The Press: Red-Eyed Woe

Each week some 5,000 woe-laden readers of the Chicago Sun-Times’s Lovelorn Columnist Ann Landers—who is syndicated in 342 other papers—apply to her for solace and advice. They usually get it, sometimes right between the eyes: to the miss who asked how to treat her swain’s offer to “get married or something,” Ann snapped: “You should get married—or nothing.” Last August one of Columnist Landers’ greatest admirers, Sun-Times Executive Editor Larry Fanning (“This girl has something beyond mere shrewdness”), detached her for a venture into straight reporting. Assignment: Moscow.

Thrilled but undazzled, Columnist Landers—who is the wife of Ballpoint Pen Executive Jules Lederer—took a Berlitz cram course in Russian, then flew off to see what makes Reds red-eyed. After three weeks she came back with a stack of well-filled notebooks, turned out a dozen columns on her impressions of Russia (“Everybody needed a bath and a haircut”; “Russians put a premium on brains”; “a warm, affectionate people”). Through all her copy ran familiar Landers material: “Ivan is worried about Irena’s supervisor at the furniture factory. He has heard rumors—and she has been coming home quite late.” “Ludmilla and Serge are in love and want to get married, but they must wait at least two years for an apartment. Elina has a lecherous boss. Igor hates his mother-in-law.” At divorce hearings in Moscow’s city court, “the next case was Nicolai Petrovitch against Valentina Petrovitch. Nicolai spoke for about ten minutes, describing Valentina as a lazy, no-good wife who neither kept house nor worked at a steady job. He said her mother interfered constantly.”

Except for the dateline and the names, Reporter Landers’ Russian diary, which has been bought by 55 papers, was barely distinguishable from her running chronicle of domestic woe. She went to Russia, said Landers Fan Fanning, “to find out what the hell people are up to.” What people are up to in Moscow, according to Dear Ann, is the same old mischief and misery that fills the capitalist press’s lovelorn columns.