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, sisters, brothers . . . There is only one thing that can be changed, or rather, only one thing that you can change, and that is yourself.” (“Maternally yours,” she signed the letter.)
As soon as she was able, Sim Wenner freed herself entirely from motherhood by sending Jann’s sisters, Kate and Martha, away to boarding schools in Vermont and Colorado, respectively. The house on Rainbow Road was sold, and Ed Wenner moved to Southern California. Wenner would never forget his mother’s parting words: “You’re on your own, Buster Brown.”
•
“I WAS UNHAPPY,” Wenner wrote in an English paper about his first year at Chadwick School. “The year was miserable.”
But he had arrived at the right place. A way station for the progeny of the wealthy and famous from Bel-Air and Hollywood, Chadwick was a progressive private school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, nestled like a bucolic camp at the top of a shady hill. Founded in 1935 by Margaret and Joseph Chadwick, it enrolled fewer than four hundred students, with only fifty-two in Wenner’s class. In his first year at Chadwick—or “Chadsuck,” as he called it—Jann Wenner spent weekends sitting in his dormitory watching TV alone, a picture of his mother on his desk, sulking over the divorce. Ed had a new girlfriend, a nurse from South Texas named Dorothy, who recalled meeting Jann in a garage in San Francisco that year: A straw hat on his head, no shoes on his feet, he looked to her like Huckleberry Finn. She told Ed that his son would be famous one day because he “had the courage to be different.”
For Wenner, Chadwick was, among other things, an education in celebrity. He was surrounded by the children of movie stars and famous directors: the offspring of actor Glenn Ford; the daughter of Jack Benny; the children of George Burns and Gracie Allen; and Yul Brynner’s son, Rock, with whom Wenner roomed in ninth grade. In a letter to his mother, Wenner described waltzing with Liza Minnelli at a school dance. “Are the movie stars’ kids the big shots in school?” she asked. “You sound impressed by them.”
He was—very. He later claimed Minnelli was his first girlfriend at Chadwick and that they held hands for a week. “I would go home with friends on the weekends, and that was always great, to stay at someone’s fabulous house in Beverly Hills,” recalled Wenner. “It was the first time I saw these extremely big, extravagant houses. I stayed at Dean Martin’s house; I was friends with the Martin girls.”
Chadwick was accepting in a way his own home wasn’t. He said being surrounded by wealth, and by Jews, made him feel more at ease. “I felt at home at last,” he said. “They became my family.”
With Wenner, there was a lot to accept. Bristling with insecurity, he regularly insulted the other students and teachers and gained a reputation as a prickly braggart. “He can be, and frequently is, extremely cruel to his classmates,” reported one teacher, “and his actions show an alarming lack of integrity.” His English instructor, Bill Holland, dubbed him Nox, for obnoxious, and the nickname stuck. “The obnoxiousness was very interesting,” said Wenner’s friend Bill Belding. “I originally attributed it to his being short, but looking back, it was his way of getting attention.”
Wenner was advised by school counselors to tamp down his attacks. “I was not Mr. Popular at that point,” said Wenner. “I didn’t become popular until the tenth grade when I decided to work on it.”
Wenner
