Philanthropist Leonore Annenberg dies

Leonore Annenberg, U.S. chief of protocol under President Ronald Reagan, widow of former U.S. Ambassador to Britain Walter H. Annenberg, and steward of the couple's massive philanthropy, died yesterday at Eisenhower Medical Center near her estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Mrs. Annenberg, 91, had been in declining health, making fewer appearances at the charitable events that were a constant in her civic life.

Known to intimates as Lee, she became an equal partner in the family's charitable legacy during the couple's long marriage and assumed control of the Annenberg Foundation in Radnor after the 2002 death of her husband, who was a longtime publisher of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, which he sold in 1969.

The Annenbergs' substantial gifts to scores of charitable institutions here and across the country made them the region's most renowned and consistent benefactors for half a century.

"Walter and Lee were the two best philanthropists in the history of Philadelphia and the region," said Gov. Rendell, a close friend.

Since its creation in 1989, the Annenberg Foundation has given $4.2 billion to cultural, educational, and medical institutions. In 2007 alone, the foundation granted more than $70 million to Philadelphia organizations. Mrs. Annenberg's worth was estimated at $1.7 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

"The University of Pennsylvania would not be what it is today if not for the generosity of Walter and Lee Annenberg," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, whose posts as director of Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center and former dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn are reflective of those gifts. The West Philadelphia campus is the beneficiary of multiple buildings, professorships, programs, and scholarships funded by the couple and foundation. The Annenbergs also endowed schools at the University of Southern California and Brown University.

"As my father, Walter H. Annenberg, would have wished, the Annenberg Foundation will carry our family's commitment to philanthropy into the future," said Mrs. Annenberg's stepdaughter Wallis, who lives in Los Angeles. "We honor both Ambassador and Mrs. Annenberg by ensuring the foundation's health and vitality to serve the community for generations to come."

"She and her late husband, Walter, exemplified service to others and were two of God's very special people," former President George H.W. Bush said in a statement.

In 2007, Mrs. Annenberg accepted the Philadelphia Award, the city's highest civic honor, in a ceremony at the Academy of Music, making the Annenbergs the first regional couple so honored in separate years.

"To pay tribute to me with an award made to my late husband is exceptionally meaningful," she said at the time, frail, immaculately attired, and visibly moved. "I'm truly, truly overwhelmed." Her husband received the award in 1993.

As recently as last month, despite declining health, Mrs. Annenberg met with Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a close friend, to discuss teaching the U.S. Constitution to schoolchildren, one of myriad Annenberg-funded programs in civic engagement.

Under Mrs. Annenberg's leadership, the foundation issued substantial grants to the National Constitution Center, the Curtis Institute of Music, Lankenau Hospital, and Thomas Jefferson University.

In 2008, the foundation granted $10 million to the Kimmel Center for a month-long festival, scheduled for April 2011, to showcase regional arts and cultural organizations.

"She gave the largest gift to public education in our history," Rendell said - $30 million over three years to a series of foundations that included grants for teacher training and early-childhood education. "It was Lee's passion. To her, education was the key to curing all the nation's problems."

The foundation pledged $10 million to keep Thomas Eakins' masterwork The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia, and committed $30 million to move the Barnes Foundation to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The couple's names are affixed to institutions in the United States and Britain, where Walter Annenberg served as ambassador under President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1974 and Mrs. Annenberg oversaw the restoration of Winfield House, the ambassadorial residence in London, subsidized with $1 million of their own money.

Mrs. Annenberg had sat on the boards of the nation's most prestigious philanthropies devoted to the arts and education, and received honorary degrees from Penn, La Salle University, and Brown University.

Mrs. Annenberg was the rare individual to be an active trustee of arguably the city's three most prestigious charitable boards: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Penn. She was also consistently among their largest donors. The Annenberg name is everywhere on the Penn campus, rivaled only by that of the school's founder, Benjamin Franklin.

"She was one of the great architects of Philadelphia's future. She really cared very deeply about the history and the culture of the city," Anne d'Harnoncourt, who was director of the Art Museum, said in 2007. "There really wasn't another couple like them. We owe them a great deal."

Among Mrs. Annenberg's close friends were former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who called her "Mom"; former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; and Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who often celebrated New Year's Eve at Sunnylands outside Palm Springs with the Annenbergs, along with Frank and Barbara Sinatra, who were married there.

The Annenbergs' 25,000-square-foot residence, decorated with Impressionist paintings and Fabergé eggs, boasts a living room the size of a grand hotel lobby. On 650 manicured acres that included a golf course, Sunnylands was not so much an estate as a principality in the desert. The estate was host to six presidents, including Nixon, who was visiting when Gerald Ford pardoned him. Members of the Philadelphia Orchestra performed private concerts at the home.

Despite such wealth, "she never took herself too seriously," said retired federal Judge Arlin M. Adams, a friend. "She was always more concerned about people who had less than her."

