In 1974, novelist Ken Kesey, the godfather of the San Francisco Acid Tests, was scheduled to pick Jann Wenner up at the airport in Portland, Oregon, where they planned on interviewing the governor of Oregon, Tom McCall, an environmental and drug-law progressive whose administration organized the first state-sponsored rock concert. But when Wenner got off the plane, Kesey gave him a quizzical look. “You don’t look like what I thought you’d look like,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Wenner asked.
“I thought you’d be tall and blond,” he replied, “the way you looked in the comic book.”
Wenner had appeared in an issue of Marvel’s Daredevil in June 1973, issue No. 100, depicted as a curiously tall and blond figure who scores an interview with the masked superhero for Rolling Stone. “I didn’t think the counterculture was interested in anybody who works with the police,” says Daredevil, floating above him.
The image of Wenner as a dashing Aryan was indeed comic. Glamour, someone once wrote, required looking like you didn’t work. By that definition, Wenner would never be glamorous. The stiff keys on his beige IBM Selectric typewriter required him to bash down so hard that, from his office, Wenner’s never-ending letter writing, his tireless scheming, sounded like an act of violence echoing down the hallways, a rhythmic clacking of ambition and need. His fingers punched boldfaced names into his beloved letterhead with the zeal of a boxer: Dear Tom Wolfe, Dear Mick Jagger, Dear Norman Mailer, Dear Truman Capote, Dear Tim Leary. The names piled up like cigarettes in his ashtray. The bolder the name, the bigger the dopamine kick, the bigger Jann Wenner’s desire to stamp them into his yearbook, Rolling Stone.
“This sounds weird,” said Timothy Crouse, “but I would swear that I sometimes used to see purple clouds around his eyes, a kind of effluvium. It was like this gas that was swirling around them because he was so hungry for everything he looked at. There are people who look at things to understand them, and people who look at things because they have to have them. With Jann, it seemed to be about desire, or greed, or a lust for power.”
In person, Wenner’s words were often lost in a jumble of “ums” and “you knows” and “blah, blah, blahs,” but in letters Wenner could articulate his thoughts with precision: In late 1971, he wrote a letter to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, crystallizing his ambitions in an urgent plea for coverage by the paper of record. “We are in a key and strategic transition now in the way the ‘outside world’ views us,” he wrote. “Are we some temporal ‘Woodstock Nation’ sheet or a serious and worthy new kind of publication that will be around for some time to come?”
Wenner intended to answer his own question. With Jane back at Ord Court, he returned to breathing Rolling Stone 24/7. “Razzle-dazzle, night and day, coast to coast,” as Alan Rinzler would later say of these days. “We were exploding sparks of amphetamine energy, bolts of manic lightning striking down every obstacle in our path.” Marshall Chess recalled waking up in the middle of the night as a houseguest to find Jann preparing to go into the office in pajamas and robe. There was too much fun! On Third Street, stars like Elton John, Bette Midler, and Al Green drifted in and out. During his visit, Green dramatically brushed off Wenner’s chair for a TV camera. “I was intimidated by Jann,” said Elton John, who met Wenner at Rolling Stone in 1971 after appearing on the cover, “not because he was a nasty or snobbish person, but because he founded something so great…like someone who formed The Washington Post or whatever.”
His mother started calling him Citizen Wenner, after Citizen Kane, the 1941 Orson Welles film based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. She used it pejoratively, as did writers like Grover Lewis, who hated Wenner. But Wenner embraced it. David Obst, the book agent who came to represent Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, recalled Jane Wenner screening Citizen Kane for Jann’s birthday one year. “I remember he literally couldn’t sit down,” recalled Obst. “This had to be his umpteenth screening of it. He would just get so excited, and his empathy with the Kane character and what he was going through, not on the sexual side, but on the business side, was palpable.”
Inspiring satire is a clear sign of success, and by this measure Rolling Stone had fully arrived. In Las Vegas, actress Mitzi Gaynor of South Pacific fame now included a Rolling Stone parody in her song and dance act (“It’s a very versatile magazine: you can either read it or smoke it”), and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, a rowdy southern-tinged band on Columbia Records, recorded a virtual advertisement for the newspaper, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” written by Shel Silverstein. It reached No. 6 on the pop charts, and Rolling Stone put a comic illustration of the band on the cover in March 1973 (Wenner later tried policing the use of the song for copyright abuse). There were also published parodies of Rolling Stone—“Rolling Drone”—that made fun of the newspaper’s self-seriousness and endless nostalgia for the Summer of Love. But herein was Wenner’s power: There was simply too much heaven behind the gates of the 1960s and 1970s. In his fourth-anniversary editorial, Wenner dispensed with any pretentions to countercultural purity, proclaiming Rolling Stone free from anybody’s agenda but its own and embracing the true calling of his newspaper: making money. “If you’re doing public art and communication in America—if you even live here—you’re dealing with money, and you’re in business…As long as there are printing bills to pay, writers who want to earn a living by their craft, people who pay for their groceries, want to raise children and have their own homes, Rolling Stone will be a capitalist operation.”
Wenner wasn’t a very good capitalist yet. Instead, he was a serial recruiter of capitalists, discovering publishers and businessmen who could advance Rolling Stone’s fortunes and teach Wenner a new trick—before Wenner hired somebody to squeeze them out and continue his march to the next hill. In 1971, Wenner hired a childhood friend of Hunter Thompson’s named Porter Bibb, a Louisville bon vivant who had helped produce the film Gimme Shelter with the Maysles brothers. Bibb, who favored Gucci loafers, painted extravagant visions of a hippie empire for Wenner, including a syndicated Rolling Stone radio show, a Rolling Stone record club, closed-circuit TV concert deals with Pepsi, and even a Rolling Stone insurance policy (“a guaranteed sure-fire money maker”). Wenner put him on the masthead as “Porter Bigg” and waited for the cash to roll in. Within a year, Bibb’s expense account swamped his fantasies as he tried and failed to get Wenner to invest in the business, and eventually Wenner fired him. Only the Rolling Stone Radio Hour materialized—until Wenner clashed with the man Bibb hired to run it, Bob Meyrowitz, who left to start the syndicated radio program the King Biscuit Flower Hour. “He was very upset, and he ended up suing Jann for breach of contract,” recalled Bibb.
