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The Annenbergs

Prologue

The Annenberg name has figured prominently in the Palm Springs Valley for many years, as Walter and Leonore Annenberg have been well-known philanthropists, giving generously to many local causes. Many of our younger readers may not know where the Annenbergs came from or how they made their fortune or how the Annenbergs may have had an impact on their lives through their gifts to education and public television, or through their publications — notably TV Guide and Seventeen Magazine. The Annenberg Education Center at Sunnylands, under construction, will be home to meetings and conferences of great importance to Americans. With the recent passing of Leonore Annenberg, the center will also offer tours of the Sunnylands Estate, arguably the most historic piece of real estate in the Palm Springs Valley. Sunnylands has hosted nearly every American president since Dwight Eisenhower and was the site of a State meeting between President George H.W. Bush and the Japanese prime minister in 1990. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip visited in the 1980s while in the U.S. on an official trip, and the estate has hosted Prince Charles on several occasions. President Richard Nixon used Sunnylands to work on his 1974 State of the Union address and after he left office was a frequent visitor. He was at Sunnylands when President Ford granted him a pardon on September 8, 1974. The Annenbergs offered refuge at Sunnylands for the mother and sister of the exiled Shah of Iran after they were tormented by demonstrators in 1979. During the Reagan presidency, the Annenbergs hosted a New Year’s Eve party for them every year.

The story of Walter Annenberg cannot be told without telling the controversial story of his father, Moses, an immigrant to our country who worked hard for his family to create a publishing empire that was nearly devastated when he was tried and imprisoned for income tax evasion after criticizing FDR’s New Deal policies.

From East Prussia to America

The family arrived cold, wet and hungry in New York with just the clothes on their backs, mother and grandmother with nine children, the three youngest tied together with an adult at each end so they wouldn’t get lost as they crossed the Hudson River by ferry to catch the westbound train for Chicago. The year was 1885, and the travelers had never been in a city before they started their journey, having spent their lives in the little village of Kalvishken, East Prussia, with a population of less than 100, near the border of present-day Lithuania. The family was eager to reunite, but they still had to cross five states, sitting on the hard bench seats of the coach car. The 30-mile-an-hour train would get the family to Chicago in 24 hours, stopping at stations in towns all along the way. It gave the young Annenbergs a good view of Middle America.

Tobias Annenberg, the head of the family, was to meet them at the train station in Chicago. He had come to America three years before and had worked night and day to save and send the money back to East Prussia that would bring the rest of his family to the “Golden Land.”

In the latter half of the 19th century, anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia and Eastern Europe increased boldly. Property and voting rights were taken away from Jews in many areas as they were made the scapegoat for the assassination of Czar Alexander II. The czar’s successor, Czar Alexander III, vowed to kill a third of Russia’s Jews, drive a third out of the country and convert the rest to Russian Orthodoxy. Jews were attacked and killed regularly in organized pogroms that left whole villages of homes and synagogues burned to the ground.

Refugees fleeing through Kalvishken to seaports that would take them to the new world told Tobias Annenberg of the killing and persecution happening in the country next door. He feared that the violence and death would soon spread to Prussia, so he left Kalvishken to take the journey to America and would send for his family when he could.

The children ran to greet their father, crying and holding on to him however they could. The small, dark, 8-year-old, barefoot boy was Walter Annenberg’s father, Moses. His only shoes, made of wood, had floated away during the terrible storm the family endured on the crossing. Their mother thought it was the end as the ship tipped from side to side and seawater poured into the ship through the smokestacks, dousing the fire in the boilers, setting the steamer aimlessly adrift in the storm.

They had arrived safely in New York, happy to see any land after the crossing. As Tobias loaded the children into the rented buggy for the short ride home, the children were awestruck by the hustle and bustle of Chicago, with streetcars clanging down every street and men with steam shovels and cranes constructing buildings that seemed to ascend to the clouds above the city. Chicago was undergoing a tremendous construction boom, rising like a phoenix from the devastation and ashes of the great fire of 1871.

The family moved into a small apartment behind a storefront on south State Street. Tobias Annenberg set up a general store after several years as a street cart peddler selling notions door to door. Now his wife and older daughters could help run the store while the younger Annenberg children went to school.

