Butler's Cinema Scene

Ruth Westheimer…despite her gesture here, she maintains size doesn’t matter

“ASK DR. RUTH” My rating: B

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s easy enough to view Ruth Westheimer as a punchline.

Over nearly  40 years she has become a sort of self-caricature, employing a chatty-grandma persona and a thick German accent to dispense sex advice which coming from anyone else would turn your ears a flaming red. (“I’m not tall and blonde and gorgeous,”  acknowledges the 4-foot-7-inch dynamo.)

The great value of “Ask Dr. Ruth,” Ryan White’s insightful and informative doc, lies not so much in rehashing her public career as in exploring the personal history that has molded the now-90-year-old “happy Munchkin of sex.”

Born to doting Jewish parents in Frankfurt, Germany, Ruth (that’s her middle name…she was born Karola Ruth Siegel) was only 10 when she was sent to neutral Switzerland where she and other Jewish children were housed (and made to work) in an orphanage. Initially she exchanged weekly letters with her parents; after a few months the letters stopped coming.

White (perhaps best known for “The Keepers,” a Netflix documentary miniseries about the decades-old murder of a  young nun) relates key moments from Ruth’s childhood through somber animated sequences and, of course, the memories of Dr. Ruth.

After the war she moved to a kibbutz in Palestine where she served as a sniper (“Thank God I never had to shoot anybody”), nearly lost both legs in a bomb blast and married an Israeli freedom fighter. She followed him to Paris where he studied medicine; when he dropped out and returned home, the newly-divorced Ruth stayed on to study at the Sorbonne.

Husband No. 2 was an impossibly handsome Frenchman who took her to the United States. That marriage ended, she says, because she realized there wasn’t much intellect behind the good looks.

On a ski trip to northern New York she met engineer Manfred Westheimer, the love of her life. They moved into a New York apartment (she still lives there), had two children and enjoyed a long and apparently blissful marriage until his death in 1997.

During that time Ruth studied psychology and human sexuality at Cornell University, and in 1980 landed a 15-minute radio show on a local station. It aired at midnight on Sundays…broadcast dead time chosen because it would minimize the chances of listener complaints over her often graphic descriptions of sexual situations.

Against all odds, the show became a hit with people from all over the country calling in to air their sexual concerns. To date she has done nearly 500 radio and TV installments of her love life advice program, becoming a beloved institution. (Although it’s fun to see footage of an early public lecture at which an outraged man in suit and tie tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Ruth for violating his sense of decency.)

Though she is venerated for coming to the defense of homosexuals and spreading common sense wisdom during the AIDS epidemic, the film accepts that a big chunk of Ruth’s personality will be forever hidden. Her adult children believe the  losses she experienced during WW2 so profoundly affected her that the inner woman has been permanently walled off from the rest of us.

In a visit to a holocaust research center in Israel she finally learns how and where her parents died…if  you expect her to shed a tear, you’ll have a long wait. (Her daughter says she has seen her mother cry only once…when her husband died.)

Whatever demons she’s dealing with, Dr. Ruth keeps them at bay with a killing schedule and a witty sense of humor. Visiting her first boyfriend and his wife (they’re pushing 90, naturally), she engages in sly banter.

“You were a little younger than me,” she says to her old flame.

“I still am,” he shoots back.

“We learned by experimenting,” she tells the camera. Then turning to her old beau: “I can still remember the taste of those kisses.”

Try getting that lump out of your throat.

| Robert W. Butler