TV Guide founder dies
The Girl Connor
By GRACE GLUECK, NY Times
Walter H. Annenberg, the philanthropist, art collector and former ambassador
to Britain who at one time presided over a vast communications empire that
included TV Guide and The Philadelphia Inquirer, died today in Wynnewood,
Pa. He was 94 and had homes there and in California.
The cause was pneumonia, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the
Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Over the years, Mr. Annenberg became one of the country's biggest
philanthropists, giving away more than $2 billion in cash, according to
Christopher Ogden, the author of "Legacy: A Biography of Moses and Walter
Annenberg" (Little, Brown, 1999), to say nothing of his art donations. The
recipients were as diverse as the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., the
small prep school he attended, the United Negro College Fund ($50 million),
organizations for the reform of public education ($500 million), and Israel,
whose Emergency Fund received a contribution of $1 million from him after
the June 1967 war.
In 1991, Mr. Annenberg pledged his renowned collection of blue-chip
Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, itself said to be worth
more than $1 billion at the time, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of
which he was a trustee emeritus. The works are exhibited at the Met for six
months every year.
Raised as a rich man's son - by the time of his birth his immigrant father,
Moses, had already developed a profitable newspaper distribution business in
Milwaukee - Walter Annenberg multiplied his heritage many times over. "I
started out with an awful lot handed to me," he once told an interviewer.
As chief executive of Triangle Publications, which he inherited as a
debt-ridden corporation at his father's death in 1942, he forged one of the
communication world's great powers, with newspapers, radio and television
stations, national magazines and racing sheets.
In 1988 he sold the remaining portions of Triangle to Rupert Murdoch for
$3.2 billion, saying he planned to devote the rest of his life to education
and philanthropy. (In 1969, he sold two Triangle newspapers, The
Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News, to Knight Newspapers
for $55 million; the broadcast companies were sold in the early 70's for $87
million.)
An imposing figure with a courtly manner, a deep resonant voice and the
formal bearing of a royal chamberlain, Mr. Annenberg was a fervid patriot
and Republican whose close friends included Presidents Nixon and Reagan, to
whom he gave considerable financial support.
His friendship with Mr. Reagan went back to the 1930's, when Mr. Annenberg
was a frequent visitor to Hollywood, and for years the Reagans had a
tradition of celebrating New Year's holidays at Sunnylands, his palatial
240-acre compound in Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs, where
President Nixon was also a guest at various times. The Annenbergs divided
their time between Sunnylands and Inwood, a baronial manor in Wynnewood, on
Philadelphia's Main Line.
In 1969, Nixon named Mr. Annenberg ambassador to the Court of St. James's,
the most coveted American diplomatic post. The appointment was criticized on
grounds that he had little experience in foreign affairs. And at a Senate
Foreign Relations Committee hearing on his nomination, he faced questions
about his father's sentencing in 1940 to a three-year prison term for income
tax evasion, an event that had plagued the son for much of his adult life.
He was praised, however, for telling the committee, "I have actually found
that tragedy a great source of inspiration for constructive endeavor."
It has often been said that Mr. Annenberg's assiduously cultivated image of
respectability and his well-publicized philanthropic largesse stemmed in
part from distress over his father's past.
"If there is one single factor that has shaped Walter Annenberg's character
and, indeed, given guiding direction to his life it is the legend and legacy
of Moses Annenberg," wrote Gaeton Fonzi in "Annenberg: A Biography of Power"
(Weybright & Talley, 1970). "No man so venerates the memory of his father.
No man is so haunted by it."
But Mr. Annenberg preferred to ascribe his philanthropy in part to the elder
Annenberg's concern for the downtrodden. Hard-nosed as he was in business,
Moses Annenberg felt compassion for the poor, according to his son, and
while bestowing money on street people he would say, "There but for the
grace of God go you and I."
The lavish way of life enjoyed by Mr. Annenberg and his wife, Leonore, was
most visible at Sunnylands - completed in 1966 at a cost of $5 million -
where the couple spent the winter months. An airy, Astrodome-size
extravaganza of glass and Mexican lava stone, pink marble floors and
clustered plantings, the 32,000-square-foot house - surrounded by
well-guarded fencing - sits on acres of rolling terrain. A well-primped,
mock-English country landscape in the desert, with trees, hills, ponds and
waterfalls, it has a nine-hole golf course and even an artificial swamp for
the birds that Mr. Annenberg liked to watch.
Sunnylands, named for a 5,000-acre fishing camp Moses Annenberg once owned
in the Poconos, was also the setting for the bulk of the Annenberg art
collection, a group of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works that is
one of the world's great holdings. Among its more than 50 piece are works by
van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, Boudin, Toulouse-Lautrec,
Fantin-Latour, Vuillard, Gauguin, Corot, Manet, Morisot, Seurat, Braque,
Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, Giacometti and Arp.
