Ruth Westheimer, the German-Jewish psychologist who enlightened and entertained radio, television and newspaper audiences for more than two decades with her frank, funny and warm advice on sexual matters, has died. She was 96.
Westheimer became the media personality “Dr. Ruth” in 1980 when she was invited to host a 15-minute radio show aired after midnight on Sundays on WYNY-FM in New York. Tackling topics from multiple orgasms to menage a trois, it quickly became a sensation, attracting 4,000 calls a night by the time it expanded to a one-hour format in 1981.
Within a few years she was a national celebrity with a radio audience that stretched coast to coast and a cable television show. She eventually wrote a widely distributed newspaper column, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” and more than two dozen books, including a pop-up book for preschoolers and kindergarteners that straightforwardly addressed basic questions about sex.
Although she was not the first media therapist — the late psychologist Toni Grant pioneered the field on Los Angeles radio in the early 1970s — thrice-married Westheimer conquered the field by specializing in advice on sexual anxieties. Few questions fazed the 4-foot-7 woman whom Time magazine called the “Munchkin of sex,” who pelted America’s airwaves with anatomically correct dialogue without batting an eye. With a high, raspy voice, thick German accent and disarming manner that was by turns ebullient, brisk, maternal and impish, she put both jittery censors and embarrassed callers at ease.
“Once you’ve talked sex with Dr. Ruth,” Washington Post media critic Tom Shales once asked rhetorically, “can it ever be as good with anyone else?”
“It was like getting advice from a favorite aunt or respected adult,” Dr. Laura Berman, a Northwestern University sex therapist who appears on her own cable show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, told The Times. “The advice she gave normalized sex and sexual preferences and made a lot of people feel less alone and isolated.”
Westheimer had detractors, who sneered at her commercial success. The woman who made 75 cents an hour as a maid when she arrived in the United States in 1956 was, by the height of her fame in the 1980s, commanding five-figure book advances and lecture fees while signing on as pitchwoman for everything from prophylactics to Dr. Pepper.
She said she understood the reason for her widespread appeal.
“I don’t come across as a sex symbol,” she told Newsweek magazine in 1982. “People trust me because I’m not a put-on.”
Nothing in Westheimer’s early life suggested that she would one day become a taboo-breaking American idol. She was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt, Germany, the only child of Irma and Julius Siegel, who were Orthodox Jews. Her parents married after Irma, a maid in Julius Siegel’s home, became pregnant.
Their world was shattered on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, when anti-Semitic mobs in Germany and Austria went on a violent rampage that left thousands of Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses in ashes. Westheimer’s father was arrested by Nazi authorities a week later along with many other Jews.
Convinced that the future was grim, Westheimer’s parents volunteered her for the humanitarian rescue effort that became known as the “Kindertransport,” in which some 10,000 Jewish children were sent out of Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia to safety; most were the only members of their family to survive. Westheimer, then 10, saw her family for the last time on Jan. 5, 1939, when she was in a group of 100 Frankfurt children sent by train to Switzerland.
She wound up in a Jewish boarding school in the picturesque village of Heiden that, because of the Holocaust, essentially became an orphanage. A ward of the Swiss state, she received little formal schooling, forced to spend most of her time there caring for younger children and working as a maid.
A stay that was to last six months stretched to six years, a miserable time made worse by her poor relations with one of the school’s directors. Westheimer had learned about sex by sneaking peaks into a marriage manual her parents had kept in the closet at home. At the Swiss school she “taught all the other girls about menstruation,” she told the New York Daily News in 1983, “and I got into trouble with the directress. She told me to shut up.”
She received cheerful letters from home at first, but they stopped arriving by the end of 1941. Westheimer later learned her family had been shipped to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland. She never made a concerted effort to find out how they died but believed that they perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
She buried her painful memories for decades, afraid that “I would get so sad that I wouldn’t be able to do the things I needed to do as ‘Dr. Ruth,’ “ she told the New York Times in 1987. Although naturally gregarious, she rarely talked about her own feelings with friends, a trait she said was formed in Switzerland, where she learned to be grateful for life and “never complain.”
Her reluctance to examine her deepest feelings led her to develop writer’s block in the 1980s when she was working on her memoirs. She sought help from a New York City psychoanalyst, who helped her recall the traumatic events of her girlhood, in part by reading the Swiss diaries and letters from home she had not dared open in more than 40 years.
She wound up using excerpts from them in her book, “All in a Lifetime,” published in 1987, but critics noted that the autobiography was oddly superficial considering the author’s training in psychotherapy.
After the Allied liberation of Europe in 1945, Westheimer joined the youth Zionist movement and moved to Palestine, where she dropped Karola in favor of her middle name, Ruth.
She signed up with the Haganah, the underground army that was fighting for the creation of a Jewish homeland, and was injured when the kibbutz where she was teaching kindergarten was shelled. She suffered serious wounds to her feet.
In her diary from those years, Westheimer expressed worries about her future, writing that “nobody is going to want me because I’m short and ugly.” In 1950 she married a young Israeli soldier who was the first man to propose to her. They moved to Paris, where he studied medicine and she earned a psychology degree from the Sorbonne. The marriage ended in divorce after five years.
In 1956 she fell in love with a handsome French Jew named Dan and moved with him to New York City. Shortly after arriving, she noticed a newspaper announcement of a scholarship earmarked for a victim of Nazi persecution to study sociology at the New School for Social Research. She won the scholarship, even though she spoke little English and lacked a high school diploma.
When she discovered that she was pregnant, the two married. They had a daughter, Miriam, who survives her, along with a son, Joel, from a later marriage, and four grandchildren.
