First Chapter: 'Legacy'
By RICHARD NORTON SMITH
|
LEGACY
A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg.
By Christopher Ogden.
Illustrated. 615 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company. $29.95.
|
how me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy,'' said F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a young man overshadowed by his protean father, Moses, Walter
Annenberg imagined himself a Fitzgerald protagonist. That the father was a figure of tragic proportions is a central theme of Christopher Ogden's aptly named ''Legacy.'' The surprise of this colorful,
acutely observed family epic is its hero, a playboy turned philanthropist whose crusade to purge the family name of scandal produced a very different kind of legend.
Ogden is a Time correspondent whose decidedly unauthorized biography of Pamela Harriman, ''Life of the Party,'' was the biggest unmasking since Toto pulled back the curtain shielding the Great and Terrible Oz. Here he draws on extraordinary
access to Walter Annenberg and to his family's papers to fashion an elegantly written account that is sympathetic without being fawning. It begins in 1885, with 13-year-old Moses Annenberg's departure from
East Prussia to join his father in Chicago. Quickly indoctrinated into the bare-knuckles capitalism of the South Side, with its ''sell 'em or eat 'em'' school of newspapering, Moe and his
equally combative brother Max fought more than rival newsboys. On one occasion, Moe took a baseball bat to a mouthy Irish teen-ager who stood outside the family store shouting, ''Sheeny, sheeny, get me a sausage.''
Such skills did not go unrewarded by his employer, the Hearst empire, where the low road was the surest path to journalistic and financial success. By 1922 Moe was in a position to buy the hugely profitable Daily Racing Form, which became the mainstay
of his own Triangle Publications; when augmented by the General News Bureau, a legal if dubious racing wire, it gave Annenberg a virtual stranglehold over news of the track. Forty years after he sailed past the unfinished
Statue of Liberty clutching goosefeather pillows from the old country, Moses bought George M. Cohan's Long Island estate. In his spare time he read Spinoza and developed an extravagant admiration for Nero as the
greatest man in history.
Along with six daughters, the Annenberg household included a son, whose birth on Friday the 13th of March 1908 heralded a difficult childhood. Walter was born with a deformed right ear and was deaf on that side. He was also afflicted with a stutter (characteristically
turned to advantage, it would later win him a reputation as the best listener in business). A precocious investor, young Annenberg earned enough playing the market to donate a $17,000 running track to his prep school.
After his luck evaporated in October 1929, Moe agreed to cover his son's $3 million losses.
In other ways Moe patronized Walter, a classic late bloomer who dropped out of the Wharton School to romance Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman, learn the gossip trade from Damon Runyon and gamble with Huey Long in a Louisiana roadhouse. Installed as nominal
editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday magazine, Walter proposed a photographic series on the world's biggest waterfalls, the Taj Mahal and Audubon's ''Birds of America.''
''Audubon,'' snorted Moe. ''What the hell did he ever do for circulation?'' Instead, Moe opted for a lingerie-clad Alice Fay and a set of images detailing ''The Psychology of the Peeping Tom.''
(''There's not a monotonous page in the whole damn book!'' Moe said.)
More sensational headlines lay ahead. Moe, who needed enemies the way most men need friends, declared war upon the New Deal and its Pennsylvania mouthpiece, Gov. George Earle. Franklin Roosevelt, never reluctant to employ government agencies against his
journalistic tormentors, told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, ''I want Moe Annenberg for dinner.'' Ogden leaves little doubt that Annenberg's 1940 conviction for income tax evasion, followed
by a three-year prison sentence and a $9.5 million fine, was the result of a White House-directed vendetta. Still, the lengths to which Moe went to shelter his family from the seamier aspects of his business imply he
may have been guilty of more than sloppy record-keeping.
Narrowly spared prosecution himself, Walter harbored lifelong feelings of guilt and obligation. These were only heightened by Moe's death from a brain tumor, six weeks after his release from prison in June 1942. Henceforth Walter pursued family redemption
through public usefulness. His postwar creation of Seventeen magazine and his even more successful 1953 introduction of TV Guide recall an earlier generation of media swashbucklers who dictated cultural norms as they
made and unmade Presidents. The Inquirer was emphatically his newspaper, whose pages were closed to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Sonny Liston. (''He was a bum. I didn't want to give him publicity.'')
And yet. As a professed ''independent Republican,'' Annenberg campaigned for the Marshall Plan and hired the first black reporters in Philadelphia. He dismissed Joe McCarthy's henchmen Roy Cohn and G. David Schine as ''lice''
and Armand Hammer as ''the most unscrupulous'' man in America. Run-ins with Walter Lippmann, Katharine Graham and Drew Pearson make for entertaining reading. So does Annenberg's wirepulling
on behalf of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Long before he introduced Reagan to Margaret Thatcher, Annenberg helped his friend land the job of host with ''General Electric Theater,'' where his
camera-friendly conservatism charmed Republicans and set him on the road to the White House.
Michael Deaver was less fortunate. Deaver, already suspect for allegedly undermining Lee Annenberg, Walter's wife, during her stint as chief of protocol and for promoting himself at the expense of the Reagans, negotiated the sale of his Washington
public relations company to London's Saatchi & Saatchi for $18 million -- only to have the deal scotched by a phone call from an unforgiving Annenberg.
Meanwhile, the Fitzgeraldean tragedy rolled on. It included Annenberg's failed first marriage and the suicide of his only son, Roger, a Harvard undergraduate. Through it all, Moe Annenberg's humiliation remained an open wound. When his ghost
resurfaced at Walter's 1969 confirmation hearings to be Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the nominee told baiting senators that ''tragedy of such magnitude will either destroy you or inspire
you to overcome it, and drive you on to deeds of affirmative character.'' The very awkwardness of his language testified to Annenberg's sincerity.
His fumbling introduction to Queen Elizabeth, captured for broadcast by the BBC, brought cackles from the British establishment. Annenberg offered to relinquish his post; instead, he and his stylish wife went on to win raves for their restoration of Winfield
House, and a knighthood from the Queen.
However uncharitable his feelings toward the New Deal, Annenberg had long since embarked on his own redistribution of wealth, settling princely sums on public television, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and journalism schools at University of Pennsylvania
and U.S.C. He donated half a billion dollars to boost public education and paid off, anonymously, the mortgage left by J. D. Tippett, the Dallas police officer who was gunned down by Lee Harvey Oswald. Christopher Edley
of the United Negro College Fund was apprehensive before visiting Sunnylands, the desert San Simeon whose 6,500-square-foot living room and unrivaled art collection led Prince Charles to ask, ''You gave up
this to move to London?'' In the event, Annenberg told Edley that his $20 million request was ''too small -- we need a crusade.'' A $50 million pledge followed.
Annenberg's giving escalated after the 1987 sale of Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch for $3.2 billion. By then he had reversed Fitzgerald's maxim, in the process far outstripping his father's accomplishments. With his prickly decency,
Annenberg provides an honorable bridge between the gorgeously egocentric titans of the McCormick-Hearst era and today's glossy carnivores, who coarsen the culture even as they profess allegiance to traditional
values. Now 91, the sage of Sunnylands has an undeviating response when asked his state of mind: ''Grateful and hopeful.'' Would that the rest of us could say the same.
Richard Norton Smith's most recent book is ''The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick.''
Return to the Books Home Page