The Education of Moses Annenberg

Moe (as Moses was called) had only one year of formal education in East Prussia. He was put into the second grade at a predominately Irish public school. Moe excelled in his studies for several years and was eventually promoted to the fourth grade without having to take the examinations. Unfortunately, Moe didn’t fare well with his fourth-grade teacher, and in a fit of rage, he quit school and never went back. Education was not compulsory in the United States in 1890, and Moe Annenberg became a student of the streets of Chicago. His older brother Max also dropped out of school, and the two boys played stickball, rolled dice, joined a boxing club and played marbles.

Even though he was raised in a very orthodox Jewish home, at age 13 Moe had no interest in religion or education. He determined that earning money would be his ticket out of the neighborhood and began to work odd jobs, the first helping a vegetable seller for 50 cents a day.

Brother Max was hired as a telegram messenger boy and persuaded his boss to also hire Moe. Most urgent communications in business were conducted via telegram in the 1890s, as very few phones existed in Chicago. Moe was one of hundreds of telegram messengers fanned throughout Chicago. After two years delivering telegrams, Moe took a job as a switchboard operator at a livery office for $20 a month. When he wasn’t busy taking phone orders for taxis and wagons, he learned all about the livery business, and at age 16 he was promoted to day manager of the livery office at the Grand Pacific Hotel. The hotel was in the heart of Chicago’s business district and exposed Moe to the lifestyles of successful businessmen.

Moe left the livery when his two older brothers needed him to help run their brother-in-law’s saloon. Moe eventually joined his brother Max in a grocery store business that Max started after he got married. Moe didn’t relish working with his brother, as he felt Max didn’t know how to run a business. Feeling that Moe should settle down, his parents encouraged him to marry.

Moe Marries, Loses Business

At age 22, Moe married Sadie Friedman, whose parents had emigrated from Berlin in 1862. The marriage was most likely brokered as was the Jewish tradition of the time. Shortly thereafter, their business became mired in debt as Max was forced to sell everything below cost, just to keep abreast of the competition. Creditors eventually took over the store and the brothers were finished as grocers.

William Randolph Hearst

It was around that time that newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst decided to start a paper in Chicago. Hearst relied on sensational headlines and price to attract subscribers for his newspapers. He bought the New York Journal with a daily circulation of 77,000 in 1895 to compete with the New York World, daily circulation 800,000. Hearst dropped the price of the paper to a penny and doubled its size to 16 pages. Within two years, Hearst had boosted the Journal’s circulation to 960,000 by using large sensational headlines, sniffing out corruption in politics and sponsoring the Spanish American War. His newspaper’s stories, while exaggerated, really riled people up to go to war. Hearst’s ultimate goal was to be President of the United States, and he and his family had the means and ambition to make it happen. A Democratic senator told Hearst in 1899 that the party needed a powerful newspaper in Chicago to help defeat President McKinley and elect William Jennings Bryan. Hearst felt that if he was successful it would put him on the ladder to the presidency. Hearst’s mission in Chicago was to be the number one newspaper in Chicago and influence the politics of the readers, so he poured his resources into the effort to launch the American.

Competition was fierce in the Chicago news market. There were 10 daily newspapers being printed in the windy city. It should be remembered that there was no television or radio in 1900. People got their news from reading the newspaper. Breaking news was printed in special editions of the paper as it happened, sometimes nine times a day.

Chicago’s Circulation Wars

Max Annenberg was hired away from the Chicago Tribune by the Hearst Corporation to be a circulation manager; he was offered 25 cents for every subscription he could sell. Max hired his brother Moe, who quickly learned that he could be an effective salesman selling subscriptions to Chicago housewives. Hearst knew that it would take a lot of money to muscle the American into the Chicago market.

The circulation people sometimes used force and intimidation to get newsstands to carry the American.

They were known to even hire baseball bat-wielding toughs from the stockyards for $3 a day to dominate neighborhoods that would only carry the Daily News. The Annenberg brothers thrived in Hearst’s circulation department and kept getting promotions until Moe was in charge of circulation for the whole south side of Chicago. Moe was a workaholic and loved his job, even though it could be dangerous — he never left the house without a pistol in each of his coat pockets for protection. Word of his performance reached Hearst, who decided to dispatch Moe to Indiana to shore up support for his 1904 run for the presidency.

