the woman in question confirmed that Wenner used the sheet as a tablecloth, as did Wenner’s friend Robbie Leeds, who married her. “I found it to be in poor taste,” he said. “It was embarrassing. It was their intimacy, and he made a big thing about it.”
That summer, NBC made Wenner a gofer for the anchors of the NBC broadcast of the Republican National Convention, fetching coffee and Salem cigarettes for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. As Barry Goldwater accepted the nomination of the party, Wenner inhaled the rarefied air of the eastern establishment, the big three TV networks, and the power brokers of party politics glad-handing in the hallways. His media credentials gave him a sense of privilege. “They are the rabble,” he remembered saying to himself. “We are the pros.”
The following month, Wenner drove to Newport Beach to see his father. Ed Wenner had started another branch of Baby Formulas Inc. in Anaheim, south of Los Angeles, this time partnered with Carnation. Jann Wenner went out with two boarding school friends to see a movie in Pasadena: A Hard Day’s Night, the Richard Lester film depicting four long-haired lads running from ravenous female (and a few male) fans in a series of comic bits. In stylish black and white, the Beatles crashed through the screen, having more fun than anybody in human history. Ringo Starr parodied the media machine they were manipulating (Reporter: “Are you a mod or a rocker?” Ringo: “No, I’m a mocker”), and George narrowly escaped the clutches of a teen marketer who traded in “pimply hyperbole.” There was Paul, the cute one, and John, the comic rebel, who was immediately Wenner’s favorite.
Wenner had never been a die-hard music fan. His first record was a 45 of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. It didn’t make a lasting impression. In high school, he was a fan of Paul Anka. “He is one of the two good singers that ‘rock n’ roll’ has produced,” Wenner wrote to his grandmother, “the other being Johnny Mathis, who I like a lot.” Even the Mose Allison record was more fad than musical interest (everybody who met him in this period remembers him playing the same album). Jann Wenner missed the Beatles’ iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but in A Hard Day’s Night he saw young men who looked like himself, though infinitely more appealing. “They were young, fresh, and good-looking in that same sort of way Jack Kennedy was,” he said. “These kids who are your age, who are so alive and upbeat and joyous and taking the piss out of everybody—man, that’s how life should be.”
His high school friend Susan Andrews, daughter of actor Dana Andrews (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), recalled driving to Los Angeles with Wenner in his VW Beetle, windows down and wind in their hair as Wenner shout-sang Beatles lyrics from the window. Hey! You’ve got to hiiiide your love a-way . . . Wenner was a committed mod, but he loved the rockers, too. Andrews’s mother was confused when she got a credit card receipt for a tank of gas that Wenner had evidently signed “Mick Jagger.”
The arrival of the Beatles and the Stones dovetailed with larger forces at work at Berkeley, where youth activists were challenging institutional power for the first time. In October 1964, a former student set up a table of civil rights literature in front of Berkeley’s administration building, protesting the school’s ban on political activism on campus. Jack Weinberg, who coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” was arrested by university police, prompting Mario Savio, a campus activist, to scale a police car and give a series of impassioned speeches on the First Amendment rights of students, sparking a thirty-two-hour protest. The fight between the students and the administration was national news, and Wenner dove headlong into the mix, attending protests and racing his audio recordings back to NBC News in time for the evening broadcasts. He positioned himself as the inside man. The day Savio gave his most stirring speech in December 1964, imploring activist students to put their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” of the “machine” of society, Wenner looked on from the steps as Joan Baez sang Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side”—the first time he heard a Dylan song, he said. A few days later, Wenner would appear in AP photos chasing Savio up the stairs of the Greek Theatre, boyish in a trench coat, tape recorder strapped to his chest.
Wenner was electrified and proud when a right-wing newspaper, citing his membership in SLATE, called him a communist sympathizer. “I was ID’d as a red,” he said. But his true convictions lay with the “apparatus” of NBC News. When the police beat and arrested protesters at a sit-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel—the site of the Cotillion balls—Wenner had run away “before the busts went down.” Indeed, Wenner rarely failed to mention his NBC job at parties, pushing the outer limits of his role there. The head of NBC News in Los Angeles accused him of misrepresenting himself to the administration at Berkeley, issuing an angry memo reminding the staff that “Jann Wenner is not a correspondent. He is not a reporter. He is not a field producer. He is a campus stringer.”
But Wenner had already managed to capitalize on his position by publishing a long account of the Free Speech Movement from the point of view of a news stringer who sympathized with the students. He had briefly dated the daughter of Jack Vietor, heir to the Jell-O fortune, who published San Francisco magazine; Wenner convinced him to run his story about the protests. “He was the most ambitious person I’ve ever met,” said Jane Kenner, whom Wenner dated that winter. “It was so clear, and he didn’t care at all what kind of attention he got. He didn’t care if it was negative or positive, as long as he got attention.”
Wenner’s love life was complicated by the arrival of a handsome young society man named James Pike Jr., son of the controversial Episcopalian bishop of California, James Albert Pike. A progressive civil rights advocate, Bishop Pike became famous for putting the images of Albert Einstein and John Glenn in stained glass in his Grace Cathedral in Nob Hill. The junior Pike attended the same deb balls as Wenner and also struggled with sexual confusion. Wenner said Pike was his first gay crush. For a time, they were constant pals, going on a road trip to Mexico to smuggle a kilo of marijuana back over the border in the car door, all the while tortured by their desires. “At that age, being gay wasn’t an identity or an option,” said Wenner. “The times that Jim and I came close to making that breakthrough, I don’t think either of us knew there was a breakthrough to be made. We were running away from it, as much as we might have wanted it.”
In a lightly fictionalized account of his life at Berkeley, Wenner would describe a character much like Pike getting an erection while the two wrestled in bed. Wenner was “afraid to tell him I love him,” he wrote. “I wanted to make love to him.” Their arrested romance did not go unobserved. Jane Kenner, who had also dated Pike, viewed Jann and Jim as rivals. “Very few people liked Jann,” she wrote in 1966. “They envied him his job as campus reporter for NBC, and his aura of superiority was thought obnoxious. Jann and Jim each had several qualities that the other needed, and in turn they needed each other very much.”
Friends whispered that Pike was impotent. Wenner had no such problem, but Kenner said “he received no pleasure from making love.” Frightened by his own desires, Wenner insulted Pike at parties and paraded new girlfriends in front of him, as if to mock his sexual confusion. “It was about proving to himself that he was hetero,” said Kenner. “He was trying to prove that to himself.”
If his sexuality was unresolved, his ambition was not. Wenner published another story in San Francisco called “Marijuana, Who’s Turned On?” Wenner tried pot for the first time in December 1964, around the time he bought Beatles ’65, and fell over laughing at a jar of mustard in the refrigerator. He was an instant convert. “A close observer will tell you that ‘nearly everyone is turning on,’ ” he wrote, sprinkling his story with anonymous stories from socialite friends at Berkeley and Stanford. “It is not unusual to come across madras-shirted students sitting beneath the house picture of a former U.S. president and ‘blowing grass.’ At least nine fraternities, including nearly all of the ‘best houses,’ have pledged ‘potheads.’ ”
The story quoted the vice-principal of a local high school blaming the
