Enid Annenberg Haupt, 99 - Heiress Donated More Than $140 Million
Bob Feigel
OBITUARIES
Enid Annenberg Haupt, 99; Heiress Donated More Than $140 Million
By Valerie J. Nelson - Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 29, 2005
Enid Annenberg Haupt, a publishing heiress who thought nothing of
selling off her jewels and fine art if it meant she could give
millions more to benefit cancer patients, museums and the public
gardens she insisted the world needed as a "marvelous escape from
reality," has died. She was 99.
Haupt, who was known best for rescuing the New York Botanical Garden's
vast, Victorian-style conservancy from demolition, died Tuesday at her
home in Greenwich, Conn., the garden announced.
She was "the greatest patron American horticulture has ever known,"
Gregory Long, the garden's president, said in a statement. "She took
the New York Botanical Garden very, very seriously as a museum of
plants."
The first $5 million she gave the garden came from the sale of fine
jewelry she kept in a vault. When she wanted to donate $25 million to
the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, she sold 15 Impressionist
paintings to her only brother, Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire
publishing magnate who died in 2002.
"I must have a project; that should be my middle name, 'Project.' I'm
really and truly not happy without one," Haupt told The Times in 1993.
In the last 25 years, she donated more than $140 million to her
projects. They included funding gardens at the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C., and fountains on the Ellipse between the White
House and the Washington Monument.
She also bought George Washington's former home in Alexandria, Va.,
and donated it to the American Horticultural Society.
The first public garden she funded, at the Rusk Institute of
Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City in 1959, was a favorite.
When she visited the institute, she wondered where the children
played, and vowed to create a world to help them forget they were in a
hospital. The resulting playground within a greenhouse was quickly
nicknamed the Garden of Enid.
When asked how often projects she supported ended up as she envisioned
them, she once told The Times, "When they think I'll see it."
Haupt, who also maintained a home in New York City, made major gifts
to museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
She was born May 13, 1906, in Chicago to Moses and Sadie Annenberg.
The fourth, and last surviving, of eight children, Haupt grew up in
Milwaukee. The family eventually moved to New York City and Long
Island.
Her father bought the Daily Racing Form in the 1920s and went to
prison for tax evasion in the 1930s. The racing bible became the
cornerstone of the publishing empire her brother built, which
eventually included the Philadelphia Inquirer, TV Guide and television
and radio stations.
Her brother coaxed her into serving as publisher and editor of another
of the family's publications, Seventeen magazine, in 1954.
"I knew nothing about running a magazine, but my brother said: 'You
can bring culture to the average working person who has not had your
advantages,' " she told the New York Times.
She remained at the helm of the magazine until resigning in 1970.
After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Wall Street
financier Ira Haupt in 1936. He died in 1963.
During their courtship, he sent her an unusual spray of cymbidium
orchids that inspired her lifelong interest in the flower.
"Nature is my religion," Haupt often said. "There is no life in
concrete and paint."
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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