Publicist Gene Willis of Universal Uclick said Phillips died Wednesday after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Phillips’
column competed for decades with the advice column of Ann Landers,
written by her twin sister, Esther Friedman Lederer. Their relationship
was stormy in their early adult years, but later they regained the close
relationship they had growing up in Sioux City, Iowa.
The
two columns differed in style. Ann Landers responded to questioners
with homey, detailed advice. Abby’s replies were often flippant
one-liners.
Phillips admitted that
her advice changed over the years. When she started writing the column,
she was reluctant to advocate divorce:
“I
always thought that marriage should be forever,” she explained. “I
found out through my readers that sometimes the best thing they can do
is part. If a man or woman is a constant cheater, the situation can be
intolerable. Especially if they have children. When kids see parents
fighting, or even sniping at each other, I think it is terribly
damaging.”
She willingly expressed
views that she realized would bring protests. In a 1998 interview she
remarked: “Whenever I say a kind word about gays, I hear from people,
and some of them are damn mad. People throw Leviticus, Deuteronomy and
other parts of the Bible to me. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve always been
compassionate toward gay people.”
If
the letters sounded suicidal, she took a personal approach: “I’ll call
them. I say, ‘This is Abby. How are you feeling? You sounded awfully
low.’ And they say, ‘You’re calling me?’ After they start talking, you
can suggest that they get professional help.”
Asked
about Viagra, she replied: “It’s wonderful. Men who can’t perform feel
less than manly, and Viagra takes them right off the spot.”
About
working mothers: “I think it’s good to have a woman work if she wants
to and doesn’t leave her children unattended — if she has a reliable
person to care for them. Kids still need someone to watch them until
they are mature enough to make responsible decisions.”
One trend Phillips adamantly opposed: children having sex as early as 12 years old.
“Kids
grow up awfully fast these days,” she said. “You should try to have a
good relationship with your kids, no matter what they do.”
The
woman known to the world as Ann Landers died in June 2002. Later that
year, the family revealed that Phillips had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease. By then Phillips’ daughter, Jeanne Phillips, who
had helped her mother with the Dear Abby column for years, was its sole
author.
Pauline Esther Friedman,
known as Popo, was born on Independence Day 1918 in Sioux City, Iowa, 17
minutes after her identical twin, Esther Pauline (Eppie.). Their father
was a well-off owner of a movie theater chain. Their mother took care
of the home. Both were immigrants from Russia who had fled their native
land in 1905 because of the persecution of Jews.
“My
parents came with nothing. They all came with nothing,” Phillips said
in a 1986 Associated Press interview. She recalled that her parents
always remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty: “It’s amazing the impact
the lady of the harbor had on them. They always held her dear, all
their lives.”
The twins spent
their growing-up years together. They dressed alike, they both played
the violin, they wrote gossip columns for their high school and college
newspapers. They attended Morningside College in Sioux City. Two days
before their 21st birthday, they had a double wedding. Pauline married
Morton Phillips, a businessman, Esther married Jules Lederer, a business
executive and later founder of Budget Rent-a-Car. The twins’ lives
diverged as they followed their husbands to different cities.
The
Phillipses lived in Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Wis., and San Francisco,
and had a son and daughter, Edward Jay and Jeanne. Esther lived in
Chicago, had a daughter, Margo, and in 1955 she applied for and was
given the job of writing the advice column. She adopted the existing
column’s name, Ann Landers.
Pauline,
who had been working for philanthropies and the Democratic Party,
followed her sister’s lead, though she insisted it wasn’t the reason for
her decision. She arranged for an interview with an editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle and presented sample columns, arguing that the
paper’s lovelorn column was boring. The editors admired her breezy
style, and she was hired.
Searching
for a name for the column, Pauline chose Abigail from the Bible and Van
Buren from the eighth American president. Within a year she signed a
10-year contract with the McNaught Syndicate, which spread her column
across the country.
“I was cocky,”
she admitted in 1998. “My contemporaries would come to me for advice. I
got that from my mother: the ability to listen and to help other people
with their problems. I also got Daddy’s sense of humor.”
Pauline
applied for the advice column without notifying her sister, and that
reportedly resulted in bad feelings. For a long time they did not speak
to each other, but their differences were patched up. In June 2001, the
twins, 83, attended the 90th birthday party in Omaha, Neb., of their
sister Helen Brodkey.
The advice
business extended to the second generation of the Friedmans. Phillips
had announced in 2000 that her daughter would share her byline. Her
sister’s daughter, Margo Howard, wrote an advice column for the online
magazine Slate.
Aside from the
Dear Abby column, which appeared in 1,000 newspapers as far off as
Brazil and Thailand, Phillips conducted a radio version of “Dear Abby”
from 1963 to 1975 and wrote best-selling books about her life and
advice.
In her book “The Best of
Abby,” Phillips commented that her years writing the column “have been
fulfilling, exciting and incredibly rewarding. … My readers have told me
that they’ve learned from me. But it’s the other way around. I’ve
learned from them. Has it been a lot of work? Not really. It’s only work
if you’d rather be doing something else.”
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