When Clive Davis was fired from Columbia Records, the Wenners were in Italy with Earl and Camilla McGrath, staying at Camilla’s dazzling classical estate in the medieval city of Lucca. The Villa Reale di Marlia, bulging with Roman statues and priceless artworks, had once belonged to Napoleon’s sister and was the site of fantastic decadence in the 1920s. As writer Ben Fong-Torres’s in-progress profile of Clive Davis pivoted into an investigative story—which speculated on Davis’s involvement in paying off radio stations with heroin trafficked by an organized crime syndicate—the Wenners went sightseeing in Rome and furniture shopping in Milan, acquiring two white modernist sofas for the new house at 2018 California Street, a three-story, four-bedroom Victorian they acquired in March 1973 for $127,000.
If the marriage of Jann and Jane Wenner was a mystery to some, for others it was completely obvious: They came together in their mutual desire for power and pleasure and style. “It was about superior entertainment,” said Joey Townsend, the hippie daughter of Robert Townsend, the Avis Rent a Car CEO who wrote the only business book Wenner said he ever found useful: Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits. Townsend met the Wenners aboard the SS Lisboa as a guest of Max Palevsky’s. “Epicureanism for that time,” she said. “That’s what that revolution was about.”
The eyes of Wenner’s writers now roved over the delicious details of celebrity interiors and fashion. The home of Columbia recording artist Barbra Streisand, according to Rolling Stone in 1971, was “massive, pin-neat, high-vaulted, gorged with Art Nouveau and Art Deco furnishings,” and Streisand sauntered in wearing “matching denim jacket and flares with that unmistakable de rigueur patina of garments washed precisely once—the overall ensemble topped off by a bio-degradable denim sombrero.” (That year, Wenner was observed by a gossip columnist wearing the same “Bob Dylan millionaire rock star look of denim jacket and bell-bottoms.”)
After “Post-orbital Remorse,” Wenner’s next assignment for Tom Wolfe was an exposé about the mainstreaming of hippie antifashion as “Funky Chic,” a 1974 analogue to “Radical Chic.” “Today, in the age of Funky Chic égalité,” wrote Wolfe, “fashion is a much more devious, sly and convoluted business than anything that was ever dreamed of at Versailles.”
“Funky Chic” was as good a description of the Wenners’ style as any, the casual mongrelizing of European jet set and California haute hippie. Jane curated California Street with the same care Wenner curated his pages, made it the backstage of Rolling Stone, a Victorian pleasure palace with rattan furniture and potted palm trees situated next to Wenner’s Warhols and large bay windows overlooking the street (“They have a tree in their living room,” marveled Mike Salisbury, the new art director). There was the 1961 Richard Diebenkorn painting Jane bought for $15,000, plus German lithographs given to them by Chris Stamp, the manager of the Who. There was a pinball machine and a Claes Oldenburg sculpture. There were mirrors, all over—mainly French, mostly eighteenth century. Inspired by the bathrooms she saw in the suites of expensive European hotels, Jane designed the bathroom upstairs, installing chaise longues, a wall-to-wall mirror bordered with Hollywood lights, and a Japanese-style steam room (with helpful advice, no doubt, from the Rolling Stone story on saunas in January 1973). Guests marveled at Jane Wenner’s raven eye for refinement, whether a Tiffany floor lamp or an antique serving spoon.
Jane’s epicureanism would reach levels of absurd refinement. “How did Jane suddenly know that she needed a Haitian laundress, because the Haitian laundresses really knew how to iron?” wondered Joey Townsend. “How did she know about ironing? She knew!” (The Wenners employed a Chinese couple as servants.) Herb Caen came to refer to Jane Wenner as “Bergdorf’s by the Bay,” but the secret source might have been Bloomingdale’s in New York. As Jane told Wenner in a letter, “A walk thru the ground floor…and you are at once aware of what’s current in Paris, Rome and [California].”
Flush with free wares from advertisers—Rolling Stone ran audio supplements featuring Frank Zappa and Ray Charles showing off their systems—Wenner outfitted California Street with a top-of-the-line McIntosh stereo and new Advent color-projection TV (on which Wenner and his pals watched the early episodes of Saturday Night Live in 1975). His underpaid staffers marveled at Wenner’s audacious commitment to luxury. “I learned all about brand names from Jann,” said writer Michael Rogers. “He got a beautiful gold Cartier lighter. He scratched it, the first day. And he took it out on [his secretary] Stephanie’s desk, and said, ‘This came scratched. Send it back.’ ‘Jann, it wasn’t scratched.’ ‘No, it was already scratched.’ ” (Wenner later said he fired her for “bad judgment.”)
The Wenners aimed to impress and it worked. When Jon Landau saw the house, he wrote to Wenner to say he was “blown back by the beauty.” “You aren’t ever going to be ‘just folks,’ but you’re doing it in style,” he said.
The house, the epicenter of the Rolling Stone social world, divided into two distinct spheres of influence: his and hers. After a guest climbed the twenty-four steps to the stained-glass double doors, the first room off a long hallway was the kitchen, which was Jane’s domain. “She had this very hip sense of humor,” recalled Craig Braun, who designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album and fooled around with Jane in 1973. “She could prod people; she could provoke them. ‘I know you fucked Richard Pryor!’ she might say. She was a great manipulator. We were all high.”
People were drawn to Jane’s dewy looks and boyish sexuality but also to her keen-eyed judgment. She could take a person’s measure while maintaining a tantalizing distance—a professional tease. People like Hunter Thompson and Max Palevsky found the effect irresistible. Said Braun, “She was like Warhol in a way, a voyeur. She was very interested in talking about what people did or didn’t do, sexually. She was obsessed with that. She was more open to talking about sexual escapades than doing them. She was coy. She had this beautiful face and boyish body, kind of ambisexual.”
Wenner’s luxe man cave was at the end of the hallway. As the Stones blared “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll” from the state-of-the-art McIntosh, Wenner stood beneath his Warhols in suit pants and unbuttoned Brooks Brothers shirt, talking a mile a minute, too excited to finish a sentence. “Jann was always afraid he was going to miss something, some conversation,” said Michael Douglas. “He’s nodding to you, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh,’ but he’s listening to two other conversations that are going on at the same time. He’s got really a reporter’s nose for that.”
“If you captured his interest for a moment, it’s really exhilarating,” said Lynda Obst, wife of David, who called Wenner “the greatest spitball intellectual” she ever met.
Wenner made declarations on records and politics with the confidence of a man who stood atop a mountain, as if his access to celebrity and fame gave him expansive vision. “Even in a small circle he thought his opinion would have a ripple effect,” observed Braun. “Almost like a silent parenthetical, ‘You can quote me on this.’ ”
Wenner supplied guests with ample drugs, whether big rocks of cocaine from Laurel Gonsalves, who lived ten blocks away, or perhaps a bowl of unidentified pills. On the surface was the druggy ease of friendship, beneath it the torque of opportunism. The difference between an interview subject and a party guest was nil. Jane warned friends to be careful what they said around her husband, lest it appear in Rolling Stone. “Don’t forget,” she would say, “there’s no such thing as gossip with Jann, or a secret. It’s all news.”
When John Gregory Dunne, husband of Joan Didion, wrote to tell Wenner about a movie he was cooking up for Diana Ross, he included an extensive postscript warning Wenner not to use it for Random Notes “or any other notes, or for Herb Caen, Ramparts, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times and/or any of the print or broadcast media, dinner parties, conventions or editorial conferences. Don’t even tell Janie.”
On the advice of his accounting firm, Wenner kept a detailed calendar of his guests to write off their visits as a business expense, logging the overnight stays of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Marshall and Diane Chess, and of course his own employees Annie Leibovitz and Hunter Thompson. When the IRS questioned Wenner’s use of the house as a tax deduction for Thompson, Wenner replied that it is “not only ordinary but necessary for many strategy meetings to be held after business hours which sometimes extend into the early morning hours.”