Mr. Annenberg delighted in showing off his treasures, 15 of which were
purchased en bloc from his sister Enid Haupt. Taking a visitor on a house
tour when he was in his early 80's, he gestured toward a painting by
Vuillard, noting that he had bought it because the seven women depicted in
it reminded him of his seven sisters. Indicating a Cézanne still life, he
pointed out that a fold in the napkin surrounding a dish of apples echoed
the incline of Mont St.-Victoire, the artist's obsessive landscape motif, in
another Cézanne that hung across the room. "I must have quality," he said.
"An interest in art grows in you and it takes over. My wife and I set out to
get things that we genuinely loved and respected and wanted to live with."
Walter Annenberg, Philanthropist and Media Baron, Dies at 94
(Page 2 of 3)
In 1993 Mr. Annenberg bought a sixth van Gogh, "Wheat Field With Cypresses,"
for $57 million from a Swiss collection, and gave it to the Metropolitan
Museum. "I thought it was something the museum should have," he said.
Walter Hubert Annenberg was born in Milwaukee on March 13, 1908, the sixth
of nine children. A shy but personable youth, born with a malformed right
ear and hampered by a stutter, he was doted on by his father as his sole
male heir, according to "The Annenbergs" (Simon & Schuster, 1982) a
biography by John Cooney.
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In 1920 Moses Annenberg moved his family to New York, where he quickly
established himself. To his own holdings in the newspaper distribution
business, he added the New York-based Daily Racing Form, expanding it into
seven papers across the country. In time he owned virtually every racing
publication in the nation.
At 15 Walter was sent to Peddie, which, unlike most prep schools in that
era, did not discriminate against Jewish boys. There he played football,
basketball and baseball and was on the track team. On the day of his
graduation, he earned his first laurels as a philanthropist by donating
$17,000 to the school for a running track. He was prophetically voted "best
businessman" and "most likely to succeed" by his classmates.
After a desultory year at the Wharton school of business at the University
of Pennsylvania, he dropped out in 1928 to pursue the stock market, where,
through his own acumen, he had already established a portfolio worth $3
million, according to Mr. Ogden's book. But when the market crashed in 1929,
he found himself $350,000 in debt from buying on margin. A disappointment to
his father, who nevertheless paid his debts and continued to support him in
lavish style, Walter had become a playboy who frequented cafe society in New
York, gambled and was often seen in the company of Hollywood starlets. His
father, bent on "making a man" of him, brought his 21-year-old heir into the
company in 1929.
In 1936 Moses also bought The Philadelphia Inquirer, which had a national
reputation as the bible of the Republican Party. He made himself a power in
Pennsylvania Republican politics and contributed hundreds of thousands of
dollars to the G.O.P.
But then the ax fell. On Aug. 11, 1939, Moses was indicted by a federal
grand jury in Chicago for evading $3,258,809.97 in income taxes. Walter was
also indicted along with two other business associates. But a guilty plea by
Moses, whereby he agreed to pay $9.5 million in taxes, penalties and
interest and serve three years in jail, saved his son. As part of the
settlement, charges against Walter and other business associates were
dropped. The son never forgot this sacrifice. On the wall behind his desk at
The Inquirer hung a brass-and-mahogany plaque, which bore the legend - taken
from a prayer - "Cause my works on earth to reflect honor on my father's
memory."
Sentenced to three years, Moses was released in two, afflicted with a brain
tumor that killed him a month later.
After his father's death in 1942, Walter took over as editor and publisher
of The Inquirer. To the surprise of its staff, he turned out to be a shrewd,
tough boss who knew what he wanted. Under his guidance, The Inquirer
initiated a host of public-spirited campaigns aimed at everything from
cleaning up the city's water supply to reforming Philadelphia's corrupt
magistrate system to crusading against the use of fireworks; its World War
II coverage was also widely admired.
One of the paper's most successful campaigns resulted in opening the
art-rich but exclusive Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion, Pa., to the
general public. In 1952 The Inquirer filed suit against the tax-exempt
foundation to enable public access, and after many legal setbacks the
newspaper's prodding brought action from the state attorney general's
office. In 1961 the Barnes Foundation was forced to broaden its admissions
policy.
More than occasionally, however, Mr. Annenberg used The Inquirer's columns
to settle scores and snipe at enemies, killing articles about or banning
mention of people who had offended him, particularly members of
Philadelphia's social hierarchy by whom he felt snubbed.
