Publishing icon is seething over tell-all
“Had (he) never come along, Rolling Stone might have survived as a rock-and-roll trade paper, but instead it was about to become the most adventurous and ambitious newspaper-cummagazine of the 1970s, Thompson imbuing Rick Griffin’s Summer of Love logo with a new sensibility.
“For the next several years, Wenner’s identity would be wrapped up with the image he saw in Thompson’s warped aviators — the sunglasses that Thompson would call, in the most famous piece of writing he would ever publish in Rolling Stone, ‘Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.’”
With Annie Leibovitz shooting some of the most iconic photos to ever grace magazine covers, Rolling Stone was always talked about.
One of those covers featured a naked David Cassidy in 1972. The photo was cropped just so, but this was scandalous to his fans. At the time, he was the androgynous teen crush from “The Partridge Family.”
Cassidy wanted to be seen as a serious rocker and relished the bad-boy image this cover was supposed to generate.
Those images on the newsstands did exactly what they should: Make people stop and take notice. Springsteen recalls talking on a pay phone in Freehold, N.J., — his family didn’t have a home phone — and spying the first issue with Lennon in an army helmet.
Rolling Stone was still a newspaper selling for quarter.
“They were the only validating pieces of writing that somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were,” Springsteen says.
Over the years the kinship between Springsteen and Wenner deepened. At Wenner’s 60th birthday bash, with Robin Williams, Bette Midler, Larry David and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Springsteen sang a ditty he wrote for the occasion.
It included the lyric: “I never guessed a man whose magazine once changed my life/Would one day want to have a threesome with my wife.”
Make no mistake about Wenner’s cultural importance. It could be argued that without Wenner, the name Kardashian would be no more than a trivia question about one of O.J. Simpson’s defense attorneys. Donald Trump could have remained just another bloviating real estate developer.
Sure, fan mags had existed for 60 years before Rolling Stone, but Wenner took things to a new level. And he was always clever.
Launching Rolling Stone, his promotion was a roach clip with each subscription.
The magazine hit its journalistic bottom in 2014 with a detailed story about frat brothers gangraping a woman named “Jackie” on the University of Virginia campus.
The story was told in scathing detail, immediately becoming major national news. There was just one problem: The whole thing was a lie.
Careers were crushed, lawsuits filed and former UVA Dean Nicole Eramo won $3 million after his portrayal as insensitive to rape victims.
Giving testimony about the monumental screw-up, Wenner looked at Eramo and apologized.
“I’m very, very sorry,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve suffered as much as you have.”
That seemed unlikely — yet the line is pure Wenner. His magazine’s reputation was now shredded and he was deeply affected, but there’s a sense of smug entitlement that seeps throughout the book.
Hagan describes Wenner as a striving social climber, “keen to obscure his Jewishness and his latent homosexuality.”
Wenner’s complicated love life is examined, as is his long marriage to wife Jane.
It’s clear they needed and loved one another and somehow survived endless drug-fueled parties. They had a custom-built entertainment center with wood partitions, his and hers, for coke snorting.
The party seemed never-ending with people wandering into their Upper East Side townhouse. Continuing as the point man of his generation, Wenner switched from counterculture to making money and living large.
He especially enjoyed owning his own plane.
Eventually, Wenner came out and divorced his wife. He’s been with his partner, Matt Nye, for over 22 years. He’s raised children, started a magazine empire and shared the wealth, covering the hospital bills for a friend dying of AIDS and paying writers far more than other publications.
Through it all though, you can’t help but feel that as much as Wenner has, he doesn’t always get what he needs.