The IRS had no idea how true it was. Daniel Ellsberg, riding the fame of the Pentagon Papers, roamed the halls in the nude between hours-long interview sessions with Wenner, who butchered his stream of consciousness monologues into an indulgent heap that ran in November of 1973 (“I made it even worse,” said Wenner. “He was kind of an idiot savant, possessed by a mission, and you fell into it”). Bernstein and Ephron made out on the white Italian couch, after which Wenner assigned Ephron to review travel writer Jan Morris (who despite her displeasure with “Memoirs of a Transsexual: The Relentlessly Cheerful Jan Morris” later agreed to write for Wenner). As the nights progressed, the Wenners and their guests would drift upstairs to the steam room, where “everybody was kind of naked and adorable and ambisexual,” recalled Lynda Obst, who went on to become a successful Hollywood producer (starting with Flashdance in 1983). “It was very kind of Virginia Woolf without the pretense. It was like everybody was attracted to everybody. Without it being gross. Without it being acquisitional. It was sensual.” (It was in the sauna that Wenner attempted the occasional gay seduction after hours. “Have you ever made it with a guy?” he asked rock critic Dave Marsh, who was surprised less by the question than by how casually Wenner asked it: “This was like, ‘Would you like another glass of wine?’ ”)
All the while, Jane kept Jann on a silken leash. When his ego became too big, she whipped him with a wry put-down or poked at his weight, which seemed to balloon with his excesses. Jane called Wenner “Chubby Checker” and regularly put him on diets, including one involving sheep urine. “Jane had cleaned the house out of anything that was good to eat except frozen foods,” recalled David Obst. “Jann, hungry beyond his comfort point, went to the freezer and actually ate the frozen foods without thawing them out and they expanded in his stomach and he had to go to the emergency room.” (Herb Caen, who treated Jann Wenner like the gossip column version of a beach ball, reported that Wenner vacationed at a fat farm in Baja, Mexico, in 1976.)
California Street produced more folly than stories. In 1973, Maria Schneider, the star of the Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris, came to stay for a week, ostensibly to do an interview with Wenner, who was titillated by the infamous butter scene with Marlon Brando. Schneider had once stayed on Ord Court with the Wenners in 1970, a guest of her then lover Joey Townsend. For fun, the two wore matching T-shirts with the Wenners’ address on it in case they got so high they became lost (they were spotted scoring barbiturates from Sandor Burstein and ended up in Herb Caen’s column). This time, Wenner followed her around with a tape recorder on the pretense of an interview but in truth trying to sleep with her. “I had a crazy infatuation,” he said. “I was really taken with her. I didn’t know she was a lesbian. I just thought she was hot. But she wasn’t interested in me.”
Indeed, Schneider appeared to pursue Jane Wenner. “She and Jane are clearly together,” recalled Harriet Fier, a Rolling Stone editor who saw them at a party that week. “They were on a couch. They were all over each other.” Meanwhile, Wenner’s “interview” tape was a long recording of the Wenners doing drugs with Schneider.
Though she was a frequent guest on California Street, Joan Didion never managed to write for Wenner, failing to finish her assignment to cover the Patty Hearst kidnapping trial in 1976. She did, however, use the Wenners’ house as a setting in her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer, referring to it as “the house on California Street” with incantatory repetition. The main character, Charlotte Douglas, whose marriage to a Berkeley lawyer is falling apart as their daughter becomes ensnared with Marxist revolutionaries, offered shades of Jane Wenner, an obsessive cleaner who spent hours vacuuming the floors of California Street. Jann Wenner wrote to Didion to tell her how much he loved the book, though he could not help but observe that “there is not a single happy, uplifting, lovable person in the novel.”
JANN WENNER NOW STIPULATED in Annie Leibovitz’s contract that in addition to her Rolling Stone work she was on call to the Wenners as the family photographer, a service she was expected to perform free of charge. Jann Wenner asked her to photograph him nearly every day and the photos quickly piled high: Jann Wenner at his typewriter, cigarette dangling from his lip; Jann Wenner, stoned and noodling on his red Gretsch guitar in the wee hours; Jann Wenner, pretending to read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying in Barbados; Jann Wenner, thumbs hooked through his orange Rolling Stone suspenders, grinning like a robber baron; Jann Wenner, smoking a cigarette poolside in Bel-Air; Jann Wenner, stoned and grinning, nose turned up in proud profile, gripping the lapels of a black leather jacket that Bruce Springsteen gave him for his thirtieth birthday.
The presence of the Rolling Stone fame maker gave Wenner the status of salon host and star in his own right. “It was like having the San Francisco version of Andy Warhol,” said Leibovitz. “I served that purpose for them.”
The Polaroid SX-70 instant camera first appeared in 1972, and Leibovitz used it both professionally and privately, generating piles of selfies, party shots, vanity portraits, “art shots,” comic vamping, all the faces mottled in saturated chemical colors as they burned the nights to oblivion. Leibovitz used a flash to make overexposed paparazzo close-ups, filling square frames with Capote’s full, fattened jowls or the cool, come-hither smile of Warren Beatty. On and on: Ken Kesey, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Carole King, Jimmy Buffett, Dick Avedon, Bob Neuwirth, Jane Fonda, Carl Bernstein, Ahmet Ertegun, Jac Holzman, Boz Scaggs, Jimmy Webb, Truman Capote, Paul Simon, Bill Graham. There were Polaroids of Wenner’s guests admiring themselves in Polaroids and Polaroids of the Wenners arranging Polaroids across the dining room table. They scrawled in-jokes under their images: “Bump till you drop” under a blurred Annie Leibovitz; “50% of the stock” under Jane Wenner’s face.
Of all her subjects, Jane Wenner was the one that most obsessed Annie Leibovitz in that era. She snapped hundreds of images of her, daily, monthly, yearly. Jane, the sad-eyed lady in pigtails and kneesocks, reading magazines or tapping out a line of cocaine; Jane the waif, swallowed up in a rattan chair; Jane the chic dolly in striped French sailor shirts from Petit Bateau in Paris (her virtual uniform starting in the mid-1970s); Jane in a bikini, arms outstretched in homage to Jim Morrison, birdlike rib cage poking out; Jane, petulant and smoking, eyes half-lidded; Jane in rented bungalow in Barbados carving lines for Richard Pryor (who told Marshall Chess he had sex with her on the beach that night); Jane pursing her lips in the passenger’s seat of Annie’s Porsche as they zipped to Earl’s house; and finally, Jane emerging from the bath, nude and smiling shyly as she dries her hair; Jane, topless, blue jeans unzipped.
When Jane tired of the Rolling Stone madness, Leibovitz caught that too—Jane curled up in the shadow of depression, her “blue periods,” as her friend Peter Wolf called them, when she secluded herself in the house on California Street. When Hunter S. Thompson came knocking one too many times looking for cocaine at 3:00 a.m.—or to steal Jann Wenner’s stereo as compensation for some unknown debt—she’d scream and kick him out, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She wanted credit for the success of Rolling Stone, but leaving the house was difficult, as was work. When she agreed to collaborate on an oral history for “everyone who graduated from the Sixties” (The Sixties, Random House, 1977), Jane couldn’t muster the energy. “She had time on her hands, and it just festered,” said Laurel Gonsalves, a frequent companion on California Street. “What do you do all day if you don’t have something to do and you have this brain that’s quite smart?”
Jane and Annie found refuge in each other, spending countless hours sharing drugs or poring over art and photography books in search of ideas. Jane would help conceive Leibovitz’s pictures, then accompany her on photo shoots, acting as her civilizing hand. “The thing about Annie was, at that time, she was not a conventional beauty,” said Jane, “or not even handsome, like she is today. She was always awkward. She always wore glasses.”
