Sidney Harman: Man of all trades

In May, Barbara Harman, a retired Wellesley College English professor who runs her family’s philanthropic foundation, got a call from her father.

“Do you get the New York Times?” asked Sidney Harman, audio pioneer, arts philanthropist and self-described “trophy husband” of Jane Harman, the Democratic congresswoman from Venice.

Take a look at the business section, Harman told his daughter. A story about potential buyers of financially imperiled Newsweek mentioned Harman as a suitor. That evening, Barbara Harman shot her father an e-mail: “So ? is it true?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “I’m 92.”

“I thought to myself: He is totally interested,” said Barbara Harman, “because he never uses age as an excuse.”

A few months later, Sidney Harman became the owner of the flailing, indebted American institution, hoping to make it good, maybe even great, again.

In November, after a tango of attorneys, advisors and egos, Harman merged the visually drab Newsweek with the livelier Daily Beast, the 2-year-old online magazine owned by Internet mogul Barry Diller. Harman would be partners with Diller, but more important, he would get the Daily Beast’s founder and editor, Tina Brown, to return to print as editor of the new entity, to be unveiled at year’s end.

Besides shuttling between Washington and New York for the merger, Harman has been in Los Angeles for meetings at USC, where he is a professor, to put finishing touches on a project he’s long desired: an Academy of Polymathic Study. (Polymaths are experts on many subjects.)

Just before Thanksgiving, Harman sat at a desk in his expansive office on the third floor of his modernist concrete-and-glass home on Venice’s Oceanfront Walk. A member of his household staff ushered a visitor into a tiny elevator on the ground floor of the art-filled home, where a glass staircase seemed to float in the entry.

Harman’s blond-wood office was filled with books, a big flat-screen TV and dozens of photos. Many show him with Jane, just reelected to her ninth term.

“When we first married, someone said to him, ‘Have you no sense of mortality?’” said his wife, who is 27 years his junior. His response: “If Janie can’t make it, she can’t make it.”

Aside from his success in industry, Harman has been a top federal appointee, a college president, and an innovator in worker/management relations. According to Jane Harman’s disclosure forms, the couple are worth between $150 million and $435 million, making her the second-wealthiest member of Congress.

Despite enormous wealth, Harman operates without the trappings of a cosseted corporate chieftain. He flies commercial. He doesn’t have a PR person to fend off reporters. He gives out his cell number and e-mail address.

In his office, Harman, in a pale lilac cashmere sweater and perfectly polished black shoes, was on the phone untangling a merger-related misstep.

Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin, chief executive of Newsweek Daily Beast Co., had apparently jumped the gun when he told the New York Times that Newsweek.com would be shuttered, prompting an anguished online response from an anonymous Newsweek.com employee. Harman seemed distressed.

The conversation sounded delicate; would he like some privacy? He shook his head.

A few minutes later, Harman pulled up a chair in a sitting area with sleek leather furniture.

“It’s a fun time for guys who get paid to be snarky,” he said, stung by some of the coverage of the Newsweek deal. “Nobody ever suggested this would be a walk in the park. I never did. But it is damn well worth the effort.”

When it was suggested that he had just been dealing with some of the problems that come with splicing an old media icon with a new media upstart, Harman bridled.

“I had frankly thought that a) you could not hear, and b) you would make it your business not to hear,” he said. “But I don’t mind telling you we are dealing with the entrails of a business of great complexity. I think you ought to treat that in total confidence. It’s totally irrelevant.”

(Also presumably irrelevant: details from Tina Brown’s contract for “equity appreciation rights,” which he accidentally pasted into an e-mail and sent to a reporter in response to a question about his family.)

“Sidney doesn’t have journalism experience, but he has business experience,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Co. who admires Harman’s business acumen but was surprised when he made the pitch for Newsweek. “I didn’t take it terribly seriously because I didn’t know how serious his interest was.... Sidney may end up being very good at it.”Harman attorney Robert Barnett said he bought Newsweek because he is public-spirited. “He said publicly he wasn’t buying it to make money,” Barnett said. “You don’t see that much in this world anymore.”

Harman technically paid $1 for Newsweek and agreed to put in $25 million in operating capital right away. The Washington Post Co., according to reports, kicked in $20 million more.

