NEW YORK — Ruth Westheimer, a grandmotherly psychologist who as “Dr. Ruth” became America’s best-known sex counselor with her frank, funny radio and TV programs, died Friday at her home in New York City. She was 96.

Her death was announced by a spokesperson, Pierre Lehu.

Westheimer First Went on the Air in 1980

Westheimer was in her 50s when she first went on the air in 1980, answering listeners’ mailed-in questions about sex and relationships on radio station WYNY in New York. The show, “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.

Landed Role in French Film

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 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-age 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?” she 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.

Columnist Bill 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 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.

Orphaned in the Holocaust

As 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 pregnancy; 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

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 5-foot-5, only about a head taller than her. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1997.

Westheimer is survived by her son, Joel; her daughter, Miriam; and four grandchildren.

The Life of Ruth Westheimer

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 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 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.

In November, Westheimer was named New York state’s first honorary “ambassador to loneliness” by Gov. Kathy Hochul. In that position, which she herself had proposed, 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,” Hochul said in a statement.

“I don’t want to be known only as a sex therapist,” Westheimer said at the time. “I want to be known as a therapist.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Daniel Lewis/Aaron Richter
c.2024 The New York Times Company