Until 1974, Wenner’s capitalist operation ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of record companies that bailed him out in 1970. Three-quarters of the ads still came from record companies and stereo manufacturers, which floated in with minimal effort: Laurel Gonsalves, who kept scales on her desk for weighing pot and cocaine, was more like the newspaper’s conscience than an ad saleswoman, policing for cigarettes, alcohol, and pornography while drawing up ethical guides showing why she rejected companies like Hi-Fashion Water Beds, whose ads used “women as sex objects, in the fashion of Playboy.” (She was also meticulous about accredited abortion referral agencies and ran Planned Parenthood ads for free.) But her attempts to get the big-league ads that Jann Wenner wanted in Rolling Stone—Porsche, Audi, Jeep, Kodak, Polaroid, Gillette, and TWA—were all but hopeless. In part this was because Gonsalves rarely ventured outside the office but also because she hired salespeople who looked like cast members from Hair and who rolled into the office after lunch.
In 1972, Wenner commissioned the corporate accounting firm Dun & Bradstreet to value the company, which it put at a relatively paltry $424,920. But profitability was up for the first time in three years, and a “planned expansion” promised more. The architect of the expansion was Wenner’s next business partner, a large-bodied and sharp-tongued Boston Irishman named Larry Durocher who was a close friend and mentor to Jon Landau and had helped salvage the Boston alt-weekly Phoenix. Durocher became Rolling Stone’s publisher, extracted Wenner from his contract with Independent News, and negotiated a new deal that put Rolling Stone next to Time and Newsweek on the newsstands. Durocher also plotted an important upgrade: By changing the size and shape of Rolling Stone—making it a large, folded tabloid—they could accommodate more pages, publish better color images, and charge advertisers $4,000 for a page.
Before Durocher was fired in 1974, Wenner recruited Tom Baker, a straitlaced business consultant who had success with a chain of California convenience stores called Short Stop. Tasked with streamlining Rolling Stone’s finances, Baker replaced Wenner’s longtime business manager, Hank Torgrimson (who didn’t wear shoes and still included astrological signs on employee forms), and installed basic financial systems at Rolling Stone, which helped Straight Arrow go from break-even to “pleasantly profitable,” as Wenner put it in 1973 when he claimed in the press that Rolling Stone earned $430,000 in profit on $5 million in revenue. (In truth, it was probably half that, which was still pretty good.)
Before Wenner fired Baker in 1975, his most important business partner of the 1970s entered the picture, a thirty-year-old salesman named Joe Armstrong. A tall, lean Texan with a flop of sandy-brown hair, Armstrong wore three-piece suits and had an aw-shucks accent to go with his wide, pleasing smile. His ambition fizzed like a glass of champagne: He had a journalism degree from Trinity and a law degree from the University of Texas. After escaping the conservative confines of Texas for the bright lights of New York City, he first tried working on Wall Street before leaping to magazines, becoming assistant publisher at Family Week. Wenner discovered Armstrong through a grand old advertising man named Whit Hobbs, a consultant to The New Yorker whom Wenner hired to try getting the same ads in Rolling Stone. Though he didn’t look like one, Armstrong was a Rolling Stone devotee. But he saw the advertising materials Rolling Stone was circulating—a cartoon hippie flying through the air and the words “Our readers like to fly, too. Especially on planes”—and knew what he had to do: deliver an image and a message that the suits on Madison Avenue could understand. Surely they could get all those blue-chip ads Wenner had been clipping from Newsweek, but Rolling Stone would need a makeover—a new image in brochures, mailers, and posters. He would need to recruit a new ad sales team, none with long hair or tank tops or drug scales on their desks, all with pressed clothes and fresh-faced smiles, able to hold the hands of old admen who listened to Ray Conniff and explain how a magazine featuring “naked hippies” and actor Paul Newman saying “fuck” in print was conducive to car and liquor sales. And above all, these straitlaced salespeople had to love Rolling Stone as much as Joe Armstrong did. “I could really only sell something I believed in,” said Armstrong. “When I got to Rolling Stone, I only hired magazine salespeople that loved the magazine, so it took me a looong time to find people. This was rare for ad sales people, anywhere.”
