Swiping left or right had a whole other meaning back when Dr. Ruth Westheimer was in her TV prime. The peppery, diminutive sex therapist, who hosted radio and television sex talk shows throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, passed away July 12 in Manhattan. She was 96.
To call Westheimer a survivor is an understatement. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, she was sent as a 10-year-old to a school in Switzerland for safety while her parents remained behind to tend to her elderly grandmother. Both parents later died in concentration camps. She later was trained as a soldier and was injured in battle during Israel’s War of Independence in the late ‘40s.
Westheimer went on to study psychology, immigrating to America in 1956. Eventually she earned a doctorate degree at 42 while studying at Columbia. She established a private sex practice in the ‘70s and by 1980 launched the radio call-in show Sexually Speaking. By 1983, it was the top-rated show in radio’s largest U.S. market.
TV fame followed beginning on the Lifetime network with Good Sex! with Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Soon the fifty-something, four-foot-seven therapist was on the cover of People magazine, appearing in feature films and the author of several bestselling books. By 2013, she was the subject of a one-woman, off-Broadway play.
She took a bit of a break from television at the turn of the century but just six years ago, at, as she put it, “ninety and a half,” she was back before the press as the main focus of an award-winning Hulu documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth.
Things had changed in the sex advice business in the intervening years, she told those of us gathered in Los Angeles for an early 2019 edition of the Television Critics Association press tour. “For two things, she said, people are no longer looking for answers to things such as premature ejaculation or achieving an orgasm. “That has been done,” she said.
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Westheimer, rather touchingly, was more concerned about a generation that seemed unable to mingle without a mobile device in their hands. “Young people are going to lose the art of conversation,” she feared. She was fielding far more questions in 2019 about loneliness than lubricant.
Some topics, she admitted, were beyond her scope as a therapist. Asked about transgender issues, Westheimer says more research is needed before she could weigh in with any authority, although her golden rule is everyone must be treated with respect.
Why was she still working at ninety-and-a-half? “I tell everyone not to retire but to re-wire,” said Westheimer, who mentioned a few times how bummed she was that she had to give up alpine skiing as she neared her nineties.
“Instead of walking with a cane I decided to hang on to good looking guys,” she said, joking about how she walked into the press conference.
Besides her own shows, Westheimer was always a lively and sought-after guest on late night talk shows. She appeared twice on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and also with Joan Rivers, Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall.
Her most memorable late night visits, however, were with David Letterman. No topic seemed to be off limits. One one appearance, a member of the studio audience boasted that his girlfriend had a habit of tossing onion rings onto his erect penis.
On every subsequent Letterman appearance, when she arrived at his old NBC address at Rockefeller Center, there in the green room waiting for her would be a full plate of onion rings.
