was an expression of Wenner’s pursuit of fame and power. He reinvented celebrity around youth culture, which equated confession and frank sexuality with integrity and authenticity. The post-1960s vision of celebrity meant that every printed word of John Lennon’s unhappiness and anything Bob Dylan said or did now had the news primacy of a State of the Union address. It meant that Hunter Thompson could make every story he ever wrote, in essence, about himself. It also meant that climbing into bed with Mick Jagger was only worth doing if you had a Nikon handy. Self-image was the new aphrodisiac.
The 1970s was “the Me Decade,” in Wolfe’s famous coinage, defined by endless “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self.” This was a fundamentally Californian mandate, sprung from the halls of Berkeley and the hills of Hollywood, where a devotion to hedonism was baked into the West’s culture of escapism and reinvention. That made Jann Wenner a walking bellwether, his own curiosities and desires a perfect editorial template for Rolling Stone. “He leads with his appetites—I take, I see, I have,” said Art Garfunkel, a close friend in the 1970s.
From a lavishly appointed Victorian on California Street in San Francisco, Wenner and his wife hosted a rolling drug salon during the 1970s, mixing pleasure with Rolling Stone business with the stars of the moment, whether Michael Douglas or Jackson Browne or John Belushi. A core irony of Rolling Stone was that its founder celebrated every kind of personal liberty imaginable but his own. But his hidden homosexuality—and that of his chief photographer—nonetheless opened Rolling Stone to the currents of the decade, when androgyny and ambiguous sexuality were in vogue. Wenner understood innately the longing of young men who papered their bedrooms with posters of a shirtless Robert Plant. Being gay, said Wenner, “gave me a good and finer appreciation of the sexuality of the guys up there on the stage, and I could understand that in a way that other people didn’t, to understand how sexual this whole thing was. All of rock and roll is sex, defined. I got it more. And I could see it; I was open to it. I was enjoying it. Much like the girls, and much like the guys who may not admit it, but it was really sexual.”
Exploiting the talents of Annie Leibovitz, who was in love with his wife, Wenner could divine the homosexual subtext of a hetero rock culture through acts of image making, personally manning the turnstile to his distinct American moment—Rolling Stone’s cover. Leibovitz’s nude photograph of teen idol David Cassidy on the cover in 1972—with a Playboy-inspired centerfold inside—was a signal moment, selling thousands of copies of Rolling Stone and establishing a new standard for self-exposure (and self-reinvention). It was also something Jann Wenner enjoyed looking at. Wenner turned the cover of Rolling Stone into a rock-and-roll confession box, with Paul Simon, George Harrison, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young all eager to climb inside the Oxford border and expose their dramas, and very often their flesh, so as to be sanctified by the essential self-seriousness of Rolling Stone. And as the cover became the prime sales pitch for selling records, and the prime sales pitch of Wenner’s magazine, Wenner made Rolling Stone into a cultural event, adding vibrant colors (a rainbow border around a fedora-wearing Truman Capote), moody studio portraiture (Kris Kristofferson in shadow), winking humor (a Vargas girl riding a silver dildo for a Steely Dan profile), adventurous illustration (Daniel Ellsberg as a Roman bust), and liberal doses of insouciant sexuality whenever possible (Wenner commanded Annie Leibovitz to make Linda Ronstadt look like a “Tijuana whore”).
None of this was exactly unique to Rolling Stone—art director George Lois pioneered pop irony at Esquire; Hugh Hefner liberated sexuality in Playboy—but Rolling Stone authenticated celebrity in a new way. Under Rick Griffin’s banner, Wenner could place Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, George McGovern, and even John Denver in the same continuum as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. It was all prefigured by the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s—a cavalcade of personalities and icons, seemingly disconnected but all flowing forth from a single fountain of youth.
And as the youth culture took over, Wenner built up a network of powerful co-conspirators: important writers and photographers (Tom Wolfe and Dick Avedon), ambitious record men and talent agents (David Geffen, Ahmet Ertegun), Hollywood executives and movie stars (Barry Diller, Richard Gere), Washington power brokers and politicians (Richard Goodwin, Ted Kennedy), and, his very favorites, the social matrons and celebrity icons in whose rarefied spheres gay men were welcome (Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie Onassis). This was a formula for Wenner’s success. “The friendships I made with people, plus their desire to have publicity, plus the demonstrated integrity and value of Rolling Stone, it all was easy to do,” said Wenner, hastening to add a last ingredient: “And my own charm.”
The result was that from 1971 to 1977, Jann Wenner was the most important magazine editor in America, shepherding the generational plotlines of the 1960s into a rambling biweekly serial of rock-and-roll news, hard and outrageous (and impossibly long) journalism, left-wing political opinion, sexual liberation, and drugs—always drugs. It was a man’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishized in it; it was a left-wing magazine, though it was tempered by Wenner’s devotion to the establishment. And the success of Rolling Stone would eventually make Wenner a full-blooded figure of that establishment. Time magazine named him one of the Top 200 “Faces for the Future” in America in 1974, among the youngest on the list at twenty-eight (“a brilliant, brash autocrat with an eye for lucrative markets and talented writers”).
By the time Wenner moved his magazine to New York from San Francisco in 1977, rock and roll had become so mainstream—and profitable—it had already begun producing its own rebellion: punk. But with his lock hold on the music establishment, Wenner could navigate through cultural storms. Rolling Stone was a formula Wenner could recalibrate from year to year, absorbing, and exploiting, any new trend. While he recruited feisty new talents like Charles M. Young—a tall, lanky punk devotee they dubbed “the Reverend”—to cover the Sex Pistols, a band Wenner despised, Wenner could test his influence elsewhere, first in Washington, D.C., where he used his readership as a kind of youth lobby to expand his political influence, and then in Hollywood, where he tried mightily to reinvent himself as a movie producer while funneling favored movie stars to the cover of Rolling Stone. Indeed, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the definitive youth movie of the 1980s, was launched partly because Wenner realized he knew nothing about what modern young people were doing and so sent reporter Cameron Crowe to find out.
When California Republican Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, Wenner had so thoroughly stamped his times with the Rolling Stone worldview that he would arrive at the preppy green lawns of the new decade like a late Roman emperor, haloed by glittering friends and plump with self-satisfaction. His unembarrassed appetite for stardom and excess had made him an object of scorn and parody but also a rich man—and right on cue as his generation was embracing the “greed is good” ethos, wealth and power as their natural birthright. And he had proven that his original insight of 1967 was an abiding one: that the 1960s were, at bottom, a business. This didn’t mean the original idealism was bogus—only that it was a thing you could stay tethered to through commerce, and specifically a subscription to Rolling Stone. For Wenner, idealism was never the enemy of money. “It was a false dichotomy,” said Wenner. “Well, it’s America! Rock and roll is America.”
In the 1980s, rock and roll became an all-powerful institution—the opposite of revolutionary, except in the sense that Jann Wenner had turned the youth revolution into a spectacularly profitable enterprise. From there, Wenner went through all the baby-boomer stations of the cross, and made journalism out of them. He launched a parenting magazine when he had children (Family Life) and a men’s magazine for his midlife crisis ( Men’s Journal). He would come out of the closet as a gay man in the spring of 1995, leaving Jane for a fashion designer named Matt Nye, when the vogue for coming out was in. By then, Wenner himself was interviewing sitting presidents, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993 and shuttling Bob Dylan in his private jet to the televised stage of the Rock and Roll Hall of
