A Life in Letters - Ann Landers' Letters to Her Only Child

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

I was fifteen when Mother became Ann Landers. The excitement of a burgeoning career was still new, so her letters to me at college reveal the exhilaration of adding client papers, making speeches, and becoming a big-deal newspaperwoman. People have asked me—for decades—how I felt about my mother suddenly taking on a demanding, high-profile job. The truth is that it was like a gift from the gods. Finally, some of her focus was deflected from me. I was never one of those kids who could later complain I received short shrift in the attention department. On the contrary, my mother had always zeroed in on me like a laser. Probably because I was an only child, I was overprotected and the primary object of her concerns, hopes, and fears. I periodically rebelled . . . though in reasonably ladylike ways. I was considered “sophisticated” even as a high school girl. I smoked and I drank scotch on the rocks; I was well traveled and a magnet for men. It was all restrained and decorous enough, however, so that Mother never felt she had to lower the boom.

It is fair to say that my mother was ambitious for me, in the sense that she was, in spirit, a stage mother . . . without the stage. She wanted me to do well and to shine. She was similarly supportive of my father and his business endeavors. He loved to travel, and she never leaned on him to do less of it and spend more time with her. She was positive and optimistic. And when it came to me, she had an all-involved and unstinting love. Starting in college, and all throughout my life, those who knew us best and saw us together would remark that they’d never seen a mother-daughter relationship as close as ours. That closeness is the underpinning of the letters that follow.

I went to Brandeis University because it was the school my mother was pushing for. I do believe that on some subconscious level she thought it would serve as a belated Sunday school. (The reason I’d had no proper religious education was that during my grade school years we lived in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a small town with only thirty-two Jewish families. The best that could be managed was a sporadic, makeshift Sunday school.) Not to put too fine a point on it, there weren’t that many schools other than Brandeis to choose from. Vassar put me on a waiting list . . . too dicey a proposition to suit me. My “fallback school,” the University of Pennsylvania, didn’t even accept me. Sarah Lawrence was the only other school, besides Brandeis, to accept me on the straightaway. Mother pleaded with me not to go there; her argument being that given the kind of student I was, it would not be useful for me to park myself at a school that had no grades, no majors, and quite a bit of freedom. She was also concerned, given its location in Bronxville, that I would spend most of my time in Manhattan at Saks or Bergdorf Goodman. Having waltzed through high school with no discernible devotion to scholarship, it would be fair to say, quoting that sage, Diane Keaton, “I went to school as a social occasion.”

In the late ’50s Brandeis was a school for intellectual heavy-hitters. That would not have been me, but I suspect my lack of seriousness was counterbalanced by quite strong board scores, a really good interview with the dean of admissions, and recommendations from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and then-Senator Hubert H. Humphrey.

This is the last paragraph of a letter from Senator Humphrey to Mother, dated January 24, 1958:

When are you coming to Washington? Tell Margo that I have written a recommendation for her to Brandeis University. She will not only be permitted to enter as a result of that recommendation, but most likely become the Dean of Women or Campus Queen on the day of registration. When Humphrey recommends they are recommended.

Best wishes,

Sincerely,

Hubert H. [hand-signed]

Hubert H. Humphrey

It worked! There was no offer of Deanship, or reign as Campus Queen, but I was accepted. My academic career can be tracked in the following four years’ worth of letters. Well . . . not quite four years . . . and not always having to do with academics. What I now find most interesting is Mother’s sliding scale of supportiveness, acceptance, or motivational browbeating about my various approaches to school. I was going to graduate; I wasn’t going to graduate. Good grades didn’t matter; they did matter.

Mother wanted me to date lots of different people—not choose a special one—but when such a person periodically appeared she was encouraging. She wanted me to take advantage of the social possibilities of the Ivy League, but she also endorsed putting schoolwork first. When it came to my college career, therefore, she was inconsistent and contradictory . . . but these approaches were indicative of her wish to be supportive. She was, I suspect, more involved with the social aspects of my college life than other girls’ mothers. What I did not understand, at the time, was that my love life was being quarterbacked by a world-recognized expert in Chicago.