Abby Dear Celebrates Another 4th : Birthday Woman Ignites Some Fireworks of Her Own

The Fourth of July? I love it! When we were kids, my twin sister and I thought all those firecrackers and skyrockets were just for us, for our birthday. We were born on the Fourth, you know . . . . --Abigail Van Buren

Abby is 68 today. That’s Dear Abby, of course, and those who know her use the modifier less as address than description.

For those who don’t know her, the question of the moment, any moment, remains. She’s read by millions daily, tens of millions. That we know. Be that as it may, is she for real? Really for real? Dear ?

The answer resounds like a five-inch salute set off in a mailbox: Absolutely! Can one make a judgment, snap or definitive, over the relatively brief span of a five-hour interview-cum-gab fest? Again, absolutely. At least with Abby. This is one of the realest ladies you are ever going to meet.

(Newspapers, at least the classier ones, have laid down new dicta, and about time: Women are to be called women , period. Not gals, or chicks, or broads. Not ladies, even. In Abby’s case, one must make an exception. Add Abby to the short list. This is a Lady.)

There are dichotomies.

There is the image of this petite, discreet lady in an implausibly red dress, seated in a private dining room of one of Los Angeles’ poshest restaurants. The lady orders, sets down the menu, throws her head back and quotes from one of her favorite poets, really lets ‘er rip: “A bunch of the boys was whoopin’ it up in the Malamute Saloon. . . .” Letter perfect. All the way through.

There is the image of the perfect hostess showing a guest around her house, pausing at a kind of photo Wall of Fame: Abby with Harry Truman; Abby with Prince Charles and Princess Diana (“Chuck and Di”); Abby with Sid Caesar; Abby with the Pope. (One is tempted to dust off the old chestnut: “Who’s that guy with Abby?”)

More Dichotomies

“Oh dear,” she says, “I suppose this is bragging. Just the fact that I have the pictures out where you can see them.”

Juxtaposed is the image of the lady in the posh restaurant dipping into her handbag, near tears now, to show a set of photos sent along by a battered wife from Idaho. “I called her, of course,” Abby says. “I had to call her.”

Here is Abby in her red dress, in a chauffeured car rustling through a silken Beverly Hills night: “My husband Mort doesn’t drive. Neither do I. We go around in a buggy like this because I like to be driven, it’s comfortable and you can never find a parking space around here.”

And here are Abby and Mort, a week previous, walking along the beach in Santa Monica, “just the two of us, in sloppy clothes, just to be together, alone and away,” then stopping off for supper in a shopping center hole-in-the-wall where they have “this really juicy whole roasted chicken.”

(And Abby, recognized--as she often is--in the chicken joint by a young couple who ask her to settle a tempestuous argument involving a former girlfriend of the young man. Here is Abby, hunkered down among the chicken drippings, listening patiently to both sides, finally producing a common-sense judgment. “It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but she was thrilled.. . .”)

Here is Abby again, recalling a glorious life with Mort, a marriage of 47 years and still counting, and then musing over changing mores, a new set of values:

“Living together before marriage? That’s really tough for me now.

“Part of me says, ‘Maybe we’d have fewer divorces if kids knew each other a little better. It’s a question I’m asked often, but if a person has to ask, that person, I think, is probably not mature enough to handle it.

“Me, I was lucky.”

The facts are pretty well known, but perhaps bear rehashing:

Born July 4, 1918, in Sioux City, of Russian immigrant parents. Three sisters, including a twin: Esther Pauline Friedman, a k a Eppie. Abby is Pauline Esther Friedman; she’s Popo.

Twins, “precocious, mischievous, talkative,” are into everything, up to and including the local college, Morningside--a noted breeding ground for Methodist ministers--where they co-author a gossip column called the Campus Rat.

Both drop out after junior year to marry (“It’s what you did then”), Popo to Morton Phillips, scion of the Presto Cooker family, also 20.

Eppie moves to Chicago, becomes advice columnist Ann Landers, mails Popo batches of letters from readers, to which Popo sends back suggested replies, apt and pithy.

