In many ways, Wallis Annenberg was the archetypal late-20th-century heiress, with all of the consummate bona fides: life of luxury, elegant parties hosted and attended, bad marriage, bouts of tragedy. In other ways, she was a refreshing, one-of-a-kind visionary. Short and compact, she possessed little of the physical elegance or commanding presence of Doris Duke or Barbara Hutton, or the willowy style and social mystery of Jacqueline Kennedy or Truman Capote’s swans. For most of her life, she steadfastly avoided the spotlight. Asked to describe how she saw herself—in a rare national television interview with CBS’s Bill Whitaker in 2013—she replied dryly: “As a person who likes to sit in a very comfortable chair with a martini and watch a good football game.”
Annenberg, who died Monday at age 86, was, of course, far more. Over the course of her life, she rose from being known mainly as the child of Walter Annenberg—media baron, Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, and longtime confidant of Ronald Reagan—into one of the most powerful and formidable philanthropists in the country. She led the namesake Annenberg Foundation for more than two decades and oversaw the distribution of over $3 billion in grants, many of them bestowed within the arts community of Los Angeles, where she achieved a status approaching sainthood for her endowment of projects across the worlds of academia, civics, science, medicine, conservation, and culture.
Drive around Los Angeles today and it’s hard to find a section of the city where some impressive building devoted to the greater good does not have her name on its side. Dedicating the new Wallis Annenberg Hall at the University of Southern California in 2014, then university president C.L. Max Nikias lauded Annenberg, a longtime USC trustee, for her “unwavering drive to promote access and connection,” and the wide-ranging impact of her gifts across the city. “Wallis is truly both a patron and a steward of Los Angeles.”
Wallis Huberta Annenberg, nicknamed Wally, was born on July 15, 1939, in Philadelphia. The eldest of two children of Walter and his first wife, Bernice, she was raised on an imposing and somewhat grim estate called Inwood on the storied Main Line. Her grandfather, Moses Annenberg, had been a German immigrant who owned The Philadelphia Inquirer, and under his son Walter’s management, the paper became one of the most prestigious in the land. Her father built a publishing empire that would eventually include TV Guide and Seventeen magazine, and he established one of the nation’s largest charitable foundations. Wallis played the part of dutiful daughter of privilege, attending a prestigious junior college in Massachusetts before marrying a doctor, Seth Weingarten, whom she met on a trip to Venice. They would have four children.
Great fortune often comes with great twists of fate. The younger brother she adored, Roger, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died from an overdose in 1962 at the age of 22. Wallis’s marriage to Weingarten proved stormy, ending in an ugly divorce and custody battle in 1975. According to a 2009 Vanity Fair interview, Wallis’s son Roger, named after her brother, was also diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 15, and was sent to live at a facility in Santa Barbara. Wallis herself later landed in the Betty Ford Center. “I did it all,” she told Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello in 2009. “If you want to term it a wild phase, fine. I would prefer to say I’m grateful for every one of the life experiences that I had. And I had them.”
She found her footing working for her father at TV Guide, where she served as a valuable conduit between editors and the powerful Hollywood crowd. After TV Guide was sold, Wallis dove into philanthropy full time. Her true blossoming as the grand dame of the LA charity circuit came in 2009, after her stepmother, Lenore, a formidable socialite in her own right who’d served as chief of protocol in the Reagan administration, died and left Wallis as the new chair and president of the Annenberg Foundation. She would go on to serve on the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the University of Southern California, whose journalism school was endowed by her father. Betsy Bloomingdale, BFF of Nancy Reagan, told Colacello that, “Wallis is becoming the Brooke Astor of Los Angeles.”
And she was. She displayed a rather unorthodox funding approach, endowing a wide swath of projects that swung from museums, medical centers, and arts organizations to the occasional quixotic bequest, such as a universally-accessible tree house in Torrance, California. Her passion for photographs (she was an avid collector) contributed to her establishing the Annenberg Space for Photography, an LA institution until its closure during the COVID pandemic. (For years, Vanity Fair’s after-party on Oscar night has been held in a sprawling, lavish pop-up space adjacent to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.) “By any measure, I’ve been very fortunate in my own life,” she told the Beverly Press in 2021. “But it’s really true what Winston Churchill once said: ‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.’”
She sometimes joked that she had to remind acquaintances that her name was “Wallis, not Wallet,” and often utilized a winningly deadpan sense of humor that landed somewhere between Elaine Stritch and Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey. Her friends ran the gamut from royals to journalists, from film stars to artists to fellow leaders of civic initiatives and social causes. She accepted the rarified air in which she had been privileged to live but remained firmly tethered to the world below. “I would rather sit in a basement on a barrel and eat a hamburger with some interesting person,” she confided to Colacello, “than be in a palace, where I could get scared out of my wits.”
Indeed, to the end of her life, she remained sanguine about her vast fortune and the life it had afforded her and her family. She is survived by her daughter, Lauren Bon; her sons, Roger, Charles and Gregory Weingarten; and five grandchildren. Wallis Annenberg readily admitted that almost everyone she met had their hand out, and yet it never seemed to bother her. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said, “to be invited to everything, and not to have to go?”