For six months, Moe spread Hearst’s propaganda throughout Indiana before the Democratic primary election. The corporation poured over $300,000 into the state to win over voters. Hearst had been the winner of the Iowa Caucus and was considered a front-runner for the nomination. He didn’t fare very well in Indiana, only picking up two delegates in the election. From there, Moe was assigned to St. Louis, the site of the 1904 Democratic Convention. In the early 20th century, most political decisions were made in smoke-filled back rooms, not on the convention floor. Hearst was sure that William Jennings Bryan, whom he had supported for years, was going to nominate him to be the presidential nominee. Bryan instead nominated a senator from Missouri who had no real chance of winning. Hearst was crushed. Teddy Roosevelt trounced the Democratic candidate in the general election.

A Move to Milwaukee

Moe set his sights on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 90 miles north, to get away from the increasingly violent newspaper circulation wars and keep his family safe. Moe created a newspaper distribution business in Milwaukee. The business would contract with out-of-town newspapers to supply and deliver newspapers to newsstands. The publishers would save money by distributing through Moe, rather than paying an employee to distribute in each city. Moe’s company thrived, and he opened divisions in several other cities. Within five years, he was the only newspaper/magazine distributor in Milwaukee.

Annenberg’s First Million

Moses (he preferred his given name in Milwaukee) made his first million dollars by taking a suggestion from his wife. He was looking for ways to sell more papers and make more money. He wanted to offer a coupon in the papers he carried for an item that women would want to buy. He asked Sadie which of the more durable household items she bought the most often. She told him teaspoons.

Moses knew the idea was a winner: He would contract with a company to make teaspoons; readers would clip the coupon from the paper and present it at the newsstand with 15 cents and receive the silver spoon. Moses conceived the idea of manufacturing the spoons with the state seal on the handle. To ensure repeat business, he would offer a different state spoon each week. Moses was stunned by the demand. The New York Sunday World sold 150,000 spoons a week, the Chicago Examiner 100,000 spoons a week. Moses signed up papers in nearly every state and Canada by manufacturing spoons with the seals of the 48 states and provinces of Canada. By the time World War I broke out the following year, the promotion had sold 100 million spoons. Moses got a percentage of each sale and had made his first million, which allowed him to branch out into investments other than distribution.

Moses built Milwaukee’s largest parking garage, anticipating the need for one in the downtown area as Henry Ford’s automobiles became more affordable. He also built and bought two theaters, bowling alleys, billiard parlors, stores and apartments.

It was in Milwaukee that Moses and Sadie welcomed their first and only son, Walter Hubert Annenberg, on Friday the 13th of March 1908. The boy was named after Walter Hubert Inman, a newsman in Cleveland whom Moses admired. Walter was born with a deformed right ear and was deaf on that side. Three more daughters followed Walter, leaving him the only son out of eight children.

“Boy” Stutters

By all accounts, the years in Milwaukee were happy. The children were always well-dressed and well-behaved. Their new wealth allowed the parents to give their children anything they wanted. Walter’s mother and sisters all called him by his nickname, “Boy.” Walter was a stutterer, probably as a result of the deafness and deformity in his right ear. Moses took him to speech specialists for years for the problem. Walter was forced to recite tongue twisters as exercises to help his speech. However, Moses was not a patient man and would embarrass Walter at times when he would stutter. Many think the stuttering problem was the main reason Walter Annenberg held on to his privacy so closely and avoided speaking in public.

Walter was enrolled in the Milwaukee’s German-English Academy from 1914-1920, a private prep school on Milwaukee’s east side that required the German language and culture be taught. The school changed its name to the University School when the United States entered World War I, when all things German became unpopular.

Annenbergs Move to New York

In 1920, Moses got an offer from Hearst to move to New York and take over the circulation of all his magazines and newspapers. Moses’ one condition was that Hearst would allow him to keep his other businesses and interests, to which Hearst agreed. Moses pulled the kids out of school, hired a private railcar, and the family was off to the east coast. Moses bought an estate in Great Neck Long Island that was the home of entertainer George M. Cohan. They also bought a large apartment in Manhattan. Moses’ columnist friend Arthur Brisbane helped to get Walter into the private Peddie School, an exclusive prep school in New Jersey.

