was driving a Porsche and living in this beautiful house, hip and zen, beautiful sound system . . . I thought he was smart as can be but too ambitious. I got the feeling he would sell me out in a second.”
One day, two letters arrived from an old friend in London: Robin Gracey. One was for Linda Schindelheim and the other for Jann Wenner. Evidently suspicious, Jane asked Linda to boil a pot of water and steam open the seal on Wenner’s letter, which revealed their secret love affair. “Jane discovered it one day in my files while I was away,” recalled Wenner.
Wenner’s gay affair was a bruising revelation for Jane, “terrifying and destroying,” as Wenner described it later. He swore to her that his dalliance with Gracey was a one-off and proclaimed his commitment to her. “Once Jane [found out],” said Wenner, “I said, ‘Look, I will stop. I will put an end to this.’ And I did.”
With his star rising in every other way, Wenner could not afford to lose Jane. There was her beauty and allure, of course, but also her calming effect on Wenner, the witty way she called Jann “Ya Ya” and casually punctured his ego at parties. Jane made Wenner palatable to people otherwise put off by his hyperactivity and forceful personality. She had a keen judgment, but she was not judgmental. Her feline presence, coy and ironic, invited confession and gave an impression of intimacy that Jann Wenner could not offer. There was also her caretaking eye. “Jann was always, in hiring, trying to bring in these people who were just horrible,” said Laurel Gonsalves, a former secretary for the Steve Miller Band who went to work at Rolling Stone in 1969. “Just losers. Kind of like a bad judge of character. Jane was always spot-on.”
One of her standards, it seemed, was whether a candidate was attracted to her. “When somebody was applying for a job there,” recalled Charlie Perry, “she would flirt with them. On the basis of his reaction, she’d tell Jann whether to hire him or not. If they didn’t react, she thought that was suspicious. If they reacted the wrong way, that was a no-no.”
But there was also the little matter of her financial stake in Rolling Stone, the Schindelheim ownership of nearly half the company. Were Jane to leave Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone might fall into ownership dispute, threatening his control.
That summer, Jann and Jane stayed with Rolling Stone’s L.A. correspondent Jerry Hopkins, who was living in Laurel Canyon with his new wife and seemed to Wenner blissful and content. “When I came back from that trip, I was like, ‘They are very happily married,’ ” said Wenner. “And all of my friends had said how much they liked Jane. People would come up to me and say, ‘She’s terrific, you should marry her.’ I saw how happily married these two were, and I discussed that with Jane, and I said, ‘Let’s get married.’ ” (Hopkins would later divorce, move to Honolulu, and take up with a transsexual prostitute.)
After meeting him, Jane’s parents were impressed by Wenner’s ambition, especially her father, whose approval was important to Jane. Plagued by self-doubt, she clung to Wenner’s promise of fidelity, even as she worried over the “un-ease that mocks at our relationship.”In Rolling Stone, their mutual desires for wealth and status and the finer things in life came together. They saw themselves in each other, like a twin gazing into a gilt-framed mirror and experiencing an affectionate familiarity. Jane’s devotion to Wenner could be seen as a kind of vicarious grandiosity. And wasn’t that love? And so Jane agreed to marry Jann, but not without trepidation. “She said later she was really doubtful and dubious about that,” recalled Wenner.
Wenner had his own apprehensions. By this time, Denise Kaufman had become close friends with Wenner’s sister Martha, who had changed her name to Merlyn and was running a hippie day school in Marin County, living in teepees and teaching astrology and the I Ching. In the days leading up to his marriage, Wenner took Kaufman on a drive in his Porsche, and they parked in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It was pretty emotional,” she said. “I was like, ‘Are you really gonna do this?’ and he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ It was poignant.”
On their wedding day, Jane cut Wenner’s hair with a bowl, making him look like a little prince. He wore a bow tie, Jane a white linen dress. It was so casual that on the way to the ceremony at a synagogue next to the Fillmore, the Wenners ran into Bill Graham and invited him to attend. John Warnecke was the best man, and the piano player was Jim Peterman from the Steve Miller Band (whose playing Wenner characterized in Rolling Stone as “precise and heavy”). It was a quick ceremony before a rabbi, and afterward they went back to the Wenners’ house and got stoned. None of their parents attended. Because Wenner’s parents hated each other, Jane didn’t invite her own parents, which she later regretted. Wenner’s mother, who came out to her kids as a lesbian in the late 1960s, also made it clear she disliked Jane. For their wedding present, Sim gave them back her modest stock in Rolling Stone, “the cheapest thing she could get away with,” said Wenner.
Nonetheless, Jane changed her last name to Wenner and removed her name from the Rolling Stone masthead so she could devote her time to being a homemaker, decorating their apartment on Rhode Island Street. Afterward, Jann wrote a four-page letter to Robin Gracey saying he was closing the book on their friendship, as painful as it was to him. According to Gracey, the letter ranged through Wenner’s private desires and guilt as he tried justifying his decision. “He’s kind of manufacturing his own security,” Gracey recounted. “I think he was trying to say, ‘Now I have a relationship with Janie, at another time I would have had one with you, and da-dee-da.’ ”
Wenner, said Gracey, told him that “he now has to put the letter in an envelope, seal it up, and get on with the life that he’s really leading, which is a married life. But there’s plenty else in the letter which suggests that things are not so secure as that.”
“He was unsure whether he was gay or bisexual or which way he was,” Gracey added.
(Gracey still possessed the letter, but Wenner asked him to keep it private because the contents would be “damaging,” he said.)
For a honeymoon, the Wenners motored the Porsche to Tomales Bay, fifty miles north of San Francisco, but when they arrived, they decided it was boring and returned to town. As it happened, British record producer Glyn Johns was in Los Angeles recording the second Steve Miller Band album, Sailor, and had invited Wenner to hang out. In a studio down the street, Johns would be helping the Rolling Stones mix a new record called Beggars Banquet. It would be Jann Wenner’s first chance to meet Mick Jagger. Jann Wenner got on a plane and left Jane Wenner at home.
6
Sympathy for the Devil
When he first saw it, Mick Jagger was startled by the audacity of Rolling Stone—to name a newspaper after his band and not even put the Rolling Stones on the cover of the first issue? It was an affront that would stick with Jagger for the next fifty years. “Why did Jann call it that, when there was a band called that?” asked Jagger. “You could have thought something else, to be honest. I mean, I know it arised from a song name, but that’s not really the point.”
He continued, trying to discern Wenner’s logic:
The song name, I wouldn’t say, is very obscure, but it wasn’t like the name of a thing. It was a song. Of course, there’s no copyright for all these things—“Rolling Stone Ice Cream,” go ahead. But it was a magazine about rock music. It wasn’t quite the same as calling something ice cream. There’s obviously a closer connection than that. It was obviously a very close connection. You could have called it Beatles, or spelled it slightly wrong, or something like that. Now, you think about it, it sounds ridiculous. But he could have done it. It’s a back-handed compliment in one way, but it’s also a very unoriginal title.
Keith
