LITMIR.BIZ

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      California Dreamin’

      Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time magazine?

      —Allen Ginsberg, “America”

      The day Jann Wenner strode into the offices of Ramparts magazine in North Beach, he wore a trench coat and sunglasses, a fedora cocked on his head. “He looked like he was from a Dashiell Hammett play or something,” said Linda Kingsbury, the office girl Friday and Wenner’s future sister-in-law. “I just thought, ‘Who is this?’ ”

      Wenner’s fortunes began when Ramparts, a monthly founded by left-wing Catholics and edited by an eccentric Irish-Catholic newspaperman named Warren Hinckle, decided to launch a biweekly broadsheet in the fall of 1966 called The Sunday Ramparts. “The idea was to have Sunday Ramparts be irreverent in the style of the Manchester Guardian and the London Times,” Ralph Gleason later explained. “It’ll look very stuffy but in actuality it would be outrageous.”

      Gleason, a member of Ramparts’ editorial board, recommended Wenner as an editor and “rock and roll specialist,” and Wenner immediately shelved his novel (which “didn’t reveal any talent,” he concluded) and moved back to San Francisco to help put out the first issue in October 1966.

      Before he could start, however, there was a hurdle: He was reclassified as 1-A by the Selective Service System, making him available for the Vietnam draft. In 1966, the number of men sent to fight in Vietnam more than doubled to 385,000. Dr. Sandor Burstein, the Wenner family doctor (and his mother’s ex-lover), declined to help him, so Wenner went to a Dr. Martin Hoffman on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. An advocate for gay rights who wrote the pioneering 1968 book The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil, Hoffman studied gay men around San Francisco and encouraged a “radical tolerance” for homosexuality. To help Wenner avoid the war, he diagnosed him with a “serious personality disorder . . . with its concomitant history of psychiatric treatment, suicidal ideation, homosexual and excessive heterosexual promiscuity, and heavy use of illegal drugs.”

      If the letter to the army draft board contained more than a kernel of truth, it also achieved its purpose: Like the rest of his friends in the society scene, Wenner avoided the most divisive and defining event of his generation. He did not know a single person who served in Vietnam. “The poor people went and fought the war,” said Wenner. “No friends of mine died there. No people I went to high school with . . . No people from my college. My group of friends were wealthy enough to avoid the draft or they were 2-S deferred in college.” (Only later did he learn that Bill Belding, class president at Chadwick, had become a Navy SEAL.)

      Instead, Wenner would have a front-row seat to the rock-and-roll revolution, witnessing history from a desk at 301 Broadway, surrounded by folk cafés, seedy topless bars, drinking holes for sailors, and beat clubs like the hungry i, the same neighborhood where Ralph Gleason wore out his crepe-soled boots. “Ralph used to take me to Basin Street to see Ray Charles,” recalled Wenner. “It was really at that epicenter of the post-beatnik hippie San Francisco . . . the melting pot of all that.”

      The same week Wenner started, a young woman stopped by his office to introduce herself. Jane Schindelheim, the resident “Xerox queen,” sister of the secretary, couldn’t help but notice the brash new editor bopping around like he owned the place. “I overheard Jann telling someone about Chadwick,” recounted Jane. “So I went into his office, and he was reading the Times. He had all these Coca-Cola bottles lined up on the ledge. I said to him, ‘Did you know John Muchmore?’ And he said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘My ex-boyfriend went to Chadwick.’ ”

      Wenner brightened. Sure, he knew Muchmore—the only skier at Chadwick who had been better than him, he said. “I guess we’re destined to get married,” he told her, “because I just broke up with somebody.”

      A bold young man, she thought. Younger than Wenner by four months and shorter by an inch, Jane was a waifish girl-woman, narrow-hipped and flat-chested, tan-skinned and almond-eyed, with a casual chic gleaned from afternoons roaming Bloomingdale’s as a Manhattan teenager. With her easy sophistication and vaguely Asian features (Wenner said it looked like somebody in her family had been raped by a Mongolian), she was exotic even in 1960s San Francisco. “She wasn’t a hippie,” said Wenner. “She was the Bloomingdale’s girl. Just savvy . . . If she had an overcoat, it would be long, [with] clean lines, much more to the Jackie Onassis style.”

      “What I wasn’t used to is the Grateful Dead,” said Jane, “and people calling other people ‘Mountain Girl.’ That I wasn’t used to.”

      Schindelheim grew up in Stuyvesant Town, the collection of high-rises along the East Side of New York City, her parents Eastern European Jews. Her father, Arthur, was from Austria-Hungary and wanted to be a lawyer but instead became a dentist because the schooling was quicker and the job more lucrative. Her mother Theresa’s family was from Eastern Europe, but she was born in New York. Both were stiff teetotalers, conservative and remote, providing everything for their daughters but warmth. Domineering and status conscious, Theresa valued beauty and wealth and reminded her daughters, especially Linda, how they failed to measure up on a daily basis. She regarded Jane as a pretty bauble, “the beautiful one,” said her sister, Linda. “And she was aware that that wasn’t something she did; it was something she was born with. And that was a difficult thing.”

      Jane found solace in fashion and art, attending the High School of Music and Art in Harlem to study drawing. She wore black turtlenecks, smoked skinny joints, and drew moody portraits in charcoal and pencil evoking her inner torpor. She didn’t smile easily, keeping friends guessing what lay behind her curtain of dark hair, offering her sly humor in small but tantalizing doses. A friend wrote a poem describing her as “plotting and scheming for nothing but the entertainment of it.”

      “She was always in a trench coat,” recalled Peter Wolf, a classmate who later became the lead singer for the J. Geils Band. “Just reminded me of some babe that would have walked off a Godard movie. And she always wore the same black turtleneck, and these sandal shoes, she was quite stunning. Eyesight to the blind, as one might say. Just had an aura about her.”

      After graduating, Jane moved to Pittsburgh to study line drawing at Carnegie Tech. On her first day, she met the quietly handsome painter from California John Muchmore, and a heated romance ensued. Art drew them together. “She had an incredible line,” Muchmore said of her drawing. “Speaking as a painter, there was an energy to it. It wasn’t an even line. There was a pulse to it. An emotion to her line. So that her line drawings were very dynamic, very alive.”

      After a year and a half, Muchmore became disenchanted with school, they broke up, and a distraught Jane dropped out and flew west to visit her sister, Linda, who had moved to San Francisco. Jane figured she’d go back in two weeks.

      While Wenner poured himself into his new job at The Sunday Ramparts, he enjoyed the company of the nice Jewish girl whose

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