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    Dr. Ruth’s Tips for a Happy Life

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    Ruth Westheimer loved to give advice — and often strayed from her area of expertise as she tried, in her words, “to make the world a better place.”Ruth Westheimer spent a lot of time talking about sex. She did so with her own brand of frankness and good cheer on her pioneering radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” and on her daytime TV program, “The Dr. Ruth Show,” as well as in her column for Playgirl magazine, in her many books and in countless interviews and public appearances across more than four decades. It’s possible that Dr. Ruth, who died last week at 96, talked publicly about sex more than anyone else. Ever.But since her specialty touched on so many other aspects of the human experience, she also gave plenty of general life advice. Some of those lessons were pulled from her own difficult experience as a German Jewish refugee who lost her parents during the Holocaust. Or from her unhappy early relationships, though she found lasting love with her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, an engineer, after two brief marriages.In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, she spoke of the importance of turning a terrible experience into something positive. “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis — because I survived — I had an obligation to make a dent in the world. What I didn’t know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night.”To describe her sense of purpose, she often used the phrase tikkun olam — Hebrew for “repairing the world” or, as she put it in a speech, “making the world a better place.” “I knew I had to do something for tikkun olam,” she said in a 2014 interview with Hadassah Magazine. “You can take horrible experiences you will never forget, but you can use the experiences to live a productive life.”In a 1984 interview with The New York Times, she noted the importance of humor in teaching. “If a professor leaves his students laughing,” she said, “they will walk away remembering what they have learned.”Dr. Ruth made her first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1982, when “Sexually Speaking” was catching on. When the host, Johnny Carson, said that many people are bashful talking about sex, Dr. Ruth offered a lesson in how to approach delicate subjects: “If you do it in good taste — and if you do it properly, then it can be — everything can be talked about. Everything.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Therapist Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96

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      Frank and funny, the taboo-breaking psychologist said things on television and radio that would have been shocking coming from almost anyone else.Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly psychologist 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.”)Dr. Westheimer with Gérard Depardieu, left, and Michel Aumont in the 1985 movie “One Woman or Two.” “Dr. Ruth will never be mistaken for an actress,” one critic wrote of her performance, “but she does have pep.”Moune Jamet/Orion Pictures Corp., via Everett CollectionThese 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.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More