![]() “I gave him this great opportunity to look at my archives, but he was too interested in the sensational gossip stuff.” “I made a terrible choice of a writer, who turned out to be a gossip reporter more than a really careful in-depth writer,” Mr. The New York Times called it “a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography.” Mr. Wenner decided to write his own memoir after he first worked closely with, and then grew disenchanted with, Joe Hagan, who wrote a biography of the editor in 2017 called “Sticky Fingers.” She was his muse and charmed the people he needed, acting as “an ethereal housemother.” Gus Wenner, Jann and Jane’s youngest son, is now the C.E.O. Wenner get his magazine off the ground (her parents gave him money to get started). One of the original staffers at Rolling Stone, the beautiful and stylish Jane was instrumental in helping Mr. His ex-wife, Jane, with whom he has three grown sons - their names are engraved on a silver ID bracelet he’s wearing - has a house nearby. Wenner lives here in Montauk - and sometimes in Manhattan and Sun Valley, Idaho - with his husband, Matt Nye, a handsome designer who has worked at Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and their three teenagers. We ate gazpacho with caviar and roasted Montauk black sea bass, prepared by his chef, and drank rosé. Wenner’s spectacular modern home, featuring a basketball court, swimming pool, tomato garden, a sculpture of a huge metal head lying on its side and Ralph Lauren and Bill O’Reilly as neighbors. We had lunch by the ocean on the deck of Mr. He had just gotten back from taking his family on a safari with the family of Bette Midler, one of his favorite traveling companions, who says she finds him “peculiarly optimistic, even in the darkest of his days.” “Coke is fun for parties but then it’s useless.” “Pot is too difficult on my throat to smoke, and edibles last too long,” he said. Looking a bit chagrined, he confessed that he enjoyed a bit of LSD a month ago at the beach, listening to Bruce Springsteen, U2, Dire Straits and Bob Dylan. Wenner for the new autobiography.īut even sitting quietly with his cane at his side, eating a bowl of cherries, he still has something of the whirlwind about him. Wenner also provides an intimate - she may think too intimate - look at Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who started her career at Rolling Stone and who took the moody cover shot of Mr. Thompson, the avatar of gonzo journalism, and Tom Wolfe, a bespoke wonder in white among the shaggy hippies. He also dishes on the inimitable writers he nurtured at the magazine, like Mr. 13) brimming with juicy anecdotes about friendships and feuds with the gods of the golden age of rock. Now 76, he has written a memoir (“Like a Rolling Stone,” out on Sept. Ralph Gleason, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, wrote that the magazine was predicated on the idea that great musicians were “the true shamans,” and that music was the glue that kept young people in the 1960s and 1970s from falling apart “in the face of incredible adult blindness, and ignorance and evilness.” It was, to use a Wenner phrase, “a king hell spectacle.”īoomers may be a punchline now, but back then, they were groovy. That wild energy is how, in 1967 when he was a 21-year-old enfant terrible, he created a magazine that chronicled a generation, serving up a flambé of music, drugs, alcohol, sex and politics. Wenner a letter about how working for Rolling Stone was “like being invited into a bonfire and finding out the fire is actually your friend.” He added, “Some people were fried to cinders, as I recall, and some people used the heat to transmogrify themselves into heroes.” ![]() I was tough, but I was also super-indulgent. “But I just would not take less than your really best effort. “I wasn’t raving around tearing up people’s copy,” he said, looking relaxed in a blue linen shirt and black pants at his Montauk home in August. “More than anyone I know, he’s always just done what he wanted,” said his friend Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.” He turned a darkroom into an in-house drug-dealing operation called the Capri Lounge, as a perk for staffers. He gave out roach clips with subscriptions. His own mother told him he was the most difficult child she’d ever encountered. ![]() The founder of Rolling Stone magazine always had a baby face, but he was never timid. Rock may be dead, but Jann Wenner is still rolling. ![]()
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