The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  And Leonore Annenberg, his pretty blonde wife, added, “I think, and most of the people who remember it think, my husband carried off a difficult situation extremely well. And yet this remark keeps haunting us. It’s so unfair.”

  What Ambassador Annenberg did not explain is that as a youth he suffered from a crippling stammer. It is only as a result of years of work, determination, and professional help that he is able to speak at all. He taught himself to speak by the arduous method used by, among other stammerers, the late W. Somerset Maugham. He composes his sentences—literally “writes” them—in his head before putting them into words. This is why his utterances so often have a stilted ring. The stammer still catches up with him at times, and his lips work to form words. The letter w is particularly difficult for him, and it is part of his training, not pomposity, that causes him to refer to himself using his full name—as he does when he asks, “Why do they write such things about Walter H. Annenberg?” Television cameras, as they do many people, cause him to freeze. Because of the stammer he will not conduct press conferences. Also, he has suffered all his life from partial hearing. Conversation—particularly the banal sort of social chitchat which is practically the only sort one hears in British Court circles (“Are you living in the Embassy?”) is an ordeal for him—and so meeting the Queen in front of a battery of cameras was, as no one knows better than his wife knows, a difficult situation carried off well.

  But it was overexplaining again that got both Ambassador and Mrs. Annenberg involved in still another brouhaha with the press about, of all things, finger bowls. Someone quoted Ambassador Annenberg as saying that the former occupants of the residence, the David K. E. Bruces, “didn’t even” have finger bowls. The comment would hardly have created more than a bitchy column’s morning giggle if the Annenbergs hadn’t risen to the bait with another explanation. “My husband,” Mrs. Annenberg announced, “was merely observing to a few friends that certain dishes were used on certain occasions and casually observed that Mr. and Mrs. Bruce did not appear to have the proper finger bowls when we took up residence. Really! Does it matter?”

  Well, now. The answer to her question might have been “No, it doesn’t,” if Ambassador Annenberg had not come forward with this explanation of his wife’s explanation. “We were merely intrigued,” he said, “at the British custom of serving finger bowls only after artichokes, asparagus, or fruit—rather than the American custom of serving them after every meal, which makes less sense.” “Those wretched finger bowls!” his wife cries. Quite clearly Mrs. Annenberg has been even more disturbed and dismayed by the hostile British press than her husband—and he has been disturbed and dismayed considerably.

  What, then, is “wrong” with the Annenbergs as far as the British are concerned? Why have they seemed such a bitter pill for the British—particularly the perfumed circles of British upper-crust and diplomatic society—to swallow?

  Walter H. Annenberg, at sixty-four, is stockily built with ruddy good looks, silvering hair, a hearty, meaty manner and a big handshake. Outwardly, he is an eager, friendly Saint Bernard of a man, but there is a steely glint in his eye that promises he would be a tough person to cross. His wife, by contrast, is coolly poised and looks very much like the actress Joan Fontaine. “When we heard Walter had been named ambassador, we all thought that it should have been Lee,” one of Annenberg’s sisters says. Leonore Annenberg’s diplomatic skills have been tested by the fact that when she married her husband—the only son out of a family of eight children—she acquired seven sisters-in-law. All the Annenbergs are extremely rich, and the family fortune is one of the largest in the world. The Annenbergs are so rich that none of them can say with any accuracy just how much they are worth, since the size of the fortune, depending on fluctuations in the stock market, the art market, real estate, and so on, rises and falls by tens of millions of dollars from day to day. “Let me just say that it is vast,” says Mrs. Leo Simon, one of Ambassador Annenberg’s sisters.