The marriage to Dan failed within a year of their daughter’s birth. To support herself and her daughter, Westheimer took a job with a market research company and went to classes at night. She earned a masters degree in 1959, then was hired as a research assistant at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. She went on to earn doctorate in education from Columbia in 1970.
She became professionally interested in human sexuality during the late 1960s, when she was hired by a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem. Her job was to train field workers to interview women about their abortion and contraception histories. “These people are crazy! They talk about sex all day long!” Westheimer, recalling her initial reaction to the work, wrote in her autobiography.
The strangeness quickly turned into fascination, however. Westheimer decided that she wanted to learn more about sex education and began to study under Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan, an authority on human sexuality at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center. Within a few years, Westheimer earned a certificate from Cornell as a psychosexual therapist.
She taught sex counseling at Lehman College in the Bronx for several years in the 1970s before budget cuts eliminated her position. She then found a teaching job at Brooklyn College, but was fired for reasons she never publicly discussed. Although devastated by her dismissal, it led, she later said, to her big break.
In 1980 she talked about the need for more sex education programming before a group of New York broadcasters, which included Betty Elam, then the community affairs manager of WYNY-FM. Elam invited Westheimer to be a guest on the station’s Sunday morning public affairs show. Elam was so impressed by her presentation that in late 1980 she offered Westheimer $25 a week to host a short program after midnight on Sundays.
The show, “Sexually Speaking,” was an immediate hit, and quickly morphed into an hour-long, live call-in format. Within two years, it became New York’s top-rated radio program with an estimated 250,000 listeners a week. Every show ended with Westheimer’s exuberant command, “Have good sex!”
In 1982 she made her local television debut on New York City’s Channel 5 with a daily morning call-in show called simply “Dr. Ruth.” It quickly became the target of a massive write-in campaign protesting such candid talk about sex on television; the show was canceled after 14 weeks.
In 1984, she agreed to work with the Lifetime cable network on another show, “Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer,” which aired six nights a week. This show became the then-fledgling network’s first bonafide hit, luring 1 million viewers a night.
A short time later, Westheimer’s radio show went into national syndication. Soon, college students were hosting “Dr. Ruth” parties in dorm rooms while tuned in to her program, and she became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows. Videos, board games, books and, eventually, a Dr. Ruth website followed.
Westheimer offered advice that was reasoned and nonjudgmental, believing that almost any nonviolent sexual activity between consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedroom was “all right with me.” Callers included nonorgasmic women, premature ejaculators and people with various inhibitions or fetishes. When a caller asked what to do about a girlfriend who gave him an inflatable love doll and “wants to watch,” she replied, without missing a beat, “Give the doll a name and have a good time.”
Some conservative critics tried to paint Westheimer as a libertine because she did not disapprove of sex without marriage, was accepting of homosexuality and urged safe-sex habits. She pushed contraception at every opportunity– advice that, she sheepishly noted, she ignored when she was 17 and had sexual intercourse for the first time.
She leavened her straight talk about sex with regular doses of conventional morality. She nixed adultery, group sex, sadism, incest and sex at too tender an age. “What the rush?” she told a 16 year-old caller. “Why don’t you just fool around, continue to hug and kiss and touch and wait a few more years?” The only regret she publicly acknowledged was the fact that her shows often attracted listeners as young as 12, for whom she considered her program inappropriate.
Among other radio psychologists, some criticized her for paying too much attention to the mechanics of sex and too little attention to the emotional aspects. “To divorce sexuality from humanism and personality is a mistake,” the late therapist Joy Browne, who then hosted a San Francisco radio show, told Newsweek in 1982.
Berman, who runs her own sex therapy institute in Chicago, agreed that Westheimer generally skimmed the surface when she addressed the hows and whys of sex. But, Berman noted, “That’s about all people could handle at the time.” Berman especially gave Westheimer credit for promoting safe-sex education in the late 1980s, when the AIDS was unfolding.
Westheimer’s radio and television shows ended in the late 1980s, but she continued to lecture widely and churned out books, including “Dr. Ruth Talks to Kids,” “Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex,” “Sex for Dummies,” and “The Value of Family.” She also taught courses at Adelphi, Yale and Princeton universities while maintaining a small private practice in Manhattan. In 2003 she became the resident sex adviser on the now defunct iVillage.com website for women. In 2013, the play “Becoming Dr. Ruth” opened Off Broadway and the documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth premiered in theaters in 2019.
To Westheimer’s chagrin, she made a highly publicized error with the publication of a book for teenagers published in 1985. Called “First Love: A Young People’s Guide to Sexual Information,” it erroneously stated that the safest time to have sex was the week before and after ovulation. (It should have said that was the least safe time.) Calling it a typographical error, Westheimer acknowledged, “Even big shot people like myself make mistakes.”
Despite her ease at discussing bedroom matters, she often said that she was “old-fashioned and a square. I believe in love and marriage.”
She made her most enduring marriage in 1961, after a chance encounter on a Catskills Mountains ski slope with Manfred (Fred) Westheimer. A German-Jewish refugee like her, he was, she wrote in her memoir, “handsome, intelligent and short”—about 5’5”. She dumped her 6-foot-tall boyfriend and married Fred, a telecommunications engineer, nine months after they met.
They had been married for 36 years when he died of a stroke in 1997 at age 70.
Westheimer disclosed in her memoir that she and Fred slept in separate bedrooms — not because of any problems in their love life but because he snored. “I don’t believe in that nonsense that couples have to do everything together,” she wrote, “and that definitely includes spending the entire night in the same bed.”