Jann Wenner met Joe Armstrong in a diner on Third Avenue in New York and listened to his pitch—the courtly manner, the gushing enthusiasm, the fluttering eyelashes. Wenner had never met somebody who seemed to love his newspaper as much as he did. A business romance. And out of the blue, Wenner made a strange request of the charming Texan. “He wanted to see everything in my billfold,” recalled Armstrong. “I said, ‘Well, I’d like to see yours.’ ”
IF JANN WENNER WAS not yet a great capitalist, the alchemy of his appetites and the fertile culture was making him a great editor in chief. The youth movement in the 1960s seemed to be essentially unitary, but as it shattered, its fragments proved to be even more journalistically interesting, and Rolling Stone was perfectly positioned to sweep them up. Here was the premier interview with David Bowie, the androgynous spaceman from England, and an exposé on astronauts by Tom Wolfe. Here was Tim Cahill infiltrating a Christian cult in Hollywood and Grover Lewis infiltrating the set of The Getaway in 1972, headlined “Why Did Sam Peckinpah Tell Steve McQueen to Belt This Actress in the Face? See Page 40” (it was Sally Struthers from All in the Family). Here was beat legend William Burroughs on Scientology, Eldridge Cleaver on Timothy Leary (“He has blown his mind on acid”), Lester Bangs on the death of Jack Kerouac, Jonathan Cott interviewing Stockhausen. How deep the well! How endless the smorgasbord! Woody Allen explained his 1971 comedy, Bananas (“The film is about the lack of substance in my movie”), and a group of media revolutionaries called TOTAL ACCESS explained the future: “When my fuckin’ revolution comes, everybody in the world’s gonna be on television all the time.” In a time of such ferment, Rolling Stone readers expected literary excess and a certain overripeness, and they often got it. Here is how the Nick Tosches review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid began:
A young girl’s voice. She is dressed in a nun’s habit. The boy turns and faces her. She proffers a chalice of cervical exudate and he drinks from it. She gets down on her knees and elbows, como peros, and tosses the nun’s hem above her posterior. On each naked buttock is the scrawled sign of Ashirikas; “Fuck me, Rolf.” The boy whips out a 10" personal vibrator, adorned in waterproof acrylics with the image of the Nazarene. He intones the words “nuk Khensu tenten nebu” and approaches her intendent fundament…impletion…across the room the fresh corpse of an illegitimate hippie baby is dis-impaled from a ceremonial sword of Baphomet.
The album was pretty good, too.
Jann Wenner was romping through this new anything-goes culture, publishing a gleefully smirking profile of Tricia Nixon, daughter of the president; putting nine-year-old Tatum O’Neal, daughter of actor Ryan, on the cover on the occasion of her role in Paper Moon (“The Portrait of an Artist as a Little Girl”); and publishing an illustrated pinup of Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing a leopard-skin bikini and licking his lips in a salacious come-on (“That was very gay,” said Wenner). Perhaps it was true that “greatness knows itself,” but Wenner wasn’t so much interested in knowing himself as in imbibing the “greatness” of everything and everyone else around him. Wenner looked east to the successful magazines of Manhattan publishing—Esquire and New York, the Medici of the New Journalism—and vowed to best them on their own turf by publishing the greatest work by the greatest writers. Unlike Hugh Hefner of Playboy, whom Wenner criticized for paying top dollar for big-name writers only to get second-rate work, he would get first-rate work by the best writers. “That was my attitude to everybody: ‘I only want your best stuff,’ ” said Wenner. “Hefner got into that habit; he would take name writers with throwaway pieces.”
And if Hugh Hefner didn’t hear him clearly, Rolling Stone published a sharp takedown of the Playboy founder in 1973 by British muckraker Anthony Haden-Guest. Afterward, a publicist for Hefner slammed “The Pubic Hair Papers” as inaccurate and unfair and complained about “Little Offal Annie [Leibovitz],” whom they had allowed to intrude on “Mr. Hefner’s privacy,” only to be rewarded with “unflattering” images. Touché!
But nothing proved Wenner’s point more than publishing Tom Wolfe, whom Wenner convinced, after a few false starts, to take on the American space program on the occasion of the last Apollo launch in 1972. To Wolfe, Jann Wenner was the sort of character he might have written about had Wenner not been working for years to get Wolfe into his newspaper. “There was something really innocent about Jann,” said Wolfe. “He was very open.”
Wenner had paid a visit to Wolfe in 1968 while Wolfe was in San Francisco researching Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, his reportage and essays on the counterculture, in an effort to get Wolfe to admit he really did take LSD while reporting The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Wolfe denied it but later admitted in Rolling Stone, in 1980, he tried it once: “It scared the hell out of me. It was like tying yourself to a railroad track to see how big the train is”).
Wolfe’s arrival at Rolling Stone was prefigured by Wenner’s own impersonation of him. For a report from a record convention at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, titled “The Blind Leading the Deaf Through a Desert,” Wenner quoted and name checked his new idol (“Tom Wolfe, you were right!”) and composed a detailed, Wolfe-like cataloging of the record men he saw there, with their “carefully trimmed reddish sideburns, yellow-tinted sunglasses in the wide-lens, gold-wire rim fashion, moccasins and/or buckskin jackets with fringes, all of it so neatly done.”
But, never satisfied with his own writing, he pursued the real thing. In late 1969, he had asked Wolfe to write a profile of Jimi Hendrix. Wolfe demurred, but he was taken by Wenner’s fanboyish enthusiasm and outrageous confidence. After Wenner took him on a ride in his limousine with tinted windows and a bandannaed hippie for a driver, it was clear Wenner wasn’t one of the freaks Wolfe had written about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “I think he always had his head on his shoulders,” Wolfe said. “I don’t know how many chemicals he took, but I’m sure he took his share. But he really did not act off the wall. He wasn’t far out; he always seemed like he knew what he was doing.”
Wolfe’s first project for Wenner was covering a record convention in Miami in 1970. Wenner accompanied him to the meeting of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, trying to sell advertising pages while Wolfe observed the scene—and promptly decided against writing about it after seeing how little any of it was about music. “Their interest is how many square feet of department store space you can sell,” he said.
Wolfe came back with a story pitch about Jesus Christ Superstar and the “Third Great Awakening” of religious fervor among hippies (an idea that never materialized in Rolling Stone but later became “The ‘Me’ Decade,” published by New York magazine in 1976). In the introduction to “Post-orbital Remorse: The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff,” Wenner wrote that Wolfe came to him with the idea. “I went down to the Kennedy Space Center in 1969, for the launch of Apollo,” said Wolfe. “So I was interested in that and decided to move forward with it.”
