to wear shoes,” said Dorothy Wenner, the woman Ed Wenner would eventually marry in the 1960s. “He refused. They had a battle going on all the time. Every time the phone rang, I was nervous. He was always in trouble.”
Once, Wenner cleaned his room to inspection standards but then hung closet hangers from the ceiling, claiming it was a piece of art inspired by the school’s own philosophy of “self-expression.” “It looked like a messy pile of shit in the middle of the room,” recalled Andy Harmon, son of Sidney Harmon, who produced the 1958 film God’s Little Acre. “And [Simon] got so angry, because everything was neat—the beds were made, we dusted, it was just ‘self-expression.’ Jann was going, ‘I’m going to fuck you so bad that you aren’t going to be able to retaliate.’ And that was the way his mind worked.” (For another infraction, Simon barred Wenner from going on the annual school ski trip, a stinging rebuke because Wenner considered himself the best skier in the school.)
But as people got to know him, they found Wenner strangely sophisticated for his age. Every morning he would open his box of Raisin Bran and count the number of raisins in the bowl, declaring the economy good or bad. “It was a revelation at that age, when I started school there, that one of my contemporaries could be that erudite and fascinating,” said Terryl Stacy, formerly Kirschke, who went to school with Wenner and later to Berkeley.
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IN 1961, Sim Wenner published a dime-store novel called Daisy about a group of swingers (“The Club”) who lived in a Northern California suburb. “But one Saturday night they ran out of kicks—so someone jumped in the pool . . . with no clothes on,” went the copy on the back flap. “From then on things were different.”
The book was a thinly veiled roman à clef. The protagonist, Daisy, was the fill-in for Wenner’s mother. Philip, the character who stands in for his father, “worked long days and played long nights, and if another woman was more sympathetic than his wife, well, he just wanted someone to talk to.” Jann Wenner didn’t have to scratch very hard to see beneath the surface: Here were the neighborhood families from San Rafael, with whom the Wenners had evidently been having affairs, if the book was to be believed. In one scene, Daisy gets pregnant and tries to have an illegal abortion, a procedure she recounts in excruciating detail:
Soon she could feel the scraping inside of her and then chopping and she thought, Oh, my God, he’s cutting it up. He’s cutting up my baby! . . .
When Daisy starts bleeding profusely and is rushed to the hospital, the hapless husband believes she’s miscarried his baby, not someone else’s. In the very last sentence of the book, Daisy acts out her rage at Philip by raising a .22 rifle to his temple and pulling the trigger.
Wenner was horrified. After reading it, he wrote back to his mother, “The last paragraph was too much for me to bear psychologically. Your bitterness must be great, whether justifiable or not, but when so openly expressed as in the précis paragraph, you must have some idea of the effect on me.”
In reality, Sim Wenner did have an abortion before the divorce. As columnist Herb Caen wrote of Daisy in the Chronicle, “definitely not for baby unless yours has a different formula than most.”
After 1959, Wenner’s mother parented him almost entirely through letters, updating him on the family business, calculating his allowance and debts, correcting his grammar, suggesting books to read, and even upbraiding him for his souvenirs from a field trip to Mexico (“A bullwhip and a switchblade knife are the weapons of a [pachuco] not a gentleman”). Wenner, feeling orphaned, wrote “Bastard” on a letter. But even as she drifted away, she was intent on conscripting her children in battles against their father, who once sued Sim to reduce child support. It was an attitude Wenner slowly absorbed and would last for years to come. “She turned us against him, me and my sister,” Wenner said. “We didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a constant, steady stream of picking away, a slow character assassination.”
His sister Kate, after years of therapy, would maintain that Wenner and his sisters were deeply impacted by their mother’s bitterness and cruelty—a view Wenner only partly subscribed to. “I came around to her point of view about how crazy our mother was,” said Wenner. “My mother is, like, according to Katie, a classic narcissist.
“I escaped the impact of it,” he insisted. “I mean, I went off on my way, fairly young, and just had this enormous success, which just overwhelmed all the need to be introspective, all the need to be insecure, it just vanished.”
In eleventh grade, Wenner added an extra n to his own first name, making it Jann, inspired, he said, by a friend named Tedd. (His mother, a sometime fabulist, would tell a different story: Wenner was embarrassed when the school delivered his luggage to the girls’ dormitory, believing “Jan” was a girl.) Wenner tried out other names as well, once asking people to call him George and printing up business cards that read “Jan G. Wenner.” In 1961, when the surf craze hit Southern California beaches, Wenner saw surf guitar legend 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
