Born in Sioux City, Iowa, on July 4, 1918, Esther Pauline (Eppie, “Ann”) and Pauline Esther (Popo, “Abby”) were identical twin daughters of Russian immigrants. Their father was a grocery merchant who owned a vaudeville theater. The sisters got married in a double wedding in their Sioux City synagogue in 1939. Plainspoken Midwesterners, their answers, according to Life magazine, “often crackle like vaudeville punch lines, and they never hesitate to give the supplicant the back of their hand.” Ask Ann Landers and Dear Abby, wrote Life, “have kidnapped that ancient journalistic device, the lovelorn column, trimmed its length, discarded its reticences.” (Two of Lederer’s signature advices were “Wake up and smell the coffee” and “Get a pet.”)
The sisters cornered the market on syndicated advice columns during the second half of the twentieth century. Lederer had four secretaries; Phillips had three assistants to type her replies. In their heydays, Lederer got two thousand letters a week from readers; Phillips received seven thousand. Lederer claimed that every letter that arrived with a name and address was answered. She said she wrote all the answers herself.
Each day, at the Ann Landers office on the fifth floor of the Tribune Tower, at 435 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, two clerks opened two thousand or more envelopes, sorting letters into categories. Four staffers selected anywhere from two hundred to five hundred for her to read. A chauffeur conveyed these to Lederer’s co-op apartment a dozen blocks to the north, where she lived with her husband, Jules Lederer—a onetime salesman of pencils and hats who went on to great success in Budget Rent a Car—and daughter. Their eleven-room East Lake Shore Drive apartment was the former home of the French consul general. Lederer rose at noon and worked until two in the morning. She chose letters to print, editing them, correcting grammar, and removing profanity. When asked how she picked from among the letters delivered, Lederer said she looked “for letters that teach something. Or that people can relate to. Or that are very offbeat.”
Three months after Lederer began at the Sun-Times, something caused a schism between the sisters. Phillips had helped her sister write responses, and Lederer’s editor put a stop to the practice, prohibiting her from farming out the work. Phillips left and set up shop at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she wrote under the byline of Abigail Van Buren. (“I took the Abigail from the Old Testament, for Abigail was a prophetess in the Book of Samuel,” she wrote in 1981. “I chose Van Buren from our eighth president, Martin Van Buren, because I liked the aristocratic, old-family ring.”)