Pauline Phillips
You know her as “Dear Abby,” the name of her advice column, which began way back in 1956. Or you may know her as Abigail Van Buren, the woman who was supposedly behind the column, which in its heyday was the most widely syndicated in the world, appearing in 1,400 newspapers and attracting a readership of tens of millions. But in fact she was the former Pauline Esther Friedman, born in 1918 in Sioux City, Iowa, the youngest of four daughters of Russian Jewish immigrants who had come, destitute, through Ellis Island.
What you might not know is that one of those other three girls was Pauline Esther’s identical 17-minutes-older twin with a near identical name – Esther Pauline Friedman – who gained fame as “Ann Landers,” writing her own advice column.
As a girl, Pauline (Abby) later recalled, “I was cocky. My contemporaries would come to me for advice. I got that from my mother: the ability to listen and to help other people with their problems. I also got Daddy’s sense of humor.” Her column was humor-filled and also featured lots of tough love; Diane Sawyer once memorably called her “the pioneering queen of salty advice.”
She and Esther were in lockstep through their school years, and when both were studying journalism and psychology at Morningside College, they wrote a joint gossip column for the school paper. They married in a double wedding ceremony. (Pauline’s marriage to Morton Phillips would last 73 years, ending only with her death this year.) But when Pauline invented Abigail Van Buren at the San Francisco Chronicle without telling her sister, who had begun as Ann Landers a year earlier, the bad blood flowed.
Discriminating readers took sides between the two. Some even switched sides. Dan Savage, the author of four books of relationship advice and the syndicated column Savage Love, is one (he started in the Ann camp), as he told LIFE upon Pauline Phillips’s death: “Ann was always great and funny, but Abby was pithier. Abby could stick a knife into your ribs before you realized what had happened to you.
“There was one issue she got, and this was decades ago: Abby was ahead of her time on issues involving sexuality, sexual orientation and tolerance – ahead of Ann, who eventually came around but for a time was wrong about gay people. Abby received a question from a person who was distressed because a gay couple had moved into the neighborhood. The questioner wanted to know what they could do about it to improve the neighborhood. Abby’s response in three words: ‘You could move.’ Sometimes it’s just better to be funny. Instead of scold or pound the table, Abby left it up to the person to decide what she meant by those three words. For gay people who were starting to live openly at a time when that was less common and a lot riskier, to have the backing of a mainstream voice like Abby’s – that really meant something.
“I always like to say that I am a Midwestern gal just like Ann and Abby were. All the best no-nonsense advice columnists come from the Midwest. East Coasters are too aggressive, and West Coasters are too empathetic. We Midwesterners, we have a way of leveling with people when delivering a straight-up hard truth so that it doesn’t alienate them or make them angry. And with Abby, there’s just this blunt way of perhaps prying the person’s brain open without coddling them but while caring for them. I think that’s what Midwestern gals like Abby and Ann and I all have.”
(2013 Life Magazine Farewells book)