None of this was exactly unique to Rolling Stone—art director George Lois pioneered pop irony at Esquire; Hugh Hefner liberated sexuality in Playboy—but Rolling Stone authenticated celebrity in a new way. Under Rick Griffin’s banner, Wenner could place Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, George McGovern, and even John Denver in the same continuum as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. It was all prefigured by the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s—a cavalcade of personalities and icons, seemingly disconnected but all flowing forth from a single fountain of youth.
And as the youth culture took over, Wenner built up a network of powerful co-conspirators: important writers and photographers (Tom Wolfe and Dick Avedon), ambitious record men and talent agents (David Geffen, Ahmet Ertegun), Hollywood executives and movie stars (Barry Diller, Richard Gere), Washington power brokers and politicians (Richard Goodwin, Ted Kennedy), and, his very favorites, the social matrons and celebrity icons in whose rarefied spheres gay men were welcome (Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie Onassis). This was a formula for Wenner’s success. “The friendships I made with people, plus their desire to have publicity, plus the demonstrated integrity and value of Rolling Stone, it all was easy to do,” said Wenner, hastening to add a last ingredient: “And my own charm.”
The result was that from 1971 to 1977, Jann Wenner was the most important magazine editor in America, shepherding the generational plotlines of the 1960s into a rambling biweekly serial of rock-and-roll news, hard and outrageous (and impossibly long) journalism, left-wing political opinion, sexual liberation, and drugs—always drugs. It was a man’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishized in it; it was a left-wing magazine, though it was tempered by Wenner’s devotion to the establishment. And the success of Rolling Stone would eventually make Wenner a full-blooded figure of that establishment. Time magazine named him one of the Top 200 “Faces for the Future” in America in 1974, among the youngest on the list at twenty-eight (“a brilliant, brash autocrat with an eye for lucrative markets and talented writers”).
By the time Wenner moved his magazine to New York from San Francisco in 1977, rock and roll had become so mainstream—and profitable—it had already begun producing its own rebellion: punk. But with his lock hold on the music establishment, Wenner could navigate through cultural storms. Rolling Stone was a formula Wenner could recalibrate from year to year, absorbing, and exploiting, any new trend. While he recruited feisty new talents like Charles M. Young—a tall, lanky punk devotee they dubbed “the Reverend”—to cover the Sex Pistols, a band Wenner despised, Wenner could test his influence elsewhere, first in Washington, D.C., where he used his readership as a kind of youth lobby to expand his political influence, and then in Hollywood, where he tried mightily to reinvent himself as a movie producer while funneling favored movie stars to the cover of Rolling Stone. Indeed, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the definitive youth movie of the 1980s, was launched partly because Wenner realized he knew nothing about what modern young people were doing and so sent reporter Cameron Crowe to find out.
When California Republican Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, Wenner had so thoroughly stamped his times with the Rolling Stone worldview that he would arrive at the preppy green lawns of the new decade like a late Roman emperor, haloed by glittering friends and plump with self-satisfaction. His unembarrassed appetite for stardom and excess had made him an object of scorn and parody but also a rich man—and right on cue as his generation was embracing the “greed is good” ethos, wealth and power as their natural birthright. And he had proven that his original insight of 1967 was an abiding one: that the 1960s were, at bottom, a business. This didn’t mean the original idealism was bogus—only that it was a thing you could stay tethered to through commerce, and specifically a subscription to Rolling Stone. For Wenner, idealism was never the enemy of money. “It was a false dichotomy,” said Wenner. “Well, it’s America! Rock and roll is America.”
In the 1980s, rock and roll became an all-powerful institution—the opposite of revolutionary, except in the sense that Jann Wenner had turned the youth revolution into a spectacularly profitable enterprise. From there, Wenner went through all the baby-boomer stations of the cross, and made journalism out of them. He launched a parenting magazine when he had children (Family Life) and a men’s magazine for his midlife crisis ( Men’s Journal). He would come out of the closet as a gay man in the spring of 1995, leaving Jane for a fashion designer named Matt Nye, when the vogue for coming out was in. By then, Wenner himself was interviewing sitting presidents, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993 and shuttling Bob Dylan in his private jet to the televised stage of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an institution he helped found with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records and operated like his personal fiefdom. Jann Wenner cast himself as—and indeed was—the gatekeeper of the rock-and-roll story. That story was underwritten by the same market forces that produced classic rock radio stations, rock-and-roll-themed restaurants, and endless television and film revivals about the 1960s. Rock and roll sold beer and cars and clothes and watches and piles and piles of Rolling Stone magazines. At one point, Rolling Stone was throwing off $30 million a year in pure profit, making Jann Wenner a bona fide media baron of Manhattan.
It didn’t necessarily make him beloved. In years to come, Jann Wenner’s bold-faced contradictions would drive nearly everyone who knew him mad. But it was his schizophrenic nature—a polarity of vulnerability and rageful ambition—that drove the magazine. He was an antiwar liberal and a rapacious capitalist, naive and crafty, friend and enemy, straight and gay, editor and publisher. His mother would say of him, “I’ve always felt Jann was twelve years old going on seventy-five. He’s certainly the most conservative member of our family.”
Success would blunt Wenner’s feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s. It was the prickly celebrity tabloid Us Weekly—his last successful invention, highly lucrative but culturally toxic—that would barricade his flagging rock magazine against the collapse of both the record and the print industries, and later the entire economy in 2008. The war-ravaged presidency of George W. Bush reanimated Rolling Stone’s once-righteous reputation as a left-wing voice, and the market crash of 2008 inspired one last star for Wenner’s journalistic firmament: Matt Taibbi, the heir to Hunter S. Thompson, whose attacks on the banking industry almost single-handedly revived the reputation of late-period Rolling Stone.
This book is drawn from over a hundred hours of conversation with Jann Wenner, from the contents of his voluminous archive of letters, documents, recordings, and photography, and from 240 interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and current and former employees of Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner’s life tells the story of a man and his generation. It is also a parable of the age of narcissism. Through image and word, Wenner was a principal architect of the rules of modern self-celebration—the “Me” in the Me Decade. The self-involvement of rock stars and celebrities became, eventually, something everyone could emulate. His advocacy of boundary-pushing journalism and the liberal verities of the Democratic Party was fundamental to the Rolling Stone formula, but above all he was a fame maker. Today the signifiers of fame—confession, preening self-regard, and blunt sexuality—are so built into modern media manners that few can even recall a time when they were novel. But the framework of American narcissism—from the permission to unload personal demons in public to the rise of the selfie—has its roots in Jann Wenner’s pioneering magazine making. In the age of social media, calculated authenticity is the coin of the realm. And Rolling Stone helped define what authenticity meant, and well after it became decoupled from the 1960s idealisms that birthed it. That Wenner is the same age as President Donald J. Trump, whose ascent to power was built on celebrity, is perhaps no coincidence. Indeed, Wenner’s oldest friends saw in Trump’s personality, if not his politics, a striking likeness to the Rolling Stone founder—deeply narcissistic men for whom celebrity is the ultimate confirmation of existence. At one time, Jann S. Wenner wanted to be president, too.
His ex-wife, Jane, would