Margo Howard was a reluctant columnist, despite the encouragement of her mother, Eppie Lederer, the wildly popular advice maven known as Ann Landers, and a succession of admiring editors.
She lacked ambition, she was quick to say, as well as journalistic training. (She had dropped out of Brandeis University to marry her first husband.) But she was mouthy — a “mouth on a trolley,” as her father put it — and possessed of a tart wit.
When she divorced that first husband, she thought that a job might be nice, if it wasn’t too taxing, and in 1970 she began producing a frothy, thrice-weekly column called “Margo” for the Chicago Tribune. She wrote of mores on college campuses (“Parietal rules are so relaxed they’re prone”), the conundrum of marriage (“Marriages are all quite happy. It’s the living together afterward that’s so tough”), and playground hierarchies, deploying the phrase “the nanny mafia” to describe the action, after which novelist Tom Wolfe’s lawyers threatened to sue, saying she had stolen the phrase from him.
David Reuben, author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), the 1969 blockbuster, also threatened a lawsuit after she compared the book’s style to a cross between Helen Gurley Brown and Popular Mechanics. (“I was only nervous once,” she wrote of their interview. “When he removed his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves.”)
Ms. Howard was proud, she said much later, that soon all her columns had to pass muster with the paper’s lawyers before publication.
“You are the star in my crown and the thorn in my side,” her exasperated editor told her.
Ms. Howard died on July 13. She was 86. Her daughter Cricket Coleman confirmed the death but did not give a cause or location.
Over the decades, Ms. Howard dipped in and out of the news business, and marriage. After ditching the wealthy businessperson whom she described as her “starter husband” and who was the father of her three children, she went on to marry three more times. Husband No. 2 was an undertaker — when she left him after three years, she gave him the family dog as consolation, which upset the children — and No. 3 was actor Ken Howard, whom she married in 1977.
The couple fell in love after she interviewed him for a column, after which she gave up newspapering for a spell. It was a mostly happy union and lasted more than a decade.
No. 4, a keeper, was Ronald J. Weintraub, a cardiologist whom she referred to variously as Dr. Pussycat and Dr. Perfect.
In 2014, Ms. Howard published a memoir of her matrimonial adventures, Eat, Drink and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife.
“Writing is what Margo does between husbands,” editor James Hoge once teased.
But Ms. Howard’s most significant relationship was with her mother. Her first book, Eppie: The Story of Ann Landers (1982), told of how the twin daughters of Russian-Jewish immigrants became celebrated (and often feuding) advice columnists.
Esther Pauline Lederer was first to the game, winning a contest in the 1950s to write the “Dear Ann Landers” column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Soon after, her deeply competitive sister, Pauline Esther Phillips, known as Popo, began writing her own advice column for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Dear Abby.” The rivalry, as depicted by Ms. Howard, was one-sided, with Phillips sniping, often in public, at her sister, and Lederer doing her best to rise above, and frequently cutting off contact altogether.
“She was a girl who kept on trucking,” Ms. Howard said, describing her mother to an interviewer in 2003. “She sucked it up.”
When Jules Lederer, Lederer’s husband of 35 years, left her for a much younger woman, she soldiered on, even buying him clothes and food once he was in his new apartment. It had been a drawn-out process: He had enlisted his daughter to deliver the news of his affair and plans for divorce months earlier.
Unlike her mother, Ms. Howard never forgave him, and they remained estranged until just before his death.
Ms. Howard’s second book, A Life in Letters: Ann Landers’ Letters to Her Only Child, published in 2003, a year after her mother’s death, chronicled their intimacy through the decades. Her mother’s vivid, salty style, peppered with the Yiddishisms she grew up with, is enticing, as are her passions, which included the Democratic Party and anti-war activism, as well as the happiness and intellectual growth of her precocious daughter.
“One of the good things she passed on to me was that it’s almost immaterial what happens to you — it’s how you deal with it that matters,” Ms. Howard told Alex Witchel of the New York Times in 2003. “She’d say, ‘When things go seriously haywire, take a nap and then get busy.’ I went into a depression when she died, so I had my nap. It was time to get busy.”
Margo Lederer was born on March 15, 1940, in Sioux City, Iowa. Her father was a salesperson turned businessperson who would go on to found Budget Rent A Car. He wooed her mother, then Esther Pauline Friedman, who was affianced to someone else, while she was shopping for wedding veils.
The family lived in eight cities by the time Margo was 7, including New Orleans and Eau Claire, Wis., before moving to Chicago, where she would later settle as an adult, after her first marriage.
Throughout her peripatetic journalism career, Ms. Howard fielded many offers to write an advice column, including a plea from her mother to take over as Ann Landers. “Honey, I don’t want to work that hard,” Ms. Howard responded.
But in 1998, when economist Herbert Stein quit after a few months of writing “Dear Prudence,” the pithy advice column he had pioneered (and written anonymously) for Slate, the publication’s editor, Michael Kinsley, offered the column to Ms. Howard. The effort required would be minimal, he promised; she would have to answer only four letters twice a week.
As she told Vanity Fair, “I’d had a big life: I’d been analyzed, I’d been married — certainly more than once — and I decided that I would write from my experience.”
Her tone was sassy and wise, and “Dear Prudence,” which she wrote for eight years, was a hit.
To Turned Off in Kansas, a reader whose boyfriend’s underwear was problematic, Ms. Howard replied:
Dear Turned,
He wears the baggy briefs underneath? I offer you two suggestions. Since things are going over his head, try under his nose. Write him a short love note saying it would mean a lot to you if he — forgive the pun — bagged his lucky underpants and only wore boxers. Alas, the alternative is to forget it. Would you think Prudie salacious if she were to suggest that it’s what’s inside the briefs or boxers that counts?
— Prudie, briefly
In addition to her daughter Cricket, Ms. Howard is survived by her husband, Weintraub; another daughter, Abra Coleman; a son, Adam Coleman Howard; and seven grandchildren.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
