Finalist for Ann Landers’ Job : Sex Expert Has Answers So Far

Among the 11,000 would-be advisers to the lovelorn who applied to take Ann Landers’ job after she left the Chicago Sun-Times was Los Alamitos sex therapist Carol Wells.

Now the field of applicants is down to seven finalists, and Wells is one of them.

Therapist Wells, 42, who invented a board game to teach children about sex, applied for the job of writing daily advice for millions of readers as the newspaper’s syndicated columnist. The position opened earlier this year when Eppie Lederer took her “Ann Landers” column to the rival Chicago Tribune. Internationally known Lederer was a housewife when she began writing the column 31 years ago.

To Be Interviewed April 30

“I think it would be an incredible challenge,” Wells said. “It’s an opportunity to be influential. I think it has tremendous potential for creativity, and I think it could be financially rewarding.”

Finalists will be interviewed at the end of April--Wells’ interview is April 30--and the winner of the advice column will be announced in mid-May.

Wells said she was notified April 15 that she made the final round. “I felt honored, scared and ready to give it my best.

“It’s like a lottery--there were so many people that wanted the job,” she said. “When I got in the top 100 my family thought it was phenomenal. They didn’t think it would progress to this point, but it did. I never thought about it again once I sent it in.”

Wells, who is divorced and has a 16-year-old son, received a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from UCLA and had a post-graduate fellowship in sexual and marital therapy at Johns Hopkins University. She said she designed Humanopoly, a game in which the players are sperms and eggs and the board is a maze representing Fallopian tubes, to teach children “the facts of life.”

Wells said her recipe for a successful columnist is: “compassion, a big heart, a sense of humor, the ability to write well and the ability to read between the lines.”

“Advice deals with human behavior and human behavior operates on lots of different levels,” she said. “It’s very complex. Giving advice means understanding human nature . . . helping people decide what’s right for them.”

Wells included a poem with her application to sum up her qualifications. It read:

Once upon a time I was a housewife.

I signed away the wife, but not the house.

Now I advise others on living life

As well as how to deal with a spouse.

Courtship, parenthood, sex or overeaters,

Questions I can answer from your readers.

She said she wrote the poem because she wanted to let the editors know about her professional skills as well as her experience as a housewife.

“The kinds of questions Ann Landers got 31 years ago were about who to stand next to at a wedding,” Wells said. “Today issues are tougher. A person might write in because they are afraid of getting AIDS and want to know if they should remain celibate.”

Wells praised Lederer for dispensing expert advice over the years.

“I think she has educated people,” Wells said. “I think she has opened and expanded their awareness. People are also less sensitive or embarrassed about seeking professional help.”

Wells said she doesn’t feel intimidated about the possibility of filling Lederer’s shoes. “Ann Landers took awhile to get to know what she was doing and do it well, and I’d have to do the same.”

Considers Career a Plus

Her professional background would be a plus in answering questions about current issues, Wells said. “What I do best because of my field is read between the lines.

“I think as a therapist there’s compassion and understanding of human behavior that is important as an advice columnist. I’ve found there are some questions that don’t have any easy answers. As a therapist I can help people to understand that.”

Wells said she hoped her columns would be as clever as the ones Lederer has written and said the major difference would be that she might look at some of the questions at a “deeper level.”

“I come from having to spend 10 years with people and reading between the lines,” Wells said. “She has certainly read more questions, but she has not spent the amount of time with them to find out what they are really asking.”

Wells said that she reads Lederer’s column several times a month and that her patients have often talked about advice they read in the column.

Editors at the Sun-Times would not comment on specific applicants but did give a general description of the type of person they are looking for to take over the column.

Contemporary Approach

“I do not like to look at this person as a replacement for Ann Landers,” Susan Axelrod, deputy features editor at the Sun-Times, said Tuesday. “We are looking for a new columnist with a more contemporary approach. But, yes, this person will indeed be head-to-head with Ann Landers and Dear Abby.”

This is not a contest, Axelrod said. “I would say it’s more of a search. It’s exactly what the Sun-Times did 31 years ago when Eppie got the job.”

But competition wasn’t as stiff in the 1950s. Contrasted with the 22 applicants then, about 11,000 people mailed in applications before the deadline. About 1,000 additional applications were received after the mid-March deadline, but they weren’t considered.

The 11,000 applicants were whittled down by Sun-Times editors to 108, and they were sent four hypothetical questions to answer. Sun-Times editors read all of those answers and narrowed the field to 22.

The answers from those 22, identified only by the writers’ initials, were given to a “panel of experts” that included psychiatrists, psychologists, a radio talk show host specializing in foreign affairs and the arts and a theologian, all “Chicago heavyweights.”

“We asked them to read the answers and to rank them 1 through 22,” Axelrod said. “Then they were asked to say why they liked their top three.”

This narrowed the field to seven finalists. The Sun-Times has not disclosed how the semifinalists were ranked by the panel.

The Other Finalists

“Sun-Times editors will make the final decision,” she said.

Among the finalists, there are two who do not want publicity--a man in the Chicago area and a woman in Massachusetts--because of professional considerations, Axelrod said.

Besides Wells and the two anonymous finalists, these people are still in the running:

Linda Perigo Moore of Evansville, Ind., a free-lance author of nonfiction and a college writing teacher;

Gary Provost of Lancaster, Me., a free-lance writer;

Linda Stasi of New York City, editor-in-chief of Beauty Digest magazine;

Jeff Zaslow of Chicago, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.