When Lesbian Philanthropist Wallis Annenberg Helped Save The Gays
“Wallis leaves a towering legacy and her impact will be felt for generations to come.” – out philanthropist David Bohnett
Insightful comedian Joan Rivers succinctly summed up the public perception and the private compassion of her friend, philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, during a 1989 tribute by the Sephardic Hebrew Academy in Los Angeles.
“Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths; [Wallis] was born with a silver tea service,” Joan said, poignantly adding that “Wallis was the second to call after my husband committed suicide.”
The friendship between Wallis Annenberg and Joan Rivers was funny, catty, smart and caring. Watching them juggle cryptic comments in Joan’s Bel Air home office about florist to the stars David Jones’ recent arrangements and Joan’s files and files of indexed jokes was like an improv skit by two dolled up dames spoofing ladies-who-lunch on a cocktail break in Beverly Hills.
When I heard that Wallis died on Monday at age 86 from complications of lung cancer, I imagined Joan and David Jones and Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor and a slew of grateful gay people ushering her into a new world where she didn’t have to wonder if she was liked for her money or for herself.
“Everyone loves to see Wallis coming,” TV producer Gary Pudney told journalist Bob Colacello for the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. “’She’s got the biggest purse in town. She gets hit on 10 times a day, seven days a week.’ Wallis, who is not unaware of why she is suddenly so popular [after taking over the $1.6 billion Annenberg Foundation], has been known to remind people, ‘My name is spelled W-a-l-l-i-s, not W-a-l-l-e-t.’”
“I’ve never had a problem using the Annenberg name,” said Wallis, who was apparently worth $200 million herself. “That’s who I am, and I’m happy to be that. I’m very proud of it. But I want to be worthy. Because it opens a lot of doors, and I want to be the best person I can to walk through them.”
Colacello aptly described Wallis as “a dame, not a grande dame. As devoted to Big Ten football as she is to high culture, she talks in quick, precise bursts, delivered in an earthy contralto, and tells me, ‘I would rather sit in a basement on a barrel and eat a hamburger with some interesting person than be in a palace, where I could get scared out of my wits.’”
I met Wallis in 1986 after her share at a Sunday morning 12 Step meeting at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. She was unexpectedly engaging and witty, with an odd peek-a-boo Jungian shadow of loneliness. But the clever haute culture trappings were just a tad too quaint. “I protest people like you on principle,” I thought as I listened.
Slowly our 12 Step worlds intersected and eventually I moved from my West Hollywood apartment into Wallis’ Wallace Neff-designed Ridgedale Estate in Beverly Hills (which she later sold to Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt). She told me a lot of “family secrets,” now in the book Legacy: A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg, including that her grandfather was a felon and her father’s drive to become a media mogul was to reclaim their name.
Another Hollywood secret was that Wallis was a deeply closeted lesbian. In 1960, she dropped out of Columbia University to get married, struggled for 13 of her 15 years of marriage leading to an inevitably acrimonious divorce, during which her daughter revealed in open court that Wallis drank, used drugs and had “affairs with women.”
Her husband got custody of their four kids, Lauren, Charles and Gregory and her son Roger who was diagnosed as schizophrenic at age 15. Roger was named after Wallis’ beloved brother Roger, also a schizophrenic, who had died by suicide at age 22.
After her divorce in 1975, Wallis hit bottom and went into therapy and the new Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage to get clean and sober. "I had everything taken away from me, even my children," Wallis told Vanity Fair for a June 1985 story entitled “The Prodigal Daughter”. "And everybody knew about it. I was sick, and I wasn't treated like a sick person. I was treated like a criminal."
Wallis went to work in a structured, nonwriting producing job at family-owned TV Guide, doing lunch interviews with top stars, producers and studio executives for possible stories, while also throwing high-society A-list parties, cheering for Roger at Special Olympics games, and trying to follow in Walter Annenberg’s philanthropic footsteps.
For the two years I was with her, Wallis always sought her father’s favor but feared never measuring up to his expectations. In 1987, Walter Annenberg told Fortune magazine that he expected to merge or sell his Triangle media empire rather than have Wallis or his sisters take over. Wealthy family members, he said, “do not necessarily have the lash of ambition on their back and become what I describe as well-fed house dogs.”
The words stung and stuck.
In 1988, Walter sold Triangle Publications valued at $1.2 billion - Seventeen, TV Guide, the Daily Racing Form, and all of Triangle’s printing plants - to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $3.2 billion (equivalent to roughly $6.3 billion in 2013, per MeasuringWorth).
Wallis worked for TV Guide for about 12 years, including three after Triangle was sold. She left in 1991. “I expected to be the first to be let go, but Rupert Murdoch kept me on and fired all these executives of my father’s who used to treat me like I wasn’t there,” Wallis told Vanity Fair. “And did I get a kick out of the worm turning.”
For the next 20 years, Wallis held various leadership positions in the Annenberg Foundation, overseeing more than $3 billion in grants and donations to projects. After she took over, she broadened the foundation’s philanthropic scope beyond media, arts and education to include animal welfare, environmental conservation and healthcare, giving about $1.5 billion to thousands of organizations and nonprofits in Los Angeles County.