And there were egregious examples of his use of the paper to further his own
interests, economic or otherwise. One such case is cited by Mr. Fonzi in his
1970 book. It involved the unsuccessful campaign of Milton J. Shapp for
governor of Pennsylvania on the Democratic ticket in 1966. One of Shapp's
chief campaign issues was the proposed merger of the Pennsylvania and the
New York Central Railroads, to which The Inquirer had given heavy editorial
support.
Shapp characterized the merger as "a legalized multimillion-dollar swindle."
The next day The Inquirer began a series of merciless attacks on the
candidate, involving misleading headlines, distorted news stories and
vitriolic editorial comment. The attacks were so vicious, according to Mr.
Fonzi, that Shapp's opponent, Gov. Raymond Shafer, began to worry that the
backlash would hurt him. What was not brought out, however, until the
gubernatorial race was over, and then only because he was elected to its
board of directors, was that Walter Annenberg was the biggest individual
stockholder of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1962 Mr. Annenberg barred his television stations in Philadelphia and New
Haven from broadcasting an ABC documentary on Nixon's career that included
an interview with Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury in 1950 when he
denied having collaborated with a Communist spy network. The next day The
Inquirer carried a front-page statement from the publisher: "I cannot see
that any useful purpose would be served in permitting a convicted
treasonable spy to comment about a distinguished American," Mr. Annenberg
declared, disregarding the fact that Hiss had been convicted of perjury, not
espionage. The censorship occasioned a storm of protest from viewers and
readers that reverberated for weeks.
Mr. Annenberg's successful efforts to expand the Triangle Publications
empire included the start-up of Seventeen magazine in 1944; the founding of
TV Guide in 1953 and the purchase of radio and television stations.
Seventeen was born of a collaboration between Mr. Annenberg and Helen
Valentine, the promotions manager of Mademoiselle magazine, after he noticed
the prevalence of teenage fashions in shop windows on Fifth Avenue and
realized that there was no magazine aimed at this lucrative market.
Seventeen was an overnight success, selling 400,000 copies of its first
issue, and for many years it carried more advertising than any other women's
magazine. In 1954 Mr. Annenberg's sister Enid, who had established herself
as a hard-working feature writer on The Inquirer during the war, took over
as editor and enlivened the magazine's layout and content.
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WFIL-AM and FM, two of Philadelphia's leading radio stations, had been
acquired by Triangle in 1945; a television station soon followed.
Subsequently, Triangle acquired other radio and television stations in
Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and California, most of them affiliated
with national networks.
These television interests led Mr. Annenberg into one of his most successful
ventures, TV Guide, which he established by acquiring and merging several
local television magazines. It was published in regional editions with
features about television programs and personalities in addition to the
listings. Available at supermarket checkout counters, the magazine
eventually reached an estimated 17 million homes, the largest circulation of
any magazine in the country.
With his designation by President Nixon in 1969 as ambassador to Britain,
Mr. Annenberg decided to curtail his business activities. He sold The
Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News that year, without prior
notification to staff members, an action that typified for many of them his
aloofness and imperiousness as a publisher.
His appointment as ambassador was viewed negatively in influential quarters,
here and in Britain. Some critics suggested that he had bought the
nomination with campaign contributions, and at confirmation hearings before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was aggressively questioned by
Senator J. William Fulbright, the committee's chairman, who did not vote for
his appointment.
Mr. Annenberg's patrician predecessor as ambassador, David K. E. Bruce, and
his wife, Evangeline, were said to be dismayed at the appointment; they
broke with tradition by staying on in London in a high-profile way after
their successors arrived. The Bruces were definitely less than charmed when
Mrs. Annenberg brought a team of Beverly Hills decorators to London to give
the 35-room embassy residence a much-needed six-month redo at a cost of $1
million.
During Mr. Annenberg's early tenure as ambassador, the British press poked
fun at his lack of qualifications and his bumbling speaking style.
Presenting his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II, he was asked by the queen,
in front of television cameras, how he was faring while Winfield House, the
embassy residence, was being restored. He replied, "We're in the embassy
residence, subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of a
need for, uh, elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation."
His first public speech as ambassador, in which he lambasted student
radicals in the United States but barely mentioned Anglo-American relations,
did not endear him to the British establishment. Yet in his five and a half
years as ambassador, he redeemed himself by hard work, his wife's talent for
gracious entertaining (she later served as chief of protocol during the
Reagan administration), and gifts to favorite royal causes like the
restoration of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Eventually, he, Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
became friends. In 1976, the queen named him an honorary knight, and in
1983, when she visited the United States, she came for lunch at Sunnylands.
