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considerable strength and energy, sometimes with any ‘weapon’ convenient to his hand.”

      When he was interviewed by a psychologist for his next potential school, Presidio Hill, near the Golden Gate Bridge, Wenner morphed into another child entirely—the charming little genius. “In light of this boys [sic] affable, pleasant, personal manner and his advanced social and mental maturity, it would seem that his school problem should be almost nil,” said a school psychologist in 1954. “Most probably, his greatest difficulties will arise when teachers feel threatened by his very superior intelligence.”

      Wenner was kicked out of Presidio for pulling the keys out of the ignition of a school bus on a field trip.

      Wenner said he felt isolated from the working-class people in San Rafael, few of whom were Jews, most of whom were less wealthy than the Wenners. But he was also desperate for attention from his absentee parents. Ed was a workaholic, once collapsing from a burst appendix because he refused to go to the hospital while waiting for a shipment of formula. Meanwhile, his mother made it a philosophical imperative to focus on herself and not her children. In her 1960 memoir, Back Away from the Stove, she codified her lack of attention into a child-rearing philosophy. “I missed a great deal of my children’s childhood and they missed a great deal of me,” she wrote. “My individual choice was to leave housewifery behind . . .

      “I quit everything and concentrated on making enough money so that when the kids grew up we could have them psychoanalyzed,” she continued. “Just because a lot of statistic-happy sadists want to make you miserable if you work by pointing to correlations, don’t be taken in.”

      In its way, Sim’s book foreshadowed The Feminine Mystique, published three years later by Betty Friedan. For Wenner, the product of his mother’s pioneering philosophy, it simply meant he never saw his mother. “In grammar school, all the moms were around all the time, except our mom,” he said. “We didn’t have the conventional house, or home. They would travel away on the weekends, and even in the winter, on vacations, we would be shuttled off to the places we went for summer camp—long weekends with the people of the camp, in their houses.”

      Every summer, the Wenner children were sent to Camp Lagunitas, in Marin, run by a man named Ed Barbano, who Wenner told his parents was an alcoholic. His sister Martha Wenner described how the drunken camp leader veered off the road with a carful of kids until Jann Wenner grabbed the wheel to keep it righted. (The Grateful Dead would later hole up near Camp Lagunitas to write songs.)

      Ed Wenner was hardly a source of comfort. Frustrated by his intemperate son, Ed frequently hit him. Kate said her brother would crawl out his bedroom window to hide from spankings. When Wenner threatened to run away from home, his mother put a can of creamed corn in a handkerchief tied to a stick, handed him a nickel, and said, “Here, take this, you’ll need it.”

      While the Wenners sold themselves in magazine articles as baby experts, they tended to ignore their own children for more idealistic pursuits, namely politics. In the 1950s, Sim was involved in the California Democratic Council, a liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and befriended Democrat Alan Cranston, who later became a senator from California. On Rainbow Road, Ed and Sim socialized with two other couples, like-minded Democrats: the Roth family, who owned the Matson shipping company, and the Flaxes, who owned an art supply store in the city, enjoying cocktail parties around the patio and pool. Despite their parents’ many failings, the Wenner kids were deeply influenced by their politics. The Wenners took their kids door to door around San Rafael for a Dollars for Democrats drive and once set up a hot dog stand so their mother could raise money for Guide Dogs for the Blind. In 1956, ten-year-old Jann Wenner met the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at the offices of the local Democratic committee that his mother headed.

      But on the eve of the 1960s, the Wenners were cracking up. The business was creating a growing chasm between Ed and Sim. When he wasn’t laboring to expand Baby Formulas, Ed spent endless hours in Freudian analysis; he loved hearing himself talk. Meanwhile, Sim was stirred by dreams of becoming a literary writer. They fought constantly, their screaming matches the central event of their children’s young lives. “The money and the business took down my parents’ marriage,” said Martha. In the late 1950s, Sim began staying home to write a memoir, which doubled as a bitter attack on Ed, describing her regret at having devoted her time to the formula business, only to be ignored by her husband. “I’d much rather be crewing on a Tahiti-bound schooner, or selling nonobjective art on the Left Bank,” she wrote. “Anything but business. I hated business.”

      As she embraced personal liberation, Jann got a brief but powerful close-up of the mother he idolized, imbibing her progressive opinions and ideas about literature or politics and basking in the glow of her increasingly eccentric personality. His mother primed him for an interest in writing. “She turned me on to E. B. White,” he said. “And that was her background. She had been a magazine freelancer for a number of years.”

      •

      WENNER’S JOURNALISTIC CAREER BEGAN at age eleven, when he joined two neighborhood kids who were producing a mimeographed newspaper. Wenner quickly shouldered them aside, renaming it The Weekly Trumpet (from The All Around News) and crowning himself editor in chief, which he made a stipulation if he was going to join. Wenner typed up news items about a neighbor “cracking open his skull” and getting stitches or earthquake damage to local pools and wrote editorials arguing, for instance, that kids who won prize money on TV quiz shows shouldn’t have to pay taxes. He also asked his readers—all sixty-four of them—not to vote for a state legislator that his mother despised, asking, “Are you going to elect a man with racial prejudice, or are you not?” In the spring of 1957, he and his friends appeared on the front page of San Rafael’s Daily Independent Journal, which reported that Wenner made $5.97 on subscriptions.

      His sister Kate later recounted how Wenner conscripted her as a delivery girl, but she quit after he refused to give her a raise. When she threatened to start her own newspaper, Wenner replied, “Oh yeah? What are you gonna call it?”

      She was flummoxed by his dare.

      “He knew that without a name you had no concept and without a concept you had nothing,” Kate said during a toast at Wenner’s sixtieth birthday party. “Jann had the confidence to pull it off. It was as simple as that.”

      Wenner’s confusion about his budding feelings for boys also started early. When he was twelve, Wenner was arrested at the local library for engaging in ambiguous horseplay with the son of a local sheriff, who told his father Wenner had harassed him. “It wasn’t gay sex; it was roughhousing and goosing,” said Wenner. “All of a sudden I ended up spending a day in juvenile hall.”

      According to his mother, this was why Wenner was sent to a coed boarding school in Los Angeles in 1958—because his father hoped the proximity to girls might cure him. Wenner said the incident was “misconstrued,” and he had already been accepted to Chadwick School when he was arrested because his parents were getting divorced. When Sim’s father, Maurice, died in Florida in 1958 after a long period of estrangement, the tension between Sim and Ed, over money, control of the company, and lack of love, came to a head. When Wenner flew home from Chadwick for Thanksgiving break, his father took him out to lunch and delivered the news of their separation. Wenner sobbed. “I lost my appetite and couldn’t finish my food,” he said.

      In the divorce proceedings, Sim gave custody of Jann to his father and took the girls with her. It was a decisive blow to Wenner’s sense of self. For years to come, Wenner would tell friends his parents fought over not who got to keep Jan Simon Wenner but who had to take him. His mother, Wenner said, once called her son “the worst child she had ever met.”

      Wenner began a campaign to get his parents back together. Sim told her son she wanted him to call only every other week to reduce her phone bills. “Your demand that Dad and I be something to each other that we’re not, is basically a child’s demand,” she wrote to him in 1959, when Wenner was thirteen. “One stamps one’s foot and says, ‘Change the world and I will be all right!’ and it’s a nice comforting thought to have, but the world can’t be changed, families can’t be changed, mothers, fathers,

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