Landers’ syndicate puts kibosh on sister act, but Popo has “acquired a taste for giving advice.” Now living in the Bay Area, she applies for a job at the San Mateo Times, which will never win a Pulitzer for prescience. They’re not interested. Popo lands full force on the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956, becomes Abigail Van Buren, moves at the speed of delight from $20 a week to a career-boosting appearance on Ed Murrow’s “Person to Person” to worldwide syndication and household namenclature.

(Along the way, a rather celebrated rift with Ann Landers, ignited by a Chicago syndicate frosted at Eppie for having introduced Popo to the lovelorn game in the first place.

(“For seven years,” Abby wrote in a column collection, “my career flourished but I walked around with a hole in my heart.”

(At length, a phone call from Chicago. The twins, who had resolved others’ problems so long and successfully, finally reached out and touched each other.)

It is virtually impossible to interview Mrs. Morton Phillips, not in the accepted sense. The trouble with Abby is, she listens too damn well.

“Nonsense,” she protests. “I haven’t stopped talking since you got here.”

True enough, but what she has been talking about, until almost forcibly diverted, is her interviewer. She is interesting, this Abby, even fascinating, but above all, she is interested . In you, in me, in the milkman as well as the mighty.

She is almost apologetic about her celebrity friends--”It isn’t as if I’m trying to impress anyone. A person in my position has got to meet a few people. But you must appreciate that most of the neatest people I know you never heard of.”

Some you have, though, and through the network of a thousand John and Mary Smiths slip the likes of Cary Grant, her dinner companion of a few weeks ago at a gala tribute--to Abby. (“Legend though he is, I want to tell you that Cary Grant wouldn’t impress me a single bit unless he were a perfectly charming guy, which he is.”)

The likes of violinist Itzhak Perlman (“a master, yes, but a loving, loving father”); of Armand Hammer, beside whom Abby sits as a director of the United World College in New Mexico; of Prince Charles, a fellow UWC director (“the epitome of a gentleman, but more important, a gentle man”).

Mainly, though, there’s the man on the street--or, since Abby doesn’t drive, the man on the plane, or the train. Perfect strangers, she says--and some not so perfect--somehow gravitate toward Abby, and “sit right down and pour their hearts out.

“Of course, it’s no great tribute to me. They figure they’re never going to see you again. But I imagine they’re people whom nobody listens to, and they take the opportunity and let it all hang out.

“I’m not reserved, not all that guarded, and I do have an interest in people. I think they feel that.

“For my part, I enjoy the feeling that people trust me and want to tell me things. But it’s nothing really remarkable.

“There are a lot of people who feel the same way I do about other people. I don’t think it’s all that unusual. . . .”

But it is, it is .

There are other sides of Abby, of course, many of them revealed in a mini-tour of her quintessentially comfortable Beverly Hills home.

The bathroom, of all places, papered as it is with clipped cartoons--many of them psychiatry jokes, some of them refreshingly raunchy. On one wall, another photo, this one of Abby and Richard M. Nixon, on which somebody has pasted a cartoon balloon: “Would I lie to you , Abby?”

The office where the serious work is done: hot-line telephones; ponderous but dog-eared reference books; a “Modigliani” that’s really a Frances Hammer (“She does knock-offs and they’re darned good--a gift of love, and that’s more important than an original”); dozens and dozens of plaques of appreciation: Kidney Foundation, Salvation Army, Overeaters Anonymous, Cancer Society, Goodwill Industries, something from Oral Roberts citing Abby’s “deep faith and wisdom from God. . . . “

“I was a judge at a Miss Teen-age America contest in Tulsa when Oral Roberts gave me this. He thanked me, and I said, ‘OK, will you do something for me?’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Will you speak in tongues?’ I asked.

“Here we are in this cluttered makeup room and he does it, he actually speaks in tongues!

“So I asked him, ‘What did you actually say ?’

“Well, he looked at me like I was crazy. Nobody ever asks them what they said .

