ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610040081
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MURRAY DUBIN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
They tried to trick Dr. Ruth.
Visiting Israel this summer, she had agreed to be a guest on a popular television program. The producers had located her first sexual partner, a man she had met at a kibbutz in 1948, and suddenly brought him on stage to the audience's delight.
The first lover of America's most famous sex therapist. What a coup!
``It wasn't such a big surprise,'' matter-of-factly says Ruth Westheimer, diminutive doyenne of the sexually explicit, Auntie Freud of the titillating.
``I've seen him over the years. I know his wife. He came out, this middle-aged, bald man with a belly. It would have been better if he was a good-looking young guy.
``I didn't get upset. I told the audience that he didn't remember that he was my first lover. He had given me a gold bracelet, and he didn't remember that either. Women remember things like that.''
She claps her hands, delighted at the recent memory and, perhaps, at the one of 48 years ago.
* * *
Seems like we've known her forever, but at 68, Ruth Westheimer's celebrity is just 15 years old. In that time, she has had her own television and radio shows, and been on others. She has had a newspaper column, been on commercials and written 14 books, almost all about sex.
But her latest is not. It is ``The Value of Family - A Blueprint for the 21st Century.'' Her next will be a children's book about grandparents, so it's clear that she has more than sex on her mind.
Her ``Family'' book is authored with University of Delaware English teacher Ben Yagoda.
``I became a celebrity a little after middle age,'' she says in her office, a cubicle testament to the design uses of clutter: four coffee mugs, books, one teddy bear, magazines, one bonsai plant and eight, maybe nine, telephone message slips plus photos of her family, Burt Reynolds and Hillary Rodham Clinton - and don't forget the Israeli posters, academic degrees and honors and newspaper stories. She grew up an orphan, with almost nothing personal, so now she embraces ``stuff.''
``I was not unsuccessful, but I was not known, a little professor at City University in New York. My personality has not changed, my bank account has. I enjoy it more because I was older when it happened.''
For how it happened, wait a little. For her thoughts on the family, wait a little, too. First, what people really want to know:
*Yes, she really is that short, 4-foot-7, 55 inches, the height of a typical 101/2-year-old girl.
*Yes, she talks like that, her words not just kissed by a German accent, but suckled and swallowed by her beginnings in Frankfurt. But she does admit to occasionally rolling an ``r'' for oomph.
*Yes, she is that upbeat. Compared to where she has been, where she is couldn't be better. Her parents were killed in the Holocaust and she lived six years in a Swiss orphanage. She had a terrible self-image, was divorced twice, was a single mother, worked for $1 an hour as a maid and wasn't quite sure what would happen to her.
Today, she's known worldwide, has been married for nearly 35 years, has two children, two grandchildren, and more lecture requests than she can attend. She's an active therapist, a full professor at New York University, working on a 15th book and a TV documentary.
She takes taxis, not the subway anymore. ``It's nice being Dr. Ruth,'' says a delighted Dr. Ruth.
* * *
``Family is the overarching interest in her life and in her career,'' says Yagoda, 42, of Swarthmore, Pa. One reason for the ``Family'' book is ``she had a negative reaction to family values being a political football.''
She says, ``I definitely know the value of family. I know what it is like to live without a family.''
Born Karola Ruth Siegel, only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple, her mother and grandmother sent her to Switzerland and out of harm's way in 1939. Her father had already been taken by the Nazis.
``Every day I am less sure that I will see my parents again. I know that I must not lose hope, but it is not easy. ...'' -1943 diary entry, Karola Ruth Siegel.
She would not see her family again.
``I am ugly, I am stupid. What will become of me? Who am I? ... I am a hollow, empty, very superficial thing. ... I'll never amount to anything ...'' -1945 diary entry.
At the war's end, Switzerland didn't want her and the United States was a ``Shirley Temple dream.'' So the tiny 17-year-old went to a kibbutz in Palestine.
Urged to make her name less German, she used her middle name. She dreamed of teaching kindergarten, and of her family.
``How did my parents die? Where do they lie? Did they die all alone? ...'' -a 1945 diary entry.
``... I have to fight for everything all alone and it hurts. Is life ... only full of sorrows and sleepless nights? I want to be young and happy like the others. Is it only because I am small and ugly?'' -a 1946 diary entry.