When Leibovitz went on an assignment with Joe Eszterhas to shoot Paul Getty, the heir to the oil fortune whose kidnappers had cut his ear off and released him for a $3 million ransom, Jane commanded, “Honey, you’ve got to get a bra. You’ve got to get a bra now. This is, like, it.” (Joe Eszterhas said Getty demanded $500 for the story and $2,000 for a photograph and Wenner paid.) “Jane never treated Annie as an employee,” said Jim Messina, of Loggins and Messina, who used a Leibovitz photograph for their 1976 Best of Friends album cover. “She treated her like a partner.”
What was plain to everyone was that this was some kind of love affair, at least for Leibovitz. “There is no question whatsoever that Annie was madly in love with Jane,” Jann Wenner said. “And that went on for a long time.”
Annie followed Jane with Nikon in hand, transfixed, as partygoers swirled around. “It’s great to be in love,” mused Leibovitz on her obsession with Jane. “If you’re a photographer, it’s more of a fixation.” It was an article of faith among veteran Rolling Stone staffers that Annie and Jane were lovers. Leibovitz, who alluded to an affair in diaries in the late 1970s, was circumspect but hardly in denial: “You can have other people talk about it and it’s fine.” Jane said they weren’t “lovers” per se, but something more ambiguous. “We were young; there were drugs involved, you know, late nights, who knows?” she said. “I mean, it was like—the idea that we were lovers, it’s not—it doesn’t have the same connotation.”
In other words, things happened. Some staffers surmised a triangle involving Jann Wenner that went on for several years. “From the office angle, it was an obvious ménage à trois,” said art director Roger Black, “and it became impossible to get between Jann and Annie and we didn’t see too much of Jane, but we heard about her through Annie and we knew she had influence and maybe more common sense than Jann.” (Wenner said he slept with Leibovitz; Jane said she didn’t know about it: “Does a ménage mean all at once?”)
Jane Wenner was the muse of Rolling Stone’s vision of celebrity—the glorification of pubescent bodies and semi-anorexic glamour, the model of the kind for louche 1970s indulgence and narcissism, with its dewy sadness and velveteen interiority. “You can’t underestimate my sketching or my studying of Jane or Jann, how that feeds into taking pictures of people,” Leibovitz said. “I got to see Jane in all kinds of configurations. I thought she was beautiful. I really enjoyed taking her picture. And it gave us something to do.”
Her obsession had one other important virtue: It made Annie Leibovitz a vassal in the Wenners’ growing court, financially in debt to Jann Wenner and romantically in debt to his wife. Given her obsession with Jane, Leibovitz didn’t mind. “I found refuge in it, and they certainly didn’t mind it,” she said. “I became very, very close with them.”
Said Jane, “There was always my friendship and love of Annie, but there was always the magazine. If I could rein her in, I would rein her in. Not in some horrible manipulative way—yes, it was manipulative, but somebody had to do it. It wasn’t so much for the magazine, but for her. What the fuck are you doing? Why don’t you have the pictures?”
As Leibovitz evolved as a photographer, Wenner built Rolling Stone around her talent, though more by momentum than by design. In 1973, when Rolling Stone changed to a larger format with color, Wenner recruited an art director recommended by Tom Wolfe: Mike Salisbury, a hotshot designer and photographer from L.A. Wenner hired Salisbury to inject a glossier, more commercial sensibility into his magazine, but to do it, he had to edge Bob Kingsbury out. Wenner was tired of his 1960s vision of Rolling Stone. When Kingsbury confronted Wenner about why Salisbury was getting paid more than he, Wenner told Kingsbury the new guy from L.A. was worth more. Outraged, Kingsbury quit, but his wife, Linda, Jane’s sister, forced Kingsbury to apologize and asked Wenner to give him another job. Under pressure from the Schindelheim family, Wenner shuffled Kingsbury off to “special projects,” but the wound was destined not to heal.
Salisbury, a dyed-in-the-wool Angeleno, found San Francisco provincial and boring, and he had a lot to learn about the oddly conservative and self-serious Rolling Stone folk. To him, it looked as if Wenner, in his sports jacket and jeans, were running a prep school newspaper. When he printed an illustration of Jerry Garcia as a corpulent cherub, by Robert Grossman, the editors were offended. “Boy,” he said, “these people are super serious. The whole place took him seriously. I think there’s two people in there that had a sense of humor.”
From the start, Wenner asked Salisbury to help focus Annie Leibovitz, whose erratic working methods produced chronic headaches. Under Salisbury, Rolling Stone began pulling style elements from European magazines like Nova, a women’s magazine from Britain, and Twen, a highly visual German publication, both of which poured sexuality and sophisticated culture writing into arid, formal spaces and ran photography to the page edge. This enraged the writers whose copy was being crowded out by pictures. But Wenner empowered Salisbury, who empowered Annie Leibovitz. It would take several months for her to make the cover of Rolling Stone again as Salisbury employed illustrators for cover images in the latter half of 1973, including a profile of Daniel Ellsberg as a Roman bust and a cowgirl riding a giant metallic dildo for the Steely Dan cover. Leibovitz’s first full-color cover photograph arrived in April 1974, a portrait of Marvin Gaye in a knit cap and hiking boots sitting on top of Topanga Canyon at sunset. Leibovitz considered the image a failure—too dark, colors bleeding together—but it was also an epiphany in how she viewed color photos. The way color smeared on newsprint created a posterized effect—imagine 3-D without the glasses—which Leibovitz would use to reinvent herself as more than just a vérité photojournalist. It would mean using more studio techniques, strobe lighting and backdrops, and more stylized close-ups of faces to fill the cover of Rolling Stone. It would mean becoming a celebrity image maker for the new era.
IN THE SPRING OF 1973, Ahmet Ertegun, a forty-nine-year-old record business aristocrat with the half-lidded ease of a beat poet, met the twenty-seven-year-old Jann Wenner for lunch at a café on Broadway in San Francisco. He brought a young woman who he told Wenner was Geraldine Chaplin, the French-speaking daughter of Charlie Chaplin. For half an hour, a starstruck Wenner tried engaging her in broken French until Ertegun finally gave up the ruse with a laugh: She was just his assistant. Delighted by the prank, Ertegun would dine out on the story for the rest of his life. “He probably told that story in my presence twenty or thirty times,” said Wenner. “He loved to laugh at his own jokes. You have to laugh along with them.”
Son of a Turkish diplomat, Ertegun had expended his wellborn oblige collecting jazz LPs and frequenting blues clubs in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s. With money from his family, and the family dentist, Ertegun founded Atlantic Records in 1947, striking gold with Ray Charles in 1952. In horn-rims and goatee, Ertegun became the prince of hip in the music business, navigating the Mob-connected underworld as he brought forth Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding (who called him “Omelet”). He once flew in hookers for a record convention in Miami in which he and other record men, including Jerry Wexler, stood around a hotel bed watching a man have sex with a prostitute and placing bets on how long he would last (nineteen-year-old Marshall Chess was also present). “Somebody like Ahmet, in a three-piece suit, had the eloquence and the intelligence to kind of walk into some funky Harlem club, or walk into some hippie pad where Buffalo Springfield played, and say, ‘Hey, baby,’ and smoke a joint with him. Two weeks later, he signed them,” said Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band, whom Ertegun signed to Atlantic on the advice of Jon Landau.
Ertegun later became, for Wenner, a walking stylebook of personal sophistication. But early on, Jann Wenner underrated his significance. In the “Pinck on Wenner” tape, Danny Fields recounts Wenner’s early encounter with Ertegun at a party the Atlantic chief threw on the Upper East Side. “All [Wenner] could do was talk about their second-rate paintings and the music was too loud, they were playing Stephen Stills’s album too loud, people were tacky social climbers, and he and Paul [Morrissey] and Andy [Warhol] were the only groovy people there.”