Some say that Walter’s years at Peddie were the happiest of his life. He thrived there and became more outgoing, engaging a new circle of friends that were sons of the east coast elite.

Moses Annenberg Expands His Business

In 1922, Frank Brunell, the founder and owner of the the Daily Racing Form, called Moses and asked if he was interested in buying his publication. Brunell was 69 years old and his wife was in ill health. He had run the Daily Racing Form for 28 years and just wanted to sell the paper, retire and enjoy life while he had the chance. Brunell had met Annenberg in Milwaukee while he was there and liked him because he was a good newspaper publisher. Brunell shared the company books with Moses, showing that the paper was clearing $175,000 to $200,000 a year. Moses bought the Daily Racing Form for $400,000 and recouped the cost in the first year of operation. He took the paper to the national level, using his nationwide news distribution company and set up offices and printing facilities in Toronto, Chicago, Cincinnati, Miami, Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles. In business, Moses had no qualms about playing hardball. As he was still Hearst’s national circulation manager, he wouldn’t let independent distributors carry any of Hearst’s newspapers or magazines, if they didn’t take the Daily Racing Form. To ease competition, Moses bought out small, local racing sheets as he wanted to control the entire track news industry. The Daily Racing Form brought the family hundreds of millions of dollars over the 60 years they owned it.

In 1927, Monte Tennes, owner of the General News Bureau, a telegraph wire service that supplied newspapers and bookmakers with racing results, offered to sell his business to Moses. Annenberg checked with lawyers for the General News Bureau to make sure that the business was legal, as Tennes was notorious as Chicago’s undisputed gambling boss. Annenberg had some trepidation, but bought the wire service anyway.

Walter Attends College

Walter was admitted to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania following his graduation from the Peddie School in 1928. Walter had been given the sobriquets “Best Businessman” and “Most Likely to Succeed.” Walter didn’t really want to go to college and had argued that his parents didn’t make his sisters go to college. Only the oldest daughter, Esther (or “Aye” as she was called), went to college, graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Moses insisted that Walter have an education. Being a man of the old world, Moses knew from the time Walter was born that one day his son would take over the family business. Moses also regretted leaving school when he did — he realized as a young adult what a mistake he made. Moses Annenberg was an avid reader and had a passion for learning.After a while, Walter became very bored with his classes; he felt they were hypothetical and hard to understand because they didn’t deal with real issues. Walter had much more interest in being a stock market day trader and was analyzing companies and trading stock all the time. His father had given him $10,000 to play the stock market during his senior year at Peddie. By early 1929, Walter’s portfolio was valued at over $3 million. He dropped out of Wharton, as he was spending less and less time in the classroom and more time at the local brokerage office. Walter favored startups and penny stocks, while Moses preferred the blue chips of Standard Oil, General Motors and GE. Moses felt that something was going to happen with the stock market and sold all of his stocks the week before the crash in October 1929. Walter wasn’t as lucky; he lost everything and then some, owing his broker some $350,000. Moses came to his rescue and bailed him out, as he didn’t want Walter to have a bankruptcy on his record. Walter learned his lesson and never speculated with stock again.

After Walter lost his shirt in the stock market, Moses created a job for him as an assistant bookkeeper in New York City. Every day, Walter would go to an office and sign checks. His father felt it would be a good introduction to the family business, as he could see where the money was coming in from and where it was going out. While Walter had a general idea of his father’s businesses, he was not in the information loop, as his father didn’t have much faith that Walter had any business sense.

Man About Town

Overall, Walter felt the job was tedious, but he enjoyed those years in New York, being young and wealthy and out on the town. He fell in love with Ginger Rogers when he was 21. She was 19 and in her first Broadway production, Cole Porter’s Girl Happy. They dated, but Ginger’s mother made her break it off, as she felt that Walter was too old and sophisticated for her daughter.Walter then set his sights on Ethel Merman, who was also starring in Girl Happy. The two became an item and were seen all over town together. They would spend weekends at his parents’ estate and share suppers with her parents in Brooklyn. They were together for several years when Ethel broke it off.

