They dropped acid together and lay in the middle of the street at the top of Telegraph Hill experiencing visions of “the explorers coming through the bay, and the moon is a giant lightbulb,” Wenner recalled. Black planned on returning to London, along with his roommate, a sensitive and intensely intellectual writer named Jonathan Cott, who studied English literature at Berkeley. Wenner wanted to go. His grades at Berkeley were on an inverse trajectory with his drug taking, so Wenner dropped out to join them. “We did have the provision that we had things we were going to do, Jon and I, and we weren’t going to babysit him,” said Black.
Wenner arrived at Heathrow Airport in June 1966 with a guitar in one hand and a portable Olivetti in the other. He wore a porkpie hat. In his pocket was the phone number of Max Jones, editor of the Melody Maker and a friend of Ralph Gleason’s to whom Wenner hoped to sell a story. Flush with excitement, Wenner took a taxi directly to Carnaby Street, where he gaped at the carnival of mods and rockers in velveteen coats and bell-bottoms wandering in and out of clothing shops. He wrote to Gleason that he saw Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones get out of a silver Rolls-Royce. He bought a pair of striped bell-bottoms and a flowered belt and rented a flat in Earl’s Court. He hooked up with Black and went from party to party introducing himself as a rock writer from San Francisco, which lent him an aura of considerable cool. To earn spending money, he tried working as a wedding photographer and a folksinger in a café. “I played one solo gig at some restaurant, sitting in a corner for the evening,” said Wenner, “and I’m sure I was boring; made 15 quid or so; that was the end of the professional career.”
Wenner could not help but observe the open sensuality between men in London, a cultural femininity baked into British manners. “That was the period when homosexuality in England was not legalized, but it was decriminalized,” Mick Jagger told Wenner in an interview in 1995. “It was part of a new freedom for men. It wasn’t to do strictly with homosexuality, so much only, or androgynous, or whatever the noun is, but there was a freedom for men to dress as you please and act as you please and not conform to just one type.”
The freedom was attractive to Wenner. “I had peace for my long hair,” he wrote in his novel. “No men threatening me on the street, no crew-cut football players staring at me so frighteningly. The sexuality of it was intense.” Richard Black picked up on Wenner’s intensity during parties. “If there were gay people, I think he felt free to put his arm around me now and then,” recalled Black. “We were at a party with Marianne Faithfull and a bunch of people. Somebody was under the impression that he was not only my friend but my lover. And I just was very totally heterosexual and trying to get laid every chance I could. So, he felt the dissonance.”
At one point, Black was invited to a dinner party with Paul McCartney. Wenner, an unabashed devotee of mod in the mods-versus-rockers debate, implored Black to bring him. But the dinner was an intimate affair for couples, and Black’s girlfriend had invited him. Wenner was wounded; afterward, he soured on both Black and London. Carnaby Street, “once so groovy,” he wrote, was “commercialized to dreariness . . . a teenage scene.”
Wenner looked up Max Jones, of the Melody Maker, and visited the offices on Fleet Street with a review of the new Beach Boys record. Though it was never published, Wenner was astonished to see a working newsroom populated with reporters smoking cigarettes and talking shop—a vision of order and professionalism amid the decadence of Carnaby. After a month of partying and interpersonal tumult—including an affair with a girl named Mandy who lived next door to him—he realized “the transient, ambiguous, do-little bohemian lifestyle wasn’t for me.” He feared he was wasting his life. The obvious solution, said Wenner, was “a conventional marriage with a good Jewish girl.”
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WHEN SIMON AND GARFUNKEL came to San Francisco to play the Community Theatre in Berkeley in May 1966, they made a special trip to Berkeley to meet Ralph Gleason, whose collection of Lenny Bruce recordings, bequeathed to him by Bruce himself, was highly prized samizdat. While Simon eagerly sampled the tapes, he met Denise Kaufman, Gleason’s acolyte and Jann Wenner’s “good Jewish girl” of choice. She offered to tour Simon around San Francisco and took him to an open mic at a folk café called Coffee and Confusion (where he played “The Sound of Silence”) and then to meet the Grateful Dead in their communal three-story Victorian on Ashbury Street. Kaufman and Simon slept together at the apartment of Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Simon invited her to Anaheim to see him play the next weekend.