“But I’ll say this for him: He recovered nicely, thought fast and said: ‘It meant “Bless this daughter of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. . . .” ’ By the time he’d finished, I had me a full-length sermon. . . .”

No sermons from Abby. Just good talk, and lots of it. At the living-room bar now, she provides for her guest, then rummages around the back of the bar for something for herself and comes up with one of those little airline bottles of pre-mixed Manhattan.

What are they looking for, she is asked, those hundreds of thousands who write to her, who cling for dear life to the replies of the “daughter of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

“They’re looking for permission,” she says simply. “ ‘Is it OK? Can I? May I? Should I?’

“I’m a sort of Supreme Court.

“My answers? They’re instinctive, intuitive. I just have a sense , not any better or worse than anyone else, really. It’s nothing special, just the process of coming to a conclusion.

“No, I’m not right all the time, but who’s to say what’s correct or incorrect, what’s definitively right or wrong?

“I figure if it works, it’s got to be good--and I would say it works more often than not.”

At the restaurant, a crisp Pouilly Fume sets off the occasion. The occasion of being , mostly--Abby lives “for the here and now,” can’t wait for the day to begin, rising at 5:30 to scale an Alp of correspondence--but also the occasion of the 30th year of the column, the upcoming 68th birthday, the just-past 47th wedding anniversary.

“Mort,” Abby says. “That’s who I turn to for advice. Strong yet very gentle. Reliable, dependable, solid.

“Even before we were married, I sensed something very unusual in this man. It was like archeology: The deeper you dug, the better it got.

“And handsome? He looked like a Talmudic Robert Taylor. . . .

“Of course I was lucky. What do you know when you’re 20? People have hardly developed. They change.

“No, I never recommend marriage at 18, 19, 20. You’ve got to be crazy to make such a commitment so young. What I recommend to young women now is an education, some sort of training. Learn to take care of yourself, because the chances are you’ll have to.”

It was different in Abby’s day. “My goal? My goal was what my mother told me to do when I was a little girl: Grow up and marry a real nice man who’ll take care of you.

“It never occurred to me that I’d have any kind of career. But after I was married, I thought, ‘There has to be something more to life than mah-jongg.’

“What I did was volunteer for the Red Cross. I ended up training Gray Ladies--at veterans hospitals, nursing homes.

“I did it--well, because I had to. There was more to life, I knew, than just enjoying yourself. Correction: I was enjoying myself. The satisfaction I got as a volunteer gave me more pleasure than anything else possibly could.”

And pointed, by natural progression, to another sort of helping hand: the column that virtually absorbs her life.

“I love to read,” Abby says, “but I really don’t have the time, not for pleasure at any rate.”

She does confess a weakness for poetry, or at least enlightened doggerel: Kipling, Millay, Robert W. Service.

The mention of Service kicks off a contest between Abby and guest: lines, passages, great rollicking gulps of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Abby gives as good as she gets.

A further confession: “I’ve written a lot of poetry--if you can call it poetry--and not bad, either. At least it rhymes. Not for any other reason than I had something to say. I write it for special occasions: parties, my husband’s birthday. I remember one I did for him that started like this:

There is nothing more defeating

I would rather take a beating

Than go shopping for a gift to give to

Mort.

For he needs another watch

Or another case of Scotch

Like upon his (you know what) he

needs a wart . . . .

Even the waiter breaks up.

On the way home, more stories, not so much unprintable as private--observations of the rich and famous that Abby usually reserves for gloves-off letters to her sisters.

She is a marvelous raconteur, but as usual, her thoughts drift back to her column.

“I work hard,” she says, “but I don’t consider it work because I love it. I really do.

“I never intended it to be a profession. A lot of people could do it better than I--I’m not kidding myself. That’s why all this hoo-hah, all these kudos. . . . Well, I can’t believe it.

“But the personal rewards are enormous--beyond price, beyond any small fame I might have achieved.

“Every day I get letters from people who say, ‘You changed my life. Thank you.’

“Now that’s important. That’s what makes me feel terrific.”