Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [179]
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Rosenstiel, the Schenley liquor king, a manic-depressive widower nearly twice her age, produced a second daughter.10 Lee was still married to Rosenstiel in February 1950, and was spending the winter in Palm Beach, when Harriet and Sylvan Simon took her to a party where she met Walter Annenberg. The forty-one-year-old publisher, a somewhat stiff and formal workaholic, had just been asked for a divorce by his first wife, with whom he had two children. “We started to dance and we just kept dancing,” recalled Lee Annenberg. “It was magic and magnetic,” said Harriet Deutsch.11
It was a year and half before Rosenstiel would let Lee go, and then only on the condition that she leave everything he had given her behind, including her 10-carat diamond engagement ring and their daughter. Walter bought Lee a 27-carat diamond ring and put his lawyers to work on securing partial custody of the child. They were married in September 1951 at his mother’s Fifth Avenue apartment. A few weeks later the newlyweds bought Van Gogh’s Les Oliviers for $68,000 and Monet’s Femme à l’Om-brelle for $27,000, thus beginning what would become one of the greatest private art collections in the world. Annenberg’s income was then said to be $1 million a year.12
In many ways his rise had been as torturous as his new wife’s. His father, Moses, a German-Jewish immigrant, started out in the newspaper business as a henchman for the Hearst organization in the Chicago circulation wars of the early 1900s and went on to make a fortune after buying the Daily Racing Form in 1922. When Walter was twelve, the family moved into a thirty-two-room mansion in Great Neck, Long Island. After graduating from the Peddie School in New Jersey, he spent a year at the Wharton School of Finance and then started working for his father. In 1936, Moses Annenberg bought the Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s oldest daily newspaper. Three years later he was indicted for income tax evasion, some historians say because of his paper’s relentless attacks on FDR. He spent two years in jail and died a month after his release in 1942, leaving his family in disgrace and Walter in charge of the nearly bankrupt Triangle Publications.
Within four years Walter had paid off his father’s $5 million debt to the IRS and launched Seventeen magazine. He then began buying up radio and television stations in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and California, and started up TV Guide in 1953. His marriage to Lee was also a success, a love match that gave them both the sense of security that they had previously lacked. Lee redecorated Inwood, his fourteen-acre estate 2 9 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and began entertaining the city’s leading political and business figures.13 Like her husband, she took an active interest in politics, and she was appointed to Pennsylvania’s electoral college in Eisenhower’s second term.14
By the 1960 presidential election, Walter was considered one of the most influential Republican media magnates in the country, right up there with his friends Time-Life chairman Henry Luce, Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, and Gardner Cowles, the owner of the Des Moines Register and Look magazine. Despite his disappointment over the defeat of Richard Nixon, whom he counted as a friend, he was careful not to repeat his father’s mistake of being overly partisan. When Jacqueline Kennedy called to ask him to donate a 1767 portrait of Benjamin Franklin valued at $200,000 for her White House redecorating project, he readily agreed, and soon after that he and Lee were invited to a small private dinner by the new President and First Lady.15
Nancy was greatly impressed by the Annenbergs, especially Walter.
“Walter was the kind of man that Nancy liked,” said Leonora Hornblow.
“He was rich, he was powerful, he was very nice. And she liked rich,