Before delving into his own colorful past, Jann Wenner and I had a little chat about Donald Trump and the future of American democracy. “I watch that news about the judge and my heart starts to race, oh, fuck. Will he never get caught?” said Wenner, one of the most influential liberals of the boomer generation. referred to laundry aileen cannon, the Trump appointee who, the day before, had hounded the Justice Department investigation in Mar-a-Lago by the former president of top-secret national security secrets. “But you know,” Wenner continued, “the wheels of justice can turn slow, but they are going to spin.”
What about the smell of authoritarianism in the air? Are Wenner’s alarm bells ringing? “No, that’s not real,” he said. “The country has 300 years of tradition – growing freedom, the republic, this form of government. And also just the mentality of the American people… I think the January 6 committee is a perfect example of democracy at work. I mean the fact that you have this third of the country that’s crazy it’s part of America America started [with] burning witches. That’s the beginning of America. And since then we’ve had tax riots, whiskey riots. We’ve had the fucking civil war. We’ve never seen [something like] Trump earlier. It’s scary, but I think it will be beaten back.”
Wenner has a new book out called a memoir Like a rolling stone. It’s about his storied life and the legendary rock magazine he founded as a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout and connoisseur of the late 60s counterculture. That’s why Wenner and I had a Zoom conversation last week, with Wenner at a desk in his home office – overlooking a lush garden through floor-to-ceiling windows – in the Montauk mansion where he lives with his longtime partner, the fashion designer Matt Nye. In 2017, when? rolling stone turned 50, my friend and Vanity Fair co-worker Joe Hagan published Sticky fingers, a widely published biography for which Wenner gave Hagan full access to his archive, which also included more than a hundred hours of Wenner interviews and additional interviews with more than 240 people. The biography was Wenner’s idea – he asked Hagan, then a neighbor in the Hudson Valley, to write it. In the end, Wenner was extremely unhappy with the final product. He and Hagan had a big fight, which you can read about in this one New York Times postmortem on the controversy.
Wenner and I agreed that it wouldn’t be the most productive use of our time to re-advance the episode (I’m not exactly an impartial third party). Sticky fingers wasn’t the first time Wenner had decided to collaborate with a biographer. In 2003, he had worked with Lewis MacAdams on a book for Knopf that apparently got off to a good start before Wenner retired. Time, Knopf said the deal was later canceled.) In 2011 Rich Cohen, formerly of rolling stone and vanity purse, drafted a proposal for an authorized biography, but Wenner again withdrew his cooperation. “I decided I didn’t like his approach,” he told me. “Great guy, though.” It may seem that Wenner was never going to get the book he wanted unless he wrote it himself, which begs the question: Why didn’t he just write it himself? “I was too lazy!” he said. “I was too involved with the magazine. I didn’t have time for it.”
I suggested that Like a rolling stone seemed like a way for Wenner to regain control of his own story after an experience where he was completely out of control. “No,” he said. “I mean, it’s true that I had hoped that Joe’s book would become the authoritative record”—Hagan states that it is the authoritative account – “but this is in no way a response. I mean this is the fact that I finally realized I’m the one who can best tell. Suddenly I had the time to do what I wanted I wanted to do that, which is to tell my story my way. And I wanted to be honest about the times, and what they meant, and about the generation. I wanted to accurately portray what I think is a very important historical era in American life.”
The reason Wenner suddenly had all this time on his hands was because he had relinquished control of it rolling stone to 1) Jay Penske, whose Penske Media Corporation now owns the publication; and 2) Gus Wenner—Jann’s youngest of three sons from his marriage with Jane Schindelheim-who’s now? rolling stone‘s CEO. This was the part of the book I was most interested in. Readers will certainly enjoy all the candy behind the scenes including Bono, Bob DylanBruce SpringsteenBette Midler and countless other stars, plus media icons like Annie Leibovitz and Hunter S. Thompson, all of which are neatly encased in Maureen Dowd‘s new Sunday Styles feature on Wenner – as well as stories of drugs, romantic relationships, childhood memories and the magazine’s glory days. But I wanted to talk about the dissolution of Wenner Media, which I had discussed while it shook live.
The first Wenner title to go was Us Weekly in March 2017, followed by Men’s Journal in June 2017. Both went to American Media Inc., the publisher of supermarket-rag-meets-fitness-mag then run by CEO and Trump friend David Pecker, who would play a starring role shortly after, alongside Trump and Michael Cohen, in the infamous catch-and-kill scandal.”Star and the National researcher, his tabloids, had carried out outrageous attacks on Trump’s opponents,” Wenner writes in one of the final chapters, recalling a lunch date with Pecker. “That’s not all, David told me. He had bought and then cheated stories of women sleeping with Trump. He was very explicit about Trump’s knowledge, approval and encouragement. I was just thinking about this when David was bragging about his buddy buddy with the president. I said it to Gus and forgot. (To be a fly on the wall at that lunch!)
About three months after the announcement of the sale of Men’s Journal— and after the chief financial officer of Gus and Wenner Media convinced him that it was no longer financially viable to operate the magazine he founded — Wenner officially stated rolling stone on the block, in a story that the front of the New York times Business section. “There was not a moment of emotion for me,” Wenner recalls in the book, “just proud of the place of honor for the event.”
The background to all this dramatic professional change was an abrupt decline in Wenner’s health as he trudged into his 70s after decades of hard living. There was a major myocardial infarction, a triple coronary artery bypass graft, a valve transplant, hip and thigh surgery. Surviving weeks in the hospital on boiled chicken and Jell-O Physical rehabilitation Learning to walk with a cane Then more problems came: Near-total nerve compression The threat of paralysis One last-ditch spinal infusion (successful) Another month in a hospital bed. “Getting old became a daily struggle, all wounds and injuries,” Wenner writes. “I was still ready for battle. The withdrawals were tactical, but not surrender.” I asked if the stress and emotional toll of divesting his businesses had exacerbated the deterioration of his physical health. “No. I smoked for 40 years. I had diabetes. You know, it was just — the bell rang. It was time.”
In the book, Wenner describes Penske – a scion of the automotive industry who has built a successful publishing house that now: rolling stone, deadline, Variety, WWD, ART news, and numerous other brands – as “a handsome young man with a terrible haircut.” What were Wenner’s first impressions of the elusive media executive who became the steward of his life’s work? “I met Jay early on and really liked him. He was always my choice to buy the magazine,” Wenner told me. “I mean you couldn’t sell to one of the big publishers. They all lose [print] Jay published similar magazines of about the same size, financially and in terms of staff. He had revived a few magazines. And he had the patience, the tolerance and the understanding. He had the right formula of what “Most importantly, Penske took Gus under his wing and cemented Wenner’s legacy by helping his son steer rolling stone Wenner was, of course, an odd one out. “As an older man who started all this, letting go is hard,” he said. “I mean, it’s a classic story. The old man won’t. I was that guy.”