From Ethel Merman’s biography: During Girl Happy’s run, a new man came into Ethel’s life: Walter Annenberg, scion of one of the most prominent families from the Philadelphia Main Line. The family business was publishing, specifically Triangle Publications, which was responsible for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the immensely successful Daily Racing Form, among other titles. Educated at the exclusive Peddie School in New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Annenberg had started at Triangle in a minor post in the company’s bookkeeper’s office. If his background wasn’t quite what Ethel was accustomed to — she remembered that when he took her to meet his family, it was the first time she’d eaten off a gold service — she was attracted to Walter, and she admired the way he constantly sought creative ways to improve Triangle’s standing in the business world. Annenberg shared the conservative political leanings that Ethel had inherited from her parents, and she delighted in the way he loved to play the “man about town.” They were seen so often around New York’s hottest night spots that the columnists began tagging them as a couple to watch. In the end it turned out to be a just a two-year romance, the kind that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had in mind when they wrote, “All in Fun.” Ethel saw him now and then socially for years and never regretted that she had broken it off with him.

Rhetoric Earns FDR’s Ire and Prison Time

Moses Annenberg’s respectable Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper became his main editorial outlet for his conservative beliefs. His scathing criticism of FDR’s New Deal programs brought him to the attention of the president and soon the Internal Revenue Service began investigating Moses’ business operations, now called Triangle Publications. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in federal court for income tax evasion in mid-1939. The government claimed that Annenberg had evaded over $3.2 million in taxes between 1932 and 1936. It is unfortunate that Moses never used trained accountants in his business; he had put his faith in two trusted senior bookkeepers that had been with him for decades. The case was set to go to trial in April 1940. Moses decided to make a deal to plead guilty to evading $1.2 million in taxes and agree to pay the taxes plus $9.5 million in interest and penalties to be paid over seven years. In exchange, the government would drop the case against Walter. Moses cut the deal, and his lawyers did not expect him to serve any prison time. However, the judge felt he needed to make an example of Moses and sentenced him to three years in federal prison.

Walter assumed operations of Triangle Publications with generous doses of advice from Moses through letters and prison visits. Walter always operated the business knowing that the government was watching everything. He had the awesome responsibility of ensuring that his mother and sisters were cared for and the debt to the government was paid. He became Triangle’s hardest-working employee.

Death of Moses Annenberg

During his third year in prison, Moses began having horrible headaches, and with each visit, Walter noticed his father more wan and frail. Finally in June 1942, Moses was released on parole because of his illness. The family immediately took him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where doctors discovered that Moses had a large, inoperable brain tumor. He died on July 20, 1942, leaving Walter all of the business holdings and the majority of the family fortune, with provisions for Walter’s sisters and mother. However, three months after Moses’ death, the estate tax return showed that his father’s assets were $2.7 million and his debts were nearly $5.6 million (mostly the unpaid balance of the settlement with the federal government). The family couldn’t sell any of their property because the federal government held liens on them and wartime property values were pretty low. They survived because the revenue from their publications could cover their debt payments. It was then that Walter Annenberg promised himself that someday he would be worth $1 billion.

Marriage and Children

Walter married Veronica Dunkelman, daughter of a prominent men’s clothier of Toronto, Canada, in 1938. Their first child, a girl, was born in 1939. Walter was so excited; he named her after himself, Wallis Huberta. She was followed one year to the day by a son, Roger. Roger was born with a severely cleft lip and palate and would require five operations over three years to repair the birth defect. The family bought a house on Philadelphia’s Main Line, named for the double track railroad route that stretched from Philadelphia 25 miles west to Paoli. Over time the Main Line became one of the country’s most exclusive addresses, with large estates and stringent residential zoning laws. The Main Line towns were cliquish and Waspy; Walter was prevented from joining any of the Main Line country clubs because he was Jewish, so he built a three-hole golf course on his property.

Walter’s marriage began to fall apart in the late 1940s, and soon he was living apart from his wife. Eventually they divorced.