  All the Annenbergs enjoy living on a grand scale, and a passion for building and decorating huge houses and apartments amounts to a family obsession. One sister, Mrs. Joseph Hazen, recently bought the twenty-seventh floor of New York’s Hotel Pierre—over the telephone. Someone told her she would like it, and so she bought it. Another, Mrs. Simon, has redecorated the large Fifth Avenue duplex that formerly belonged to Joan Crawford. All the Annenbergs have multiple addresses, with houses in New York, Westchester, Palm Beach, and Beverly Hills. Walter Annenberg has an estate on the Philadelphia Main Line and another, much larger, called Sunnylands, in the desert near Palm Springs, California. Sunnylands has, among other things, its own golf course with, according to the owner, “only nine holes, but the course is laid out in such a way that a total of twenty-seven holes can be played.” There are eight golf carts with blue and white hoods, thirteen man-made lakes and a swimming pool that cascades down on various levels, like a natural stream, and a giant beaucarnia tree—the largest tropical tree that grows—imported from Mexico via Los Angeles. Sunnylands requires a staff of forty-five to run it, and to make sure that his golf course would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. The place has guesthouses, equipment houses, and a main house with a fountain copied from the fountain at the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City. The entrance to the house is a room with a high vaulted ceiling through which sunlight pours down into a reflecting pool. Beside the pool, Rodin’s Eve is placed. All the rooms of the house are placed so they view the beaucarnia tree. There is a sculpture garden, a cactus garden, two hothouses—one just for orchids—and Lee Annenberg’s private garden, just off her bedroom suite, is a simple affair: a circle of white chrysanthemums enclosed in a square of Japanese pebbles set in grout, the whole enclosed in a holly hedge. Gardeners make sure that Mrs. Annenberg’s chrysanthemums are always fresh. Visitors to Sunnylands go on picnics with insulated hot and cold picnic baskets, and are driven about in a Mini-Mok, a housewarming present from Frank Sinatra. The list of pleasures available at Sunnylands goes on and on.

  The source of all this was a Prussian immigrant named Moses L. Annenberg who came to Chicago at the age of seven, and whose first paying job was as a messenger for Western Union. Moe Annenberg also sold newspapers on the street, swept out livery stables and, before he was eighteen, worked as a bartender in a saloon on Chicago’s tough South Side. In 1900, a brash, rich young man named William Randolph Hearst came to Chicago. Moe Annenberg’s older brother, Max, went to work for Hearst and his new paper, the American, and Max hired Moe. These were the days of the great Midwest newspaper circulation wars, and presently Moe Annenberg was proving himself to be a genius at promoting circulation. Mr. Hearst, seeing this, put Moe Annenberg in charge of his operations in Milwaukee.

  Though Moe Annenberg certainly possessed a flair for selling newspaper subscriptions, Walter Annenberg likes to recall that his father’s “first important money” was made as a result of an idea suggested by Walter’s mother. Looking around for a new circulation gimmick, Moe Annenberg asked his wife, “What is the one thing you’re always running out of?” Oddly enough, her answer was teaspoons. Thus the “State Teaspoon” promotion was launched whereby a housewife, for coupons clipped from six daily papers and one Sunday—plus twenty-five cents—received a sterling silver teaspoon embossed with the seal of one of the forty-eight states. Naturally, every woman wanted a full set. Under an arrangement with the International Silver Company, Annenberg sold millions of spoons, and millions of copies of the Milwaukee News. Walter Annenberg remembers sitting with his seven sisters on weekends, wrapping spoons. It is curious that a fortune begun in teaspoons should wind up in a flurry over finger bowls. From then on, Moe Annenberg was into taxicab companies, electric automobiles, restaurants, bowling alleys, grocery stores—into the Racing Form, which he bought for four hundred thousand dollars cash wrapped in old newspaper, into the Philadelphia Inquirer, then the Morning Telegraph, and on into the foundation of what today is the massive
Triangle Publications, Inc., which owns radio and television stations and publishes, among other things, Seventeen magazine and the fantastically successful TV Guide—all still completely family-owned.

  By the 1920s it was time for the Annenbergs to buy the George M. Cohan estate on Long Island for a million dollars, a place in the Poconos, a villa in Miami next door to the Firestones, and a ranch in Wyoming that covered eighteen miles, with a fabulous trout stream and a house that had curtains made of yellow calfskin embroidered with turquoise beadwork, handmade by the Indians. Two Annenberg family sales made news within weeks of each other—Walter’s sale of his Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News for $55,000,000, and his sister Harriet Ames’s sale of one of her big diamonds that she had grown tired of, for an undisclosed price. The gem, which weighs 69.42 carats, went on display at Cartier’s, where it drew record crowds and was sold to Richard Burton for his wife for $1,050,000. At the time, it was rumored that “the Annenbergs must be going broke.” Nothing could be further from the fact.