But it became a full Rolling Stone production, with staffers mailing out form letters to the astronauts to campaign for Wolfe’s access. When Wolfe went to Cape Canaveral for the launch in December 1972, he was accompanied by Annie Leibovitz and met by another space gawker, Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun. Wenner teased the story in advance, writing in Rolling Stone on the eve of the launch, “The Mojo Wire will be humming from the Eastern seaboard tonight, and our thoughts are with you, Tom.”
The story extended over four issues, seventeen pages on the lives of test pilots who subjected themselves and their long-suffering families to the terrible pressures of piloting experimental planes and spacecraft. According to Wenner, the talkative first-person opener of the story was an homage to Hunter Thompson, whom Wolfe first met in Manhattan over lunch at the Brazilian Coffee House on West Forty-Sixth Street. In usual form, Thompson brought a mysterious object with him. “He said, ‘I have something in this bag that could clear out this place in fifteen seconds,’ ” recalled Wolfe. “ ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to show me,’ and he took the thing out. It was like a little can of shaving cream. He pressed the top, and there was a piercing sound.”
It was a marine air horn. “I was surprised I had any hearing left,” said Wolfe.
It would take Wolfe several years to turn his NASA exposé into the 1979 best seller The Right Stuff, by which time Wolfe felt the stuff that appeared in Rolling Stone was not quite right. “Jann seemed to like it more than I did,” Wolfe said. (When Wenner asked for minor changes on a draft, Wolfe had said, “Oh, come on, Jann, just say it’s shit!”) Nonetheless, he credited Wenner with getting him started on a story that would define his career. And the effect of Tom Wolfe on Rolling Stone was bigger than the story itself. Wolfe’s fame—he was a regular guest of Dick Cavett’s on ABC—made Wenner’s newspaper the center of gravity for New Journalism at the movement’s high-water mark. Wenner managed to recruit Wolfe from editor Clay Felker at New York, who had belittled and intimidated Wenner at a dinner party four years earlier. Felker, a veteran of Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune who’d founded New York magazine, along with Milton Glaser, in April 1968, was every bit as ambitious as Wenner and had been publishing Tom Wolfe for years. Wenner hung a quotation from Felker over his desk that read, “Where is it written that Jann Wenner should inherit the earth?” (Later, Felker acknowledged that Wenner had “one of the best journalistic antennas in the United States. He has an incredible sense of knowing what’s going to be hot. Whenever things change, he’s there.”)
In competition with ad-rich super magazines like Playboy and Esquire, Wenner survived by being an inveterate cheapskate. He once asked writers to use three-minute egg timers to make long-distance calls, and he made the staff send him cost-saving memos with signed promises to pare back expenses. He drove by the offices late at night to make sure the lights were all off. But mainly he saved money by regularly underpaying writers. As Wenner joked to a group of students in 1973, “The better they are, the less we pay them.” In some cases, this was literally true: When Norman Mailer agreed to publish an open letter to Truman Capote in Rolling Stone in 1973—a rebuttal to Capote’s comments about him in the Warhol interview—Wenner declined to pay Mailer, arguing that his literary bon mot was, after all, just a letter. “It’s not a matter of the rates[,] which I’d certainly be willing to stretch to our outer limits for your work,” he wrote, “it’s just that I felt in view of its nature as a letter, it would simply be inappropriate.” (“Since I can’t afford your rates,” Mailer replied, “you get it for nothing.”)
For years, Wenner would go through the assignment lists for writers and lop off a few hundred dollars from their promised fees, leaving his editors to apologize or grovel. Wenner’s secretary revealed the practice to Michael Rogers. “I said, ‘You’re kidding,’ ” recalled Rogers. “She said, ‘No, he does that every two weeks.’ So I complained about that, until we got the right amount of money.” (Rogers’s first story was published not only without payment but without his knowledge.)
What Jann Wenner had instead of money was a come-on like no other. He would sit in his oversized chair, a man-child with twinkling blue eyes, and charm a writer with visions of endless freedom and literary fame inside his Oxford-bordered playground. “I covered the motorcycle races on the Isle of Man and spent a week with Tim Leary, who was then in exile (following his escape from a California jail) in Switzerland,” recalled Jerry Hopkins. “Jann also paid for a journey to Kenya and South Africa, where I wrote stories about a hippie colony.”
When Jonathan Cott asked to fly to Zurich and interview Marie-Louise von Franz, a disciple of Carl Jung’s, Wenner didn’t know who she was but said sure. Writer Robert Palmer was accompanying Wenner shopping when Palmer began telling him about the ecstatic Jajouka musicians in the desert of Morocco. Wenner offered him $500 to go and write about it. “I agreed instantly,” Palmer later wrote, “right before Jann shelled out several thou for a Persian rug without batting an eye.” Occasionally, this method backfired, like the time Wenner bought a customized van for a writer going on a reporting trip to Mexico and never heard from him again.
In those years, Wenner’s deputies, the two poles of his editorial psyche, were Paul Scanlon, the mustachioed former Wall Street Journal writer with a nose for talent and hard drink, and David Felton, the gifted experimentalist with Harpo Marx hair whose love of nitrous oxide was matched only by his loathing of a deadline but who dreamed up novel ideas—like a participatory journalism project to publish first-person stories by readers in 1972 (including a moving recollection by a Vietnam veteran). Scanlon and Felton recruited crack talents from the mainstream like Joe Eszterhas from Ohio and Tim Cahill from Tennessee and Chet Flippo from Texas, names that would adorn Rolling Stone and other major American magazines for the next thirty years. What they had in common was ambition to burn and a set of insecurities that Jann Wenner could play on. “He must have perceived me properly,” said Robin Green, who wrote on Dennis Hopper’s drug-fueled orgies and the Mustang Ranch whorehouse in Reno (where she and Annie Leibovitz wore bikinis on assignment). “I was scared, I was inept socially, I was kind of straight. I became this ironic kind of hit man. He used me like that.” (Wenner’s unlikely assassin would go on to win Emmys for her writing on the Sopranos TV series on HBO.)
