“worst case of San Francisco pompousness I’ve ever observed” and asked whether Wenner wrote all of his letters “while high.” Christgau didn’t write another review for Rolling Stone for decades. “I took out my animosity toward New York– based critics and intellectualizers on him,” said Wenner, “and alienated him early on and he never forgave.”
Wenner had a fair-weather relationship to the “straight journalism” he aspired to. When Susan Lydon filed a film review that used the first person, Wenner tore it to pieces and stomped on it like a “crazed Rumpelstiltskin,” she later recounted, telling her that the first person undermined journalistic objectivity. Meanwhile, Al Aronowitz, the rock journalist famous for introducing Dylan to the Beatles, excoriated Wenner for pasting whole paragraphs from a press release into his story on the Band. “Such use of press releases indicates that you are more interested in record company advertising than you are in honest reportage,” he wrote.
Was Rolling Stone a newspaper, wondered Aronowitz, or “just your own personal ego trip”?
Wenner, for all his chutzpah, tended to avoid personal confrontation. In 1968, he published a fake letter to the editor disparaging a Landau review under the pseudonym “Kevin Altman.” “I was disagreeing with something Jon Landau said, but I wouldn’t say it to his face,” he said.
But with Rolling Stone as his sword and shield, Wenner delighted in biting the hands that fed him. In the same issue he published his Clapton interview, and he tested his influence by running Jon Landau’s critical assassination of Cream—“Clapton is a master of the blues clichés”—which Eric Clapton later said made him pass out and then disband the group. “The ring of truth just knocked me backward,” Clapton would recount. “I was in a restaurant and I fainted. After I woke up, I immediately decided that it was the end of the band.”
Not to be outdone, Wenner followed up with a slashing review of their album Wheels of Fire, saying, “Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately, songwriting and recording are not among them.” “Cream Breaks Up!” went the headline in the very next issue.
When the inevitable blowback from a record label came, Wenner would blame a writer or simply shrug. It was a cycle he was destined to repeat, fomenting controversy and then whistling past the ensuing storm: “I wrote a headline, ‘Pig Pen to Meet Pope?’ ”—about a rock festival in Rome—“Bill Graham thought this was sensationalist. I just thought it was funny. But he thought it was terrible. Then he tried to ban me from the Fillmore.” (Graham later caught Jann and Jane Wenner attending an Allman Brothers show.)
Some of Wenner’s biases were merely petty and personal. After the song “Mrs. Robinson,” from the soundtrack of The Graduate, made the success of Simon and Garfunkel too conspicuous to ignore, Wenner reported in his gossip column that they had made “an amazing comeback.” Gleason, well aware of the personal history, called up Denise Kaufman to share a laugh about it. “Did you see Rolling Stone?” he asked and then read her the quote. “He had to say something,” recalled Denise Kaufman, “but he had to justify why he hadn’t written about them in all that time.”
That spring, Rolling Stone panned Simon and Garfunkel’s next album, Bookends, which also featured “Mrs. Robinson.”
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JANE SCHINDELHEIM WAS NOT FOND of work, preferring long afternoons on the couch or a languorous stroll through a department store, running her finger across an expensive Eames chair or pondering the appeal of an Oriental rug. And by the summer of 1968, she was tired of taking the public bus to work. She asked Jann to buy a car and not just any car but a Porsche. So Wenner borrowed $200 from Jane’s sister, Linda, who figured they would use it to buy a sensible VW Bug. Instead, Wenner was raising money so he could buy a 1963 powder-blue Porsche 1600-N Cabriolet. “At first I was like, ‘Well, that’s outrageous,’ ” said Linda. “But then I thought, ‘Well, why not? Why do you have to be stuck with a geeky car?’ ” Wenner said it would barely climb the hills of San Francisco, but he did pay to have it painted burgundy.
At the start, Rolling Stone was a family affair, with Linda briefly living with Jann and Jane, but the couple was moving up fast, relocating to an apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, an A-frame triplex with a rattan chair hanging from the ceiling, a sleeping loft, a Balinese-style bathroom, and a bowl of hash on the dining room table (the apartment belonged to David Buschman, co-founder of the outdoor equipment company Sierra Designs). For people their age, most of whom were still living on mattresses in communal circumstances, Jann and Jane were veritable sophisticates entertaining like upstart Medici. “Jann and Janie were closer to adults than the rest of us,” said Ben Sidran, a jazz writer who met Wenner in London in 1968. “They were more plugged into society and the social scene.”
Wenner regularly courted potential investors, offering Steve Miller a quarter of the company for $4,000 one night over dinner. Miller didn’t bite. “I remember being really amazed when I got to his place because I was living in a funky old house in the Haight and driving around in an economy VW bus,” Miller said. “Jann was driving a Porsche and living in this beautiful house, hip and zen, beautiful sound system . . . I thought he was smart as can be but too ambitious. I got the feeling he would sell me out in a second.”
One day, two letters arrived from an old friend in London: Robin Gracey. One was for Linda Schindelheim and the other for Jann Wenner. Evidently suspicious, Jane asked Linda to boil a pot of water and steam open the seal on Wenner’s letter, which revealed their secret love affair. “Jane discovered it one day in my files while I was away,” recalled Wenner.
Wenner’s gay affair was a bruising revelation for Jane, “terrifying and destroying,” as Wenner described it later. He swore to her that his dalliance with Gracey was a one-off and proclaimed his commitment to her. “Once Jane [found out],” said Wenner, “I said, ‘Look, I will stop. I will put an end to this.’ And I did.”
With his star rising in every other way, Wenner could not afford to lose Jane. There was her beauty and allure, of course, but also her calming effect on Wenner, the witty way she called Jann “Ya Ya” and casually punctured his ego at parties. Jane made Wenner palatable to people otherwise put off by his hyperactivity and forceful personality. She had a keen judgment, but she was not judgmental. Her feline presence, coy and ironic, invited confession and gave an impression of intimacy that Jann Wenner could not offer. There was also her caretaking eye. “Jann was always, in hiring, trying to bring in these people who were just horrible,” said Laurel Gonsalves, a former secretary for the Steve Miller Band who went to work at Rolling Stone in 1969. “Just losers. Kind of like a bad judge of character. Jane was always spot-on.”
One of her standards, it seemed, was whether a candidate was attracted to her. “When somebody was applying for a job there,” recalled Charlie Perry, “she would flirt with them. On the basis of his reaction, she’d tell Jann whether to hire him or not. If they didn’t react, she thought that was suspicious. If they reacted the wrong way, that was a no-no.”
But there was also the little matter of her financial stake in Rolling Stone, the Schindelheim ownership of nearly half the company. Were Jane to leave Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone might fall into ownership dispute, threatening his control.
That summer, Jann and Jane stayed with Rolling Stone’s L.A. correspondent Jerry Hopkins, who was living in Laurel Canyon with his new wife and seemed to Wenner blissful and content. “When I came back from that trip, I was like, ‘They are very happily married,’ ” said Wenner. “And all of my friends had said how much they liked Jane. People would come up to me and say, ‘She’s terrific, you should marry her.’ I saw how happily married these two were, and I discussed that with Jane, and I said, ‘Let’s get married.’ ” (Hopkins would later divorce, move to Honolulu, and take up with a transsexual prostitute.)
After meeting him, Jane’s parents were impressed by Wenner’s ambition, especially her father, whose approval was important to Jane. Plagued by self-doubt, she clung to Wenner’s promise of fidelity, even as she worried over the “un-ease that mocks at our relationship.”In Rolling Stone, their