Prince Charles spent the weekend there in 1974 while on shore leave from a
naval cruise, and visited many times thereafter.
A "room of memories" in the house is filled with trophies and souvenirs of
life among the powerful. On Mr. Annenberg's return from Britain (for the
rest of his life, he liked to be called Ambassador) it also became something
of a shrine to British royalty. Photographs and other mementos of the royal
family are there in abundance, and a series of framed Christmas cards from
the queen mother hangs outside in a corridor.
Mr. Annenberg's first marriage, in 1938, to Veronica Dunkelman of Toronto,
ended in divorce in 1950. The couple had a son, Roger, who had schizophrenia
and committed suicide in 1962 at age 22, and a daughter, Wallis Annenberg of
Los Angeles, who survives him.
In 1951, Mr. Annenberg married Leonore Cohn Rosenstiel, who also survives
him, as do two of his seven sisters, Enid Haupt and Evelyn Hall, both of New
York City; two step-daughters; four grandchildren; three step-grandchildren;
five great-grandchildren and a step-great-grandson.
His interest in the mass media's potential for education led Mr. Annenberg
to establish, in 1962, the large, handsome M. L. Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, named for his father. In
1971, he set up another Annenberg communications school at the University of
Southern California.
Both aimed at turning out not just reporters but researchers, managers and
policy analysts as well. He also financed, in 1986, the Annenberg Institute
in Philadelphia, successor to the former Dropsie College there and the
inheritor of its 180,000-volume library. The institute is devoted to
expanding the understanding of Western history and culture as they developed
from Middle Eastern foundations.
But his 1976 proposal to set up a fine arts center at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York that would provide mass art education using
television technology ended in defeat.
On his return from London in 1974, he joined the Met's board, and hatched
the idea of establishing a center at the museum that would make great art
more available to the general public. His plan called for the use of film,
television, tapes, slides and reproductions to educate the widest possible
audience about the history and nature of art. The project's head would be
Thomas P. F. Hoving, then the Met's director, and Mr. Annenberg offered $40
million to get the ball rolling.
At first the idea was welcomed by Met officials, who suggested that the
center could become part of the museum's new southwest wing, where it would
displace planned exhibition areas. But opposition began to build among local
politicians and Met trustees. Questions arose over the center's function,
its autonomy from the rest of the Met's operation and the use of city-owned
land for a project that some saw as unrelated to the museum's fundamental
activities. Mr. Hoving was denounced for the conflict of interests entailed
in his negotiating for the job of the center's director while still head of
the museum.
Several City Council members opposed the project on grounds that it would
entail further expansion of the museum into the sacred precincts of Central
Park, already a sore point raised by the Met's vast building projects of the
1970's. The furor became so intense that Mr. Annenberg, after trying to
explain the project by means of an advertisement in The New York Times,
abruptly decided to drop it.
A good deal of the money from the sale of Triangle in 1988 went into the M.
L. Annenberg Foundation (in 1995 the foundation reported assets of $1.4
billion), enabling Mr. Annenberg to expand his already far-flung
philanthropies considerably, largely in the field of education.
In 1991 he pledged $60 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to
support mathematics and science programming for students from kindergarten
to the 12th grade. His donation of $50 million to the United Negro College
Fund in 1990 was hailed as the largest gift ever for historically black
colleges.
In 1993, Mr. Annenberg gave $365 million to three universities - Harvard,
the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California -
and to Peddie, his prep school alma mater. That same year, he announced what
is probably the biggest gift ever made to benefit public education, $500
million, spread over five years and among several institutions and
organizations bent on boosting the efficacy of public schools, the bulk to
be spent in urban areas.
In 1989, when he gave $15 million for acquisitions to the Metropolitan and
$5 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he said: "Having
reached the age of four-score years, I am trying to be a constructive
citizen. I have heard it said that no good deed goes unpunished, but I don't
intend to let that discourage me."
Connor
--
"Why can't they use real numbers instead of
this Roman numeral crap. I mean, look, it's
one minute past X."
~Ozzy Osbourne
James
columns and I'd be a goner as well.
ANIM8Rfsk
That's exactly what I was thinking.
I am puzzled
>From: "The Girl Connor" click...@hotmail.comNOSPAM
>father's death in 1942, he forged one of the
>communication world's great powers, with newspapers, radio and television
>stations, national magazines and racing sheets.
RACING SHEETS ??? do you know the
real story of the Annenberg family ?? do
you know where the first BIG MONEY
CAME FROM ???????? Have you ever
heard of the DAILY RACING FORM ???????????? Moe made it theeeeee
bible for horseplayers..made millions and
then Walter parlayed it.....andnow you
know the rest of the story ...thank you