matter what I did, I had to do something bigger, tougher, to prove myself,” he said. “I had to compensate for being poor and growing up in the slums.”
At the dawn of America’s entrance into World War II, Ed’s ambition was the antidote for Sim’s desperation. After Ed enlisted in the air force, Sim joined a women’s volunteer unit. And while on spring break from Hunter College, she flew to Alabama, where Ed was stationed, and they got married in an air base chapel in the spring of 1941.
At first, the couple lived apart. Sim was training as a supply officer at Radcliffe College in Cambridge when she discovered what she would call her “homosexual gene,” having an affair with a fellow volunteer. The woman, nicknamed Smitty, asked Sim to run away with her to California. Sim confessed the affair to Ed, who was surprisingly understanding and offered to end the marriage. But Sim would say she wanted a “normal” life with children—not one living as a lesbian pariah—and went with Ed. To cement the decision, they decided to have a baby. In the spring of 1945, while Sim and Ed were furloughed in New York, they conceived Jann Wenner on a train trip to Chicago. After he was discharged from the air force, Ed became a traveling salesman of surplus mattresses for recycling into paper mulch. With Jan Simon Wenner in utero, they moved to Elmhurst, Queens.
Ed and Sim rejected Judaism, viewing the old-world culture as an embarrassing millstone. In Wenner’s baby book, Sim wrote that “any religious ceremonies will be of his own choosing and not ours.” For Ed Wenner, “the words ‘Jew’ and ‘poor’ were synonymous,” Kate Wenner wrote in Setting Fires, a loose fictionalization of their father’s history published in 2000. If they were going to reinvent themselves, they had to get away. Around the time Jann was born, Ed and Sim changed the family name to Wenner from Weiner. “The explanation was that he didn’t want us as children teased,” said Jann Wenner. But it also obscured the Jewish background that Ed resented.
In 1946, Ed dreamed up a business idea, inspired by a story he’d read in a magazine: The babies of British war brides, while on boats to America, had gotten sick from drinking unsterilized milk. “It hit me right then,” Ed told Newsweek in 1961, “terminal sterilization had possibilities as a commercial venture.” So in 1947, they put Jann Wenner in the back of their Dodge Coupe and drove west, part of a great postwar migration to California. “Of course,” wrote Sim Wenner in a memoir published in 1960, “that’s where any real pioneer headed in those days. It was the land of gold, a state littered with patio pools and producing parents.”
After a period in the city, they settled north of San Francisco in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, and Ed Wenner rented a former butcher’s shop with a freezer, spending nights in a sleeping bag while he figured out how to sterilize and bottle formula. To sell the idea, he peddled a twenty-five-page “Mother’s Guide” describing the benefits of formula but then shifted to bulk sales to Bay Area hospitals. Despite her skepticism, Sim’s mother, Zillah, lent them money to expand, and Ed bought a green truck, had a stork stenciled on it, and began delivering formula.
The business boomed, and so did the Wenners. Sim became pregnant again not long after they moved to California and gave birth to Kate Wenner in 1947. Two years later, she had another girl, Martha. But as Ed became consumed with the business, Sim began to think of motherhood as both too much and not enough. When Jann Wenner was two, she began going to work as the office manager for Baby Formulas, leaving the kids at home with a series of African American nannies. Sim Wenner later maintained that her motherly remove made her son independent. He could scramble an egg when he was three years old, she claimed.
However it happened, what nobody could deny was that Jann Wenner was precocious in the extreme. Short and pudgy, with a prickly intelligence and a bracing self-confidence, he was kicked out of nearly every school he attended until the age of eleven. “A pain in the ass,” his father said. He could be unpredictable and cruel. In third grade, he physically attacked the principal of his public school. A year-end review by his teacher characterized eight-year-old Jann as unusually intelligent but with a compulsion to violence. “In group situations he tries to dominate,” his teacher wrote, “withdrawing when the group does not recognize his leadership. He attempts to make friends by teasing, which has recently resulted in fighting. Once he is involved in a fight or argument he becomes extremely angry and attacks, with every ounce of his rather considerable strength and energy, sometimes with any ‘weapon’ convenient to his hand.”
When he was interviewed by a psychologist for his next potential school, Presidio Hill, near the Golden Gate Bridge, Wenner morphed into another child entirely—the charming little genius. “In light of this boys [sic] affable, pleasant, personal manner and his advanced social and mental maturity, it would seem that his school problem should be almost nil,” said a school psychologist in 1954. “Most probably, his greatest difficulties will arise when teachers feel threatened by his very superior intelligence.”
Wenner was kicked out of Presidio for pulling the keys out of the ignition of a school bus on a field trip.
Wenner said he felt isolated from the working-class people in San Rafael, few of whom were Jews, most of whom were less wealthy than the Wenners. But he was also desperate for attention from his absentee parents. Ed was a workaholic, once collapsing from a burst appendix because he refused to go to the hospital while waiting for a shipment of formula. Meanwhile, his mother made it a philosophical imperative to focus on herself and not her children. In her 1960 memoir, Back Away from the Stove, she codified her lack of attention into a child-rearing philosophy. “I missed a great deal of my children’s childhood and they missed a great deal of me,” she wrote. “My individual choice was to leave housewifery behind . . .
“I quit everything and concentrated on making enough money so that when the kids grew up we could have them psychoanalyzed,” she continued. “Just because a lot of statistic-happy sadists want to make you miserable if you work by pointing to correlations, don’t be taken in.”
In its way, Sim’s book foreshadowed The Feminine Mystique, published three years later by Betty Friedan. For Wenner, the product of his mother’s pioneering philosophy, it simply meant he never saw his mother. “In grammar school, all the moms were around all the time, except our mom,” he said. “We didn’t have the conventional house, or home. They would travel away on the weekends, and even in the winter, on vacations, we would be shuttled off to the places we went for summer camp—long weekends with the people of the camp, in their houses.”
Every summer, the Wenner children were sent to Camp Lagunitas, in Marin, run by a man named Ed Barbano, who Wenner told his parents was an alcoholic. His sister Martha Wenner described how the drunken camp leader veered off the road with a carful of kids until Jann Wenner grabbed the wheel to keep it righted. (The Grateful Dead would later hole up near Camp Lagunitas to write songs.)
Ed Wenner was hardly a source of comfort. Frustrated by his intemperate son, Ed frequently hit him. Kate said her brother would crawl out his bedroom window to hide from spankings. When Wenner threatened to run away from home, his mother put a can of creamed corn in a handkerchief tied to a stick, handed him a nickel, and said, “Here, take this, you’ll need it.”
While the Wenners sold themselves in magazine articles as baby experts, they tended to ignore their own children for more idealistic pursuits, namely politics. In the 1950s, Sim was involved in the California Democratic Council, a liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and befriended Democrat Alan Cranston, who later became a senator from California. On Rainbow Road, Ed and Sim socialized with two other couples, like-minded Democrats: the Roth family, who owned the Matson shipping company, and the Flaxes, who owned an art supply store in the city, enjoying cocktail parties around the patio and pool. Despite their parents’ many failings, the Wenner kids were deeply influenced by their politics. The Wenners took their kids door to door around San Rafael for a Dollars for Democrats drive and once set up a hot dog stand so their mother could raise money for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