Walter met Leonore “Lee” Rosentiel in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1950. From the moment he asked her to dance, it was clear they were a good match. Lee had been raised by her uncle, Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles. She married young to get out of her uncle’s house, had a daughter and divorced. She remarried, had another daughter, but sadly that marriage wasn’t as happy as she would’ve liked. It was while she was wintering in Florida that she met and fell in love with Walter. She asked for a divorce, but her husband convinced her to give the marriage another chance. He promised that he would change his workaholic ways and spend more quality time with her and their daughter. Lee ended it with Walter so she could concentrate on improving her marriage, and though their marriage improved for a while, her husband was soon back to spending most of his time working. About a year later, she ran into Walter in New York City, and the two found that the magic was still there between them. With Walter’s support and encouragement, she divorced and wed Walter shortly thereafter in 1951.

Seventeen

Near the end of World War II, Walter heard that the fashion magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar were turning down about 150 pages of advertising a month because of wartime paper rationing. The restrictions prevented startups from entering the magazine publishing business. However, a loophole allowed publishers who put out two or more magazines to redistribute their paper rations, so Walter dropped a movie star fan magazine and a detective magazine that Triangle published so he could use the paper to print a fashion magazine for teenage girls and young women. Seventeen magazine was an immediate success, selling out its first printing of 400,000 copies. Walter knew that he was filling a void in the market, and he had a head start, before the war ended, before there was any competition for him.

TV Guide

Walter bought WFIL radio in Philadelphia in 1945 for $190,000. What made it attractive was that the station had a permit grandfathered in to build a television station. Walter felt that television was going to play a big part in future communication. Walter exercised the TV option, and the FCC approved his license application in 1948. WFIL became the 13th television station in the United States.

By 1952 he had learned enough about television as a station owner and viewer that he realized a need for more detailed and comprehensive television listings than could be printed in newspapers. He began to study several regional television listing magazines and felt that if he could buy up those regional magazines, he could print a color wrap-around with national television news and ship it to regional centers that could paste in the local listings. His idea became the well-known TV Guide, and it turned out to be quite a winner, at one time the highest-circulated magazine in history. One in every five magazines sold in America was a TV Guide, providing Triangle with millions and millions of dollars in profit.

American Bandstand

In the 1950s, Annenberg needed programming for WFIL’s afternoon air time. Hollywood studios still considered television a threat, so they would only sell old B-movies to television outlets. Annenberg did not want to pay to air bad movies, so he borrowed a successful program from his AM radio station that played and rated new pop records. Within months it became the most popular daytime show in the Philadelphia area. During the show’s second year, the original host got into some trouble with the law, and Annenberg fired him. Annenberg suggested that they use the radio host of “Bandstand,” who was a clean-cut young man named Dick Clark, as a replacement. Clark, in his mid-20s with lots of energy and drive, looked more like one of the teenagers. As rock ‘n’ roll became more popular, Clark begged, and Walter offered the ABC network the program at no charge for national broadcast. ABC, a distant third in size and ratings to NBC and CBS, finally agreed to a seven-week trial run. In August 1957, a 90-minute version, renamed American Bandstand, began airing, and by the fourth week it had become America’s number one daytime show, a savior for ABC and the beginning of Dick Clark’s rise to fame as a national icon. Millions of teenagers rushed home from school every day to hear the latest rock ‘n’ roll songs and learn the latest dances during the late 1950s and 1960s on American Bandstand, a fond memory for many baby boomers.

Sunnylands

Walter and Lee began building their Rancho Mirage winter home in 1963, but had been spending time in the desert since the mid-1950s at the La Quinta Resort. They played golf with friends and Frank Sinatra at Tamarisk Country Club every winter. When they played Tamarisk, they would see a big mound of sand, just outside the course every time they came down the 14th fairway. Lee told Walter that if they ever built a house, it would be fun to have it high enough, like on the mound of sand, so that they could look over the trees at the mountains. Building a house with a golf course appealed to Walter, who had become frustrated arranging tee times at busy Tamarisk. They bought the first property of 197 acres in 1963. An additional 69 acres were purchased in 1967, and the following year he paid $1.66 million for an adjacent parcel of 658 acres that he kept undeveloped as a buffer zone.

They developed a team of an interior designer, an architect, and a golf course/landscape designer to develop the plan for Sunnylands. William Haines was their designer and friend. Haines brought in his partner and furnishings specialist Ted Graber; golf course designer Dick Wilson; and A. Quincy Jones, professor of architecture at USC. The team worked with Walter and Lee to develop the most spectacular estate the Palm Springs Valley has ever seen.

