The Right Places (29 page)

It was probably Ambassador Annenberg's naïveté and newness at his job that caused his subsequent embarrassments and predicaments, and that were responsible for the fact that during the first six months of his tenure he was the unhappy recipient of a perfectly terrible press, particularly in Britain. He had never claimed to have any great diplomatic experience and, for a while, to newspaper readers and television viewers, this seemed almost painfully apparent. As he was getting his feet wet as our ambassador to the Court of St. James's, he kept putting his foot in it, again and again.

To begin with, there was the episode of his presenting his credentials to the Queen, an event which was immortalized on television film. What happened was that the Queen asked him, “Are you living in the Embassy?” The Ambassador's longwinded reply was, “We are in the Embassy residence, subject of course to some of the discomfiture as a result of the need for elements of refurbishing and rehabilitation.” Ambassador Annenberg had no sooner uttered these words than the British press leapt upon them with wild little squeals of joy, sticking little pins into the ambassadorial syntax. The British, who have always felt that no one speaks the English language properly but a Briton, and certainly not an American, went to great lengths to point out that the noun form of
refurbish
is
refurbishment
, not
refurbishing
, and that
rehabilitate
means to restore to health. Had the Embassy residence been ailing? If not, Mr. Annenberg's answer contained a pathetic fallacy. Did it all matter? To the British, apparently, it did, and for a while it seemed as though these would become the twenty-six most quoted—and misquoted—words in London.

No one, meanwhile, troubled to point out that the Queen had asked a particularly vacuous question, and might herself have been called guilty at least of having her facts wrong. “Are you living in the Embassy?” The Embassy in London is an office building and closes at
6
P
.
M
. It contains no living facilities. The Embassy
residence
, a huge mansion originally built by Barbara Hutton for the second of her many husbands, is miles away in Regent's Park, and was being refurbished—as Ambassador Annenberg was attempting to explain to Her Majesty.

Then there was the weighty matter of whether or not Mr. Annenberg's daughter, Wallis (Mrs. Seth Weingarten of California), accompanied her father to the presentation ceremony. A reporter from the mass-circulation
Sunday Express
wrote that she did go along, and treated it as a
gaffe
of the first water, since for members of an ambassador's family to accompany him on this mission is something “never done” in Britain. Immediately, everybody denied that Mrs. Weingarten had done more than wave goodbye to her father from the Embassy steps when he went to see the Queen. Ambassador Annenberg denied it (“Ridiculous!” he said), Mrs. Weingarten denied it, and Buckingham Palace denied it. Whether the
Sunday Express
made an honest error or maliciously made up the story, no one knows.

Ambassador Annenberg seems to share the Nixonian habit of over-explaining (“Let me make this absolutely clear”), a habit which can make each clarification of the issue at hand seem even cloudier. Thus, each time the story of Mrs. Weingarten tagging along to meet the Queen was denied, and the more her actual whereabouts during the ceremony were explained, the more the story spread and the more people began thinking that she did, even though she most emphatically did not.

Instead of letting his remarks to the Queen die a natural death in the press, Ambassador Annenberg has kept on issuing new explanations of why he made them, thus keeping the long sentence alive—to the delectation of reporters. “You must remember I had never met Her Majesty before,” he said. “I had never been inside the environment of Buckingham, and you must realize the impact of a thousand years of history. You must remember along with that I'm an inexperienced diplomat. I'm basically a businessman. So if you add all that together, all together in white tie and tails with your letters of credence, and the letters of recall of your predecessor, what could have had a greater impact on somebody, a neophyte in the arena. I'd never
in my life experienced anything like it. I responded in formal terms to a formal occasion. Was I so wrong? I don't reckon so.”

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.