The Press: Sister Confessors

Sister Confessors From a chauffeured yellow Cadillac convertible in front of the San Francisco Chronicle building last winter stepped a shapely brunette wearing a little black dress by Dior and the scrutable smile of a woman who knows what she wants. Ushered into Sunday Editor Stanleigh Arnold’s third-floor office. Mrs. Morton (“Popo”) Phillips announced that the paper’s advice-to-the-lovelorn column had gone from drab to worse. “Why.” she protested prettily, “I know I could do better myself.” Editor Arnold suggested that she try, handed his visitor a six-week sheaf of columns by Lovelornist Molly Mayfield.

In less than two hours, Popo Phillips was back with her own replies to more than 70 lonelyheart letters. Their crisply confident style so impressed the editors that she returned the same afternoon to sign a contract to write six columns a week for the Chronicle under the pen name Abigail Van Buren. also landed a ten-year contract with the McNaught Syndicate. As she was leaving the Chronicle, Editor Arnold remarked to Popo Phillips that her witty, worldy replies to the letters reminded him of Ann (Your Problems) Landers, heartthrob star of the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate. “They ought to,” rejoined Popo. “She’s my twin sister.”

Deliberate Satire? Last week as Popo, 38, celebrated her first birthday as Abby Van Buren, she was the fastest rising lonelyheart columnist in the U.S. So quickly has her Dear Abby column caught on that it now appears in some 80 U.S. newspapers, from New York’s garter-snapping Daily Mirror (circ. 842,023) to the sobersided Portland Oregonian (181,910), only a dozen fewer syndicate clients than carry sister Ann Landers, whose real name is Mrs. Jules (“Eppie”) Lederer. This makes Abby the fourth-ranking U.S. lovelornist, after Dorothy Dix, Mary Haworth and Ann Landers.

Abby’s swift climb is the more remarkable because her column often reads like a parody of other lovelornists. In fact, San Franciscans at first thought that Abby even concocted her own letters as a deliberate takeoff. One letter to the Chronicle that is still quoted with glee came from a girl who confessed: “My boy friend took me out on my 21st birthday and wanted to show me a very special good time. I usually don’t go in much for drinking, but I had three martinis. During dinner we split a bottle of wine. After dinner we had two brandies. Did I do wrong?” Quipped Abby: “Probably.”

Last week Dear Abby related the plight of a woman who complained: “My problem is my husband. He wears false teeth —uppers and lowers—and he thinks it is real funny to take them out at parties and do a Spanish dance, using them as castanets. Should I keep him away from parties or should I just tell him he isn’t funny?” Advised Abby: “Let him have a good time. I think it is hysterical.”

Psychiatry to Chopin. Abby rarely clucks at length over the details of dating and mating. When a theater cashier confided her secret passion for the married manager, Abby counseled: “Find another job. It’s not worth being the tail-end of a double feature.” A bachelor confided that he knew a sweet, demure girl who would make a wonderful wife, and another girl, “uninhibited, gay.” who “comes up to my room.” “How,” he asked, “shall I discourage this girl?” Quipped Abby: “Which girl?” When a California husband complained that his wife, though “smoochable, affectionate and responsive” before marriage, had “cooled to a considerable degree” since they married and moved into a $40,000 home, Abby suggested: “Have your thermostat checked.”

As a result of Abby’s fast rise, sister Ann sniffs that Abby is “very imitative.” If not imitative, the two columnists have reason to show some similarity. Maiden-named Pauline Esther (Popo) and Esther Pauline (Eppie) Friedman, they are identical (5 ft. 2 in., 108 Ibs.) twins, who dressed identically until the day they were married (in a double wedding), and still find that they occasionally buy identical clothes in San Francisco and Chicago. Married to wealthy businessmen, they have many of the same friends, share interests that range from psychiatry to Chopin.

Abby’s replies are slicker, quicker and flipper, but Ann comes up with an occasional Eppiegram. To the worried young man who asked, “How can I keep my hair?” she suggested: “You could keep it in a cigar box or just throw it away like everybody else.”

Both receive more than 1,000 letters a week, and both discuss the more complex problems, especially religious, with outside advisers.” And both consistently employ the astringent approach. Explains Ann: “When you sit down and cry with people, you don’t help them. Some people have to be shook—and Ah shakes ’em.”