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The billionaire publisher was famous for monetary gifts and his regal style of living.
©Washington Post
October 2, 2002
Walter Annenberg, the billionaire publisher, philanthropist, art collector and ambassador to Great Britain during the Nixon presidency, died of pneumonia Tuesday (Oct. 1, 2002) at his home in Wynnewood, Pa. He was 94.
Mr. Annenberg presided over a media empire that included the weekly magazine TV Guide, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News newspapers, Seventeen magazine, several broadcast properties and the Daily Racing Form, which was essential reading for serious horse bettors.
In the late 1960s he began selling parcels of this amalgam, culminating in the $3-billion sale in 1988 to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. of Triangle Publications, the umbrella company for Mr. Annenberg's media properties.
He gave away more than $2-billion, much of it through the Annenberg Foundation. Among the largest of these were gifts of $120-million each to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California for the establishment of communications schools and $150-million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 1993 he announced a five-year, $500-million program of grants to programs in rural and urban public school districts.
There were hundreds of smaller, spontaneous gifts, most of which were unpublicized. He routinely paid medical bills for his employees' children who were injured in accidents. In 1963 he sent a check to pay off a mortgage for the widow of a Dallas police officer slain trying to capture Lee Harvey Oswald.
He gave his money away, reported his biographer John Cooney, to compensate for the stain left on his family reputation by his father, Moses Annenberg, who made a fortune during the 1920s and 1930s operating a wire service that supplied horse race results to bookmakers. In 1940 Moses Annenberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges and served two years in prison. Walter Annenberg "spent his life trying to atone for the sins of his father. . . . He believed that it was through good works that he could redeem the honor of the name Annenberg," Cooney wrote in The Annenbergs: The Salvaging of a Tainted Dynasty.
As an art connoisseur, Mr. Annenberg had world-class taste and a discriminating eye. His collection was not large, but it was reputed to be among the finest. It included 50 paintings by such masters as van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Renoir, Bonnard, Monet, Degas and Cezanne. Valued at more than $1-billion, the collection is bequeathed to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From 1969 to 1974, Mr. Annenberg was President Richard Nixon's ambassador to Great Britain. He would call this experience "the greatest honor of my life." On his arrival in London he spent $1-million of his money to redecorate and refurbish Winfield House, the ambassador's official residence, and it cost him $250,000 a year to run the embassy for the 51/2 years he served in London.
"This embassy could be handily run on $75,000 to $100,000 a year -- but not the way I like to run it, with fine wines and flowers in every room," he said at a farewell luncheon at the embassy in October of 1974.
He insisted on the best. He lived regally in two primary residences: a baronial manor, Inwood, just outside of Philadelphia, and Sunnylands, the estate he built near Palm Springs, Calif. Biographer Cooney described his lifestyle at Sunnylands as "reminiscent of a Renaissance Venetian doge."
At Sunnylands, in a 32,000-square-foot house surrounded by a private nine-hole golf course and protected by armed security guards, Mr. Annenberg welcomed world leaders and Hollywood luminaries as his guests.
"I do not treat myself unkindly," Mr. Annenberg said in 1989. ". . . I am a nut on quality. . . . I can think of nothing stupider than to live poorly in order to die rich."
Walter Hubert Annenberg was born in Milwaukee, the only son and the sixth of nine children of Moses and Sadie Annenberg.
Throughout his early years, his father was the dominant figure in his life. In 1939 when his father was indicted on charges of income tax evasion and bribery, Mr. Annenberg, then a vice president in his father's business operations, was indicted on charges of "aiding and abetting" in his father's crimes. As part of a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped charges against Mr. Annenberg in exchange for a guilty plea from his father.
Mr. Annenberg inherited his father's estate, but few of his father's business colleagues had confidence in his ability to manage the operation. Mr. Annenberg surprised them.
He launched Seventeen magazine in 1944, and it was virtually an overnight success. In 1953 he launched TV Guide by combining it with other local television magazines he had bought.
In 1957 he bought the Philadelphia Daily News, gaining control of two of the city's three daily newspapers. As a publisher he generally backed Republican political candidates, conservative programs and law-and-order policies. As a manager he could be despotic and mercurial. The names of Philadelphians who offended him were often banned from his newspapers. For a period in the 1960s, the president of the University of Pennsylvania was referred to only as "a university spokesman." The name of the city's baseball team, the Phillies, was once stricken from the Annenberg papers because team owners refused to reschedule a baseball game that conflicted with a charity event sponsored by Mr. Annenberg.