(As we know, Dr. Ruth, a safe-sex advocate, had her first sexual experience in Israel. How safe was she back then? Not very. ``In those days, I thought hoping was enough'').
Her kindergarten study finally began, but was interrupted by fighting between Jews and Arabs in 1947. She joined the underground Haganah as a lookout and a sniper.
She never killed anyone, but ``I was a good sniper. ... I'm still a good shot. I just went with my grandson, Ari, to a fair in Riverdale, N.Y., and I won 13 stuffed animals with the water pistol gun.''
She was struck in the legs by shrapnel in 1948, but her wounds healed. She still skis.
The next year, she taught kindergarten and met David, an Israeli soldier. They married and soon went to France, where he could go to medical school. She was moving to her fourth country.
* * *
``Family'' is book 14, but she's not ``written'' any of them. ``I don't type, I'm not computer literate, but I talk well. I always work with someone.''
Jonathan Mark, associate editor of Jewish Week, a newspaper in New York, co-authored the 13th book, ``Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition.''
``It was her idea, not mine,'' he says. ``I expected a far more subservient position, but she made me feel like an equal ... I was surprised at how real she was, how much I liked her. I think her charm, good humor and celebrity status obscures what a wise person she is.''
She says that she needs the challenge and interaction of another person to write. Yagoda has provided that interaction four times, including on her autobiography.
He didn't know much about her when serendipity brought them together in 1986. ``She's a talker, not a writer, but she's an unbelievable communicator, like Will Rogers,'' says Yagoda, who wrote a book about Rogers in 1993.
She ``doesn't dwell on the negative, never broods and has no patience for people who complain. She has ... incredible energy.''
* * *
Because of the renown, one might expect jealousy or criticism of her in the sex therapy world.
``The public is poorly educated in getting factual information about sexuality, so what she does is a benefit,'' says Gerald Weeks, director of the Penn Council for Relationships' Institute for Sex Therapy.
``She doesn't do therapy on the air. She presents information. The comments I've heard her make made sense. She's read the literature.''
``She has communicated to the public that it is OK to have problems and that it is OK to seek help,'' says Howard J. Ruppel Jr., executive director of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists.
``You know, when I try to book a meeting or convention and I tell people [who's in] the group, they look at me funny. Then I tell them, `You know, Dr. Ruth,' and they warm right up.''
* * *
In Paris, she taught kindergarten, got a high school diploma and entered the Sorbonne. The education went well, but the marriage did not. She divorced in 1955. David went back to Israel. She was 27.
Then she fell in love with Dan, a French Jew. With some unexpected reparation money from the West German government, she booked passage for them both to the United States.
In New York, she saw an ad for a scholarship for Nazi victims at the New School for Social Research for a graduate degree in sociology. She applied. She got it.
She worked as a maid, got pregnant - she didn't think she could because she was so small - got married and gave birth to Miriam in 1957. Soon after, she and Dan divorced. Now she was a single mother, balancing home, school and work.
She graduated, married Fred Westheimer in 1961, worked in public health and earned a doctorate in education. But public health funding dried up and she went to work for Planned Parenthood.
``I thought those people were crazy, sex, sex, morning to night, that's all they talked about.''
In the early '70's, she was asked to teach sex education. ``I thought, `How could I talk like that'? ... I practiced in front of a mirror saying `penis' and `vagina.'''
She decided to be a sex therapist and went back to school. In 1980, she gave a brief sex education lecture to a broadcasting group. The next week, she was offered a 15-minute local radio show at midnight.
The rest is history.
* * *
She ``blushed and was uptight'' talking to her children about sex.
Sometimes, she still cannot believe who she has become. ``I have a tremendous sense of thankfulness, maybe to a fault. I know not to burden others with my sadness.''
Wait, she wants us to see something. It's a new photography book, ``Jews: An American Representation,'' and it has a section called ``Icons.'' Each person pictured - Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Barbra Streisand, Edward Koch - has his or her face and a portion of his or her body shown in a picture frame.
Except for Dr. Ruth.
``See, my whole body is in there, look at that little Ruthie Westheimer. Who would have thought that little Ruth Westheimer would be a Jewish icon?''
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