Joe Eszterhas started as a beat reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and when he first showed up at Third Street to buy back issues of Rolling Stone—in a bowl-cut hairdo and imitation-leather coat from Sears—he was taken for a narc. Paul Scanlon assigned him a Thompsonesque piece on a biker-bar shooting, after which Jann Wenner invited Eszterhas to join the staff in San Francisco in 1972. Eszterhas moved west with his wife, becoming a major soloist in Wenner’s growing orchestra: the street guy who could worm inside the world of a corrupt narcotics officer or turn a minor news story on a man who died in a botched drug raid into stone-cold noir. “Rolling Stone was the first place where I worked where I didn’t feel like some kind of insurgent against the people who read it,” said Eszterhas. “I felt like Jann was my ally and the publication was my ally and I grew a terrific amount of feeling for it.”
Eszterhas said Jann Wenner was not a “reader” per se, no man of deep literary interests. His editorial marks rarely ventured past the first page or two as his attention flagged on yet another magnum opus. Instead, Wenner had a lustful eye for ambition that rhymed with his own. (Only later would he learn that some of Eszterhas’s gleam came from threading his reportage with fiction, which worked better when he got to Hollywood and wrote the screenplays for Basic Instinct and Flashdance.) The editorial meetings in the Raoul Duke Room were like group therapy, Wenner’s men trying to divine his desires as he nervously chewed the cellophane from a fresh pack of Marlboros and nodded with the series of noncommittal, vaguely skeptical “uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huhs”—until he grabbed his armrests, sat upright, and said, “Okay, do it.”
A sure sign that Wenner liked a writer is that he would start flattering him with imitation. He regularly used Hunter Thompson’s lingo in letters, signing off with Thompsonisms like Selah and Cazart!, slang Thompson co-opted from obscure sources. When Stanley Booth, the eccentric Memphis writer who wrote The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, tempted Wenner with a Jerry Lee Lewis profile, Wenner replied by morphing into Stanley Booth, cribbing his style: “I could just sneak off and publish your latest letter, couldn’t I, and trap you into an insane correspondence, to run in the letters column and get away with just sending you a little molasses, a free record, and a cut gram of cocaine for payment each time, couldn’t I, if I was clever as a swamp fox.” (Wenner told him in a telegram that Rolling Stone would print “whatever” and paid him for a story with a pound of weed procured by Laurel Gonsalves.)
Though Wenner continually asked writers to turn in shorter pieces and pare back their literary fulmination, he usually printed what they wrote. The pages of Rolling Stone were endless expanses of prose, page after page of the novelistic, the literary, the baroque, the indulgent, no shoe left undescribed down to the lace knots. Journalism was “the new Hollywood,” as many were saying. It was a newly serious game, with big stakes, a horse race where everyone was running for the roses. Writing was rock and roll, and Wenner’s journalists were pushing it hard—often too hard. Grover Lewis, a poet from Texas, summoned Faulkner and Steinbeck in his Grand Canyon of a story on the making of the classic 1971 film The Last Picture Show, a story that featured, in addition to director Peter Bogdanovich and actress Cybill Shepherd, the writer Grover Lewis. “In the darkness beyond the swath of headlights,” he wrote, “the stringy mottes of mesquite trees and stagnant stock tanks and the Christmas-tree oil rigs flash past at 80 mph. Startled by the sight, I glimpse my bone-white hair and ravaged face in a window as I light a cigarette.”
Point of view, the authorial “I,” was central. As Wenner told a reporter in 1971, “There is no such thing as objectivity. It does not exist. Nobody is objective. No perceived event is objective, and any serious editor or writer will recognize that.” (Or as he said of the Columbia Journalism Review, which published the scathing profile of Wenner, “So much for objectivity in journalism.”)
Wenner’s benchmark for the new subjective objectivity, of course, was Hunter Thompson. Though he was rarely in San Francisco, Thompson’s Mojo Wire madness permeated the offices of Rolling Stone. Editors imitated Thompson’s cranked-up personality, with cries of “Holy Jesus!” echoing down the hall every time someone stubbed a toe. In August 1973, when Rolling Stone converted to a new physical format, Wenner changed his byline to Jann S. Wenner, a clear homage to Hunter S. Thompson. “You just learned to have more fun with him,” said David Felton, who took up smoking cigarettes with an FDR-style holder, “by being more of an asshole, in a way.”
No one gunned for Thompson’s status harder than Eszterhas, who began smoking a pipe and strapping a buck knife to his leg, hardly veiling his envy for Thompson. “That was tough to feel that,” Eszterhas said. “Hunter was a god to all of us. The amount of attention his pieces got, the fan letters—I think Hunter was in a total separate category, but there was certainly a sense of competition with guys like Tim Cahill and David Felton and Ben Fong-Torres. We all felt that. We all wanted to be Rolling Stone stars. There was a very special cachet to being a Rolling Stone writer to begin with—especially the stuff that was on the covers.”
The group of desks where Eszterhas and Felton worked was now dubbed Macho Village for the irascible and competitive men who jostled for cover bylines. When Robert Greenfield showed up from the London office, a longhair in dungarees, he was surprised to find the staff of Rolling Stone posturing like a fraternity of fighter pilots. “They all had judgment,” said Greenfield. “Ben Fong-Torres, Felton—they all considered themselves a step above many of the people they were writing about.”
