Sticky Fingers - Joe Hagan

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of a letter, envelope, postcard, pamphlet, press release, financial record, photograph, and telegram—because he believed he would one day be important. He seemed never to consider the possibility that Rolling Stone might fail. And why should he? If his appetite seemed bottomless, if he was “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything,” as Jack Kerouac had it in On the Road (a book Kerouac nearly titled Rock and Roll Road), if he regularly spent more money than he had, made enemies of friends in record time, and consumed drugs like a Viking, Wenner figured it would simply work out, as if the bounty of the biggest, richest generation in the history of the planet, converging on Northern California in 1967, was a kind of manifest destiny, an endless wind at his back.

      •

      WHEN THE JOHN LENNON INTERVIEW APPEARED in Rolling Stone, published over two issues in January and February 1971 with cover portraits by Annie Leibovitz, Lennon’s unvarnished honesty and hostility, and the sheer volume of his words, were the shattering end of the Beatles. But it established Rolling Stone at the center of the culture, making international news. Not incidentally, it also put Wenner’s newspaper, which had been struggling financially, on a sound footing. But Wenner, as was his wont, could not stop there with Lennon. The interview, titled “Lennon Remembers,” was simply too powerful. And so he proposed to publish the interview as a book. And though John Lennon strongly objected, Wenner published it anyway. Lennon was furious. “John took it so badly,” Yoko Ono said. “It’s not what the book says, or the interview, but the fact that Jann betrayed him . . . He took the money and not the friendship.”

      It was a signal moment for the young publisher. And it was also completely in character, for better and worse. The two never spoke again.

      BOOK I

      The Wunderkind

      1

      Atlantis

      They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

      —Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”

      Jann Wenner stood inside a closet, tripping on LSD. A kitten purred outside the door. A young woman, sitting cross-legged, stroked the kitten and smiled mystically.

      It was the spring of 1965, and Denise Kaufman, a darkhaired free spirit who played blues harmonica and wore tall velvet boots, had met Wenner a few hours before while sitting with friends at the Terrace, the outdoor café on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The sit-ins and protests of the Free Speech Movement, which pitted students against the university’s administration over civil rights and the First Amendment, had focused the nation’s attention on Berkeley in the preceding months and now dominated the talk. They all seemed to think they were making history, destinies colliding in nearby apartments and along Telegraph Avenue over joints and copies of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

      A couple of Kaufman’s friends had shown up with a grinning preppy in a Brooks Brothers shirt. The brash fireplug of a boy declared he was going to take LSD for the first time and write a psychology paper about it. Kaufman’s eyebrows went up. She’d heard of Jann Wenner before. Her parents, successful Jewish liberals from Presidio Heights, were acquainted with his mother, Sim Wenner, whose racy dime novel Kaufman had furtively thumbed through as a teenager back in 1961. Kaufman also knew a society girl, the daughter of a British diplomat, who told of a notorious Jann Wenner (to whom the society girl lost her virginity). “I was like, ‘This is that guy,’ ” she recalled. “We were sitting next to each other, and he started talking about LSD.”

      For his class, Wenner had checked out library books about psychedelics, including The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” by Timothy Leary. The chemical compound lysergic acid diethylamide, discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, was still legal in California, but not for long. In the preceding months, people had been returning with tales of wild experiences with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, whose playful social experiment in a garishly painted 1939 International Harvester school bus was already taking shape on a ranch in nearby La Honda. LSD-25, Kesey’s acolytes reported, plunged the user into a state of euphoric revelation, the unconscious mind emerging from the depths like a lost kingdom. In his 1968 best seller, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe would quote a woman who inadvertently drank “electrified” Kool-Aid at an early Grateful Dead show:

      I stood close to the band and let the vibrations engulf me. They started in my toes and every inch of me was quivering with them . . . they made a journey through my nervous system (I remember picturing myself as one of the charts we had studied in biology which shows the nerve network), traveling each tiny path, finally reaching the top of my head, where they exploded in glorious patterns of color and line.

      Wolfe would portray Kaufman, who joined Kesey’s Merry Pranksters that summer, as Mary Microgram. And so Ms. Microgram had to laugh at Wenner’s absurd proposal. “Well, you’re not going to be able to write that paper!” she explained to Wenner. He would need a guide, she said. “How about you?” Wenner flirted.

      On the way to his apartment on Carleton Street, they stopped by a dormitory and a friend’s house to borrow a kitten and a stack of LPs, including a modal folk guitar album by Sandy Bull called Inventions. When they got to Wenner’s apartment, the living room was littered with wine glasses from a sorority party he’d thrown the night before. “We went into his room, and [he] took this acid,” Kaufman recalled. “We were just talking, and the kitten was playing, and then the acid started to come on. I had the Sandy Bull music on, and he was like, ‘Take that off, I can’t stand it.’ ”

      Freaking out, Wenner opened his closet door, stepped inside, closed the door, and stood by himself in a laundry basket full of starched shirts. “And I said, ‘That’s fine, if you need me, I’m here,’ ” said Kaufman. “He was in there for a long time.”

      •

      RAINBOW ROAD.

      That was the name the Wenner family gave the woody drive leading to their new house. In 1951, Edward Wenner, a stout man with dungarees hiked to his chest, bulldozed the grounds himself. His wife, Sim, a slim and attractive woman who wore her hair short, had paid $3,000 for the five acres, and Ed banged out a ranch-style dwelling with exposed beams and large windows, a flagstone fireplace, a playroom for the children with a tiled checkerboard on the floor, an office for his wife, a carport for their imported sports cars—her Alfa Romeo, his MG. A towering oak tree stood out front. It was their homemade version of the California dream, nestled in the base of a land preserve in rural San Rafael, eighteen miles north of San Francisco.

      All this was paid for by Baby Formulas Inc., the business Ed Wenner came to California to create. At one time, he would claim his company fed 90 percent of the babies within a hundred miles of San Francisco. In 1946, Ed and Sim had arrived in San Francisco with a baby of their own, Jan Simon Wenner. For years to come, the son would look at 8-millimeter home movies of this life on Rainbow Road—his mother filming him as he hopped around the patio in a cowboy hat while his father dug a hole for the swimming pool—and craft a dewy vision of his childhood. “It was a pretty idyllic and archetypal childhood for that time,” he said. “They came from the East Coast, out of the military, out to golden California to find postwar fame and fortune; I was the first child of the baby boom.”

      Wenner’s early memories of childhood included baby bottles moving down the assembly line in his father’s factory on Sacramento and Laurel and his mother playing Moonlight Sonata on the piano when he went to bed at night. There were weekends at Squaw Valley, near Tahoe, where his father taught him skiing, which became a lifelong passion for Jann Wenner. There were the dogs, Adlai and Estes, named after liberal Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver. There was his mother writing on her Olivetti typewriter while listening to the Joe McCarthy hearings on the radio.

      But Rainbow Road was as much an escape as an arrival. The Wenners’ new son was born only a few months before they left New York, at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan at 12:25 p.m. on January 7, 1946. In Wenner’s baby book, his mother, Sim,

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