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Walter Annenberg, Philanthropist and Media Baron, Dies at 94 October 1, 2002 By GRACE GLUECK 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." 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. 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. 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." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/01/obituaries/01CND-ANNE.html?ex=1034498241&ei=1&en=6288fdcb073aed98 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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