Who is Dr Ruth Westheimer, legendary sex therapist spotted with Bill Clinton at US Open?

Legendary sex therapist, 94, spotted making Bill Clinton blush at the US Open

Dr Ruth Westheimer at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2019 at the premiere of a documentary about her extraordinary life (Roy Rochlin/Gett)

The sight of former US president Bill Clinton comparing notes with veteran sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer as they sat side by side at the US Open on Monday evening has caused much amusement online.

The 42nd commander-in-chief, 76, whose presidency was almost curtailed prematurely when he was impeached in 1998 over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, was spotted chatting to TV’s Dr Ruth, 94, as they watched Serena Williams thrash Danka Kovinic in their first round clash at New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium.

The duo, part of a crowd that also included Anna Wintour, Mike Tyson, Hugh Jackman and Martina Navratilova, caught the attention of ESPN commentators John McEnroe and Chris Evert, who jokingly speculated on what they might be discussing.

“They’re really involved in some sort of… She’s giving him advice,” Ms Evert noted.

“She just gave him advice. Yep, ‘you shouldn’t be doing that’.”’

“’Why is his face getting redder?” Mr McEnroe grinned.

By any measure, Dr Westheimer – born Karola Ruth Siegel on 4 June 1928 in Wiesenfeld, Germany – has led an astonishing life.

Her Orthodox Jewish parents raised her in Frankfurt in the 1930s but were forced to send her away to an orphanage in Heiden, Switzerland, when she was aged just 10 after the Nazis came to power. Her father Julius was taken away to Dachau by Gestapo men, a heart-breaking scene she never forgot. He was later murdered in Auschwitz.

The decision by her mother Irma and grandmother Selma saved her life, while the rest of the family are believed to have perished in Nazi concentration camps.

After the Second World War, aged 17, she emigrated to what was then British-controlled Palestine and fought with the Zionist underground paramilitary organisation Haganah, forced to serve as a scout and sniper because she stood just four foot seven inches in height.

On her 20th birthday, at the height of the 1947-1949 Palestine War, she was severely injured by mortar fire in Jerusalem and almost lost both feet.

By 1950, she had moved to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne.

By 1956, she was a postgraduate pursuing an MA in sociology at New York’s The New School, living in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighbourhood and working as a maid to pay for her tuition, initially earning just 75 cents an hour.

Her doctorate would follow in 1970, obtained from the Teachers College, Columbia University, at the age of 42, after she had spent the 1960s teaching and running her own private sex therapy practice, a period in which she also secured US citizenship.

After a decade in postdoctoral research, Dr Westheimer took to the airwaves in 1980, aged 52, to host the radio show Sexually Speaking on New York’s WYNY-FM, which ran until 1990 and saw her develop a devoted following by serving up impressively frank counsel to variously frustrated and embarrassed anonymous callers.

The programme successfully transferred to TV in 1985 as The Dr Ruth Show, on which she again matched candid advice with cheery good humour and swiftly became a household name, nicknamed “Grandma Freud” and the “Sister Wendy of Sexuality”.

An astonishing pop cultural career followed in which she acted opposite Gerard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver in the screwball comedy Une Femme ou Deux (1985), released a sex-themed board game (which in turn became an early video game) and became a stalwart of the late night chat show circuit, sitting down with everyone from David Letterman and Johnny Carson to Joan Rivers.

Her fame continued into the 1990s and beyond, seeing her release a series of instructional Playboy videos, appear on Howard Stern and Conan O’Brien’s shows among many others and even guest on Quantum Leap.

Still at it in her ninth decade, she has published 45 books on life and sex and can apparently still assemble a Sten gun with her eyes closed, something she first learned to do back in Israel in the late 1940s.