From the S&S archives:
Ann Landers: Chocoholic and a shoulder to lean on

Columnist Ann Landers is also a "chocoholic" who works her "fanny off" to stay slim and doesn't let the burden of other people's tragedy get her down.

She says she doesn't know all the answers. But, during an hour's conversation here before she took part in the USAREUR teen forum in Berchtesgaden last weekend, she talked so eloquently about her career and character that you'd hardly know it.

She admits there are some problems she can't solve, although she says "I don't like to say to a reader that it's utterly hopeless even though it is.

"Questions on homosexuality are difficult to deal with. Questions from parents with uncontrollable children bother me.

"There's little that can be done to turn a homosexual straight; it's difficult after they're in their 20s. And you never know what sets uncontrollable children off the track."

Faced with these problems, Miss Landers said, "There's not only no comfort, there's no advice I can give." She tries to explain to uncontrollable children's parents that "we don't know what causes this. A lot of parents feel guilty."

"I try to relieve the guilt," she said.

To understand what kind of an "advice-to-the-lovelorn" columnist Ann Landers is, you must first know what kind she isn't; the drunken bum journalist sometimes depicted in movies or the sufferer vividly portrayed in Nathanael West's book, "Miss Lonelyhearts." In that book Miss Lonelyhearts was a newspaperman so overwhelmed by the readers' tragedy he was flooded with that he became a Christ-figure and finally perished.

When Ann Landers began the column back in 1955, "the first book I took out to read was "Miss Lonelyhearts,' " she said. "I didn't think that was me. I've learned to take these problems seriously, but not personally. If I did, I couldn't function."

Before Ann Landers' column appeared there were other columnists. But often, Miss Landers said, they resembled the caricatures of books and films. Dorothy Dix, for instance, at the end of her career "was non compos mentis — out of her head — and her column was written for her by others," Miss Landers said. "Her advice was very anti-male," Miss Landers recalled, and said it was because the former columnist, who died in the late 40s, had been divorced.

Miss Landers is far more positive, in her life as well as in her column. A self-described "middle class Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa," Miss Landers, whose real name is Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer said, "I've always been pretty pleased with myself. In order to do well, you have to think well of yourself.

"The no-smoking, no-drinking is part of it," she said. In her column and in personal appearances she has often stressed that she decided at the age of 15 not to drink or smoke.

But she breakfasts on pancakes and snacks on donuts washed down with coffee (black) with no apparent worry about her trim figure; and an admirer's gift of a bar of German chocolate brought the confession that she's a "chocoholic." "To take care of the old bod, I walk, walk walk," she explained, "and I exercise my fanny off."

As to her advice, Miss Landers said, "I'm not an authority on any subject."

When asked what made her advice legitimate, she explained, "I know the authorities. I know the people who know the answers, the top physicians and psychologists."

As to opinions on moral questions, such as sex behavior, she says they are "not engraved on a Rosetta stone."

"This is how I feel: Take it or leave it."

In the 19 years she's been writing the column, she said, some new kinds of problems have cropped up: drugs, abortions, interracial marriages and divorce, and shoplifting. But, she says, most of her writers have "man-andwife problems."

"The husband cheats on the wife; the wife drinks; the wife's sloppy; the husband doesn't bathe," she explained.

Some of her readers have been writing her for years. She gave as an example one woman who had written for her advice as a teenager and now was writing her because of marriage difficulties.

Whatever her advice, however, Miss Landers is convinced her correspondents have already made up their minds as to what action to take. "I'm a shoulder to cry on; that's a therapeutic thing."