She also got to defang the hurtful internalized “lapdog” image and publicly outshine her father, putting her Annenberg name on more than a dozen buildings and public facilities.
“I have to give from my heart, first and foremost. Which is why I’ve been focused on issues like women’s empowerment, engaging people in the visual and performing arts, strengthening the human-animal bond. Things that really matter to me,” Wallis told The Beverly Hills Courier in 2019.
Not included in her obituaries are Wallis’ contributions to the LGBTQ+ community, such as to Project Angel Food the $1 million in December 2004 to Gay & Lesbian Elder Housing to kick-start development of an affordable housing complex in Hollywood for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender older adults, people at risk of homeless and people living with HIV/AIDS. Wallis kicked in an additional $200,000 for a pool.
"The extraordinary generosity of Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation sends a message of reassurance to elder gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people with lower incomes that they will not be forgotten," said GLEH executive director Brian Neimark.
But perhaps the most shocking erasure is how Wallis Annenberg helped save gay lives during the eight years President Ronald Reagan, First Lady Nancy Reagan, and Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” hung out at her father’s Sunnylands estate to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
“I went to all those parties. I didn’t have a choice,” Wallis told Vanity Fair. “It was very interesting to watch the Rose Bowl Game on New Year’s Day with President Reagan. He would just tell stories that came to his mind, one after the other.” Stories about old Hollywood films that she found tedious while pretending it “was a very heady experience.”
“President Reagan liked Wally a lot,” said her usual escort Gary Pudney, then-executive vice president of ABC-TV.
"Look, I love money. I'm glad I'm me. And I'm not going to be a pompous ass and say that I know what it feels like to be hungry. I don't want to know. But I do my part," Wallis said in the 1985 “Prodigal Daughter” story that ends with: “Little Wallis... happy at last.”
Wallis braved the sexist “humiliation” of being outed as an alcoholic lesbian and turned societal shame into a kind of spiritual endeavor.
“Her do-gooding wasn't just a matter of lending her name to fashionable causes,” her friends like Loreen Arbus told Vanity Fair. She “was charitable to save her life.”
"If all she wanted was position," said Jill Spalding, "she would have gone to the Bistro Garden or Ma Maison every Friday—I mean, ladies' lunches are key in this town. But to Wallis, that's a waste of time.”
And in 1985, there was no time to waste for neglected people with AIDS, despite valiant efforts by Joan Rivers and others to raise visibility and money.
Then came Wallis.
Hollywood hunk and Reagan friend Rock Hudson came out as gay and dying just before AIDS Project Los Angeles’ annual black tie Commitment to Life Dinner. Wallis’ friend Marylouise Oates, society columnist for The Los Angeles Times, called Wallis to see if she would co-chair the dinner, knowing the impact it would have. Wallis agreed and the two decided that her perfect co-chair would be First Lady Betty Ford. Known for refusing such invitations, she not only agreed but said she would attend.
The dinner sold out when news spread that Wallis and Betty Ford were co-chairs.
Betty Ford's “decision to join us in the battle against the epidemic was courageous, ground breaking and historic,” gay politico David Mixner wrote later. “Those in the room will never forget when First Lady Betty Ford rose that evening to the podium. The ovation and tears of gratitude seemed to last forever. As she stood that night among us, she gave us a dignity and respectability like no other person before her.”
Wallis also reached out to Elizabeth Taylor to co-chair, a decision that made history. “Tonight is the start of my personal war on this disease, AIDS,” Taylor said, helping raise $1.3 million that night and many millions more until she died in 2011.
“Wallis leaves a towering legacy and her impact will be felt for generations to come,” says Wallis’ friend, bridge playing partner, Board Member of the Wallis Annenberg Legacy Foundation, and out tech philanthropist David Bohnett. “Wallis had the very unique capacity to make every person she met feel like the most important person in the world. Wallis really gave people the feeling they were really 'seen' and heard, which is a rare quality indeed.”
And, while others might focus on her money, David highlights this: “Wallis had a great empathy for those less fortunate and spent her life trying to make the world a better place for everyone, including nature and wildlife.”
“Proof of a person,” Wallis Annenberg said at the Sephardic Hebrew Academy, “is when idealism is matched by her deeds.”
Of course, YOU would be the one to write this. And from the bottom of my heart, I thank you. And I have a strong feeling Wallis thanks you as well. I didn't know you were on Substack. I'm so glad to learn this. And now I have a chance to support you myself for all the years, no decades of work you've done to support our community. Thank you, Karen. I'm sending this to Brian Neimark, whom I know will appreciate being mentioned. Thank you for staying on course. We need you now more than ever. Love, Joe Argazzi
Phil Tarley
I met Wallis when she invited me to the opening night of her photography museum in Century City. I was a member of The L A Photographic Council and the photography critic for Fabrik Magazine. The inaugural festivities were wild, and Wallis spared no expense on the food, liquor, and entertainment. She hired Dita Von Teese, who brought the house down when Dita and Wallis threw kisses at eachother with each bump and grind.