Legacy of a Lifetime : Bequest: After building a fortune over 40 years, a childless couple leave $7.8 million to Harvard to study Alzheimer’s disease.

Ed and Anne Lefler moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and established a mass mailing business that would help make them wealthy. They had no children. By the time they retired in 1984 to a house in Indian Wells with walls of windows that overlooked the desertscape, they had amassed a substantial nest egg.

“We’ve been working on our wills,” Ed Lefler told a neighbor one night. “We’ve got $3 million and not a darn soul to leave it to.”

In a sense, they left it to a growing circle of people such as themselves--victims of Alzheimer’s disease and their beleaguered loved ones.

Anne Lefler died of lung cancer at age 80 in 1991 but not before watching her husband’s decade-long deterioration from what they surmise was Alzheimer’s, the disease that starts with memory loss and ends by robbing patients of the ability to conduct the activities of daily living. Ed Lefler died of emphysema at age 84 in 1994, after suffering the ravages of dementia for 10 years.

In their will, the Leflers specified that most of their estate be used to study the disease. As a result, $7.8 million is about to be presented to Harvard Medical School, believed to be the largest Alzheimer’s gift the school has received.

The Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Center for the Study of Neurodegenerative Disorders will fund a professorship in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School as well as fellowships for graduate and postdoctoral students at the medical school.

The gift also will fuel a special fund devoted to innovative and experimental research. “It’s exactly the kind of money that is impossible to get now,” said Gerald Fishbach, chairman of the medical school’s neurobiology department, who will chair the committee running the center.

Though a variety of disorders fall under the center’s rubric, Fishbach expects much of the research to concentrate on Alzheimer’s.

“In all my experience in medicine, it’s the worst medical disorder I know of,” Fishbach said. “You are no longer yourself.”

In addition to the bequest to Harvard, the Leflers left $500,000 to the Arthritis Foundation and several $100,000 donations to a church, a school and the Rotary Club in Palm Desert.

The Lefler bequest to Harvard may not be the biggest in academe or private research, but for a couple who led a very private life, leaving behind only Ed Lefler’s sister, an accountant, a lawyer and two beloved miniature schnauzers, it is their greatest legacy.

Ideally, the couple wanted a building named after them. It turns out that even a seven-figure gift doesn’t buy that these days.

But it says a lot about the couple: “The Leflers had a great desire that things that they created remain after they’re gone,” said the couple’s longtime accountant, Daniel Bernstein, who selected Harvard for the gift while acting as trustee of the estate. “And they didn’t have children to carry on their name.”

What they had was the kind of devotion that Bernstein describes by telling a story about a dog.

They were newlyweds, living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the late 1930s. The young couple was out for a walk when Anne Lefler spied a dog in the window of a pet store and swooned over it. The next day, Ed Lefler, an ambitious but neophyte salesman, went back to the pet store and spent all his day’s earnings to buy the dog.

“He was totally dedicated to her,” Bernstein said. “In essence, he took the food money and bought the dog.”

The splurge was rare for either Lefler--and so was the leanness of their finances.

Both Illinois-born, they left the Midwest for Los Angeles in the ‘40s seeking better weather and better opportunities. They found the latter in their mass mailing business, The Mailing House Inc. Ed Lefler conceived the company and became a master at wooing customers while Anne Lefler managed the business and became a financial wizard. “She was the inside and he was the outside,” said Bernstein, 51, of his first clients out of school.

For years, the Leflers ran the company from its location at 4th Street and Western Avenue, maintaining a condominium in nearby Hancock Park.

“They were both career people,” said Ed Lefler’s sister, June, 80, who was office manager at The Mailing House for 40 years. The business, June Lefler said, “took up most of their time.”

The Leflers sold the company in 1984 to two longtime employees who now run it from its Bell location. The Western Avenue building was sold after the 1992 riots for $2.5 million--$1 million less than the asking price but 20 times more than the Leflers paid for it. Though the company thrived, it was Anne Lefler’s investments, including real estate and bonds, that built the couple their fortune.

“I don’t know of any investment she made that didn’t perform the way she expected,” Bernstein said.

Her meticulous and demanding nature was both her strength and weakness. “She expected people to be as thorough as she was,” Bernstein said. “She had a temper. And she was not forgiving.”

“They were not the most lovable people in the world, but I managed to get along with them,” chuckled Terence Nunan, their estate planner and lawyer. “If you wrote a letter and there was a misplaced comma, Mrs. Lefler let you know. She was a very precise and careful lady.”

The couple’s biggest indulgence was travel. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, they traveled the globe from Europe and South America to what were then exotic ports of call for Americans--China and Japan, Israel and Jordan and Iran, and South Africa in 1968. Their travel slides are both extraordinary and odd. They depicted great sights of the world but virtually no pictures of the couple.

They loved to smoke and collected cigarette lighters from around the world. They played golf, sometimes slipping away on weekends to the home they built in the late ‘70s in Indian Wells.

In the ‘80s, as Ed Lefler’s health began to fail--he had a leg amputated below the knee--they retired to the desert home. By the mid-’80s, he had begun to show signs of Alzheimer’s. It was 1985 when the Leflers decided that the bulk of their estate should go to research.

As Ed Lefler worsened, few people saw him. When Bernstein came to visit on business, Anne Lefler would sometimes say her husband was sleeping.

June Lefler would telephone her brother from her Sherman Oaks home. “He knew who I was, but unfortunately I was hard of hearing and he had a soft voice so we didn’t have much to discuss,” said Lefler, chuckling. “The perils of old age.”

On the eve of Anne Lefler’s 1987 surgery for lung cancer, she called Bernstein to her bedside to tell him that she wanted to make sure that if her husband ever had to be hospitalized in a facility, that he would have excellent care--and that whoever gave him care would be remembered in her will.

It wasn’t gratitude. It was a business deal. “Her intentions were to be able to walk into a facility and say to the owners: ‘Do you want this money? I want this kind of care,’ ” Bernstein said.

Four years later, Anne Lefler lay dying in a hospital bed.

“She was in a state of almost delirium,” Bernstein said. “She said, ‘I want to go home. I want to see Ed.’ I called the doctor, and he said releasing her would mean almost certain death. . . . She died being restrained in the bed. It was awful.”

Furious, Bernstein never paid the doctor’s bill. “I knew if he got paid, Anne would strike me dead from heaven.”

*

It fell to Bernstein to tell Ed Lefler that his wife had died. On the few occasions that Bernstein saw his client, Lefler wafted in and out of rationality, sometimes talking about nonexistent golf games that he had played that day. But Lefler was cognizant of his accountant’s bad news.

“He was very sad,” Bernstein said. “That’s when he told me the dog story.”

Oddly, the meticulous Anne Lefler had not provided for the upkeep of their two dogs. Bernstein had to go to court to get money for the care of the dogs, which were given to one of the nurses who cared for Ed Lefler in his home. .

The Leflers’ will dictated that their gift would go to an institution selected by Bernstein. After months of discussion, Harvard Medical School was chosen and last month a court approved it. Five million dollars of the bequest is already on its way. The balance will come as assets are liquidated.

As reserved as they were, Bernstein marvels at the task his clients gave him.

“I will never have the wealth to be able to do what they have allowed me to do for them,” he said.