But their interests finally came together in Bette Midler, whom Ertegun invited Wenner to see at the Boarding House in 1973. The campy and outrageous belter sauntered down to Ertegun’s table and serenaded him with “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” while Wenner watched in awe. Ertegun had Wenner’s number: Midler started off performing in the Continental Baths, a gay trysting spot in the basement of the Ansonia hotel in New York that promised “the glory of ancient Rome” (and was later renamed Plato’s Retreat). Her act as “the Divine Miss M” dovetailed with the faux androgyny of David Bowie and the New York Dolls—“mascara rock, sex and theater to the extremes, boring heterosexuality to the sidelines,” as Rolling Stone described 1972. On this, Wenner was eager to tap the mood. For the Bette Midler story of February 1973—the first full-color image on the cover of Rolling Stone, illustration by Philip Hays—Wenner ran an attending story called “So You’re Planning to Spend a Night at the Tubs?,” written by an openly gay writer named Perry Deane Young. Young initially showed up on Third Street to propose an ambitious story in which he would travel to Vietnam to seek out missing friends (Wenner assigned it, but Joe Eszterhas killed it). But Perry also showed Wenner a story he’d written on the Continental Baths, which mentioned that Prince Egon von Furstenberg—a scion of the fabulously wealthy Agnelli family that owned the carmaker Fiat and the husband of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg—cruised for sex there. “Jann was more than a little interested in the piece and took it,” said Young.
Later that afternoon, Wenner met Young down the block at the Ritch Street Health Club, and they had a liaison. “For all these years, gay men have had these secret places to themselves in various capitals of the world,” wrote Perry in Rolling Stone. “Dimly lit, unmarked doors opened onto a whole lifestyle that ‘dared not speak its name,’ that maybe never even wanted to talk because acceptance might have unmasked the mystery, the fun of it all.”
While Perry was in town, Rolling Stone insiders filled him in on the Wenner lifestyle. “It was explained to me at the time that he and his wife had an arrangement,” said Perry. “Having gone through the bullshit involved with being openly gay at that time, I can fully understand why anybody—especially anybody involved in business—would choose to be ‘hidden.’ ”
By now, the Wenners were spending so much time in New York they started subletting a duplex on East Sixty-Sixth Street from Piedy Gimbel, a “political groupie” whom Wenner met through her then boyfriend, Dick Goodwin, a former Kennedy speechwriter. Wenner liked the location’s rumored secret history: Gimbel supposedly slept with both John and Bobby Kennedy there in the 1960s (she denied it). From his new perch on the Upper East Side, Wenner could explore the convergence of uptown and downtown. Around this time, he premiered a column called New York Confidential, by writer Ed McCormack, who documented the “usual collection of sexes and sub-sexes” at Max’s Kansas City, like Steve Paul, the gay club owner who managed the Winter brothers, Johnny and Edgar, and whom McCormack once described as navigating the space between “Woodstock Nation and Gramercy Park East.”
In this new space, a minor press baron from San Francisco could casually float into high society with the drug dealers and the rough trade. “Jann, in a sense, was very lucky,” said Dotson Rader. “It was in the ’70s when the social categories collapsed. In the ’70s, you’d go to a party at Leonard Bernstein’s at the Dakota and you would see socialites, some of the Kennedys; you’d see the crème de la crème of New York society. And then you’d see musicians, artists, and then you’d see drug dealers and everybody, perfectly well mannered, but the social mix would’ve been unthinkable twenty years before. And suddenly, I think because the rich were frightened and were thinking, ‘We better let the barbarians in before they tear the house down,’ the walls came down. Forced tolerance is what it was. It also made it possible for Jann to move as quickly as he did.”
Diane von Furstenberg, who designed her signature wrap dress in 1973, was introduced to Wenner by Craig Braun. “First time I saw him, he was a little fat guy with blue eyes, not particularly attractive,” said Furstenberg. “He became attractive over the years. He was kind of judgmental. Provocative in his first opinion. So that he would get a reaction.”
In 1973, New York magazine was preparing a story on the Furstenbergs, whose European marriage and mores were titillating Manhattan society, so Wenner assigned Rader to draw up a competing story for Rolling Stone. The resulting piece was a rare window into the secret world of polyamory in 1970s New York. “The only thing that matters in life is sex,” declared Prince Egon, who when asked if he was a bisexual laughed and said, “Bisexual? That is funny! Hahaha. You talk like that is rare. Do you know any man our age, any man under thirty, do you know one who has not slept with a boy? No, you know none. There are none.”
The Furstenbergs were catty and outrageous, baring their jeweled claws for the bourgeoisie. Diane von Furstenberg performed a savage impersonation of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her “rolling Jackie-walk.”
“Ohhh, don’t you think…it’s just faaaabulous!” Hahaha.
She laughed hoarsely, “I mean, really, the woman is stupid!” She slapped her hand against her thigh. “Did you see the nudes of Jackie? Hahaha. I have them here somewhere. The Italian editor who brought them, she thought she was so cunning, that American magazines would pay great prices to see Jackie naked…the pictures were so ugly. How can any woman look beautiful bending over naked to pick up a beach towel?”
Furstenberg illustrated, bending over and spreading her legs. “Haha. No, no, impossible! It all just hangs and spreads like that. It is so unattractive. Jackie is such a skinny woman.”
Rader’s story concludes with Egon, in skintight pants and wilting with ennui, being informed of a secret necrophilia bar where a cadaver hangs from the ceiling and drinks are $10: “God. Boring, yes? Life is so long.”
Joe Eszterhas and Paul Scanlon rejected Rader’s story, saying it was too far afield for Rolling Stone (“Unless you gave him stock options for it, let’s kill it,” said Eszterhas). Furstenberg wouldn’t appear in the magazine until 1977, but the story was a delicious peek into a world of glamour and wealth that Wenner envied and adored and, within three years, would go marching like a glittering circus into Steve Rubell’s Studio 54.
This was the era of the “New York marriage,” in which gay men married for both friendship and social cover, including Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, and Earl and Camilla McGrath. Egon called Diane his “best friend,” which was not unlike Jann’s feelings toward Jane. Theirs was a world where sex was as inconsequential as a handshake. “We thought we invented sexuality,” said Furstenberg. “We were the generation between the pill and AIDS. It was just a form of expression.”
The Wenners’ marriage was nowhere near as open as that of Diane and Egon, but there was nonetheless a utility to their partnership. And nothing captured that utility better than their respective relationships to Simon and Garfunkel.
While Art Garfunkel was living in San Francisco in 1971 to record his first solo album, Angel Clare, he became Jann Wenner’s friend and tennis partner. “One day we’re in the locker room,” Garfunkel said. “I’m spouting off about my quasi-political notions, my philosophy—I don’t know Jann that well, he’s never really shown his colors—and he says to me, ‘Artie, you don’t really believe that stuff, do you?’
“He pulled the rug out from under me,” he said. “Just because I am selling a million records and sitting so pretty, Jann’s not buying my philosophy easily.”
This was also a flirtation. The nature of their friendship was “sexual understanding,” said Garfunkel: a mutual interest in the open sexuality of the period. Wenner, he said, saw rock and roll through the prism of his homosexual libido. “My mind goes to Jackson Browne,” said Garfunkel. “That was a cute rocker. Jackson Browne was a quintessential star for Jann Wenner to adore, praise, and push forward.”
And so was Art Garfunkel, who appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in October 1973. Wenner gave Ben Fong-Torres a list of questions to ask, inviting Garfunkel to air grievances with Paul Simon. Meanwhile, Wenner protected Garfunkel: After Fong-Torres interviewed him, Wenner let Garfunkel edit the manuscript and preview the photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz. Garfunkel thanked Wenner for “your deferral to my cover choice” and demanded the tapes and transcripts be destroyed. Fong-Torres was furious. He told Wenner he wished he’d removed his byline before publication. (In the next issue, Stephen Holden reviewed Garfunkel’s album as an “opulent, if somewhat overcalculated, success.”)
Conversely, Wenner’s bias against Paul Simon was now conspicuous enough that Clive Davis, his champion at Columbia Records, was aggrieved that Wenner had failed to recognize his greatness, which he felt rivaled Bob Dylan’s. “I always felt that Rolling Stone underestimated Paul Simon,” said Davis. “There was not this serious enough evaluation of Paul Simon, so that was an issue at the time.” (Told of Wenner’s prehistory with Paul Simon, Davis grew heated: “You’ve now explained something that mystified me, because they were fucking putting him down.”)
