Frank and funny, the taboo-breaking therapist said things on television and radio that would have been shocking coming from almost anyone else.
Ruth Westheimer at her home in New York City in 2023. Her radio show, on which she discussed sex and relationships, made her a national media celebrity and a one-woman business conglomerate.
Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly therapist who as “Dr. Ruth” became America’s best-known sex counselor with her frank, funny radio and television programs, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. Her death was announced by a spokesman, Pierre Lehu.
Dr. Westheimer was in her 50s when she first went on the air in 1980, answering listeners’ mailed-in questions about sex and relationships on the radio station WYNY in New York. The show, called “Sexually Speaking,” was only a 15-minute segment heard after midnight on Sundays. But it was such a hit that she quickly became a national media celebrity and a one-woman business conglomerate.
At her most popular, in the 1980s, she had syndicated live call-in shows on radio and television, wrote a column for Playgirl magazine, lent her name to a board game and its computer version, and began rolling out guidebooks on sexuality that covered the field from educating the young to recharging the old. College students loved her; campus speaking appearances alone brought in a substantial income. She appeared in ads for cars, soft drinks, shampoo, typewriters and condoms.
She even landed a role in the 1985 French film “One Woman or Two,” starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver and released in the United States in 1987. “Dr. Ruth will never be mistaken for an actress,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, “but she does have pep.”
These days, some effort may be needed to recall that Ruth Westheimer had a radical formula and considerable influence on social mores. Talk shows abounded in the 1980s, but until she came along, none had dealt so exclusively and clinically with sex. Nor could anyone have anticipated that the messenger of Eros would be a 4-foot-7 middle-aged teacher with a delivery that The Wall Street Journal described as “something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.”
A talk show about sex? “Why not?” Dr. Westheimer asked. “Why not share a few recipes on the air. I am promoting sexual literacy in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom.”
Of course, her recipes were not limited to things you were likely to hear in a Sunday sermon.
The columnist William E. Geist, who visited her in the studio for a New York Times Magazine article in 1985, wrote that “she looks for all the world as though she is about to tell us in her cheery mittel-European accent how to make a nice apple strudel.”
“But when she opens her mouth it’s Code-Blue-in-the-family-room all across the country,” he added. “She sends forth on radio and television the most explicit insert-tab-A-into-slot-B instruction in sexual manipulation, stimulation and satisfaction.”
In response to one question that day, she cautioned: “Don’t let her do that while you’re driving!’’ But whether the topic was how to restore romance to a marriage or something a little more specialized – for example, might there not be a legitimate reason for peanut butter in the bedroom? – she tried to stress respectful relationships and safety, not just the mechanics of intimacy.
As Dr. Westheimer said, hers was an only-in-America story of someone who had come to this country “with absolutely nothing.” What she did have was a degree from the Sorbonne — and a determination forged through hard times as an orphan of the Holocaust, a refugee and a fighter in the war for Israeli independence. She had joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, and trained as a sniper; although she never shot anyone, her legs were gravely injured by an exploding shell in 1948.
By the time she reached New York in 1956, she had also experienced two unsuccessful unions. She had married an Israeli, “the first guy who offered to marry me,” she said. They moved to Paris, where the marriage cracked under the stress of his training to be a doctor while she studied psychology. She married her second husband, a Frenchman, to legalize a p
egnancy. Although he moved to New York with her and they had a daughter, she found the relationship wanting. “Intellectually, it was just not tenable,” she told People magazine in 1985.
Her life as a single mother revolved around child-rearing and years of evening classes in English and professional studies. At first, she took whatever work she could get, including as a housemaid for a dollar an hour. But after earning a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research in 1959, she was hired as a research assistant at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.
She was named project director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem in 1967, and she continued night studies until she received her doctorate in education from Columbia in 1970. Then came postdoctoral work in human sexuality at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, training with Helen Singer Kaplan, the pioneering sex therapist. She later taught at Lehman College in the Bronx and at Brooklyn College.