In 1973, a guerrilla documentary crew called TVTV interviewed Wenner and his big stars, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson (who gamely popped a speed tablet for the cameras), and came away disgusted by the pretension inside Third Street. “I’ve talked to them high and low and I’ll tell you this about Rolling Stone,” said director Allen Rucker, standing in the parking lot below Wenner’s office. “It’s mystical. That’s what Paul [Scanlon] said. It’s a mystical place. It is mystical—boredom is mystery.” (The film’s co-director, Michael Shamberg, went on to produce The Big Chill.)
Behind all this mystery was a world of discontent, with Jann Wenner the subject of the staff’s eternal complaint. Scanlon and Lewis regularly saddled up at Jerry’s Inn down the block and bitched about his follies and excesses, bonding like abused family members. They called him “the fascist insect” (Joe Eszterhas), “Yarn Vendor” (David Dalton), and “the rotten little dwarf” (Hunter Thompson). In the press, current and ex-employees, including Ralph Gleason, aired their grievances over Wenner’s ruthless personality (“He has real trouble with interpersonal relationships,” reported Jerry Hopkins). Wenner had an especially toxic relationship with Grover Lewis, a man twelve years his senior who drank like a hardened novelist of the Hemingway school and resented Wenner’s imperious youth (“It would be nice to think that he would die in the gutter,” Lewis once said). The feeling was mutual: To get rid of him, Wenner gave Lewis a $40,000 book contract to write a biography of Texas governor John Connally and then canceled it once Lewis left town. Lewis sued him. “He sued Jann because he deserved to be sued,” said Scanlon.
Three thousand miles of distance didn’t soften his personality. When Wenner visited his New York bureau in 1973, he demanded that editor Stu Werbin go fetch him a club sandwich while Wenner commandeered his desk for the afternoon. Werbin (who first reported that a twenty-three-year-old Bruce Springsteen had signed to Columbia) was so angry he spat in Wenner’s sandwich and delivered it to him. Later, Wenner asked Glenn O’Brien, whom he recruited from Inter/View, to fire Werbin and take over his job, but O’Brien refused. “I said, ‘No, that was the last straw,’ ” recalled O’Brien.
But for his core group—Charlie Perry and Ben Fong-Torres and David Felton and Joe Eszterhas and Paul Scanlon—Wenner was a kind of paternal figure, the mercurial taskmaster whose peccadilloes became part of the fabric of their lives, which were wholly devoted to Rolling Stone. They were willing tools of his ambition. When David Felton failed to finish stories or slipped too far into a drug fog (he kept a canister of nitrous oxide next to his reclining dentist chair), Wenner would fire him and then hire him back later. He fired and rehired Felton three separate times. With the kind of drugged-out artist-writers Wenner was cultivating, second chances were necessary. “We gave him lots of reasons to write us off,” said Felton, who became an alcoholic, as did Grover Lewis.
The staff of Rolling Stone grappled with the two irreconcilable sides of Jann S. Wenner: Jann No. 1, the seducer; and Jann No. 2, the betrayer. One minute Wenner was the pudgy princeling passing a joint, infatuated with every word from your mouth; the next a savage bully, asking your replacement to fire you. Charlie Perry said Wenner’s two-sidedness was predictable in at least one regard: “Jann No. 2 has veto power.”
“The closer people got to Jann, the more likely they were to get fired,” observed Sarah Lazin, who worked for Wenner from 1971 to 1983. “People mistook that Jann was their friend. And that wasn’t true. People around Jann were people who could do something for him.”
“My sense of my value to the magazine was always at odds with the way Jann treated us,” said Barbara Landau, formerly Downey, who started as a proofreader in 1972. “He was hard-ass. Very hard. He terrified the staff. Like going into the Colosseum with the lion.”
“Jann, in those days, could be the warmest and most intimate, great friend,” said Jon Landau, who after he divorced his first wife, Janet Maslin, married Downey, “and then he could turn on a dime. And everybody at one point or another would experience the negative. Today they’d probably call him bipolar. There was volatility and unpredictability. He was a master at going after people’s vulnerabilities.”
Landau was one of the few writers outside Hunter Thompson able to push back on Wenner. Landau was Wenner’s critical standard-bearer and tuning fork, not just for rock criticism, but for the integrity of the newspaper as a whole. In 1973, Landau tore Wenner apart over the handling of an extensive interview with James Taylor and Carly Simon, written by Stu Werbin. In a letter, he described the crippling pressures they labored under to finish the story on deadline, spending late night hours closely editing the piece with Taylor and Simon themselves, who forked over a list of changes they wanted made and that Landau had wired to Wenner. The changes never got made, though Wenner had promised to make them.
At 5:00 AM, I thought I was through. The last thing you told me Monday night was it was under control, you could handle it, would take care of the quotes and make sure that it looked right…How could you permit this level of incompetence to represent Rolling Stone?…[T]he masthead says you’re the editor in chief. And aren’t you the guy who lectured me about if you want the authority you have to take the responsibility? As long as you’re running the show, you ought to be on the fucking case…I made the biggest mistake of all—I trusted you.
In response, Wenner blasted Landau’s “arrogant and self-serving advice,” which he said Landau delivered with a “reckless disregard for our friendship and at the peril of our professional relationship.”
If his mercurial personality left bruised feelings and lifelong hatred, Wenner could hardly be bothered to care. “He never looks back,” said Tom Wolfe. “I don’t know how he does it, but I think he’s pretty much immune to guilt.” Wenner justified his cruelty as a business virtue, pointing to the mismanagement of the Beatles’ Apple Corps as a cautionary tale. “The Beatles, when they started Apple, they couldn’t say no; they didn’t know how to fire anybody,” Wenner said in 1973. “They had people working on payroll who had no business being there, old friends. They were pouring money out of there at $50,000 a week, you know, and they couldn’t say no, you know, so they had to bring somebody who was, you know, a vicious bastard to say no and really had to overcompensate.”
