My Afternoon with Dr. Ruth

Sad news about the death of Dr. Ruth Westheimer at the age of 96. I remember fondly spending an afternoon with her in her Washington Heights apartment in NYCm in 2013 to advance a production of “Becoming Dr. Ruth” at TheaterWorks Hartford starring Debra Jo Rupp. The story is below.

The doorbell of the apartment in a modest brick building in a quiet residential neighborhood in Washington Heights rings like Big Ben announcing the queen.

“Come in, come in,” says the chirpy, accented voice of Ruth Westheimer, known more popularly as Dr. Ruth, the sex counselor, author, TV and radio star and cultural icon.

“How do you like my British chimes?” she says as she welcomes her guests into her living room. “Can I get you something to drink? Coca-cola? Seltzer? Water? Here, have a ‘Sex for Dummies’ key chain. Have two. Have another. My publisher gave me hundreds. It’s in its third edition, 27 languages!”

The doctor is in. The doctor is on.

Dressed is a teal blouse that compliments her red hair, the 4-foot-7 Westheimer flits about like a hummingbird. Within a few minutes she delivers beverages, points out family pictures and mementos, arranges that evening’s transportation to midtown and tickets for the Hartford run, all the while slipping in plugs for her many and far-flung projects.

“I’ll tell you something new – because journalists always need something new to write about,” she says finally settling down, temporarily, at the dining room table. “I just got a Fulbright at the age of almost 85, not for whole year, but for a weekend seminar in Jamaica – and not Jamaica, Queens either. Jamaica, the island.”

Duly noted – but we are here to talk about “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” formerly called “Dr Ruth: All The Way,” the one-person play about her life by Mark St. Germain that was a hit last summer at its premiere at Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, Mass. A revised version, again starring Debra Jo Rupp (TV’s “That ’70s Show”) and directed by Julianne Boyd begins previews Friday, May 31, at Hartford’s TheatreWorks. The show opens June 7 and continues through July 7.

“The new version is superb,” she says. “They took the intermission out.”

In the play, Rupp plays Westheimer at a crossroads in her life: her third husband has just died and she is packing to leave her beloved apartment where she raised her family and created a career. She talks to the audience much as if she would talk to anyone within earshot, with humor, speed and endless details about her eventful life.

Looking Back

Westheimer, who turns 85 on June 4, was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1928, the daughter of a privileged Orthodox Jewish family. After her father was taken away by the Nazis a week after Kristallnacht, her mother and grandmother sent her for safekeeping in Switzerland. She never saw her family again.

At 17, after years of miserable treatment in what became an orphanage for refugee Jewish girls, she emigrated with some of her friends to Palestine, where she became a Zionist and joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground movement fighting for the creation of a Jewish homeland.. She became a scout and sniper and was wounded.

“I can put five bullets in a red circle,’ she says. “I can throw hand grenades. But I’ve never killed anybody.”

In 1950, she married an Israeli and the couple to moved to Paris where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne and her husband studied medicine.

In 1956, and divorced, she emigrated to the U.S with her Parisian boyfriend who later became her husband. She studied at the New School for Social Research. In 1959, she graduated with a master’s degree in sociology and went to work as a research assistant at Columbia University.

In 1961, divorced again, she met and married Manfred Westheimer. In the late 1960s, Westheimer took a job at Planned Parenthood in Harlem. She simultaneously worked toward her doctorate degree in family and sex counseling through Columbia University evening classes, and in the early ’70s, became an associate professor of sex counseling at Lehman College in the Bronx.

A lecture to broadcasters about the need for sex-education programming, led to her getting a weekly 15-minute late-night radio show, “Sexually Speaking” on WYNY-FM in the ’80s. The show was a hit and it was soon expanded to one hour with audience call-ins. The idea of getting sex advice from a tiny, bubbly but emphatic Jewish lady in her 50s proved irresistible, and she quickly became a cultural fixture in publishing, television and films.

Life On Stage

“Becoming Dr. Ruth” began several years ago after Westheimer saw playwright St. Germain’s “Freud’s Last Session” in New York and she went backstage to meet the actors. “I loved the show and I loved the set. I told them I sat on Freud’s couch, which no one else was permitted to do, in Vienna.”