After three years of construction, the Annenbergs took up residence at Sunnylands. Walter named the estate after his father’s summer retreat in the Poconos. The house sits on the high point near the center of the property and was built with Mayan influences, pyramidal with flying facades and flat roofs with walls and halls of windows that bring in light and enable views of the gardens and mountains. The main part of the house covers 22,803 square feet and includes the two main bedrooms and a four-bedroom guest wing. The arcades, loggias, terraces and a porte cochere are another 15,000 square feet. Three sides of the house open to different gardens, while the fourth opens to one of the larger lakes on the property. The private golf course features three different tees at each of its nine holes, so it can be played like a 27-hole course. As soon as the boxes were unpacked, the first guests at Sunnylands were former President and Mrs. Eisenhower, longtime friends of the Annenbergs. Ike, who had a home at El Dorado Country Club in Indian Wells, liked coming to Sunnylands to fish and golf. A month after Richard Nixon was elected president there was a Republican Governors Conference in Palm Springs. The Annenbergs hosted the VIPs of the party for golf and dinner. It was then that President-elect Nixon asked Walter to be the Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Sunnylands was Walter’s favorite place to display his considerable 19th-century impressionist art collection. He and Leonore began collecting art shortly after they married. Leonore had a bachelor’s degree in art history from Stanford University and found that she and Walter had the same tastes and interests in art. They would study pieces carefully together before making a purchase. They didn’t consider art as an investment, but as optical decoration that could stir memories or emotion. They amassed one of the finest collections in the world during their marriage. They would occasionally loan out parts of the collection to museums for exhibition, but in the end Walter bequeathed their collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1991. The collection, estimated at a value of between $1 and $2 billion, was the largest gift to any museum in the world.

A little-known fact about the house is that it was built with a bomb shelter basement. Constructed during the Cold War, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sunnylands was built complete with a state-of-the-art nuclear fallout shelter. Oddly enough, in the 35 years that he lived at Sunnylands, Walter Annenberg had never been in the basement. The U.S. Secret Service loved coming to Sunnylands because the security was so good, it made their job easier.

Sunnylands is also home of Rancho Mirage’s only cemetery. Several years before his death in October 2002, Walter Annenberg quietly approached city officials about rezoning one acre of Sunnylands to cemetery, so that a mausoleum could be constructed for himself and Leonore, as they wished it to be their final resting place. The city quietly approved the zoning change.

Ambassador to the United Kingdom

Walter Annenberg’s greatest honor was being named as Ambassador to the United Kingdom by Richard Nixon in 1969. The Annenbergs spent $5 million of their own money renovating the ambassadorial residence, Winfield House, when they arrived in London. Walter hoped that his service to the country would restore the Annenberg name. He decided that it was too difficult to run his newspaper from London, so he sold the Philadelphia Inquirer at the end of 1969. Walter and Lee developed close relationships with the Royal family, but Walter was just mad about Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mum. He adored her because she was real and she was a good person that reminded him of his own mother. The two remained friends until her death just a few months before Walter died.

Walter only wanted to serve two years, but felt that he could hold on until Nixon’s re-election. He offered up his resignation immediately after Nixon won in November 1972, but Nixon begged him to stay because Nixon didn’t want to give the position to a large campaign donor who had been asking for the job, but whom Nixon found obnoxious. If Walter stayed on, it gave Nixon a good reason to turn the donor down. Walter reluctantly agreed and stayed on as ambassador until Nixon resigned the presidency in the disgrace of the Watergate scandal.

Selling His Publications

Returning to life as a private citizen was a mixed bag for Annenberg. He had sold the Inquirer to Jack Knight during his first year in London. Walter sold nine radio and television stations to Capital Cities Broadcasting in 1970 for $110 million. He sold seven more broadcasting properties a few months later to two former employees for $16 million, and in 1973 he sold four cable television properties to Harris Cable in Los Angeles for $11 million.

The biggest sale for Annenberg was, of course, the family company, Triangle Publications, which included TV Guide and Seventeen, to Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch for $3.2 billion in 1988.

