald Reagan thanked her for sending chocolate-chip cookies. Vice President Al Gore wrote to thank her for a note about a television appearance. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, while an editor at Doubleday, thanked her for a quote recommending an unnamed book. “They are doing extra print runs, the works, because they foresee a word from you sending hordes into the bookstores,” Onassis wrote in 1990.
Among the boxes are the faxes and handwritten notes that were sent almost daily between the sister columnists during the ’90s dealing with practically any subject on their minds.
“I’m nervous about the upcoming election,” Lederer wrote to her sister on the eve of the 2000 election. “I can’t bear the thought of looking at George Bush’s smirk for the next four years–maybe eight. … The next president will make three, maybe four appointments and I can see Roe vs. Wade and all the good stuff going down the tubes.”
Months earlier, she had seen candidate Bush at a dinner gathering, and she told her sister then, “The guy is extremely good looking, but when he opens his mouth, you know that he is not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.”
Although the sisters were known for their rivalry, the correspondence in the auction suggests they were quite affectionate toward one another. “I’m off and running to get a touch of Botox,” Lederer wrote to her sister in 1998, adding, “Have you heard of it? … We must share our beauty secrets always.”
Howard, Lederer’s daughter and an advice columnist for the Web publication Slate, said she and her family went through her mother’s belongings but simply could not make room for all there was (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“There was no way that apartment was coming with me,” Howard said.
She said she decided to auction the items because, “I know that it would interest people who felt that she had touched their lives.”
She said she felt she had a duty to make some letters available in the public domain. “Mother just couldn’t make up her mind where she wanted them to go, so a bunch of things were left to my discretion,” Howard said.
Some correspondence was boxed together so it could not be sold piecemeal, Howard said, adding that universities and libraries had been notified of the sale. She said she thought the notes from her mother’s trip to Vietnam during the war, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to abandon her opposition to America’s military involvement, would make for interesting reading.
Asked if anyone might consider the sale of her mother’s belongings unseemly, Howard said: “No. How would that be? If [anyone] has a better way of distributing literally thousands of items, I’d love to hear it.”
She said Butterfields Auctioneers spent weeks combing through her mother’s apartment. Then Bunte Auction Services took what remained. The auctions are expected to raise several hundreds of thousands of dollars for Lederer’s estate.
“Mother was not a shopper, but she would see things on the fly and, one way or another, see that they were sent to Chicago,” Howard wrote in the Butterfields auction catalog.
“In many ways she could be described as a collector of people rather than objects, and this is borne out by her fascinating trove of correspondence with politicians, celebrities and other luminaries. Even coming from a generation of pre-e-mail letter writers, Mother stands out as one of the last great correspondents of all time.”