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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The evolution of Jann Wenner: How the ultimate '60s rock groupie built his fantasy into a media empire.
Apr 20, 1999 | Just this much above the bustle of midtown Manhattan, feet propped on a table, leaning back and grinning his infectious grin, Jann Wenner is exactly where he wants -- and deserves -- to be: in the midst of the bustle without necessarily having to rub any shoulders he doesn't want to rub. In contrast, all around this room and the ones adjoining are photos of him shoulder-to-shoulder with his crowd -- Jann with Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bob Dylan; Jann at the White House; Jann with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Jann with the significantly taller Attorney General Janet Reno ("I had to do that one. She's such a star").
Beyond the door to his office suite stretches the bustling Wenner Media headquarters ("almost the size of a football field," he says with characteristic immodesty), where the young, the slender and the hip march about in platform shoes performing the mundane tasks of running Jann's empire.
This is where the music went. It's strange, but if the entire cultural explosion from the 1960s could be drawn down to just one guy, it would be this compact energy ball right here -- the quintessential baby boomer, our own Peter Pan, a chubby adolescent who would never grow up.
Wenner was an entrepreneur long before it was cool. And if, as the venture capitalists like to say, entrepreneurs usually have only one good idea, at least his was a doozy. Wenner was, to put it plainly, the star-fucker who always traded up -- the ultimate name-dropper who finally became a bigger name in the tabs than many of the stars he worshiped.
These days he oversees three successful magazines (Rolling Stone, Us and Men's Journal), and if that doesn't provide enough fodder for Wenner-watchers, there are plenty of other angles for the wags to whisper about -- his much younger boyfriend, designer Matt Nye; his many Hollywood buddies, including David Geffen, Barry Diller and Richard Gere; his longtime business partner and now ex-wife, Jane, and their three sons; and the accouterments of his success -- the Hamptons mansion, the driver and car, the jet and the private Idaho retreat, for summers.
Jann's long, strange trip here, to the center of his own conspicuous universe, began a continent away and three decades ago, in a rundown warehouse in the old printer's district in San Francisco's South of Market area, a few short gestational months after the Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Love in 1967. There, Rolling Stone magazine, which would become the voice of a generation, was born. Until the moment issue No. 1 launched, Jann had been just a frustrated wannabe, one of the guys jumping around the margins of the action, crashing the performances, handing out fliers, hanging on outside the doors of the stars.
From a separate group of would-be entrepreneurs across town, according to Robert Draper's detailed history, "Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History," Wenner stole a mailing list and a corporate name (Straight Arrow Publishing) to get off the ground. But nobody doubts that the editorial concept came directly out of Jann's own music-crazed soul. The idea was unique for its time: Instead of the puff pieces expected from a trade magazine, Rolling Stone would cover rock 'n' roll for what it was, the most powerful cultural and political force in a time of widespread social tumult. The magazine would take risks, and run stories no one else was willing to cover. Jann recognized that a new social order was forming, with music as its binding energy.
Wenner's mentor in this new world of publishing was an older music critic named Ralph Gleason; most of the money for the risky venture came from the family of his wife, Jane Schindelheim Wenner, a dark-haired, fine-boned beauty who was rarely seen at the magazine, but whose presence was always felt in its formative years.
What made Jann -- and Rolling Stone -- successful was the power of rock 'n' roll combined with his personal ruthlessness and the opportunism, including kindness, that wealth allows. He was unparalleled in his generation of magazine editors as a spotter of talent, and for creative types of a certain age and temperament, Jann will always be considered the magic-maker. He embraced the ideas and generated the excitement; he untapped his writers' best work. He untapped everybody, loosened the words, made the sap flow. That was part of his pure genius as an editor.
In the early years, when 20,000-word pieces were not uncommon in the magazine and it was his job to edit them, Jann often seemed to lose interest and stop reading a few paragraphs into a piece. Nonetheless, his mark was always there. The headlines, the ledes, the art, the display type -- much of that was Jann. His skill at positioning a story, the way he drilled to the sweet spot -- those were his gifts. He didn't really write or line-edit with distinction himself. He was the man who hired the writers and the editors, the designers and the photographers. He spotted you and he spotted your story. Before long, he was the keeper of the story.
One of the critical elements in Wenner's success was that he knew not only how to develop and exploit talent, but also when and how to dump it. Every Rolling Stone writer and editor, photographer and designer has a bucketful of Jann tales, how the outbursts, the abuse, the breakups, the firings came down. When Jann turned heartless on you, he played that part better than anyone else.
The brand names of Jann's once and former stars is impressive: Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Chet Flippo, Joe Klein, Tim Cahill, Tom Hayden, David Harris, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, David Felton, Tim Ferris, Ben Fong-Torres, Howard Kohn, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, Grover Lewis, Abe Peck, John Morthland, Paul Scanlon, Marianne Partridge, John Burks, Timothy White, Sarah Lazin, Charley Perry, Michael Rogers, Roger Black, Ed Ward, Charles Young, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier -- and that list could go on and on to embrace dozens more. (I, too, was one of Jann's stars for a while -- between 1974 and 1977, I wrote a dozen or so long investigative stories for the magazine, half the time as a freelancer and the other half on staff as an associate editor.) Not all of these people were fired, of course; increasingly, as the years went by, the talent got fed up with Jann's antics and just quit.
Either way, as Rolling Stone went forward with the business of seducing each new group of 16-year-olds, the genius of Jann's ruthless content strategy gradually became apparent. No matter how spectacular one group of staffers might be, they all shared one problem from which there is no escape -- they grew older. Everybody, that is, except Jann himself. His petulant fits and rages actually seemed frozen at an age considerably south of 16 -- think "terrible 2" and you'll get the idea.
By 1977, Jann decided he'd outgrown his hometown, and he took his whole San Francisco hippie show to New York, the main media stage. Ten years after the Summer of Love, the magazine had survived countless financial and personnel crises that might have sunk it, much as they sank all the other start-up rags from the '60s. But the tyrannical boy king had stayed atop his throne, always seducing another wave of talent, closing bigger ad accounts, just barely holding it all together. Now he would become rich.
In New York, Jann hit gold. Soon he was a regular in the celebrity pages, grinning ear to ear, escorting Jackie and Caroline Kennedy to a party. There he was, throwing the party for the Democratic convention in New York. There he was in a movie, playing himself ("Perfect," with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis), and he wasn't half-bad, though the movie's story line made a travesty of Rolling Stone's editorial standards. ("It must be difficult making the transition from editor to actor," I gently suggested during a visit just before the film launched. "Not really," Jann answered. "Not when you have so much natural talent.")
