“In those weeks since this Sugar Bowl experience,” he continued, “I have dropped more and more of my homosexuality which was never dominant but always present. I come more and more to what is called normal. But not completely. I don’t know why.”
At Sugar Bowl, Wenner also met a striking society boy named John Warnecke. He had all the qualities Wenner desired in friends: dashing good looks and a sterling pedigree, plus an appetite for experimentation, especially with drugs. Warnecke introduced Wenner to another friend, the square-jawed Ned Topham, whose family were fixtures of San Francisco since the nineteenth century. The three became fast pals, Warnecke and Topham admiring Wenner’s scampish energy and independent spirit. Greil Marcus, a friend of Barry Baron’s who met Wenner at Berkeley, was impressed that a freshman had his own apartment, let alone a Mose Allison LP on the stereo. “[I] went into this place and it was a bohemian student apartment like I had never seen before,” said Marcus. “I was also struck by the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle two-page spread of this year’s debutantes was pinned to the wall. So I thought, ‘Whoa, interesting crosscurrents at work here.’ ”
As he social climbed, Wenner dated and slept with a series of debutantes, a relentless suitor battering away at his quarry. “In Jann’s case a refusal is almost always a guarantee that he will pursue relentlessly,” a former girlfriend wrote in a remembrance from 1966. He treated women strictly as social conquests. One of Wenner’s roommates, Ted Hayward, recounted to writer Robert Draper how Wenner slept with the daughter of a British diplomat and used the sheet from their tryst as a tablecloth for a dinner party the next night, strategically placing her plate over a stain and giggling during the meal.
Wenner denied the incident occurred, claiming Hayward was only bitter about another incident: While they sought a third roommate to pay the rent for their pad, Wenner accused Hayward of scaring off candidates with his gay affectations. “Ted, let me do the roommate thinking,” Wenner told him. “Everybody thinks you’re gay.”
“He was so hurt,” said Wenner. “He never spoke civilly to me again. He was very flamboyant in his gestures.”
But the woman in question confirmed that Wenner used the sheet as a tablecloth, as did Wenner’s friend Robbie Leeds, who married her. “I found it to be in poor taste,” he said. “It was embarrassing. It was their intimacy, and he made a big thing about it.”
That summer, NBC made Wenner a gofer for the anchors of the NBC broadcast of the Republican National Convention, fetching coffee and Salem cigarettes for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. As Barry Goldwater accepted the nomination of the party, Wenner inhaled the rarefied air of the eastern establishment, the big three TV networks, and the power brokers of party politics glad-handing in the hallways. His media credentials gave him a sense of privilege. “They are the rabble,” he remembered saying to himself. “We are the pros.”
The following month, Wenner drove to Newport Beach to see his father. Ed Wenner had started another branch of Baby Formulas Inc. in Anaheim, south of Los Angeles, this time partnered with Carnation. Jann Wenner went out with two boarding school friends to see a movie in Pasadena: A Hard Day’s Night, the Richard Lester film depicting four long-haired lads running from ravenous female (and a few male) fans in a series of comic bits. In stylish black and white, the Beatles crashed through the screen, having more fun than anybody in human history. Ringo Starr parodied the media machine they were manipulating (Reporter: “Are you a mod or a rocker?” Ringo: “No, I’m a mocker”), and George narrowly escaped the clutches of a teen marketer who traded in “pimply hyperbole.” There was Paul, the cute one, and John, the comic rebel, who was immediately Wenner’s favorite.
Wenner had never been a die-hard music fan. His first record was a 45 of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. It didn’t make a lasting impression. In high school, he was a fan of Paul Anka. “He is one of the two good singers that ‘rock n’ roll’ has produced,” Wenner wrote to his grandmother, “the other being Johnny Mathis, who I like a lot.” Even the Mose Allison record was more fad than musical interest (everybody who met him in this period remembers him playing the same album). Jann Wenner missed the Beatles’ iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but in A Hard Day’s Night he saw young men who looked like himself, though infinitely more appealing. “They were young, fresh, and good-looking in that same sort of way Jack Kennedy was,” he said. “These kids who are your age, who are so alive and upbeat and joyous and taking the piss out of everybody—man, that’s how life should be.”
His high school friend Susan Andrews, daughter of actor Dana Andrews (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), recalled driving to Los Angeles with Wenner in his VW Beetle, windows down and wind in their hair as Wenner shout-sang Beatles lyrics from the window. Hey! You’ve got to hiiiide your love a-way . . . Wenner was a committed mod, but he loved the rockers, too. Andrews’s mother was confused when she got a credit card receipt for a tank of gas that Wenner had evidently signed “Mick Jagger.”
The arrival of the Beatles and the Stones dovetailed with larger forces at work at Berkeley, where youth activists were challenging institutional power for the first time. In October 1964, a former student set up a table of civil rights literature in front of Berkeley’s administration building, protesting the school’s ban on political activism on campus. Jack Weinberg, who coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” was arrested by university police, prompting Mario Savio, a campus activist, to scale a police car and give a series of impassioned speeches on the First Amendment rights of students, sparking a thirty-two-hour protest. The fight between the students and the administration was national news, and Wenner dove headlong into the mix, attending protests and racing his audio recordings back to NBC News in time for the evening broadcasts. He positioned himself as the inside man. The day Savio gave his most stirring speech in December 1964, imploring activist students to put their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” of the “machine” of society, Wenner looked on from the steps as Joan Baez sang Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side”—the first time he heard a Dylan song, he said. A few days later, Wenner would appear in AP photos chasing Savio up the stairs of the Greek Theatre, boyish in a trench coat, tape recorder strapped to his chest.
Wenner was electrified and proud when a right-wing newspaper, citing his membership in SLATE, called him a communist sympathizer. “I was ID’d as a red,” he said. But his true convictions lay with the “apparatus” of NBC News. When the police beat and arrested protesters at a sit-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel—the site of the Cotillion balls—Wenner had run away “before the busts went down.” Indeed, Wenner rarely failed to mention his NBC job at parties, pushing the outer limits of his role there. The head of NBC News in Los Angeles accused him of misrepresenting himself to the administration at Berkeley, issuing an angry memo reminding the staff that “Jann Wenner is not a correspondent. He is not a reporter. He is not a field producer. He is a campus stringer.”
But Wenner had already managed to capitalize on his position by publishing a long account of the Free Speech Movement from the point of view of a news stringer who sympathized with the students. He had briefly dated the daughter of Jack Vietor, heir to the Jell-O fortune, who published San Francisco magazine; Wenner convinced him to run his story about the protests. “He was the most ambitious person I’ve ever met,” said Jane Kenner, whom Wenner dated that winter. “It was so clear, and he didn’t care at all what kind of attention he got. He didn’t care if it was negative or positive, as long as he got attention.”
Wenner’s love life was complicated by the arrival of a handsome young society man named James Pike Jr., son of the controversial Episcopalian bishop of California, James Albert Pike. A progressive civil rights advocate, Bishop Pike became famous for putting the images of Albert Einstein and John Glenn in stained glass in his Grace Cathedral in Nob Hill. The junior Pike attended the same deb balls as Wenner and also struggled with sexual confusion. Wenner said Pike was his first gay crush. For a time, they were constant pals, going on a road trip to Mexico to smuggle