In a lightly fictionalized account of his life at Berkeley, Wenner would describe a character much like Pike getting an erection while the two wrestled in bed. Wenner was “afraid to tell him I love him,” he wrote. “I wanted to make love to him.” Their arrested romance did not go unobserved. Jane Kenner, who had also dated Pike, viewed Jann and Jim as rivals. “Very few people liked Jann,” she wrote in 1966. “They envied him his job as campus reporter for NBC, and his aura of superiority was thought obnoxious. Jann and Jim each had several qualities that the other needed, and in turn they needed each other very much.”
Friends whispered that Pike was impotent. Wenner had no such problem, but Kenner said “he received no pleasure from making love.” Frightened by his own desires, Wenner insulted Pike at parties and paraded new girlfriends in front of him, as if to mock his sexual confusion. “It was about proving to himself that he was hetero,” said Kenner. “He was trying to prove that to himself.”
If his sexuality was unresolved, his ambition was not. Wenner published another story in San Francisco called “Marijuana, Who’s Turned On?” Wenner tried pot for the first time in December 1964, around the time he bought Beatles ’65, and fell over laughing at a jar of mustard in the refrigerator. He was an instant convert. “A close observer will tell you that ‘nearly everyone is turning on,’ ” he wrote, sprinkling his story with anonymous stories from socialite friends at Berkeley and Stanford. “It is not unusual to come across madras-shirted students sitting beneath the house picture of a former U.S. president and ‘blowing grass.’ At least nine fraternities, including nearly all of the ‘best houses,’ have pledged ‘potheads.’ ”
The story quoted the vice-principal of a local high school blaming the uptick in pot use on “too much money and too much freedom.” Wenner, assuming an authority beyond his years, advised “a realistic and sensible approach” to legalization. (He edited out a concluding joke from the early draft: “Potheads, arise!”) The story landed like a stink bomb among the matrons of Pacific Heights. Frances Moffat, society columnist at the Chronicle, accused Wenner of using the story to social climb. “The more serious article by Jann would have been improved if he hadn’t been so busy making a point of his connections,” she wrote. “In this case, his social connections, not the ‘connection’ of the marijuana user.” (“I’m sure I was social climbing,” said Wenner, “but not through that article.”)
In the same story, Wenner cited a news item about a drug bust at Berkeley in February 1965. Five students were charged with possession of LSD. The ringleader, who was exonerated, would go on to become a drug-world legend: Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the Berkeley chemist whose powerful underground formulas blew the minds of every major figure in the brewing counterculture, including the Grateful Dead. As it turned out, Jann Wenner was among those trying to buy LSD from Owsley when the bust went down. He lost $125 and failed to try LSD. But not for long.
2
Are You Experienced?
Coincidences, trappings, costumes & climbing. These made me rich. –fragment from “Now These Days Are Gone,”
an unpublished novel by Jann Wenner, 1966
When Jann Wenner emerged from the closet, he was crying. “His eyes were soft, and he had been weeping, and he just was beautiful,” recounted Denise Kaufman, describing the day Wenner first tried LSD in the spring of 1965. Arms wrapped around his knees, Wenner asked her to put the Sandy Bull record back on. “And he just sat and listened,” she said. “It was beautiful, and we listened and put the Beatles on. He was in the most beautiful state.”
She said the moment marked a deep and abiding bond between her and Wenner, a cosmic understanding. Wenner would tell a version of the story in his lightly fictionalized memoir, “Now These Days Are Gone,” which features a Berkeley student named Jim Whitman and his elusive muse Vicki (Denise Kaufman’s middle name). The LSD scene includes the kitten, the LPs, and even the closet. The moment before he stepped inside, Wenner wrote, he had had a terrible vision:
I was fighting my father, hitting him, and then tearing him apart, ripping his flesh and pulling out his guts, but his guts were machinery, cogs and wheels, and pipes, and he lay there bloodied without blood, fleshy with metal.
It was a vision of Oedipal rage, prompting Wenner to climb into the womb of the closet.
Wenner was infatuated with his acid guide, Denise, the woman Ken Kesey later dubbed Mary Microgram. “Maybe it was the way Vicki did things, things girls weren’t supposed to do,” Wenner wrote in his novel. “Ride motorcycles, invite anyone on the street to parties, doing all those things and not just sitting around smoking cigarettes. She didn’t even smoke.”
She was also a distant cousin of Jann Wenner’s through the Simmons family line, both of them tracing their roots to a Russian Jew named Isaac Szymonovsky. More important, she was, in the parlance of the times, “happening,” the spirit of 1960s San Francisco made flesh. Jerry Garcia and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, future members of the Grateful Dead, played at her high school graduation party in Palo Alto; she met Ken Kesey on a beach in Monterey and joined the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey’s LSD explorers, riding alongside beat legend Neal Cassady on the painted school bus; she would form an all-female rock group called the Ace of Cups, who opened for both Jimi Hendrix and the Band. As important to Wenner, Kaufman was from a wealthy family who made their money in real estate. “She combined those two worlds so perfectly for me,” said Wenner. “She was from a straight background, wealthy background, the proper background. The good Jewish girl, and the wild child thing. And that was perfect for me.”
While acid transformed Kaufman from a folkie communist to a free-range child of the cosmos, Wenner’s transformation was less clear. To Kaufman, his mother, Sim, seemed more turned on than he did. After moving to Hawaii, Sim morphed into a middle-aged bohemian who wore floor-length muumuus, usually nude underneath, and took up pot smoking and rediscovered her “homosexual gene.” “I’m thinking, how did she get this straight son? She is so out there!” said Kaufman. “We ended up going to the Matrix together, the club in the Marina area, where Jefferson Airplane first played. Sim was kind of more in the groove of it than he was.”
Wenner was embarrassed by his mother’s libertine life, especially her pursuit of men his own age. She sashayed into the room and said whatever came to mind, usually something insulting or sexually provocative. When a friend brought her football player boyfriend to a party at Sim’s apartment, Sim looked the guy up and down and said, “You’re fucking him?” Wenner also recoiled at her increasingly “hip” lingo. “I had a terribly difficult time relating to that,” he later said. “To have your mother say something like ‘hey, man,’ you know. It drives me nuts, her language.”
In the summer of 1965, Sim’s latest boyfriend convinced her to let Wenner use her house in Hawaii while she was stateside visiting Kate. Before he left, Wenner traded two tickets to see the Beatles for thirty hits of acid from Kaufman. (Wenner never saw the Beatles.) He spent a month in Kailua Kona, Hawaii, plucking out folk songs on an acoustic guitar that his sister Kate gave him for his birthday and exploring the effects of LSD while snorkeling over a local reef. When he returned to San Francisco, Wenner decided that Denise Kaufman was the answer to all his problems. Kaufman said she felt a “heart connection” with Wenner but no sexual spark, and she bristled at his relentless attempts to sleep with her. In a letter written from Esalen, the spiritual retreat in Big Sur, she told Wenner he was not “at ease” with himself. She wrote a garage-rock song about him called “Boy, What’ll You Do Then,” a feminist kiss-off to a jealous suitor.
You saw me out with your best friend
And you can bet I’m gonna do it again
But if I leave you
Boy what will you do then?
You say I must be true to you