It was in New York that she found the right mate: Manfred Westheimer, a telecommunications engineer, whom she met in 1961 while skiing in the Catskills. He was, like her, a German Jewish refugee and, at five-foot-five, only about a head taller than her. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1997.
Dr. Westheimer is survived by her son, Joel Westheimer; her daughter, Miriam Westheimer; and four grandchildren.
Many years after her husband’s death, Dr. Westheimer paid fond tribute to their romance: “Skiers make the best lovers because they don’t sit in front of a television like couch potatoes,” she told Esquire magazine. “They take a risk and they wiggle their behinds. They also meet new people on the ski lift.”
Ruth Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928, the only child of an Orthodox Jewish couple, Julius and Irma (Hanauer) Siegel. Her father was a notions wholesaler in Frankfurt, and together with her parents and grandmother, she lived a comfortable life largely shielded from the reality that Germany was becoming ever more perilous for Jews.
When the Nazis took her father away in 1938, her mother and grandmother managed to get her included in a group of children sent to a school in the Swiss mountains. There, she later recalled, she was educated only through the eighth grade and served for all practical purposes as a housekeeper for the Swiss children. She never saw her family again; they were all presumed murdered at Auschwitz. After the war, still a teenager, she set out for what was then Palestine.
Here’s how she became Dr. Ruth: The community affairs manager of WYNY, Betty Elam, had heard Dr. Westheimer give a lecture on sexual literacy to a group of broadcasters, and it was she who proposed the original “Sexually Speaking” program in 1980. It paid all of $25 a week, but it was like a winning lottery ticket. Before long Dr. Ruth had set up her brand, with ventures in broadcasting, commercials, book publishing and other areas.
She was not without her critics. Some mental health professionals fretted that she was mass-marketing sex therapy and turning neurosis into entertainment. She also came under fire from some clerics, including the Rev. Edwin O’Brien, who had once been secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York. “The message is just indulge yourself; whatever feels good is good,” he wrote in a 1982 Wall Street Journal article. “There is no higher law of overriding morality, and there’s also no responsibility.”
For the most part, though, she enjoyed a dispensation to say things on the air that would have been shocking coming from almost anyone else. Discussing her success with a Times reporter in August 1984, just as Lifetime cable television was introducing “Good Sex! With Dr. Ruth Westheimer” as a Monday-through-Friday program, she said humor was an important part of her approach: “If a professor leaves his students laughing, they will walk away remembering what they have learned.”
Overexposure and competition cut into Dr. Westheimer’s popularity after the 1980s, but she continued for many years to lecture, make television guest appearances and maintain a private sex-therapy practice. In 2019, she was the subject of a documentary directed by Ryan White, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” which chronicled her journey to celebrity sex therapist.
In November 2023, Dr. Westheimer was named New York State’s first honorary “ambassador to loneliness” by Gov. Kathy Hochul. In that position, which she herself had proposed, Dr. Westheimer would “help New Yorkers of all ages address the growing issue of social isolation, which is associated with multiple physical and mental health issues,” the governor said in a statement.
“I don’t want to be known only as a sex therapist,” Dr. Westheimer said at the time. “I want to be known as a therapist.”
Above all, she published books – more than two dozen alone on sexuality, often with her Mr. Lehu, her longtime collaborator – and others, including a memoir, “Musically Speaking: A Life Through Song” (2003), in which she described in great detail the band concerts, folk tunes and popular songs she had known as a happy child in Frankfurt.
Though she was tone-deaf and not much of a music lover, she said, she came to realize rather late in life that these vivid recollections probably took the place of the family history she would have heard if her family life had not ended abruptly at age 10. “The melodies and the words of the songs I knew provide a link with the past forever,” she wrote.
And these memories helped to explain how she could have had “such joie de vivre in the face of the losses and dislocations I had to endure in the early years of my life.” When people wondered at her ebullience, she said, “the answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood socialization had a remarkable power and influence.
“But now I have realized that there is another part to the answer. And that is music.”
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Dr. Westheimer at one point. She was a therapist, not a psychologist.