Landers portrayal starts with the hair
NEW YORK — How do you turn a twangy Texas blonde into a stylish, Midwestern media superstar?
It’s all about the hair.
When Judith Ivey takes the stage as Esther Pauline “Eppie” Lederer — aka Ann Landers — at the Cherry Lane Theatre next week, she takes it with the legendary advice columnist’s black bouffant firmly in place.
“The hair’s right,” Ivey assures us.
So is the distinctive cadence of Lederer’s native Iowa, her home study on Chicago’s swanky Gold Coast and the mammoth IBM Selectric typewriter that serves as Ivey’s only co-star in “The Lady With All the Answers.”
It’s the two-time Tony winner’s reprise as the fiftysomething Eppie duringaprofessionally precarious moment in1975— how to break the news to millions of readers that she’s divorcing Budget Rent-a-Car mogul Jules Lederer. This a decade after Eppie first began to soften her “cure it, don’t kill it” advice to married couples in crisis, driven by the home-fires discord of her only child, the four-time married Margo Howard.
On stage, Lederer describes herself as once being “so anti-divorce, my dateline could be Vatican City,” but what to do when your husband of nearly 36 years falls in love with a woman younger than said daughter?
“Her husband reveals to her that he’s been having an affair for three years and she didn’t pick up on it, and she said, ‘That’s it.’ That was the end of the marriage, but they remained friends,” Ivey said.
Only rarely did Lederer write of herself or her family as Ann Landers. A notable exception was her 1969 tribute to her one and only husband for their 30th wedding anniversary. Another was the divorce column that “CSI” writer and co-producer David Rambo took hold of with Howard’s blessing in his one-woman play first done in regional theater in 2005.
Lederer received 32,000 letters of support in response to the divorce column. She offered her readers few details, praising her hard-drinking ex as a loving, supportive and “extraordinary man.”
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