When Wenner heard about the affair, he seethed with jealousy, generating an animus against Paul Simon that lasted for years to come. In his pursuit of Kaufman, Wenner often told her parents that he intended to marry her, but Kaufman would roll her eyes. “I don’t think so!” she moaned. “She loved me, but not like that,” said Wenner. “Her mind was on these acid cowboys, and Hells Angels. She wanted the real authentic guys, the real deal. I thought I could get her.”
The surest sign Kaufman didn’t intend to marry Wenner was when she got pregnant by a member of the New Christy Minstrels. Wenner put her in touch with a doctor in Berkeley “who gave me the name of a doctor in Mexico who would do an abortion,” Kaufman recalled. The procedure (performed on a washing machine in Tijuana) made Kaufman hemorrhage, and she went to an American doctor for help. The police showed up to file a report, and Wenner drove down from Berkeley to be with her. Kaufman was grateful, though later irritated when Wenner used the abortion fiasco to cast her as a troubled soul in need of his guidance. “I really can’t believe your hypocrisy,” she wrote to him. “You—who all year long wanted to sleep with me—trying to put me down for having had an abortion.”
Wenner also accused her of corrupting him. “You say I got you going to the Fillmore on acid,” she wrote. “It was you + John + Ned who did that, Mr. Jones—not me. Do you remember that or have you fantasized your own past[?]”
But in the summer of 1966, Kaufman’s parents became so worried about her LSD use they had her institutionalized in the psychiatric ward at Mount Zion Hospital. Wenner offered a way forward: While in London, he proposed they give up drugs and rock and roll, get married, and move to Spain or Greece. Naturally, Kaufman figured the best way to meditate on the proposal was to take acid. “I was like, am I just ignoring the obvious?” she recalled. “Do I have this radar for attracting people who aren’t truly loving, and here’s someone who is? . . . I was questioning my own choices. When he said, let’s do it, I said, okay.”
Her acid revelation faded, however, when Wenner started planning the wedding ceremony with his mother. Kaufman gently applied the brakes, recommending they get to know each other better. Also, she wanted to come to London to take acid on Carnaby Street and buy some hip clothes before they went straight. In a panic, Wenner got the next flight back to New York and immediately got on a pay phone at Kennedy Airport to pressure Kaufman to marry him. When she said no, Wenner sobbed and fumbled with dimes, begging the operator to keep him connected. He threatened to commit suicide. “He told me he was going to kill himself,” Kaufman recounted. “He was gonna do just what Jim [Pike] did; he got a hotel in New York and was gonna kill himself, unless I came there and married him.”
Kaufman talked him down, after which Wenner’s marriage fantasy collapsed. Plans thwarted, he accepted an invitation from Andy Harmon to stay at his family estate in Rye, New York, north of Manhattan. It was grand property with guesthouses and a tennis court moldering in neglect but still staffed with servants. Wenner brought a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver from England, and they got stoned and listened to it as they mulled over their futures. Between tearful walks through the woods, a bereft Wenner harnessed his ambition for another project: the Great American Novel.
He started writing a book with the wistful title “Now These Days Are Gone,” a story of his youth, which already seemed to Wenner worth enshrining in literature. An awkward blend of On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye, the book was Wenner’s attempt to square the warring sides of his personality, his desire for a straight life with Kaufman with his hidden homosexuality, his love of high society with his love for rock and roll. In one scene, the Jim Pike character stumbles upon Wenner’s open diary, where Wenner discusses their mutual attraction and concludes that “there are certain things that must be left unsaid and not openly