Harman has always had an entrepreneurial bent. Born in Montreal in 1918 and raised in New York City, he collected discarded magazines while in high school and college and sold them for a nickel -- “pre-owned but reasonably current” -- in candy stores.

In 1953, he and Bernard Kardon founded Harman Kardon Inc. on Long Island, creating home audio systems before branching into auto sound. At their early trade shows, they set up a hotel room to look like a private living room, then played Frank Sinatra records on their stereos. “Where is he?” confused customers would ask, a story Harman recounted in his 2003 memoir “Mind Your Own Business.”

“I have vivid memories of our living room being covered with these ugly speakers that my mother of course hated -- PA system speakers and wiring,” said Barbara Harman. Her father would play test records -- “a train going from one end of the track to another, or you’d hear a drop of water hitting something and splashing. All the kids in the neighborhood would come in and everybody would sit around and go, ‘Wow.’ It was quite thrilling to witness the emergence of this new technology.”

In 1967, Harman became president of Friends World College on Long Island, an experimental Quaker school. A few years later, problems at a ramshackle Harman plant in Bolivar, Tenn., that made car side-view mirrors gave him a chance to put his progressive thinking into practice.

Harman instituted “earned idle time” letting workers go home early if they’d reached their production quotas. A school on the plant premises was started for the mostly African American workers.

For a time, the plant became so famous for its cooperative practices, it had to limit visitors.

In 1977, Harman was appointed by President Carter as deputy secretary of Commerce. To avoid a conflict of interest, he sold his stake in what was then Harman International Industries to Beatrice Foods for $100 million. In 1980, he bought it back for $55 million, and finally retired three years ago.In Washington these days, Harman is known as a philanthropist with a particular interest in the arts ? and as the husband of Jane.

“I have learned very well how to walk a good yard behind my wife,” he said. “I am comfortable with it.”

The Harman Family Foundation, run by Barbara Harman, gives away millions of dollars a year, mostly to arts and arts education groups in the Washington area, as well as a handful of Los Angeles groups.

In 2007, thanks in part to a $20-million gift from the Harmans, the Harman Center for the Arts opened in Washington. The center is home to the Shakespeare Theatre Co., a particular passion of Harman’s.

“You want Shakespeare?” he growled when pressed to recite his favorite passage. “I’ll give ya Shakespeare.” He recites a line from “King John” that is a favorite toast to Jane:

“He is the half part of the blessed man / Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided excellence / Whose fullness of perfection rests in him.”

When pressed for something that reminds him of his current situation, he offered a passage from Lincoln’s 1862 speech to Congress a month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation: “ ‘The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.’ It goes on from there. It’s glorious.”

Recent profiles have noted Harman’s love of recitation at the regular dinner parties he and Jane host. “It sounds kind of grim,” one guest told New York magazine, anonymously. “But it’s very fun.”

This rankled him. “Some guy who once attended a dinner party of ours clearly decided to speak about it as a very inside figure,” Harman said. “He sure as hell made it sound pretentious. But it isn’t. I like to quote these guys to my friends and family, and I know the stuff, so I use it.”

Last summer, Jane asked him to take her to Paris for the weekend to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. Before they left, she said, “I ran an errand, and when I got back, he was sitting in a chair mumbling. I said, ‘Honey, are you OK?’ He said, ‘I am reviewing my poetry.’ He says the arts are not decoration, they are central to our humanity.”

His diverse interests and fascination with innovative thinking explain the Academy of Polymathic Study. Harman admires intellects like Galileo, Leonardo, Jefferson, Franklin. “What is it about them,” he asked, “that produced the prodigious and invariably peaceful work that changed the course of history?”

Scheduled to launch in February as a certificate program, the academy will bring students together with some of the university’s best minds. Harman is chairman and historian Kevin Starr is executive director.

“He’s in his 90s going on his 40s,” Starr said. “What was that movie? Benjamin Button? That’s Sidney. Every time I meet him, he’s younger.”

“How do I do it?” asked Harman without prompting. “Good genes, lack of interest in eating, great interest in athletics and staying in physical condition.” He has outlived five brothers and three sisters, one of whom was his twin.

Harman ticked off the schools at USC where he has lectured -- law, medicine, architecture, public policy -- and noted dryly, “I was always in particular demand in the School of Gerontology.”

robin.abcarian@latimes.com