You don’t have to read John Cooney’s splendid The Annenberg Dynasty (1983) to know that while Moses’s son Walter was a brilliant entrepreneur in perceiving how piddly little newspaper supplements on the fledgling medium of television could be coalesced and parlayed into TV Guide—one of the great magazine publishing successes of our century—he was also arguably the worst newspaper publisher of our city, if not our time.
I once told TV Guide editor Merrill Panitt that I thought his magazine was the most serious intellectual journal we had. It treated the pervasive new medium with the kind of seriousness its influence called for. And in spite of the fact that Walter not infrequently invoked his droit de seigneur to publish Reagonoid editorials in TV Guide, its overal record was splendid.
No so with the Inquirer. Under Annenberg’s stewardship from 1942 to 1969 it became a bitter joke among journalists and readers who took the newspaper function seriously. Did he have a spat with the president of the University of Pennsylvania? Penn stories diminished or appeared headless. Did he have a falling-out with the head of the 76ers? Basketball coverage waned. It was the most egregious sort of news management. And not all the eponymous billions he has dispensed in the interim have quite removed the bad taste his irresponsibility as editor/publisher left in the mouth of Philadelphia.
There were even paradoxical reactions to his benefactions. When the first class of Penn’s Annenberg School of Communications were ready to look for jobs in the second semester, they fell by my office (I was one of four faculty members in the new school) to commiserate about the contradictions of Walter’s having founded a graduate school to raise standards in the communications industry at the same time that he owned the worst big-city TV stattion and a newspaper they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. What gives, they implored. I wasn’t really sure until I read the Cooney book 20 years later. But I had a hunch.
Penn faculty friends twitted me as the “bagman” for the new school. The three other faculty were full professors with tenure, I a new assistant professor without it. Faute de mieux, I become the errand boy between the school’s Blanchard Hall and Walter’s headquarters at 400 North Broad—and a kind of academic flack as I traveled the country, explaining the new school’s ambitions to the old-school veterans.
Most of the burnt-out managing editors who then ran journalism schools openly scorned me. They sneered that Hearst had tried to launder his money a generation before, but they had told him to go toot. Oddly, the new breed of communications professors-to-be would sidle up to me on the same missions and psst! “How many full professors do you need, and what are you paying?"
It seemed to me a watershed in our media education history: the old fighting journalists who held grudges along with their strong convictions; the new social scientists who were all too understanding of power. They turned Lord Acton inside out: Questioning the powerful enfeebles; confronting the powerful absolutely enfeebles totally.
And I remember being dumbstruck by the placard on Annenberg’s desk in his 13th floor eyrie to the effect that he would so live his life as to honor the member of his father. I never understood the myth of the Greek furies until that encounter.
And I recall an episode early in the school’s history when Penn president Gaylord Harnwell and the Annenberg School faculty gathered with Walter himself and his legal counsel for our first meeting. It happened that the day before, the Inquirer had quite substantially expanded its Sunday funnies. And just to pass time, I teased Walter about “raising standards” in his newspapers.
There was a stricken look on Harnwell’s face and an empty one on Annenberg’s, and an exceedingly awkward pause. Suddenly, Walter smiled at my joke. One of the disabilities of a terror-inducing publisher is that being teased by his inferiors is an entirely new experience.
So there’s the legacy of fear and contempt left in Philadelphia, and I’m sure that the California Eden that Annenberg has devised for his retirement in Sunnylands is tainted by such clouds of reminiscence, just as his office exuded the funereal air of the placard announcing his commitment to clearing his convict father’s reputation.
And so, after a considerable courting, Annenberg’s enviable private collection has been blessing the Art Museum. Hank Klibanoff wrote a fascinating profile for the Inquirer Sunday magazine (May 21), the leitmotif of which was the museum’s eagerness to land the collection for good eventually. Klibanoff possesses a good eye for pertinent detail, such as spying that the only book in the office of Metropolitan Museum of Art direct Philippe Montebello was the Cooney biography of Annenberg.
Predictably, the Inky subsequently ran a PMA trustee’s outraged letter about the insensitivity of the piece. Not so, sir. The Art Museum is hypersensitive about whether it will be ultimately blessed. Klibanoff’s was excellent reportage, not the least value of which was his making clear how deeply Walter loves his collection as he walked the reporter through Sunnylands. Frankly, it’s the first piece I’ve read about Annenberg that went beyond his ogre image to show how much a man of flesh and blood—and of high intelligence and exquisite taste—he is.
But a human being, with limitations. Which brings us to Ed Sozanski’s brilliant essay (Inquirer, May 28) on the tilt in Annenberg’s collection, pointing out that it avoids completely the raggedy, industrial side of Impressionism, concentrating solely on upper-class women engaged in leisure pursuits. Call it the Sunnylands syndrome, this skew to the lighthearted—a bias, by the way, that wealthy American collectors have been exemplifying for over a century since sweet maidenly Renoir maidens appealed to their ungritty muses.
I was formulating a note of praise to Sozanski while listening to Frank Ford’s radio talk show. A witty listener was bellyaching how mean-spirited Sozanski was in his essay. And Ford, without so much as apologizing for not having yet read Sozanski’s piece, added “and stupid” to the ignorant indictment, and thereupon embarked on a little tirade about who did Sozanski think he was mouthing off like that, and who give this guy credentials?
Now, I happen to attend many of the press openings that Sozanski attends, so I know how highly he is regarded by museum officials and media peers alike. So instead of writing Sozanski a valentine, I wrote Ford and told him I thought it was “stupid” (to use his word) to indict a critic about a piece he hadn’t read.
And now we have still another letter to the Inquirer (June 9) from Dean Hill Jr. of Villanova, bemoaning the Klibanoff and Sozanski pieces as “so unkind to Walter Annenberg, the man, that the Art Museum’s quest to make Philadelphia the collection’s ultimate home has been set back a good deal.”
Ho hum. Mr. Hill, the function of reporting and art criticism is not to stroke potential donors but to tell the truth as completely as conscientious reporters and critics can. Alas, that high a standard was rare in the bad old Annenberg days at the Inquirer, where the blackmailing reporter Harry Karafin epitomized the paper’s dishonesty.
For our city’s sake, I hope Annenberg displays the ultimate mitzvah (which is to treat even alleged enemies generously) and donates his great cache to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But as this flap illustrates, it is as important to the cultural vitality of Philadelphia that the Inquirer has been transformed into a great newspaper as it is that PMA fulfills its greatest fantasy. My few face-to-face contacts with Annenberg convince me that he’d much rather deal with someone with character equal to his own than to be flattered by self-serving flunkies. We’ll see.
from Welcomat, July 5, 1989
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