Jon Landau, a fan of Paul Simon’s, was hot to interview him for Rolling Stone about his new self-titled solo record featuring “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” But Simon was wary of Wenner and wanted assurances that he wouldn’t use the interview in a book, as he had with John Lennon, without Paul Simon’s express permission. Simon brought in his lawyer, an agreement was drawn up, and Simon gave Landau a thirteen-hour interview in his apartment on the Upper East Side. A year later, Wenner published Paul Simon’s interview in The “Rolling Stone” Interviews, Vol. 2. Simon was livid and confronted Wenner at a party in New York, getting nose to nose with him in a doorway as Garfunkel looked on. “Artie, this guy is a no-goodnik,” spat Simon. “Don’t fall for him. He’s taken my interviews and he is a wise ass. He never asked my permission!”
“And Jann would smile,” recalled Garfunkel, “with that same likable smile as if, ‘What can I say? My pants are down.’ This is the first introduction to Jann as a mover and a groover. Got to make hay while the sun shines.”
Two years later, however, Simon found something he did like about Rolling Stone: Jane Wenner. Their relationship blossomed during Jane’s stays at the Gimbel duplex on East Sixty-Sixth Street. Suddenly Simon liked Rolling Stone again: In 1976, Rolling Stone published an engrossing cover story on Simon by Paul Cowan, titled “The Odysseus of Urban Melancholy,” which featured photos of a bearded Simon riding in a limousine with “friends” on either side of him—one of whom is Jane Wenner, veiling her face. Annie Leibovitz took the pictures. In another published image, Jane is at the Manhattan hot spot Elaine’s, sitting next to Simon at a table that also featured Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase, and other cast members of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Jane gives a knowing smile. Something like a romance had blossomed between Simon and Jane Wenner. “Paul fell in love with her and actually asked her to leave me and go marry him,” said Wenner. “Paul and I have always had a very prickly relationship. He’s very, very full of himself, but he’s a certifiable genius.”
At the time, Simon was separating from wife Peggy Harper, whom he famously married after her divorce from his former manager Mort Lewis. Jane Wenner said she never slept with Simon and claimed surprise at his romantic overtures. “I thought we were buying furniture,” said Jane. “I knew he had a crush on me. But I don’t know. I guess a lot of people have crushes on me.”
Said Leibovitz, “She knew exactly what she was doing. That was part of what she did. Jane wasn’t going anywhere. Ever.”
Garfunkel on Simon: “Nasty business. A married woman!”
Wenner on Simon: “Paul just looks at everything and judges it before he does one thing: What’s in this for me? How does this affect Paul Simon? And he analyzes it very carefully. Is it good for Paul Simon? And he’s extremely selfish that way.”
Jane allowed Jann Wenner to have his cake and eat it, too. If a Max Palevsky or a Paul Simon tried squiring her away, Jane remained loyal to Jann Wenner, protecting his interests, which were hers as well. Meanwhile, she gave him implicit permission to enjoy extracurricular sex, as long as he kept it well hidden. She didn’t want to hear about it, which Wenner considered permission. When she did get wind of it, Jane forgave him. “She didn’t make me feel guilty; she let me off the hook every single time,” said Wenner. “It hurt her, but she let me off the hook and it didn’t change the relationship. And her explicit thing was ‘Don’t hurt me. I don’t want to hear about this from other people; I don’t want to be humiliated,’ and she kind of winked and nodded and gave permission to it.”
There was only one rule between them: Don’t fall in love. “I was able to go have sex, the kind I liked, but there was no emotional content,” said Wenner. “I wasn’t risking betraying my love of Jane or our relationship. And this sexual thing—I could isolate that from the emotional content and not be betraying her fundamentally.”
Jane Wenner knew as well as Jann that his homosexuality, had it been known, would curtail their social mobility. The gay vamping of Rolling Stone cover boys like Bowie and Jagger was all well and good, but it was “pretend libertine,” observed Bette Midler, who traveled the fault line between the gay and the straight worlds in the 1970s. “Even though they pretended that all this was okay, those barriers were pretty high.”
When an openly gay rock singer named Jobriath emerged in 1973, the headline in Rolling Stone was “Gay Rock Breaks All the Rules”—because it was the rule. “Today sexuality exudes from every pore in the body, instead of just the groin as it was in the Sixties,” Jobriath told Rolling Stone, which praised his record. But after Jac Holzman of Elektra spent $500,000 to sign him, and his manager had a $22,000 nude statue of the singer made as a promotional stunt, Jobriath’s career went nowhere. He died of AIDS in 1983.
With Jane’s protection, Wenner said he never experienced his own homosexuality as a “conflict.” “I could, in my own mind, be gay on the side and have relationships with guys without thinking it was of any consequence to my heterosexual identity,” he said. “It didn’t threaten my identity. I was quietly doing what I sometimes felt compelled to do without it interfering and it became a part of it and I was happy to hold on to that forever.”
PAGE 61: Johnny Winter, the albino blues guitarist, naked on a bed with his tongue in the mouth of a female lover, her forested crotch aimed squarely for the camera.
The uncredited photograph was published by Rolling Stone alongside a review of Winter’s 1974 album Saints and Sinners. “Winter’s manic guitar is there in all its glory,” ran the caption, quoting Jon Landau, who called the album “a fine rocker.”
Winter famously scored a $600,000 record contract from Columbia in 1969 because of a rave write-up in Rolling Stone. But he was humiliated by this photograph, which, besides being a strange image to accompany a record review, upset his girlfriend. The issue got pulled from grocery stores. Johnny Winter knew the photographer and “beat the shit out of him,” according to Susan Warford-Winter, the girlfriend in question, who later became his wife.
Jann Wenner had been threatened by unhappy rock stars before, most famously Buddy Miles, who showed up at the offices in 1973 after Rolling Stone said his album was boring and got into a physical altercation with Paul Scanlon while Wenner hightailed it. But now Wenner faced Winter’s manager, Steve Paul, whom Rolling Stone had described as a “well-fed vampire.” He had a more diabolical idea for revenge: According to writer Paul Gambaccini, a friend of Steve Paul’s, Winter’s manager plotted to release a copy of the “Pinck on Wenner” tape and out Wenner as a homosexual. (Paul was gay and a friend of both Danny Fields and Tony Pinck.)
As fortune would have it, Wenner had just hired a brand-new managing editor from Newsday in New York: an albino named John Walsh. Walsh said he was unaware of the impending threat from Steve Paul, but he heard about Winter’s fury and wrote an elaborate apology to both the guitarist and his girlfriend. “Being an albino myself,” he wrote, “I’ve followed your career and think your latest album is your finest.”
He signed off with “All white power.”
The apology worked, and the Tony Pinck revelations remained underground.
In 1973, Wenner hired Walsh to streamline and professionalize Rolling Stone. Wenner was interested in the “name” writers Walsh could bring in, like David Halberstam. But the hire became an instant joke around the office: Jann Wenner had hired a legally blind albino to be managing editor.
Walsh moved west in October 1973 and lasted less than a year at Rolling Stone, but he built a vital institution inside Wenner’s newspaper: a fact-checking department. When he arrived in the fall of 1973, Walsh noticed Rolling Stone didn’t have a copy or research department, but it did have a lot of women with postgraduate degrees working in menial jobs. A women’s lib movement had cropped up in the ranks of Rolling Stone, and the women—Marianne Partridge, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier, Sarah Lazin, Cindy Ehrlich—formed a club to share their grievances. The leader was Partridge, whom Walsh hired as a copy chief after she was rejected for a job at PBS, told by her interviewer she was too frumpy for TV. Wenner said he kept tabs on their meetings through a spy in their ranks. But Walsh, a cultural outsider from a pro shop back east, saw how they served as de facto editors while Wenner’s macho men, Paul Scanlon and Joe Eszterhas, failed to pull off their journalistic heroics on deadline and published embarrassing errors (when they weren’t all getting drunk at Jerry’s Inn down the block).
