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 her more like his acolyte than a girlfriend. Wenner returned her love letters with red grammatical corrections. Indeed, he tried editing her into an outline of his mother, noting she had the same initials as Sim Wenner and buying her replicas of his mother’s clothes. Wenner was convinced he would marry Weigel once she graduated in 1964, a year after him. In Wenner’s yearbook, Weigel wrote in floral cursive, “I love you very deeply, I honestly do. With all my love, forever and ever.” (Margaret Chadwick congratulated Wenner on the yearbook but also advised, “Stop and think first my impulsive friend.”)
When Wenner and Weigel returned to San Francisco for the summer, Weigel served as Wenner’s entrée to the small and provincial Bay Area society set, children of local industry and politics who mingled at lavish debutante balls. Wenner was enchanted by the Cotillion, the seasonal rite of house parties hosted by parents of young women and culminating in a grand ballroom party at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in the winter. The swanning of the elite was closely monitored in the social pages of the Chronicle, complete with photo spreads and boldfaced captions, and Wenner read it religiously. “The wealth was on display, the booze, the big settings, young kids in black ties,” said Wenner. “I was just dazzled by it.”
Wenner was a quick study, absorbing the backgrounds of the local gentry. There was Ned Topham from the Spreckels sugar fortune; James Pike Jr., son of the famous Episcopalian bishop and civil rights spokesman; John Warnecke, son of John Carl Warnecke, the architect of the Kennedy memorial. A few, like Richard Black, whose father worked for the California energy company PG&E, traveled in the same social orbit as the Hearst family, and Black’s stories of visiting the Hearst ranch in San Simeon were potent fuel for Wenner’s imagination.
Meanwhile, Sim Wenner was living in Potrero Hill, at the time a largely black and industrial neighborhood that was becoming a bohemian enclave. After selling her share of the Baby Formulas business, she was socializing with a literary set at Berkeley, including beat writer Herbert Gold and artist and bullfighter Barnaby Conrad, and dating the Wenner family doctor, Sandor Burstein. Susie Weigel was fascinated by the unconventional divorcée but appalled by her lack of warmth for Jann. “She had three children and one bedroom,” said Weigel, later Susan Pasternak. “I was so upset for Jann because there was no place for the kids. And Jann wasn’t wanted by either [parent].”
Weigel, who went on to become a Manhattan psychoanalyst, had a simple, powerful theory of her boyfriend’s psychology. “It was all about Sim Wenner,” she said. “There was no room for anybody else except her. I think Jann internalized that. The only way he was going to have room for himself was to create himself.”
Through
