Wenner had his own apprehensions. By this time, Denise Kaufman had become close friends with Wenner’s sister Martha, who had changed her name to Merlyn and was running a hippie day school in Marin County, living in teepees and teaching astrology and the I Ching. In the days leading up to his marriage, Wenner took Kaufman on a drive in his Porsche, and they parked in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It was pretty emotional,” she said. “I was like, ‘Are you really gonna do this?’ and he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ It was poignant.”
On their wedding day, Jane cut Wenner’s hair with a bowl, making him look like a little prince. He wore a bow tie, Jane a white linen dress. It was so casual that on the way to the ceremony at a synagogue next to the Fillmore, the Wenners ran into Bill Graham and invited him to attend. John Warnecke was the best man, and the piano player was Jim Peterman from the Steve Miller Band (whose playing Wenner characterized in Rolling Stone as “precise and heavy”). It was a quick ceremony before a rabbi, and afterward they went back to the Wenners’ house and got stoned. None of their parents attended. Because Wenner’s parents hated each other, Jane didn’t invite her own parents, which she later regretted. Wenner’s mother, who came out to her kids as a lesbian in the late 1960s, also made it clear she disliked Jane. For their wedding present, Sim gave them back her modest stock in Rolling Stone, “the cheapest thing she could get away with,” said Wenner.
Nonetheless, Jane changed her last name to Wenner and removed her name from the Rolling Stone masthead so she could devote her time to being a homemaker, decorating their apartment on Rhode Island Street. Afterward, Jann wrote a four-page letter to Robin Gracey saying he was closing the book on their friendship, as painful as it was to him. According to Gracey, the letter ranged through Wenner’s private desires and guilt as he tried justifying his decision. “He’s kind of manufacturing his own security,” Gracey recounted. “I think he was trying to say, ‘Now I have a relationship with Janie, at another time I would have had one with you, and da-dee-da.’ ”
Wenner, said Gracey, told him that “he now has to put the letter in an envelope, seal it up, and get on with the life that he’s really leading, which is a married life. But there’s plenty else in the letter which suggests that things are not so secure as that.”
“He was unsure whether he was gay or bisexual or which way he was,” Gracey added.
(Gracey still possessed the letter, but Wenner asked him to keep it private because the contents would be “damaging,” he said.)
For a honeymoon, the Wenners motored the Porsche to Tomales Bay, fifty miles north of San Francisco, but when they arrived, they decided it was boring and returned to town. As it happened, British record producer Glyn Johns was in Los Angeles recording the second Steve Miller Band album, Sailor, and had invited Wenner to hang out. In a studio down the street, Johns would be helping the Rolling Stones mix a new record called Beggars Banquet. It would be Jann Wenner’s first chance to meet Mick Jagger. Jann Wenner got on a plane and left Jane Wenner at home.
6
Sympathy for the Devil
When he first saw it, Mick Jagger was startled by the audacity of Rolling Stone—to name a newspaper after his band and not even put the Rolling Stones on the cover of the first issue? It was an affront that would stick with Jagger for the next fifty years. “Why did Jann call it that, when there was a band called that?” asked Jagger. “You could have thought something else, to be honest. I mean, I know it arised from a song name, but that’s not really the point.”
He continued, trying to discern Wenner’s logic:
The song name, I wouldn’t say, is very obscure, but it wasn’t like the name of a thing. It was a song. Of course, there’s no copyright for all these things—“Rolling Stone Ice Cream,” go ahead. But it was a magazine about rock music. It wasn’t quite the same as calling something ice cream. There’s obviously a closer connection than that. It was obviously a very close connection. You could have called it Beatles, or spelled it slightly wrong, or something like that. Now, you think about it, it sounds ridiculous. But he could have done it. It’s a back-handed compliment in one way, but it’s also a very unoriginal title.
Keith Richards put it more succinctly: “We thought, ‘What a thief!’ ”
From the start, there was confusion over the name. “Because Rolling Stone was brand-new,” said Jerry Hopkins, “I was constantly saying to people, ‘No, not the group, the newspaper.’ ”
Wenner once said he had no trouble getting the phone company to install his business lines on Brannan Street because they “thought we were the Rolling Stones.” He benefited from the confusion, a fact not lost on Allen Klein, the band’s manager, who immediately sent Wenner a cease-and-desist letter. “Your wrongful conduct constitutes, at the very least, a misappropriation of my clients’ property rights in the name Rolling Stones for your own commercial benefit,” wrote Klein’s lawyer. “It is also a violation of my clients’ copyright to the name ‘Rolling Stones.’ ”
The lawyer demanded Wenner retract and destroy all copies of Rolling Stone or suffer “immediate legal action including an injunction and a suit for treble damages.”
Wenner, whose friendship with Stones press secretary Jo Bergman had emboldened him to promise “an interview with Mick Jagger” in a Rolling Stone press release, began living in quiet terror. In November 1967, he wrote to Jagger directly, hoping to circumvent a lawsuit. “Greetings from San Francisco!” began the letter. “My feeling is that you haven’t got any idea that this action has been taken on your behalf,” he wrote. “ ’Cause it just doesn’t seem like it’s where you and the Stones are at.”
Wenner asked Jagger to call him for an interview so Rolling Stone could publish something positive about the Rolling Stones. “That would be a groove,” he said, “ ’cause we’re all very interested in what’s happening with everybody.”
“It just looks like a great mistake,” he concluded. “We love you.”
Silence followed and Wenner squirmed, telling Bergman he was “very edgy” waiting for Jagger to exculpate him from legal action, which was “essential” if he were going to forge an advertising deal with Columbia Records. “We have to get this settled before it becomes out of sight,” he wrote to her.
Stroking his chin from afar, Mick Jagger could not help but observe how the Beatles were using Rolling Stone as a handy promotional vehicle, with Wenner writing about them in the most reverent of terms. Indeed, Jagger could use a guy like Jann Wenner in America, especially after his last album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was so poorly received. Jon Landau ripped it in Rolling Stone as an insecure Sgt. Pepper’s knockoff and declared the production and Jagger’s lyrics “embarrassing.” A full nine months and fourteen issues into the existence of Rolling Stone and the Rolling Stones had yet to appear on the cover, while their archrivals, the Beatles, had already appeared three times. If the lawsuit threat was a “great mistake,” it was also a convenient bit of leverage, and if nothing else Mick Jagger liked leverage. “I don’t think Mick lets anyone off the hook for anything,” said Keith Richards. “He’s never let anyone off the hook, once he’s got one in.”
That summer, Jagger learned that Wenner was hoping to start a British version of Rolling Stone in London. Jonathan Cott wrote to Wenner to report rumblings of legal hassles from the Stones if he attempted to publish in England. Bergman, the Stones’ secretary, warned Cott that “the Stones might bring the legal thing out in the open here, since there is a Rolling Stone Magazine for the group, already here.” It looked to Cott like a “bad scene.”
Wenner had met Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns through his neighbor Boz Scaggs, late of the Steve Miller Band, and over dinner one night in San