Wenner’s temperament fostered a hermetic culture of ambition and fear—and, naturally, sexual tension. The staff socialized so little outside Third Street they became each other’s only friends and lovers. The women’s room was scrawled with graffiti about how certain male editors performed in bed. “Nobody on the outside would understand,” said Bryn Bridenthal, Wenner’s publicist, who started in 1971. “Everybody slept on their desks and had sex on their desks.”
Marriages tended to break up when a new hire joined the staff. Robin Green was sleeping with the married David Felton; Jon Landau divorced Maslin and took up with editor Marianne Partridge before marrying copy editor Barbara Downey; Paul Scanlon was living with fact checker Sarah Lazin (in Sandy Bull’s former house); the married Joe Eszterhas was sleeping with anyone who would sleep with him. Eszterhas claimed that he used Wenner’s office as a trysting spot on weekends. “I had a girlfriend there, after hours,” he said. “We would use his couch. [Wenner] comes back unexpectedly and when I come into the office—‘Jann is looking for you right away!’ I go back and he is really pissed. ‘I let you use my office and I come back and, look, there’s cum and coke and shit all over my desk.’ ” (Paul Scanlon insisted that this story was made up, in keeping with Eszterhas’s penchant for fiction.)
The staff was not immune from Wenner’s own adventuring either. “He fancied himself as a sort of polymorphous-perverse William Randolph Hearst,” said Glenn O’Brien, who joined Rolling Stone in 1973 and quit after what he said were Wenner’s unwanted advances. “He told me he had slept with everyone who had worked for him.”
Though he tried for young men, Wenner said he slept with more women than men in the 1970s. “It may not be what I preferred,” he said, “but that’s what was available.”
In letters, the Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta facetiously addressed Wenner as “O Great Child God.” But Wenner was only the boy his mother had made him, the wounded thirteen-year-old with the preposterous confidence and bottomless need for affirmation. By 1971, his mother was involved in a hedonistic self-improvement group led by an entrepreneur and swinger named Victor Baranco who published a magazine called Aquarius. Wenner said his mother “was close to him and talked about him all the time.” Baranco recruited lost souls and spiritual seekers to live and work in his communal “More Houses,” where residents rehabbed Baranco’s real estate investments while paying him for “courses” on sex and the virtues of selfishness—having “more.” As he prospered, Baranco started cruising around San Francisco like a would-be Jann Wenner, driving a purple Jaguar XKE with Wenner’s mother in the passenger’s seat, his long hair flapping in the wind. In an Oedipal rage, Jann Wenner attacked Baranco in the only way he knew how: He assigned writer Robin Green, his resident assassin, to profile him in Rolling Stone and “really expose him for the hustler he was,” he said.
IN 1973, Jann Wenner was speaking to students at the University of Colorado about the success of Rolling Stone when a man bolted onstage and lobbed a pie into his face, declaring, “A present from the Rock Liberation Front!”
His face dripping whipped cream, Wenner asked plaintively, “Has anybody got a handkerchief?”
Wenner was compelled to explain to the audience the backstory of the Rock Liberation Front: an anticapitalist offshoot of the Yippies that came to include Jerry Rubin, A. J. Weberman, the Dylanologist famous for stealing and dissecting Bob Dylan’s garbage, and John Lennon—Jann Wenner enemies all. Wenner compared the group to Lee Harvey Oswald: “They have no meaning to their own lives and finally seek it out by killing someone famous.”
Afterward, the Yipster Times published an account of the pieing that added creative flourishes: “ ‘Eat the rich!’ cried [Sebastian] Cobot as he mushed the pie in the hip capitalist’s baby face.”
“Jann got scared,” the paper reported, “and made a motion like he was gonna split, but froze in his tracks, figuring he was about to be shot.”
Actually, Wenner sounded as if he were expecting it. Two years before, Rolling Stone had published an exposé on Yippie godfather Abbie Hoffman from a former associate who described in granular detail how Hoffman stole his book idea for Steal This Book, Hoffman’s best-selling guide to fighting the “Pig Empire” of the establishment. The article’s author, Izak Haber, a self-described “speed freak, male prostitute, chess champion, junkie, model,” claimed Hoffman was a cynical opportunist who lived in capitalist splendor while exploiting idealistic naïfs like himself. Though Hoffman denied the story before publication, it comported closely with Wenner’s personal view of Hoffman and his allies as hucksters. “I knew what the impact of this would be,” said Wenner. “It was a full frontal attack on their integrity.”
In the next issue, Wenner published letters from both Hoffman and his wife, the latter describing the financial trouble and jail time Hoffman suffered for his radicalism. “To be constantly harassed by cops, FBI, judges and the attorney general and then to read about…Abbie prancing around his fancy penthouse like Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner really makes me mad,” she wrote. (Wenner, in a rare moment of guilt, said, “It makes me feel bad because of all the beatings he’s had, the donations to Panthers. I’m sure he was sincere in his heart.”) In a separate letter, Hoffman offered his own barbed attack on Wenner, pointing to his suspicious relationship with the chairman of the Xerox Corporation: “How about a similar piece on chief Rolling Stone stockholder Max Palevsky who doubles as chairman of the board of the Xerox Corporation. I’ll bet he lives in a real shithouse just like us.”
The idea of Rolling Stone as a front for the Xerox Corporation had taken hold in certain precincts of the underground. The Yipster Times ran a story called “The Day Rolling Stone Sold Out to Xerox,” claiming Xerox paid off Wenner’s debts in exchange for opposing antiwar demonstrations (an earlier report made the same postulation, subbing in Warner Communications). Wenner faced the accusation directly: “Max is chairman of our board of directors and, as it turns out, the largest single stockholder in Xerox. Maybe we control Xerox? Maybe the times they are a-changin’?”
