A Gofer for Walter Annenberg

2009 was the Golden Anniversary of the Annenberg School of Communication. Faute de mieux, as a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow creating a new course on the Mass Society for Penn’s Department of American Civilization, I was considered a “natural” as a gofer explaining the plans of the new school throughout the U.S. The first day we met in 1958, the future dean Gilbert Seldes (my mentor and successful nominee) had not yet been appointed. I arrived early to find President Gaylord Harnwell chatting with Walter Annenberg.

As their conversation flagged, I decided to liven the scene by teasing Annenberg. The day before, the Inquirer had grandly expanded the paper’s Sunday funnies. I asked Walter if that was his idea of raising standards in mass communication. He looked at me, puzzled, speechless. Harnwell looked like he was going to have a stroke! As I grinned Hibernially, Annenberg finally got the joke: I was kidding him. One of the deficits of being inordinately powerful is that the lower orders rarely have the chutzpah to tease their overlords.

What a dull life the powerful lead, I learned from this incident. 50 years later, back in Philly for my annual Veterans Administration physical, I dropped by the School to inquire about their jubilee plans. I sought out the associate dean who was attending a lecture: A black scholar reporting his new book on the way the media were responding to black consumers. I thought my experience on that very subject 50 years before at Annenberg as an assistant professor would be most timely.

I had just bought a house in Greenbelt Knoll, the first planned racially integrated community in Philly. My favorite neighbor, the Reverend Leon Sullivan, the so-called Lion from Zion (Baptist Church), was in a rambunctious mood as we lolled one Saturday at the community pool. “I don’t believe you Annenberg people are serious about raising standards in mass communication. I have organized a boycott of TasteeKake products by the Black Clergy. Hire us or we won’t buy your products. Not a word in the Inquirer!” Nor in the Bulletin or Daily News for that matter!

Bright and early Monday morning I was taking the elevator to Walter’s office, having bee frisked like a common criminal for weapons! I told Walter what Sullivan had charged. Again he was speechless.The he called in his lawyer Joe First, who added nothing to the conversation Finally he called in his executive editor, one A.Z.Dimmitman.

His response to the charge. “We hired a colored boy last summer but he didn’t cut the mustard!” I replied that was no response to a charge of censorship. Finally, I warned them that “The Reporter” magazine was breaking the story in its next biweekly edition, and that if they had any pride, they’d beat them to it. At which point I felt a firm hand on my shoulder, squeezing, which I took to be a cease and desist order.

That hand, alas, belonged to the Annenberg dean. My thrill at seeing a black scholar where there had been none before dissolved. And the black scholar didn’t have a word of comment to my most apposite comment on his book’s subject. Unhappy Anniversary. If academics can’t be brave and honest 50 years after a gift, what’s the point of higher education. Incidentally, my favorite curricular contribution was a weekly meeting with a media policymaker.

Alas, Charles Lee, the assistant dean turned it into Love Feast. No tough questions. No learning about media policy formation. Gilbert later told me that Lee and Annenberg conspired to deny me a promised return to Annenberg if my directorship of the East West Center’s Institute of America Studies didn’t turn out. (I discovered that my assistant had been a CIA agent since his Iowa Ph.D. 10 years before!)

More unsettling had been my visits to established J-Schools. Some mocked my mission. They sneered that thirty years before Hearst had tried to buy his way to their praise and they refused the money. Except for the new cadre of social science communications professor. They discreetly asked what the salary levels were. Hmm.

The burned out ME’s who ran most of those schools had better ethical standards than the bright arrivistes. It was no news that Moses Annenberg to whom Walter had dedicated the school had ended in the poky for income tax fraud. Or that his infra-legal circulation fights with Hearst in Chicago or his relations with Al Capone were notorious. And Walter dug cruising around with Frank Rizzo. Only when Harry Karakas’s frauds embarrassed him did he sell the paper as fast as he could find a buyer.

Heh, for a remarkably innocent ex-seminarian, being a gofer was not always a bore. Once when I was dispatched to LA to romance NBC television, their press officer invited me to lunch at a new restaurant run by Polly Adler’s brother. As a Detroit prole, I’d never turn down a free lunch! Ms. Adler was curiously obsessed with my academic training and current position. She was proud of having just earned an Associate in Arts degree at L.A. Community college. And she divided professors into Good Guys and Smucks.

After dessert, I learned I had earned the G.G. Award. She started to give me the standard Hollywood embracero when my Contaflex hit her right between her boobs. “Patrick,” she exclaimed, “you look like a goddam tourist!” “Polly,” I replied honestly, “I am a goddam tourist.” Only later did I learn that she had been Hollywood’s principal Madam! Her memoir is entitled “ A House Is Not a Home”!

And a graduate School of Communications doesn’t always communicate!