"She was an elegant woman who served her country as a dedicated public servant, and was a generous philanthropist to many Philadelphia charities," said Brian Tierney, chief executive officer of Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

Mrs. Annenberg was known for "small acts of unexpected kindness. She was genuinely a nice person," Penn's Jamieson said, forever penning notes on her trademark yellow stationery. "She was so gracious and attentive to the things that interested her. Being with the Annenbergs was a special experience. The attention to detail and graciousness went beyond what was ordinarily done."

"She was a funny and lively conversationalist, and it was the conversation you remember about being at their home," d'Harnoncourt once said, describing the Annenbergs' longtime, 13-acre Wynnewood home, Inwood, as "not fancy but beautiful." In 2007, Mrs. Annenberg sold the estate to Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie.

"She doesn't care about labels. She cares about principles and issues," U.S. District Judge Marjorie O. Rendell once recalled. "When you are with Lee in a group, she wants everyone's views on the table. She's elegant, but she's also the warmest person you can imagine." She liked to watch Jeopardy! taking dinner on a tea table.

Walter and Leonore Annenberg were viewed as a strong partnership, rarely apart, with her grace, charm, and attention to detail leavening her husband's occasionally less polished ways.

The Annenbergs shared a lifetime interest in Republican politics. In later years, she gave generously to Rendell's campaigns, and admired Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Rendell said. Mrs. Annenberg funded both abortion-rights and gay-rights organizations.

She was credited with influencing her husband's interest in art, especially French Impressionism and Postimpressionism, helping to amass an exquisite collection of paintings that was sought aggressively by several major museums, all with strong charitable ties to the couple.

In 1991, after intense wooing by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of Art, the couple decided to lend their 53-piece collection of paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for six months every year.

The Annenbergs lived in a manner rarely matched in contemporary American life, dining with royalty and dignitaries, purchasing Cézannes, maintaining a full-time staff of 30 at the Southern California residence. The couple kept a gold-embossed Gulfstream jet to shuttle between their estates.

Mrs. Annenberg was a constant on the charity circuit, chairing myriad social events, lending her name as "honorary chairwoman" to others.

She was one of those gracious women who fix their style at an early age and rarely waver in appearance - powdered porcelain skin seemingly untouched by sun, a meringue of blond hair impervious to the elements, and the latest designer suits adorned with jewelry worthy of museum collections. At the Philadelphia Award gathering, with two nurses in attendance, she was attired in an Oscar de le Renta dress and matching coat from that season's collection. She was never one to dress down.

Her name appeared hundreds of times in this newspaper, which the Annenberg family owned from 1936 to 1969, listed weekly in society pages at various charitable events, her designer clothes invariably described. The articles occasionally included a quote or two about an event, but she preferred that her husband do the talking and her actions speak for her.

"He chose the public; she chose him," Jamieson said.

The Annenberg fortune derived in part from The Inquirer and the Daily News, owned first by Annenberg's father, Moses, and sold to Knight Newspapers in 1969. Annenberg's company, Triangle Publications Inc., also published the Daily Racing Form, TV Guide, Good Food, and Seventeen. Rupert Murdoch purchased Triangle for $3 billion in 1988. Among reflections of Annenberg's interest in Philadelphia journalism is Annenberg Hall, housing Temple University's School of Communications and Theater.

On her husband's death, Mrs. Annenberg inherited $2 billion, placing her 163d on Forbes magazine's 2008 list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Since then, she had served as chairman and sole director of the Annenberg Foundation, a task that was said to be initially daunting but that she wholly embraced.

Mrs. Annenberg was never known as merely a socialite but also as a charitable arbiter. She was a past president and an honorary trustee of the Palm Springs Desert Museum, an honorary trustee of the Performing Arts Council of the Los Angeles Music Center, a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, a former member of the board of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a charter member of the board of overseers of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown, and a founding member of the governing boards of the Annenberg Schools for Communication at Penn and the University of Southern California.

"She had a very high sense of her responsibility to the community," Adams said. "I think anyone who has as many material things as she did and to be interested in so many things is very unusual, and to be so relatively humble about it."

Walter Annenberg was her third husband, she his second wife, and, by all accounts, it was the love match of their lives.

"She was utterly devoted to Walter," d'Harnoncourt recalled a few years ago.

When Mrs. Annenberg resigned as U.S. chief of protocol in January 1982 after only 10 months in the $50,000-a-year post ("the first paying job I ever had," she said at the time, and the last), she explained her decision as an act of love for her husband - although her brief tenure had not been without criticism for lavish entertaining at Blair House, which the Annenbergs subsidized, and for curtsying before Prince Charles upon his arrival in the United States. The truth was she was one of the few Americans who already lived on a scale akin to the president.

"After 30 years of close, harmonious, and happy marriage, my priorities are my husband first," she said at the time of her resignation.

"He was very honest about it. He said, 'Honey, I don't know how many years I have left to spend in the desert, and I love you, and I want you with me.' That's all I had to hear."