But it was true that Wenner was steeping in Palevsky’s influence. In late 1971, Palevsky took the Wenners on a Mediterranean cruise on a hired yacht, the SS Lisboa, where they lounged on the deck in sunglasses and Wenner went water-skiing off the coast of Sardinia in a red Speedo. Tanned and handsome, the Wenners set up a camera in their room to take a self-portrait on the bed, sexy siblings practically pinching themselves with delight. Wenner scored some pot for Palevsky’s fifteen-year-old son, and Jane amused everyone by taking the ribbons off the Gucci and Hermès packages from Palevsky’s shopping trips and sewing them into her blue jeans.
For a while, Jane Wenner had an office in Palevsky’s Bel-Air home, where he kept his Rodins and Warhols, and Hunter Thompson squirreled himself away there to write on deadline. Palevsky was infatuated with Jane, the woman a friend once described as “an iridescent, jeweled spider. If you get stuck in her web, you don’t want to leave.”
For a while, Palevsky enjoyed the Rolling Stone ride, bringing a modicum of financial discipline to the company ledger and teaching Wenner how to run a proper business. Palevsky started another magazine called L.A. and funneled one of its scoops to Rolling Stone: a potential interview with D. B. Cooper, the man who hijacked a plane in 1971 and jumped out in a parachute with $200,000 in stolen cash. A mysterious source was promising to arrange the interview and a series of cloak-and-dagger high jinks ensued until Palevsky grew paranoid. “It was going to cost $25,000 in cash,” recalled Wenner. “Max, on our behalf, got cold feet and said Rolling Stone shouldn’t do this because the FBI is going to be after you, and the IRS, and you won’t withstand all the pressure. Of course, it turned out to be a hoax.”
But Wenner had tried Palevsky’s patience. Palevsky found it infuriating that Wenner took his son to buy pot in Sardinia and that Wenner dined out on his access while flouting his financial oversight. Palevsky rolled his eyes at Wenner’s proposal to build a massage room in the offices and rescinded Wenner’s privileges to the Sherry-Netherland after Wenner and Earl McGrath threw a party for a hundred attendees. “He paid for it with Max’s money,” recalled McGrath. Meanwhile, according to Rinzler, he and Wenner once tried to make the company look more profitable by using a legal but dubious accounting maneuver that essentially allowed Wenner to credit unsold book inventory as revenue. Palevsky discovered what he called their “creative accounting.” In 1972, after Wenner and Palevsky fought over how to calculate the value of Palevsky’s stock holdings, a flurry of letters ensued until Palevsky told Wenner “any further action has to be between our lawyers.”
The Xerox chairman eventually demanded Wenner put all of his shares into a blind trust controlled by Palevsky and a lawyer for a period of seven years, plus another 7 percent of the stock, or else Palevsky would resign as chairman of Straight Arrow Publishing. Wenner hated losing favor with his patron, a father figure who treated him like a good Jewish son and urged him to keep regular working hours and exercise. “I was distraught, because I was losing Max,” said Wenner. “I went to Arthur [Rock], ‘What can I do? I’m so upset.’ I was crying. I didn’t know what to do.”
When Palevsky was hospitalized for a heart attack in 1973, Wenner directed Michael Rogers, who had published a story on the meditative effects of biofeedback, to take a modified electroencephalogram machine to Palevsky’s hospital bedside in L.A. to help him recover. “I went back and [Jann] said, ‘Did you give it to him? How’d he look?’ I said, ‘Jann, they wouldn’t let me near him.’ ”
But Wenner had no intention of handing over control, and Wenner’s controlling shares allowed him to maintain authority. Palevsky was furious. The final straw was Wenner’s purchase of a three-story Victorian house on California Street in the rarefied neighborhood of Pacific Heights. According to Jane, Palevsky had offered to help finance a house, presumably to avoid Wenner dipping into the Rolling Stone coffers. According to Rinzler, Palevsky confronted Wenner about his “taking gobs of cash to buy his house in Pacific Heights and taking home original Steadman art and other Rolling Stone corporate assets. Jann pledged not to do it again, but did.” (Wenner simply relisted the art as “personal assets” and kept Steadman’s work in his house.)
As the relationship disintegrated, it was Jane Wenner who maintained the bond to the investor. When Palevsky organized a trip to Israel to tour a wing of the Israel Museum he’d underwritten, he wanted Jane to come, which meant bringing Jann as well. But Wenner said he was bored, so he and Jane escaped the Palevsky entourage for Tangier to hang out with novelist Paul Bowles, who was recently widowed. “We spent the next three days smoking hashish and eating in restaurants and hearing all about him and Jane Bowles, who had just died,” said Wenner. “And met his boyfriend, Mrabet.” (The artist Mohamed Mrabet.)
Palevsky resigned from the board of Straight Arrow in the summer of 1973. Ralph Gleason, who was equally fed up with Wenner, suggested they try a hostile takeover. Palevsky wasn’t interested, because he didn’t want to hurt Jane. “When I ask him, ‘Why did you finally give up?’ ” said Jodie Evans, Palevsky’s fourth wife, “he said, ‘For Janie.’ She came and had a talk with him. About letting go. I remember him wondering, ‘Had Jann put her up to that?’ If that was her, or if that was him.”
Palevsky would maintain his investment until 1976, but his bitterness toward Jann Wenner never dissipated; he once told a reporter that Wenner had a “compulsion to kill his father.” Wenner said Palevsky “blew apart every single relationship he ever had”—remember George McGovern in 1972?—and he was only the latest. But over the years, Palevsky often asked aloud: Why did Jane stay with Jann Wenner?
“Max knew that Jann was gay,” said Evans. “It was a mystery to him then why Janie was with him. Almost every time we got together, he would try to get Janie to explain. The mystery of Jann and Janie remained to the very end.”