Rolling Stone was a notoriously sexist newspaper. Critic Paul Nelson famously snubbed Janis Joplin when he cast her as the “Judy Garland of Rock” and another critic called her an “imperious whore,” a slight Joplin never forgave. Jon Landau also downgraded her. When John Burks tried calling her for details on her new band in 1970, she said, “I don’t like the way your paper treated me and I don’t see why I should do you any favors,” and then hung up. “They were just always negative, always negative, always negative,” Joplin said. “I really cried behind that, man…they shot me down, those shits.”
Ellen Willis, a pioneering feminist and the first rock critic at The New Yorker, wrote to Ralph Gleason in 1970 saying she refused to write for Rolling Stone because it was “viciously anti-woman.” “RS habitually refers to women as chicks and treats us as chicks, i.e. interchangeable cute fucking machines,” she wrote, adding for good measure that Jann Wenner’s bias against revolutionary politics fed the oppression of females: “To me, when a bunch of snotty upper-middle class white males start telling me that politics isn’t where it’s at, that is simply an attempt to defend their privileges. What they want is more bread and circuses; I like to have fun too, but what I really want is an end of my oppression.”
Within two years, Partridge would become Wenner’s most trusted editor and saw to it that Ellen Willis was published in Rolling Stone—starting with a story in August 1975 called “The Trial of Arline Hunt,” about a rape victim who could not get justice. Willis also wrote a powerful feminist essay on Janis Joplin, proclaiming her second only to Bob Dylan in importance, in part for taking “advantage of changes in our notions of attractiveness; she herself changed them.”
These women often had a different view of Wenner from his men. To Partridge, the pugnacious editor could seem vulnerable and shy—the little fanboy whose Mummy didn’t love him. When the Wenners threw a New Year’s Eve party in 1974, Wenner was dancing with Partridge to “Brown Sugar” when he stopped, grabbed her excitedly, and declared, “Oh my God! It’s 1975 and I don’t know what’s going to be happening!”
But rock and roll was about men (“male supremacist,” to quote Ellen Willis), and Wenner was more interested in men by default. When he published a special “men’s issue” in 1975, with Muhammad Ali on the cover, a female staffer had to laugh: “Every issue of every magazine since magazines were invented has been a men’s issue. And now you’re trying to do one on purpose”—a line Michael Rogers published in his introduction. The men’s issue also featured an essay on the pioneering gay magazine The Advocate, written under the pseudonym John Reid, who was Andrew Tobias, author of the gay memoir The Best Little Boy in the World; and a profile of a Playgirl photographer by Ed McCormack that began, “Eddie Bloom may be small and slightly built but he knows he has a very respectable schlong on him. Certified!”
Partridge said Wenner wasn’t sexist per se. She liked to recall the moment she nervously pitched Ellen Willis’s story on rape in an editorial meeting on Third Street. Joe Eszterhas snickered and said, “Why don’t you just lean back and enjoy it and it wouldn’t be a rape?” Wenner didn’t laugh. He took the story seriously and assigned it, asking to meet Willis next time she was in town. He gave her a prominent cover line in August 1975. “I fell in love with Jann at that moment,” Partridge later said.
“All he really cared about was who was gonna give him what he wanted,” observed Harriet Fier, who started as a switchboard operator and rose to top editor in 1978. “Who was gonna get him where he wanted to go? And that he didn’t actually see gender. It didn’t matter.”
But the empowerment was going to be a problem for some of Wenner’s men, particularly Eszterhas, who, besides gaining a reputation for making up facts and plagiarizing from other writers, proclaimed his copy off-limits to women. (He left for Hollywood soon after.) And then there was the most macho and important of Wenner’s fact-challenged man club, Hunter S. Thompson. “There are those who see Hunter’s destructive tendencies as cute and then there are those who have to clean up,” Sarah Lazin wrote in a memo to Wenner after finding a telephone smashed to bits, papers scattered, and several LPs missing. “If you could head him off toward some other pass, we’d appreciate it.”
As the feminist revolution arrived at Rolling Stone, Hunter Thompson was already in decline. When Thompson came to San Francisco in the early 1970s, Wenner and his staff prepared for his arrival as if for a sitting president, work flow coming to a halt. “When you were with Hunter,” said Wenner, “you felt like you were going to have the most fun you were ever going to have.”
When Campaign Trail ’72 was published the following year, Wenner publicized it as a seminal book of American political writing. To finish on deadline, Alan Rinzler arranged for Thompson to hole up at the Seal Rock Inn, a motel near Golden Gate Park (which Thompson called the “Sealed Right In”), and coaxed him along with speed, acid, and Wild Turkey so Thompson could stitch his columns together into a coherent narrative. The effort almost broke Thompson. Feeling Wenner was exploiting his success while nickel-and-diming him on expenses, he didn’t write anything interesting for Rolling Stone until late the next summer. Wenner realized that Thompson was in extremis. “I don’t know why we could have thought that we could go ahead, without pause, with another year of the same,” he wrote to him.
Thompson came out of his “decompression chamber” in September 1973 after writing a minor column on “the meaning of McGovern” that asked, “Where do we go from here?” Wenner declared the National Affairs Suite in Washington “re-opened and prepared for ‘total coverage.’ ” But Thompson wasn’t prepared and had no idea where he was going from there. In “Fear and Loathing at the Watergate,” he gargled about the burglary at the Watergate but noted that it was “probably the most thoroughly and most professionally covered story in the history of American journalism…[T]here is not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere.”
Wenner tried fanning his champion back to life, agreeing to Thompson’s next big idea: a symposium of Democratic Party pooh-bahs in which Rolling Stone would unite the factions and forge a winning platform for the White House in 1976. Wenner and Thompson invited a bunch of young advisers—from the liberal and centrist wings of the party—to remote Elko, Nevada, where they holed up in the Stockmen’s Motor Hotel. The plan was to review McGovern’s loss in 1972 and then hash out a winning policy for 1976. Among the participants were Sandy Berger, Pat Caddell, and Adam Walinsky (who gave Thompson the Elko idea). Thompson handed out heavy-duty tire gauges used by long-haul truckers as a symbol of their street-fighting spirit, and Wenner tape-recorded the proceedings. They planned on turning the results into a manifesto, which Wenner would describe as an “attempt to fundamentally—and, if necessary, radically—change the whole organization of the government, the economic structures and the social circumstance, itself.” Wenner gave Thompson a contract to write another election book for Straight Arrow Books, and they called the secret plan “C-76.”
But the plan quickly dissolved as both men became distracted by diverging interests. In 1974, Thompson began a months-long college lecture tour, giving impromptu monologues for $20,000 a pop about his Fear and Loathing career, shadowed by groupies, mainly young men, who wanted to hear Thompson rip Richard Nixon and witness Doctor Hunter S. Thompson drink Wild Turkey by the bottle. He was happy to oblige. Soon his visits to Rolling Stone became a grand anticlimax. He would idle in Wenner’s office or at the house on California Street, arguing about money and assignments while driven to distraction by Wenner’s cocaine.
Thompson first tried cocaine when David Felton assigned him to review Sigmund Freud’s Cocaine Papers in 1973. He initially dismissed the drug as expensive speed, but Felton mailed some to Woody Creek, and Thompson tried it and was quickly convinced. Cocaine became part of his writing life, which soon became a non-writing life. “From then on, he wouldn’t do a story unless you included cocaine with the payment,” said Felton. “And he dries up and couldn’t write. I was there when he had huge fits of screaming because he couldn’t write the next sentence. After he got into coke, every editor at some point broke into tears. He’d get maybe one paragraph an hour. And you had to write transitions, all this stuff. And then he would crash, and you had to edit everything, and you got no sleep for a week. It was very difficult for him. It turns your brain into cement.”