Philanthropy

After the sale of Triangle, Walter focused his energy in the 1990s on investing and philanthropy. His father had left him 240 nearly worthless shares in his will, which by 1990 he had grown to holdings worth $1.5 billion. He established the Annenberg Foundation in 1989 with $1 billion, and 10 years later the assets had grown to $3 billion. His own personal assets were more than $2 billion and he had made his sisters near billionaires. Walter had invested most of the proceeds from the sale of Triangle into six companies, four of them banks: Bank of America, First Union, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo. The other two were General Electric and Spieker Properties. The more the money rolled in, the more Walter concentrated his philanthropy on education. He had permanently endowed both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California with Schools of Communication. He donated $50 million to the United Negro College Fund, $25 million to Harvard, $100 million to the Peddie school and $25 million to Northwestern University. Annenberg believed that education was the key to leadership. He also felt that television, notably the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was a good communication tool for education. He gave $90 million to PBS in 1981 to put college courses on the air. On December 17, 1993, he announced a gift of $500 million in matching grants to improve education in public schools. It was Walter Annenberg’s ambition to give away his fortune during his lifetime to benefit the types of people that made him his fortune.

Locally, the Annenbergs gave to many charities and institutions, most notably Eisenhower Medical Center. Walter had been a founder and trustee of EMC, joining the board in 1965. In January 2007, coinciding with the groundbreaking for the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Pavilion, a five-story, 250,000-square-foot inpatient facility, Mrs. Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation announced a new gift to Eisenhower — $30 million — the largest single donation ever to Eisenhower. During the groundbreaking ceremony, Mrs. Annenberg addressed the invited guests, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Honorable George P. Schultz and Senator John C. Danforth.

“Great moments like this have filled Walter’s and my life with such joy,” said Mrs. Annenberg. “This medical center, including the Eisenhower Board members, physicians and staff, has meant so much to our lives as well as to the development of the entire Coachella Valley.” Mrs. Annenberg continued, “Over 35 years have passed, and I am honored to be here to say that I have seen Walter’s dream come true for Eisenhower. This has become a top 100 hospital in America — it has become the place of excellence we all have hoped for.”

The Annenberg Pavilion groundbreaking also included a video in which former President George H.W. and Barbara Bush congratulated Mrs. Annenberg. “She [Leonore] and Walter were doing so much for healthcare over the years. And they loved this hospital,” said President Bush. “They loved this medical center…I always talk about being one of a thousand points of light. Well, Lee is a shining point of light in the galaxy because she’s done more than most people could possibly dream of doing.”

In December 2007, Mrs. Annenberg announced a $10 million gift to Eisenhower, bringing the Annenberg’s total contribution to an astounding $100 million. The Annenbergs donated the land for the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center at Eisenhower and supplemented it with several multi-year grants. They were also generous supporters of their friend’s Betty Ford Center on the campus.

The Children’s Discovery Museum of the Desert is in Rancho Mirage today because of the Annenberg’s largesse. They donated the land where the museum sits and supplemented it with another donation of lands and funds for the capital expansion project. The Rancho Mirage Public Library was also a worthwhile cause for the Annenbergs as they and President and Mrs. Ford were on hand for the opening of the first library in 1996. Mrs. Annenberg served as honorary co-chair for many of the library’s fundraising events and donated $1.8 million to the library.

Then, of course, was the philanthropy that wasn’t public knowledge, but spoke volumes about the kind of people the Annenbergs were. Many times they would read a story in the paper or on the local TV news of a family displaced because of a fire, or a family pleading for money for a lifesaving operation for their child, and the Annenbergs would give the money anonymously, wanting no thanks or recognition. They had the means and wherewithal to positively change people’s lives — because they were good people.

The Annenberg Foundation will continue to give to education and worthy causes for many years to come, and those of us in the Palm Springs Valley who have been lucky enough to benefit from their gifts will remember them with great warmth and affection.

Bibliography:

• Annenberg Foundation [Online]. www.annenbergfoundation.org
• Cooney, John. The Annenbergs. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
• Fessier, Bruce. “Leonore Annenberg’s Local Philanthropy,” The Desert Sun. March 13, 2009, p. A4.
• Ogden, Christopher. Legacy: a biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg. New York, NY: Little, Brown, 1999.
• Rancho Mirage, City of, Sunnylands PDP, April 2008.