  At the same time, the cost of all this wealth has been great in terms of human suffering. As occasionally happens in great dynastic families—one thinks of the Kennedys, or the Greek House of Atreus—it is as though the Fates demanded that great men be somehow punished for their greatness. The most shattering blow of all, of course, was Moe Annenberg’s indictment, in 1939, for income tax evasion, and his subsequent prison sentence. When released, in June 1942, he was a broken man and died a few months later. Few children loved their father more than Annenberg’s son and seven daughters. “We worshipped him,” Aye Annenberg Simon says. (She was her father’s “A Number One Girl,” he used to say, which earned her her nickname.) “We thought him all-powerful. During electric storms, when there’d be a flash of lightning, he’d say, ‘Now I’ll push the thunder button,’ and of course the thunder would come. We thought he was God.” The Annenbergs continue to insist that their father’s tragedy was the result of no wrongdoing. There may have been discrepancies in his accounts, they say, but after all he was by then the head of over ninety corporations; for tax advice, he relied on a battery of lawyers and accountants, some of whom may have been unreliable. Certainly, his children say, he did not prepare his own income tax returns, nor did he set about deliberately to cheat the government. Moe Annenberg had entered the New Deal era as a Roosevelt supporter, but when Roosevelt attempted his Supreme Court—packing plan, Annenberg withdrew his support and attacked Roosevelt in a series of editorials. Roosevelt accused Annenberg of being a “traitor,” but Annenberg persisted with the editorials. The word went out from Washington to “get Annenberg”; then came the tax indictment. Their father, his children believe, was simply the victim of a particular political era, just as Eugene Debs, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, and Dr. Spock have been the scapegoats of theirs. What happened to their father in 1939, their lawyers have told them, could not happen in 1972.

  The pattern of tragedy has continued. Walter Annenberg’s only son, considered brilliant, was a suicide, and Annenberg was so staggered by this blow that news of it was withheld for a week, as though he could not bring himself to believe that it had happened. One of his nieces was also a suicide, and another died tragically of cancer. A nephew, Robert Friede, was involved in a drug-manslaughter scandal several years ago for which he served a prison sentence. All Walter Annenberg’s sisters except one—a widow—have had divorces, and Walter’s own first marriage was a particularly unhappy one. The Fates at times must have seemed relentless.

  And yet it is absolutely certain that His Excellency Walter H. Annenberg, United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, would not be the man he is or where he is if it had not been for the grim day in 1939 when he heard the verdict passed down against his father. Walter was thirty-one at the time. Up to then, he had been a shy, withdrawn young man living in his father’s shadow. Suddenly he was head of the house, responsible for his mother and the seven sisters, older and younger. Ever since, he has worked diligently to enrich his family—as he certainly has done, to the point where, barring the most unusual circumstances, Annenberg heirs will be wealthy for many generations to come—and has worked even more doggedly to vindicate his father, to clear and elevate his father’s name. Engraved in gold on a wooden plaque, prominently displayed in all his offices wherever he goes, are the words:

  CAUSE MY WORKS ON EARTH TO REFLECT

  HONOR ON MY FATHER’S MEMORY

  This has been the single most important, most consuming, mission in Walter Annenberg’s life. He may not always have succeeded, but he cannot be faulted for not trying. Sitting behind his big desk at the Embassy in London, he said, “Tragedy will either destroy you or inspire you, and I continue to have many inspirations to reflect credit on my father. In fact, I feel sorry for people who do not have great incentives in their lives. Great incentives can be sobering and inspiring.” Walter Annenberg is a man who lives by mottoes; in fact, he has his favorite quotations typed up and printed on mimeographed sheets so he can carry them with him and refer to them for inspiration. Some of the ones he finds most comforting and reassuring are: “Today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope”—William Osler; “Our main business is not to do what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand”—Thomas Carlyle; “The high places occupied by those who are genuinely repentant cannot be reached even by the righteous”—the Talmud. His favorite is this, from an unknown source: “There is no misfortune but to bear it nobly is good fortune.”

