Harman at center stage

Sidney Harman is one cool gent.

The entrepreneurial business titan - a co-founder of Harman/Kardon International Industries - is a former Cabinet official, a member of numerous nonprofit boards and an arts patron extraordinaire. He holds a professor’s chair at the University of Southern California and, as of Monday, is recipient along with his wife and daughter of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s first Sidney Harman Award for Philanthropy in the Arts.

It was Mr. Harman, more than any one person, who made possible the institution’s Harman Center for the Arts by giving extensive seed money - many millions of dollars - toward the building’s capital campaign.

That’s reason enough for him to be first on the company’s list for the annual award. (None of his money goes toward the award itself - a piece of crystal engraved with an image of the Harman Center facade - but his name stays on it in perpetuity.)

“We first made the decision to name it after him - that was earlier this year - and then who should be the first to get it,” notes Ed Zareski, the Shakespeare company’s chief development officer, who calls Mr. Harman “the most thoughtful and intellectual of any philanthropist I have met.”

Philanthropic arts awards are something of a trend, and even Broadway’s Tony Awards will include one next year on behalf of the late Isabelle Stevenson, former president of the American Theater Wing. Yet Mr. Harman may lead the pack as an erudite, Shakespeare-loving, classics-quoting jack of all trades who lectures at USC’s schools of business, technology, medicine, law, architecture, public policy, cinema arts, arts and sciences, and - “amusingly but real,” he says - the school of gerontology.

Plus, he has a doctorate in higher education from the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, granted in 1973.

The man who calls himself “something of a troubadour,” at least at USC, turned 90 in August, one month after retiring his Harman International chair and chief-executive title.

Though the word “dude” isn’t in the Shakespeare canon, it most certainly could apply to the Bard’s rebellious young Hotspur from “Henry IV, Part I,” a character whom Mr. Harman says he always has “fantasized” himself to be.

“Even though I don’t think this is the Shakespeare character most widely applauded and emulated as a star, I’ve always found him stunningly intelligent, courageous, charming,” Mr. Harman explains.

The rebellious Henry Percy, surnamed Hotspur, also has been defined as rash and blind in the face of defeat, but it’s difficult to find failure in Mr. Harman’s life.

Known best as an audio industry pioneer, he developed the first stereo receiver with Bernard Kardon, whose stake in the business he later bought. He has strong ties to the educational world as well as the arts. From 1970 to 1973, he was president of Friends World College (now Friends World Program of Long Island University-Southampton College). He funded a writer-in-residence program at City University of New York’s Baruch College, his alma mater, and founded a program on technology, public policy and human development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also is author of several books, including “Mind Your Own Business: A Maverick’s Guide to Business, Leadership and Life,” which contains what he says are “a set of reminiscences and responses to life experience.”

Above all, it is the arts to which he turns for a favorite quote credited to playwright Maxwell Anderson. The part he most often cites, Mr. Zareski says, is: “But let us do what we can to encourage our nascent arts, for if we are to be remembered as more than a mass of people who lived and fought wars and died, it is for our arts that we will be remembered.”

The closest Mr. Harman has come to mentors in real life, he acknowledges, “are people I knew either directly or indirectly against whom I determined I would design my life, my code - in contradiction to what I found unappealing in them. … More important was my determination to design myself as a function of what I had taken from my reading. You cannot define yourself or say who you are until you can say what it is you believe in. I defined a model for myself instead of thinking I had a mentor telling me the way to go.”

Monday’s black-tie event was a gala fundraiser in the grand tradition, with tickets priced at $1,000 including a reception, program and dinner later in the National Building Museum. The theme was “A Night in Verona,” inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Presentation of the award - officially to the Harman Family Foundation, which is Mr. Harman, his wife, U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, and his daughter Barbara Harman - took place during a program that honored artists who have interpreted the play in their work.

The three performers receiving the company’s annual Will Award, given to people who contribute in some way to classical theater in America, were Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet; Chita Rivera; and Rennie Harris, founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement.