Jann and his adopted son, Alexander, 1985. (Camilla McGrath)
Sean Lennon (standing) and Cameron Douglas, son of Michael (right), with Alex Wenner, 1985. (Camilla McGrath)
Michael Douglas and Jann Wenner in East Hampton, 1986. (Jean Pigozzi)
Michael Douglas and Jane Wenner, 1986. (Jean Pigozzi)
Wenner and Ahmet Ertegun, 1987. (Ron Galella/Getty)
Hunter Thompson deplaning from Wenner’s Gulfstream IV, 1993. (Mark Seliger)
Wenner and his writers—William Greider, P. J. O’Rourke, and Hunter Thompson—interviewing Bill Clinton at Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1992. (Mark Seliger)
Matt Nye, cover of Out magazine, 1999. (Here Publishing Inc.)
Portrait of Jann Wenner, 2000. (Mark Seliger)
Bonnie Fuller was named Advertising Age’s Editor of the Year in 2002 after reviving Us Weekly. (Larry Busacca/Getty)
In March 2004, Jann Wenner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Mick Jagger and Ahmet Ertegun. (Kevin Kane/Getty)
Wenner with his son Gus, 2009. (Mark Seliger)
Wenner interviewing President Barack Obama at the White House, 2010. (Mark Seliger)
Bono, Jann Wenner, Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2009. (Mark Seliger)
Jann Wenner and his son Gus, 2017. (Jesse Dittmar)
Jane Wenner in Amagansett, 2016. (Theo Wenner)
Prologue: Get Back
John Lennon was in a movie theater, crying.
The image of Paul, singing from the rooftop in the final ten minutes, had set him off. Jann Wenner shifted in his seat. In the darkness of a tiny movie house in San Francisco, the Beatle, Wenner’s hero, whose iconic spectacles and nose adorned the first issue of his rock-and-roll newspaper, Rolling Stone, had tears running down his cheeks as light flickered off his glasses. And next to him was Yoko Ono, the bête noire of Beatledom, raven hair shrouding her porcelain face, also weeping.
It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, and John and Yoko and Jann and his wife, Jane Wenner, were watching the final scenes of Let It Be, the documentary about the Beatles’ acrimonious recording session for their last album. John and Yoko were deep into primal scream therapy, their emotions raw and close to the surface, and the image of a bearded Paul McCartney singing from the rooftop of Apple Records, against a cold London wind, was too much to bear.
Get back to where you once belonged . . .
For Wenner, the twenty-four-year-old boy wonder of the new rock press, who worshipped the Beatles as passionately as any kid in America, this was a dream, sitting here in the dark, wiping away his own tears at the twilight of the greatest band of all time, elbow to elbow with “the most famous person in the world, for God’s sake.”
“And it’s just the four of us in the center of an empty theater,” marveled Wenner, “all kind of huddled together, and John is crying his eyes out.”
Lennon and Ono had driven up from Los Angeles to meet the San Francisco fanboy who had bottled the counterculture and now commanded 200,000 readers. Wenner received the couple like visiting royalty to his spanking-new offices on Third Street, the clatter of typewriters going silent as they walked through the cubbies of writers and editors, bushy-haired men in ties and Levi’s who paused from parsing Captain Beefheart and Pete Townshend to gawk. Wenner’s unabashed idol worship had so often embarrassed them—starfucker, they grumbled behind his back—but now here he was with an actual Beatle. And Yoko! Who could deny this? The hirsute supercouple were smaller than anybody imagined, but John Lennon still towered over Jann Wenner, who at five six so often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire.
“I mean, it’s everything you ever worshipped or cherished from afar,” said Wenner. “You try and be as natural as possible because I don’t think people want the worship and the ‘gee whiz.’ And you’re just mainly curious and fascinated and hanging on to every word but also trying to be sociable, entertaining, and good company and not be groupie-ish and slavish.”
Wenner guided them to his back office, past the plastic marijuana plant and the picture of Mickey Mouse shooting heroin, laboring to project the air of a self-possessed press baron inured to celebrity. He looked every bit the modish publisher, plump in his button-down oxford and blue jeans, shoulder-length hair fashionably styled, a True cigarette smoking in his fingers. Wenner personally moved the couple from the Hilton to the more upscale Huntington Hotel, in Nob Hill, and then took them sightseeing in Wenner’s convertible Porsche, hoping to impress. “People like John Lennon,” Wenner would say, “want to feel they are dealing with somebody important.”
It worked, but maybe not for the reason he imagined: Yoko Ono’s memory of the weekend would be Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, a chicly dressed waif with sculpted cheekbones and an insolent gaze. “I thought, how lucky is this man!” said Ono. “What did he do to get her?”
The women were crammed in the back of the Porsche, while Wenner and Lennon talked up front and Wenner drove through the hills where Ono once lived as a child in the 1930s with her Japanese immigrant parents, scions of imperial wealth. While he casually offered advice on promoting Lennon’s promised “primal” album and inquired about their lifestyle in Los Angeles ( Wenner recalled John and Yoko living in the mansion featured in The Beverly Hillbillies), Wenner found the proximity to John Fucking Lennon as intoxicating as a drug. Here was the selfsame Beatle who’d cracked open Wenner’s world in 1964 when, on summer break from UC Berkeley, he first saw A Hard Day’s Night in a Pasadena movie theater. The sly smile and scabrous wit had seemed to wink across the screen directly at him. Wenner even named his aborted novel for a Beatles lyric—“Now These Days Are Gone,” a nostalgic, Holden Caulfield– at– Berkeley roman à clef. From the very first issue of Rolling Stone, Lennon was the lodestar: In his first editorial on November 9, 1967, Wenner declared that Rolling Stone was “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces,” proving his point with a cover image of Lennon from his role as Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s absurdist antiwar comedy, How I Won the War. “Since 1965,” wrote Wenner for an issue naming Lennon Rolling Stone’s “Man of the Year,” a few months before John and Yoko’s visit, “the Beatles have been the single dominant force in the new social thought and style for which the Sixties will forever be remembered, just as Charlie Chaplin was the public figure of the Twenties.”
And so every moment with John Lennon felt like a story Wenner would tell for the rest of his life, a page of history he’d stepped into—indeed, that he would publish. Every detail of the weekend seemed charged with significance: the white sneakers dangling from Lennon’s flight bag, the look of shock on the bellboy’s face at the snobbish hotel when Lennon casually tossed him the bag. Over lunch, Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him. “People