Through charm, a mastery of the art of hostessing, and a thick and ever-open checkbook, Mrs. Annenberg is credited with helping elevate the Annenberg family's stature, bending a then-arthritic Philadelphia social order that excluded most Jewish leaders and Annenberg in particular.

Her graciousness also helped perfume a family legacy tainted by the rough-and-tumble tactics of her husband, whose personal likes and pronounced dislikes shaped Inquirer news coverage, and his tough father, owner of a horse-racing wire service. Moses Annenberg was sentenced to three years in federal prison for tax evasion and died a month after his release. Walter Annenberg also was indicted in the case. The indictment was dropped after Moses Annenberg pleaded guilty.

Walter Annenberg's oft-repeated motto, which he kept on his desk at Sunnylands, was "Cause my works on Earth to reflect honor on my father's memory," a crusade Mrs. Annenberg joined him in fulfilling.

Her childhood was comfortable, eventually privileged but not easy.

Leonore Cohn was born Feb. 20, 1918, in New York City. She was the granddaughter of Russian and German immigrants and daughter of Maxwell Cohn, the less successful brother of Harry and Jack Cohn, founders of Columbia Pictures.

When she was 7, her mother died in an automobile accident. She and her younger sister, Judith, were sent to Los Angeles to live with her Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harry, who raised them. She was not spoiled by attention.

Harry Cohn "really was too busy to have a direct influence on me," she said years later, "but I think he always felt that I had ability and that I could do what I wanted to do. I think he wanted me to be something or somebody."

Her daughter Diane Deshong once said of her mother's upbringing, "She never talks much about those early years, but I know that growing up wasn't easy for her. I think how Mother grew up without parents and how trying circumstances must have been. There wasn't that loving relationship with a mother, and I think she's tried to make up for it with her own daughters."

At Stanford University, Leonore Cohn studied history and political science, which were to remain lifelong interests, and completed her degree, unlike Walter Annenberg, who attended Penn but did not graduate.

A brief marriage to Belden Katleman, scion of a Southern California family with interests in parking lots and real estate, produced daughter Diane.

In 1946, Leonore Cohn Katleman, then 28, married Lewis Rosenstiel, 55, multimillionaire founder of Schenley Industries, the distiller, and had a second daughter, Elizabeth. Rosenstiel was a tempestuous and controversial character, and the marriage was rocky.

Four years after marrying, she met the divorced Walter Annenberg at a party in Boca Raton, Fla., hosted by Henry Crown, the Chicago financier. Rosenstiel was not in attendance. It was a profound, immediate, and mutual attraction.

"He was Mr. Right," Mrs. Annenberg said to the Washington Post in one of the rare interviews she granted. "We thought alike, had the same goals, aspirations and feelings, and we loved to do the same things." She secured a divorce in Reno, Nev., and the Annenbergs were married in 1951.

"A fabulous husband," Mrs. Annenberg said of her spouse of a half-century, "and the thing I love most about him is he's a wonderful companion. We do everything together, and I think that fulfills something I wanted in life and he wanted in life. You know how some men go off and play golf with their men friends? Well, Walter prefers to play golf with me."

Mrs. Annenberg is survived by her daughters, Elizabeth Rosenstiel Kabler and Diane Katleman Deshong; her stepdaughter, Wallis; her sister; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Plans for a memorial service were pending.

These are some of the gifts Leonore Annenberg made to regional institutions as president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation:

$50 million to the Philadelphia Orchestra endowment.

$33.5 million to establish the Leonore Annenberg Scholarship and School Funds at the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

$20 million to the Annenberg Public Policy Center to increase student understandings of democratic institutions.

$10 million to the Kimmel Center for a month-long festival in 2011 to showcase arts and cultural organizations in the region.

$10 million to the Philadelphia Foundation for the Pennsylvania High School Coaching Initiative.

$10 million for the acquisition of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic to be displayed publicly in perpetuity in Philadelphia.

$10 million for the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication's Project for Global Communications Studies.

$6.4 million for seven national and regional civic education and engagement programs at the National Constitution Center.

$5.3 million for the renovation of the Academy of Music ballroom.

$5 million to endow the Leonore Annenberg University Professorship at Penn.

$5 million for the renovation and renaming of the Penn School of Nursing's building.

$2.5 million to Penn's Annenberg School for Communication to establish a lecture fellowship program honoring the late dean George Gerbner.

$1 million for the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships.

$500,000 for the University of the Arts Skyline Performing Arts Center.

$500,000 to the United Way.

$10 million to Lankenau Hospital.

The Annenberg Foundation also has made bequests to many institutions outside the region, including:

$10 million to the Metropolitan Opera.

$10 million to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

$10 million to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

$15 million to the Newseum in Washington.

$10 million to the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

$20 million to create the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Fund for Small-School Advancement for a portfolio of New York City schools.

EndText

To sign a memorial guestbook and view photos of Leonore Annenberg's life, go to philly.comEndText