“Martin [Rayner, who played Freud] asked if he could come to my office and I thought, ‘Ooohh, Freud has a problem? So he comes by and he didn’t have a problem – and if he did I wouldn’t tell you – and he tells me the playwright, who wasn’t there when I saw the show, would like to do a play about me.”

She said no – just as she had to film pitches about her life – but she also understood that, as a public figure, she had no legal rights to block any bio-project.

“Then Mark left me a message on my answering machine, and it was so delightful, so nice, about how much he respected me and listened to me on the radio and he would never do anything I wouldn’t want. I called right back, we met and within two minutes I said yes.

“I gave him my [1987] autobiography, he talked to my son and daughter and he talked with Pierre, who is my minister of communications for 32 years. The only thing I did say no to was the possibility of [the character of Dr. Ruth] taking questions from the audience like I do in a lecture. I said no. Those questions only I answer. There were also a few minor things I changed, mostly some dates about World War II, but otherwise I didn’t change a thing.”

During the rehearsal period for the play Westheimer was especially tickled to see Rupp mastering her accent.

“When I came to this country in 1956 they told me I had to take speech lessons to lose my accent. I was making $1 an hour with a little girl to support so who had time for speech lessons? And now Debra Jo Rupp had to go to a speech coach to learn my accent. I love that.

“On a serious note, on opening night I had to pinch myself. I think she does a wonderful job, brilliant, in terms of my persona, in terms of the sadness and of the fun. I think she captured me. I saw it 10 times.”

One of the themes of the play – and one of the reasons the play is set in the apartment she has lived for 48 years – is Westheimer’s long search for a place she could call home.

“That’s the way it is for orphans in general and it was certainly no question in my case,” she says.

Her apartment is filled with books crowding her shelves and stacked on the floor, many pictures of presidents, celebrities and family and huge piles of papers from her many teaching gigs, including Yale and Princeton. She finds the new commute to Columbia University, just south of her home, much easier.

Finding Home

“Don’t tell Nate,” she says about the folding card table piled with files and papers from her Columbia assignment.

She is referring to Nate Burkus, interior designer, who gave her apartment a high-profile face-lift several years ago.

“I was on his show and I said, ‘Nate, I need your help. I have a mess. Papers all over the place. I need to get be organized.’ And because I was on TV, I added, ‘For free.’ And he took me up on it. So I stayed at Waldorf for three days while they fixed this whole room.”

The 10th floor apartment overlooks the Hudson and has a grand view of the Palisades. Throughout the apartment there are variations of the idea of homes within homes: multiple dollhouses, a miniature set design of her apartment from the play (“Brian Prather did this for me,” she says picking up the tiny model iof the set. ” Write that down.”), and many turtle knickknacks – including one from Tiffany’s – all of which have symbolic meaning to her.

“I didn’t have control over my life [growing up],” she says. “But I have control over the dolls because the dollhouses stay in one safe place.”

And the turtle tchotchkes? “If the turtle wants to move, it has to take a risk and stick its neck out. And that’s what I did when I started the radio. I stuck my neck out by talking about the things that nobody was talking about.”

Life On Stage

Though her family members are mentioned in the play, Westheimer over the years took special efforts not to involve her family in her spotlight “because I talk about sex all the time.”

There was one exception – when Diane Sawyer came to her apartment to interview the doctor.

“[Husband] Fred loved Diane Sawyer and I didn’t have the heart to say he couldn’t be home [for the interview]. So the cameras start rolling and Fred and I are sitting and the first question Diane asks is to Fred. She asks him ‘How is your sex life?’ to which he replied – and I have it on tape – ‘The shoemaker’s children don’t have shoes.'” She giggles with the delight at the sure-fire anecdote, before turning serious.

“But I don’t take my children or grandchildren whenever I do anything in public. I don’t want people asking them, ‘How is it for your grandmother to talk about orgasms?’ I don’t need that. I made it very clear over the years to keep my professional life separate.”

Has sex changed since she began broadcasting?

“I’ll tell you what has changed. The questions have not changed. They’re still about loneliness, boredom, about finding a partner, about sexual issues of not having orgasms for women or premature ejaculation for men. What has changed is the vocabulary. People talk with much more precision. It’s much more explicit.”

What is needed is more research, she says.

“The studies that exist are very old: Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Helen Singer Kaplan, who I trained with. We need new studies but in the climate of today I don’t see it. But as for the future of sex, it’s going to be around so don’t worry.”