The best you could hope for from Hunter Thompson was an amusing personal anecdote. Felton recalled Thompson pouring a gram on a mirror and cutting it into a swastika.
Thompson’s frustration with his own writing morphed into a resentment of Jann Wenner’s success. In the spring of 1974, Wenner began working as a political strategist to Bill Roth, a family friend from Marin County now running against Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination for governor of California. Kent Brownridge, an advance man with the campaign who later joined Rolling Stone, recalled that Wenner “wanted to attack the oil companies, and he wanted to seize all the coastal property from the property owners and turn it into a bar.” In a rambling letter to Thompson offering him a job as a correspondent in a new Washington bureau, Wenner bragged that Roth gave him a $700,000 media budget and that Roth’s staff was now calling their fax machine a “Mojo wire.”
The letter seemed to enrage Thompson, who returned it with snide comments scrawled all over it. Increasingly, Thompson saw loopholes and betrayals in Wenner’s offers. He kept a running tally of his grievances, outraged that Wenner wanted repayment for a shot from Sandor Burstein (a “placebo,” Thompson sneered) and accusing Wenner of talking smack behind his back. “Tell Jann to stop telling people that I’m going to die very soon,” he wrote to Alan Rinzler; the remark “tends to bother Sandy,” his wife. To placate him, Wenner tried offering Thompson stock options in Straight Arrow: five hundred shares at $12.50 a piece, the only caveat being that Wenner could buy them back at “market value” if Thompson was terminated. “This is a worthy offer to the assistant director of the mail room,” Thompson spat, ending his reply with “fuck it.”
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone was doing fine without Hunter Thompson. In January 1974, the newspaper scored an interview with the children of E. Howard Hunt, who was the White House “plumber” jailed, along with G. Gordon Liddy, for Watergate. When reporter Julia Cameron (future wife of director Martin Scorsese) announced she was from Rolling Stone, the long-haired son declared, “Far out!” The Hunt kids were the godchildren of William F. Buckley, a family friend who, they told Rolling Stone, fed their imprisoned father “distorted information” about their welfare. Mainly about their drug and sex habits. Buckley invited Wenner to lunch at the Four Seasons in New York to try persuading him to kill the story. He appealed to his sense of honor but also his vanity. He booked him on his public affairs TV show, Firing Line. But Wenner said he pressed Buckley on the fallout of Nixon’s resignation: “I asked him, ‘Do you believe in the Constitution as a governing document?’ He said, ‘I believe in America.’ That’s pretty fascist. Crypto-fascist. ‘No, I don’t believe in the rule of law; I believe in the supremacy of America.’ That was an insight for me.”
Wenner sent Buckley an advance copy of Rolling Stone, with “Life Without Father” inside, which prompted an outraged Buckley to cancel Wenner’s TV appearance and rip him for publishing “the sickly and internecine musings of two pathetic young people who are your pigeons, my godchildren, and the poignant victims of a personal and public tragedy. Your failure to situate their story in the relevant contexts makes you, in my judgment, a fraud as a journalist and, as a human being, a failure.”
This was, of course, a great victory for Wenner. Certainly it impressed his newest quarry, former Kennedy administration speechwriter Dick Goodwin. Goodwin was a craggy Beltway operator with bushy eyebrows and a cigar perpetually puffing in his mouth, an old Democratic hand dining out on his career in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He had broken up with Piedy Gimbel (who went on to marry the director Sidney Lumet) and was now dating Doris Kearns, ghostwriter of Lyndon Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point. Warren Hinckle once called Goodwin “the terrible-tempered Lord Fauntleroy of the Camelot administration.” Jann Wenner started writing to him in 1972, proposing a column in Rolling Stone. He invited him to Elko and hired Goodwin because he thought he wrote some anti-Vietnam essays in the Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker. They were written by Jonathan Schell. Goodwin didn’t disabuse him, and Wenner, in a rush of excitement, told Goodwin he was prepared to spend $900,000 to make his mark in Washington. Politics, Wenner proclaimed, is the rock and roll of the 1970s.
Goodwin grinned as Wenner gave him a six-month contract, a regular column called Politics, an expense account, a housing allowance in D.C., a personal loan of $20,000, use of his white Mercedes while he was in San Francisco, and tickets to see Bob Dylan. In late 1973, Wenner published Goodwin’s stentorian essay “The Obligation of the Congress to Impeach the President,” which was excerpted in The Washington Post, injecting Rolling Stone directly into the chatter. The day Rolling Stone opened its new Washington office at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, Goodwin took Wenner on a grand tour of the monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial, where he put his arm around Wenner’s shoulder, squinted up at Lincoln, and declared the Gettysburg Address the greatest piece of American political writing ever written. Wenner felt himself standing on the pinnacle of history. “I was just swimming,” said Wenner. “I was starstruck.”
And then Goodwin gave Wenner the ultimate thrill: an introduction to Jackie Kennedy Onassis in the spring of 1974, in New York. Jackie Kennedy considered Wenner an ideal diplomat to bridge the generation gap between herself and John John and Caroline (the teenage children whose mid-1960s nanny inadvertently introduced Wenner to his first gay love). Onassis invited Wenner to stay at Ethel Kennedy’s place in Hickory Hill, where the Kennedy children came bursting into his room to gawk at the editor of Rolling Stone. A dream! This put Dick Goodwin in good stead. As Nixon faced a televised drip of questions over Watergate, Wenner started cooking up a biweekly magazine for Goodwin called Politics, a reported tip sheet and opinion journal to rival The New Republic. Wenner drew up a proposal and assignment memos and let Goodwin hire his own deputy—Joe Klein, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter for The Real Paper in Boston. When Klein emerged from a taxi on July 2, 1974, he found himself at the gates of Ethel Kennedy’s mansion, ushered in by a maid who announced his arrival at the foot of the pool. Goodwin was floating on an inflatable raft, smoking a Cuban cigar. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Tax reform,’ ” said Klein. “And I said, ‘Tax reform?’ He said, ‘If you really want to learn this town, you have to learn about how Congress works. They’re marking up a tax reform package now, and I want you to watch them do it.’
“And I go, ‘But the sucker is getting impeached!’ ”
Then Hunter Thompson showed up with a bagful of drugs and shared them with Klein and David Kennedy, son of the late Robert. Thompson was avoiding his latest deadline by dreaming up pranks, like delivering a truckload of rats to the White House lawn. The jukebox at Ethel’s was filled with 45s by her boyfriend, crooner Andy Williams, and Thompson replaced them with Otis Redding records. The next week, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Teddy Kennedy both called Ethel’s house to find out what the hell was going on down at Hickory Hill, thus ending Rolling Stone’s access to the pool.
That summer, Goodwin invited Wenner and Thompson to his house in Maine for a weekend with Doris Kearns and Norman Mailer. Thompson gave Wenner acid, and they drove all night from Massachusetts, making a tape recording of themselves screaming like monkeys. They arrived at dawn while everyone was asleep and put the tape recorder in the kitchen, volume all the way up, and ran.
It was a classic Thompson prank, but he was in a full-blown crisis, faced with a choice between his fame and his writing. Joe Klein advised him to write a novel, but Thompson gestured to the drugs and said, “Well, if I did that, I’d have to give those up.” When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Wenner ordered John Walsh to get a column out of Thompson, come hell or high water. But Walsh couldn’t do it. Instead, Wenner ran a photo spread by Annie Leibovitz, including her classic portrait of Dan Rather between stand-ups on CBS, and filled the cover with Richard Nixon’s jowled face, which David Felton stamped, in a moment of inspiration, “The Quitter.” (Soon after, Wenner fired Walsh.)
