Dear Abby's alter ego, Pauline Friedman Phillips, died Wednesday at 94. The Dear Abby advice column ran for decades alongside that of Pauline's twin sister, who wrote Dear Ann Landers.
"Dear Abby" advice columnist Pauline Friedman Phillips, known to millions of readers as Abigail van Buren, died Wednesday. In this picture, she was signing autographs for dozens of fans after the dedication of a "Dear Abby" star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Valentine's Day, 2001.
Reed Saxon / AP / File
EnlargeTwo men had recently bought a house together in the tiny San Francisco neighborhood of Nob Hill, and the neighbors were annoyed. The men were entertaining "a very suspicious mixture of company," the neighbors wrote into their paper's advice column, asking, "How can we improve the neighborhood?"
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"You could move,"?Dear?Abby?replied.
That zinger was such classic?Abby?? real name, Pauline Friedman Phillips ? that it moved her daughter to burst into laughter Thursday when reminded of it, even though she had just returned from the funeral of her mother, who died a day earlier at age 94 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
"People weren't really talking about homosexuality back then," Jeanne Phillips, who now writes the famous syndicated column, said. "But you know, there wasn't a subject my mother wouldn't take on."
As the world said goodbye to?Dear?Abby?on Thursday, the Web was full of her snappiest one-liners, responses to thousands of letters over the decades that she wrote in her daily column. But her admirers noted that behind the humor and wit was a huge heart, and a genuine desire to improve people's lives.
"She really wanted to help people," said Judith Martin, the etiquette columnist known as Miss Manners. "Yes, she wrote with humor, but with great sympathy. She had an enormous amount of influence, and for the good. Her place in the culture was really extraordinary."
The long-running "Dear?Abby" column first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956. Phillips was hardly experienced, but she had managed to snag an interview for the job. A skeptical editor allowed her to write a few sample columns, and Phillips was hired.
She wrote under the name Abigail Van Buren, plucking the name Abigail from the Bible and Van Buren from American history. Her column competed for decades with that of Ann Landers, who was none other than her twin sister, Esther Friedman Lederer (she died in 2002.) Their relationship was stormy in their early adult years, but they later regained the closeness they'd had growing up in Sioux City, Iowa.
Carolyn Hax, who writes her own syndicated advice column, feels that one can't speak of one sister without the other, so influential were they both, and at the same time.
"Any of us who do this owe them such a debt," she said. "The advice column was a backwater of the newspaper, and now it is so woven into our cultural fabric. These columns are loved and widely read, by people you wouldn't expect. That couldn't have happened without them."
In a time before confessional talk shows and the nothing-is-too-private culture of the Web, the sisters' columns offered a rare window into Americans' private lives and a forum for discussing marriage, sex and the swiftly changing mores of the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
The two columns differed in style, though. While Ann Landers responded to questioners with homey, detailed advice,?Abby's?replies were more flippant and occasionally risqu?, like some collected for her 1981 book "The Best of?Dear?Abby."
Dear?Abby: My boyfriend is going to be 20 years old next month. I'd like to give him something nice for his birthday. What do you think he'd like? ? Carol
Dear?Carol: Nevermind what he'd like, give him a tie.
Dear?Abby: I've been going with this girl for a year. How can I get her to say yes? ? Don
Dear?Don: What's the question?
Jeanne Phillips, who took over the column in 2002 after a few years of sharing the byline, recalled in a telephone interview Thursday her mother's response to a woman who wrote in detail of how many drinks she'd shared with her date one night. "Did I do wrong?" the woman wrote, in the daughter's retelling.
"Probably," her mom responded.
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