at an early Grateful Dead show:
I stood close to the band and let the vibrations engulf me. They started in my toes and every inch of me was quivering with them . . . they made a journey through my nervous system (I remember picturing myself as one of the charts we had studied in biology which shows the nerve network), traveling each tiny path, finally reaching the top of my head, where they exploded in glorious patterns of color and line.
Wolfe would portray Kaufman, who joined Kesey’s Merry Pranksters that summer, as Mary Microgram. And so Ms. Microgram had to laugh at Wenner’s absurd proposal. “Well, you’re not going to be able to write that paper!” she explained to Wenner. He would need a guide, she said. “How about you?” Wenner flirted.
On the way to his apartment on Carleton Street, they stopped by a dormitory and a friend’s house to borrow a kitten and a stack of LPs, including a modal folk guitar album by Sandy Bull called Inventions. When they got to Wenner’s apartment, the living room was littered with wine glasses from a sorority party he’d thrown the night before. “We went into his room, and [he] took this acid,” Kaufman recalled. “We were just talking, and the kitten was playing, and then the acid started to come on. I had the Sandy Bull music on, and he was like, ‘Take that off, I can’t stand it.’ ”
Freaking out, Wenner opened his closet door, stepped inside, closed the door, and stood by himself in a laundry basket full of starched shirts. “And I said, ‘That’s fine, if you need me, I’m here,’ ” said Kaufman. “He was in there for a long time.”
•
RAINBOW ROAD.
That was the name the Wenner family gave the woody drive leading to their new house. In 1951, Edward Wenner, a stout man with dungarees hiked to his chest, bulldozed the grounds himself. His wife, Sim, a slim and attractive woman who wore her hair short, had paid $3,000 for the five acres, and Ed banged out a ranch-style dwelling with exposed beams and large windows, a flagstone fireplace, a playroom for the children with a tiled checkerboard on the floor, an office for his wife, a carport for their imported sports cars—her Alfa Romeo, his MG. A towering oak tree stood out front. It was their homemade version of the California dream, nestled in the base of a land preserve in rural San Rafael, eighteen miles north of San Francisco.
All this was paid for by Baby Formulas Inc., the business Ed Wenner came to California to create. At one time, he would claim his company fed 90 percent of the babies within a hundred miles of San Francisco. In 1946, Ed and Sim had arrived in San Francisco with a baby of their own, Jan Simon Wenner. For years to come, the son would look at 8-millimeter home movies of this life on Rainbow Road—his mother filming him as he hopped around the patio in a cowboy hat while his father dug a hole for the swimming pool—and craft a dewy vision of his childhood. “It was a pretty idyllic and archetypal childhood for that time,” he said. “They came from the East Coast, out of the military, out to golden California to find postwar fame and fortune; I was the first child of the baby boom.”
Wenner’s early memories of childhood included baby bottles moving down the assembly line in his father’s factory on Sacramento and Laurel and his mother playing Moonlight Sonata on the piano when he went to bed at night. There were weekends at Squaw Valley, near Tahoe, where his father taught him skiing, which became a lifelong passion for Jann Wenner. There were the dogs, Adlai and Estes, named after liberal Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver. There was his mother writing on her Olivetti typewriter while listening to the Joe McCarthy hearings on the radio.
But Rainbow Road was as much an escape as an arrival. The Wenners’ new son was born only a few months before they left New York, at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan at 12:25 p.m. on January 7, 1946. In Wenner’s baby book, his mother, Sim, describes being startled by “the enormity of his nose” and reports his eyes as blue; Ed believed they were brown. (They were blue.) In a single stroke, Sim both blessed and cursed her son by naming him Jan, writing that his name referred to the Roman mythological figure Janus, a byword for betrayal and contradiction. “Two-headed,” she wrote. “Gatekeeper of heaven.” (As a teenager, Jan would add the n to his first name.)
Sim would describe the birth of her son as a time of intense loneliness: The bars on the hospital windows, she told Wenner in 1982, were all that kept them both alive. “I would have jumped,” she said. Wenner’s first pediatrician was Dr. Benjamin Spock, the progressive doctor and civil rights activist, who published the best-selling Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care the same year Wenner was born. Sim, whose name was shorthand for her maiden name, Simmons, came from a well-off family who lived on the Upper West Side near Central Park. Her parents were first cousins. Sim’s mother, Zillah, came to New York from Australia, where her parents were unsuccessful merchants. Sim’s father, Maurice Simmons, grew up poor in New York, but he shone with ambition: After graduating from City College in Manhattan, he served in the army during the Spanish-American War and helped found the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America. He became a judge in New York and gave the nominating speech for Al Smith’s first run for office in the early twentieth century. Zillah, whom he married in 1919, ran an antiques store that sold silverware.
The Simmonses poured their immigrant hopes into their firstborn son, Robert, but the birth of their second child, a daughter, two years later, would mark the abrupt end of the marriage. A serial philanderer, Maurice had an affair with the family governess in a drama that actually made headlines: The New York Times reported that Zillah filed for divorce, the governess was arrested for physically attacking Zillah with a dog leash, and Maurice sued Zillah’s sister-in-law for libel after she called him a “scoundrel.” By the time Sim was born in 1922, Zillah was so bitter she couldn’t bring herself to name her daughter. “She was ‘baby girl something’ for the longest time,” said Wenner.
Sim’s childhood was shadowed by Zillah’s anger—her mother regularly threatened to throw herself out the window—and starting at age twelve, Sim was raised by her maternal grandmother, Kate Gilbert Symonds, with whom she often shared a bed. By the time she reached adolescence, Sim had developed a flinty independence and a desperation to escape her mother. Around 1940, a white knight presented himself: Edward Weiner, a stocky but sporting fellow she met on a ski trip to Stowe, Vermont.
Ed was raised by a single mother who immigrated to Boston from Russia with a penniless and ne’er-do-well husband. After Ed’s father died of cirrhosis when Ed was five, he and his mother, Mary, and an older sister made their way to Brooklyn, where Mary changed the family name to Weiner to escape her past (the previous name was forgotten, as was her husband’s name). Mary Weiner struggled with a lingerie business and tasked little Edward with helping women snap on their brassieres. Ed spent hours alone in the library, educating himself enough to start high school at thirteen. He came to hate his mother for reasons he couldn’t discuss: He had watched her and his sister spread newspapers around the shop and burn their business down to collect the insurance money—an act that nearly killed the Italian fruit vendors who lived upstairs. As he would recall later, he and his mother stood on the street and watched it burn: “The fruit merchant came out and he said, ‘You did this! You did this! You could have killed my baby!’ ”
His mother fainted. “After the fire,” Ed later said, “the Italian family moved out and she used the insurance money to expand and buy new merchandise.”
Though he spent years in denial, the event left Ed tortured with guilt. “I could have killed somebody,” he confessed in a documentary made by Jann Wenner’s sister Kate. “You don’t know what that feels like.”
“Cheating, lying—I thought that’s the way life was,” he admitted. “How could I be something people respected or admired? I’m going to be something that people will like. I’m going to make myself something.”
One day, Ed stole money from his mother’s