Things weren’t going any better with Dick Goodwin, who was spending Wenner’s money in rapid fashion, holding lavish dinner parties and demanding he be paid in cash to avoid taxes. Marianne Partridge, who edited Goodwin’s columns, called them “Grappling with the Obvious.” And Goodwin was laughing at all he was getting away with, encouraging Joe Klein to spend as much as possible and charge it to “the benevolent Mr. Stone.” The same month Nixon resigned, Goodwin threw a dinner party for foreign-policy wonks, including future titan of American diplomacy Richard Holbrooke. Wenner showed up. While the experts jawed on the finer points of import-export, he sat on a stereo console and flipped through a copy of Foreign Policy magazine (edited by Holbrooke) and sized up his cigar-gnawing investment. The next day, Wenner called Klein to his new office at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue and asked his thoughts on the dinner. The best idea to come out of the party, conceded Klein, concerned the production of shoes by overseas companies. Wenner agreed, and fired Klein. “I’d love to have you write for the magazine, but I got to send Goodwin a message,” Wenner told him. “He’s out of control. You’re the message.” (He hired him back on a contract basis a few months later.)
Jann Wenner refused to pay Goodwin’s catering bill, and Goodwin offered to represent Ridgewells Catering in a lawsuit against Jann Wenner. The fight blew over—Goodwin had an ironclad contract for six columns and was promising to recruit big writers like Seymour Hersh—but Wenner canceled Politics magazine and demanded Goodwin give back the company tape recorder, which Goodwin refused to do, claiming it was broken. Later, Wenner threatened to sue Goodwin for repayment of the $20,000 loan.
Wenner would say Hunter Thompson’s postscript on Watergate—“The Scum Also Rises,” from 1974—was one of the last decent things he wrote before his writing career died. Thompson’s muse had climbed inside a helicopter and flown off the White House lawn. “Hunter always had to have an apocalypse going on, a demon, to energize him,” said Wenner. “Somebody had to be the foil; somebody had to be the demon. And Nixon was his most constant lodestar demon.” (Tom Wolfe told Wenner that covering politics ruined Thompson’s talent.)
After Nixon, the relationship between Wenner and Thompson became a widening gyre of disappointment. In the fall of 1974, Wenner sent Thompson to Zaire to cover the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. But while Ali battered Foreman in the ring, Thompson dumped a bag of pot in the hotel swimming pool and floated around in it, missing the fight entirely. The bill came to thousands of dollars, and no story was produced.
A 1974 reader survey showed Thompson as the most popular writer Wenner published (Ben Fong-Torres second, Dick Goodwin last), and Thompson kept close tabs on Rolling Stone’s circulation numbers, mailing Wenner a memo citing Rolling Stone’s circulation of 2.9 million readers, more than Esquire’s. Thompson felt he helped make this happen, and he was right. The readers knew it, too, and demanded more. So Wenner kept trying, offering the assignment they’d been talking about since 1970: Vietnam. The United States was exiting Saigon in April 1975, the official end of the long and bloody war that defined the generation, and Thompson was gung ho. Wenner went to Woody Creek to conspire with Thompson, who would cross the border into Vietnam and directly into the apex of the war’s denouement. But in the days leading up to his departure, Wenner mentioned offhand that he was shuttering Straight Arrow Books and killing the C-76 book, for which Thompson believed he was promised $75,000. Wenner said that Straight Arrow wasn’t making money on eccentric titles like A History of the Israeli Army (1870–1974) and The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, and he was firing Alan Rinzler and instead partnering with New York publishing houses to produce Rolling Stone books.
At this, Thompson exploded:
You came out here and laid a near-perfect con job on me while wallowing in an atmosphere of friendliness and hospitality that might be hard to revive on your next visit. The next time you feel like accusing ex-RS editors of “taking advantage,” think back on your recent vacation out here…God’s mercy on your ass when your time comes to explain yourself to the Lords of Karma (sp?), but in the meantime we should make some kind of legally & financially binding agreement as to my professional relationship with The Empire, however arthritic it may or may not be at this point…and if I wanted to get genuinely ugly on this point, I could look back on the bound copies of RS and find the RS pre-convention “coverage” on Chicago.
Thompson hit Jann Wenner where it hurt—his integrity. In a fit of pique, Wenner canceled Thompson’s writing retainer, leaving his employment status ambiguous while Thompson was en route to Vietnam. Wenner also asked Tom Baker to draw up a life insurance policy on Thompson in case he died in Saigon. Was it proof that Wenner was determined to profit on Thompson or that he was trying to protect Thompson’s family after suspending his contract? Wenner said the policy paid out to Thompson’s family. Sandy Thompson said she had never heard of it, though she doubted Wenner would do something so underhanded. (Tom Baker wasn’t so sure; he suspected it was tantamount to an investment scheme.)
In either case, a life insurance policy was probably smart. Thompson was ill-equipped to function in a theater of war—he later wrote that he brought ten hits of blotter acid with him, taped to the back of his press card—and after some misadventures wandering the streets of Saigon, he flew to Hong Kong, ostensibly to buy some surveillance equipment, and missed the iconic moment the last U.S. helicopter flew off the roof of an apartment building.
When Thompson came home, he believed that Wenner had, in effect, fired him and canceled his company health insurance along with his writing retainer and left his family in the lurch while he was in Vietnam. He was enraged. Wenner, acknowledging his actions, offered him an olive branch of sorts by sending him a copy of the letter Ralph Gleason sent to Wenner in 1968, which dressed him down for his various failings. See, Wenner seemed to say, you’re not alone. Thompson shook his head: a Nixonian move, he said, like “sending an autographed transcript of one of his most damaging tapes to [White House lawyer] John Dean” (though he was impressed, he wrote, by “the integrity of Gleason’s instincts”). Thompson agreed to take a new contract at Rolling Stone, but he told Wenner, “If I have any tax, medical or unemployment problems resulting from your capricious failure to clarify my situation, you can be goddamn sure they’ll bounce back on you—in court, in person, and every other way that seems appropriate.”
In case Wenner thought he was joking, Thompson gave interviews to the press declaring his past work for Rolling Stone “embarrassing” and demanding once again that his name be removed from the masthead. For a profile of Jann Wenner in The Washington Post, Thompson compared Wenner to William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce—a publisher, he said, with more faith in logos than writers. Further, Thompson began circulating a rumor that would persist for years: that after shutting down Straight Arrow Books, Wenner secreted away the remaining five thousand copies of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, presumably to profit from them later. (Thompson believed Wenner kept them in a warehouse in New Jersey.) Wenner would deny it for years, stung by Thompson’s accusation. Infuriated with the public attacks, Wenner suggested that their working relationship might be over. “What really have I done to cheat you? Haggling? Fuck…that’s been your trip, not mine, all along,” he wrote. “I am sick and tired of the abuse, private even more than public, drained of my desire to work with you in the near future.”
But the next year, fearing Thompson was cooperating for a negative profile of him, Wenner pleaded with Thompson to stop slagging him and return to the fold. “Let’s put the misunderstandings and bitterness behind us and forget it,” Wenner wrote. “Let’s just end the quibbling that arose from the intense back-and-forth of the past, and return to the productive and enjoyable dealings of earlier years.”
The reality was that Thompson was not able to return to those productive earlier times. His writing had dried up as his marriage to Sandy collapsed. Wenner, with mixed motives, kept up appearances, keeping him on the masthead, doling out assignments. He also used his likeness on a subscription card until Thompson threatened to sue him. In an unpublished interview, Wenner claimed he never made any money on Thompson. “He was always in debt to me,” he said. “I lost money. I’m sure if you told it all, I lost a fortune. I mean, what did I ever make out of Hunter?”
But Wenner knew on some level what he owed to Thompson, and it was about more than just business. Thompson could belittle and humiliate Wenner for sport, steal his stereo, pound a dent in the hood of his Mercedes, turn every assignment into an expensive boondoggle, and let deadlines come and go, but Wenner would always endure it, even ask for more, hopelessly devoted to Hunter Thompson. Wenner would call Thompson his soul brother—“my Keith Richards.” Their endless battles had a sadomasochistic feel, their tedious arguments over money an elaborate homoerotic smoke screen. Indeed, Thompson once said arguing with Wenner over money was “better than sex.”