Dick Dale and started wearing huaraches. “He put a bleached streak in his hair,” remembered Andy Harmon, “and my father, obviously, sensing something that ended up having some truth in it—‘This is not something a man does’—went after Jann about it . . . He implied that Jann was gay.”
In 1962, Wenner was nearly suspended from Chadwick for leaving campus without permission but was saved by the headmistress, Mrs. Chadwick, who admired his writing in her English class. Divining Wenner’s troubles, she arranged for him to see a Beverly Hills psychiatrist and also directed him to the theater department, where Wenner starred in Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, playing the title character who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for occult powers. Onstage, Wenner, as Faust, mused before Mephistopheles:
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
He later played in H.M.S. Pinafore and became a lifelong fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Wenner’s best friends were two boarders, Andy Harmon and Jamie Moran, the son of a social worker at Chadwick. Wenner and his pals identified as proto-beatniks, inspired by the Maynard Krebs character played by Bob Denver in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on CBS and humor magazines like Mad, intent on bucking the “bourgeoisie.” While Wenner received middling grades, he gravitated to current events, keeping up with Kennedy and Nixon in the papers, writing a critical essay on the right-wing John Birch Society and another on the historic ramifications of the atom bomb. In keeping with his mother’s quasi-socialist worldview, Wenner was an orthodox Adlai Stevenson liberal, aping his rhetoric in school papers and precociously imbibing books like A Nation of Sheep, a liberal critique of American foreign policy and the media by William Lederer, co-author of The Ugly American.
But Wenner was primarily distracted by the pecking order at Chadwick. Moran thought of Wenner as a kind of innocent hustler who admired creative people but was seduced by “the false glamour of celebrity.” Even as he hung out with the bohemians, Wenner organized his calendar around popular kids in whose wealth and fame he found deep affirmation. “At Chadwick, he dressed in a fucking coat and tie,” Harmon said. “He hung out with the preppies, which I couldn’t bear . . . and was very attracted to power. I think he was attracted to my dad, because he had a reputation as a prominent filmmaker.”
Even then, journalism synthesized Wenner’s interests. In his junior year, he befriended Chadwick’s publicist, Frank Quinlin, who assigned Wenner to cover sports for The Mainsheet, the school paper, and helped him get a weekly column in the local Palos Verdes Peninsula News, reporting the goings-on at Chadwick. Quinlin, known as Uncle Frank, also involved him in Chadwick’s yearbook, The Dolphin. This gave Wenner access to the school’s Graflex camera, and he used it like an all-access pass, snapping pictures in classrooms, study halls, and dormitories. It also gave Wenner access to a twenty-foot-long closet with a desk and a typewriter, dubbed Shaft Alley, over which Wenner put a sign reading members only. “I was the only person in the school who had an office,” he said.
The yearbook was the perfect tool for social climbing. “His friends were mostly friends that would advance him socially at school,” recalled his mother-in-law. “I remember he had made friends with this girl from Chadwick. She was able to give him a lot of money for the annual. Then I remember we were at the house one time and she called him. He was really abrupt with her. He was like, ‘Why are you calling me? We don’t have anything in common anymore.’ And it was just awfully rough.”
As graduation approached, Wenner set his sights on Harvard, Jack Kennedy’s alma mater. His archrival at Chadwick, a handsome jock and class valedictorian named Dennis Landis, was also gunning for Harvard, while Wenner’s friend Bill Belding applied to Yale. “I distinctly remember December of ’62,” recounted Belding. “Mrs. Chadwick came out and Jann and Dennis and I were talking in the rotunda. ‘I have good news for you, Bill, you were admitted to Yale. And, Dennis, you were admitted to Harvard. And, Jann, you were not admitted to Harvard.’
“She handled that so badly, and I know Jann was devastated,” he said. “Jann really, really wanted to go to Harvard and he didn’t.”
Instead, Wenner would be going to the University of California at Berkeley, where his mother had taken continuing education courses.
But Wenner found another way of pursuing his rivalry. His senior year, he devised an unorthodox plan to take over the student council and block Landis from becoming vice president. Instead of running for president himself, he created a slate of candidates on a so-called progressive platform, with swim champ Belding at the top of the ticket, an attractive girl named Cydny Rothe for secretary, and Wenner wedged in the middle as vice president. The Wenner sandwich worked: Advocating, along with a liberal agenda, for coffee for seniors, the progressives soundly defeated Landis, which Wenner ran as news across the front page of the premier issue of a rogue newspaper he’d recently founded, The Sardine. In his paper, Wenner described the campaign—his own—as one of “innovations and uniqueness.” “Jann’s whole reason for wanting to run for student body,” said Belding, “was so he could become an insider and start an underground student newspaper . . . When he did The Sardine, he had the school at his feet.”
With a title that spoofed the nautical themes of Chadwick, The Sardine published a gossip column called Random Notes, modeled on Herb Caen’s “three dot” column in the Chronicle, using ellipses to separate news items. In the second issue, Wenner wrote a snide taxonomy of “poseurs” who adopted the surfer look—as he had done the year before. The school’s main disciplinarian, Ed Ellis, shut down The Sardine after three issues, claiming it undermined school spirit (among other things, Wenner attacked the school for banning white Levi’s). Regarding Wenner as egotistical, Ellis also tried unsuccessfully to remove Wenner as editor of the yearbook, but Margaret Chadwick intervened again. When the yearbook, The Dolphin, arrived in the spring of 1963, it was a fully formed Jann Wenner production, a blueprint for everything he would aspire to. “I designed the yearbook, layout, variety of pages, length and all the things,” he wrote to his grandmother. “There are dozens of new things, innovations, and changes, all my ideas except one. I designed the cover, and picked out the class symbol, which I like very much, the whole think [sic] cost $6000, and we charged $6 per book, sold nearly 400 books, collected nearly 4500 in ads and patronage.”
He also created a two-page spread to mock the faculty, featuring a photo of his friends posing as teachers and “reading books about how to get authority because they did not have any, with their cigarettes and their coffee cups.”
On Wenner’s personal page, he listed his accomplishments (skiing, sports statistician) and declared in his class quotation that “greatness knows itself”—a line spoken by Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
In the back pages of the yearbook were irreverent photo montages that Wenner spent hours cutting and pasting together, including several images of shirtless boys horsing around in their dorm rooms. Wenner was keenly aware of his homosexual feelings, but he kept them concealed, not even telling the Beverly Hills therapist he was forced to see every week (his mother, perhaps attuned to Wenner’s sexual confusion, complained that he was “manipulating” his therapist). Wenner said there were several teachers at Chadwick he believed were gay, including Bill Holland, the man who had dubbed Wenner “Nox.” “He had a big friendship with a couple of cute guys in my dorm,” he recalled. Another teacher took Wenner on a trip to Santa Barbara in a Corvette and put his hand on Wenner’s knee, causing him to squirm. “I felt I was not being polite by moving over and getting away from him,” he said.
Wenner clung to a girl he began dating his senior year, Susie Weigel, who was everything Wenner felt he should want: rich, blond, popular, Jewish, her father a federal judge in Northern California appointed by President Kennedy in 1962. Wenner impressed her with his literary interests—he co-edited a literary journal called The Journey with Andy Harmon—and gave her a John Donne love poem. But in other ways he treated