  Annenberg says, “For every advantage a citizen has, he has a corresponding responsibility. Having had more than my share of personal success, I have felt my obligation particularly strongly. All my life I have endeavored to be a constructive citizen.” He has endeavored to be constructive through philanthropy, and heads three charitable foundations, one named in his father’s memory. He has given the Annenberg School of Communications to the University of Pennsylvania, and the Annenberg Library and Masters’ House to the Peddie School, the latter given in honor of the masters who taught him as a student there. He has also toiled for the Philadelphia Art Museum and, in the process, has assembled an imposing collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings which he has been generous in lending to galleries and museums. He has striven to have the Annenberg name linked with philanthropy and public service, and clearly he feels that his ambassadorial post is just another way he can “reflect honor” on his father’s memory.

  But is he the right man for the job? Or is he, as his harshest critics say, actually hurting U.S.-British relations with his ineptitude and lack of experience? Of course, much of the criticism of the Annenberg appointment started in America and preceded his arrival in London. It was pointed out that he knew little of Britain, except as an occasional tourist, and that his biggest newspaper, the Inquirer—since sold—didn’t even employ a foreign correspondent. Much was made of the fact that two Annenberg publications were racing papers, “a service that supplied bookies with racing results.” This, of course, is rather like calling the Wall Street Journal “a service for illegal manipulators and shady speculators,” because Annenberg’s Morning Telegraph, after all, is the official newspaper of the Thoroughbred Racing Association and of the National Association of State Racing Commissioners. It lists among its subscribers none other than Queen Elizabeth II, who knows more about horses than about ambassadors’ addresses. Needless to say, at the time of the appointment, Moe Annenberg’s tax troubles were taken out and dusted off.

  Leading the criticism in America was the New York Times—now known in the Annenberg family as “The goddamned New York Times.” In a sharply worded editorial, the Times took President Nixon to task for “returning now to the unhappy practice of parcelling out key embassies to major campaign contributors” and said that Kennedy and Johnson had “scrapped” this tradition. Today, Walter Annenberg carries the Times editorial, slightly dogeared, in his date-book, and appears to have it committed to memo
ry—the way actresses sometimes memorize bad notices. He takes it out, brandishes it, pounds the desk as his gorge—and voice—rises. “I made no political contributions!” he cries. “I have not one nickel. This is an editorial based on falsity. This is a textbook example of yellow journalism!” He also claims that at least two ambassadorial appointments of which he has personal knowledge—Matt McCloskey as envoy to Ireland, under Kennedy, and Frederick Mann, to Barbados, under Johnson—were both the result of money contributions. He knows this, Ambassador Annenberg says, because both President Kennedy and President Johnson telephoned him and told him so at the time.

  On this rather important point—whether or not Walter Annenberg gave money to the Nixon campaign—it is hard to get a definite answer. Back in New York, John B. Oakes, the Times’s editorial director, expressed astonishment that Annenberg had accused the Times of lying, and said, “Why, it’s been part of my general knowledge that Annenberg has been a big contributor,” which seems a somewhat flimsy basis for an editorial claiming this to be a fact. Since the appointment, the Times has continued to needle Annenberg, once commenting that a room in the Embassy where a reception was being held “looked like a place where people gulp down a quick, cheap lunch.” With the British press continuing to be hostile or mocking or both, there were signs, by the fall of 1969, that the Annenbergs were visibly wearying of the attack and that Annenberg might indeed offer his resignation by mid-1970. Later, though, the British press became kinder, led by the Evening Standard, which commented that “Mr. Annenberg has impressed independent observers by his sincerity and determination. Perhaps the critics will relent a little when they get to know him better.” Even the New York Times has adopted a gentler tone.