Jann's personal life was always on the edge, of course, just like Clinton's, though the orientations were different. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out his marriage with Jane. It was, euphemistically, an "open" marriage; rumors of Jann's bisexuality often circulated, as did stories of Jane's affairs, but somewhat like that much-later celebrity couple -- Bill and Hillary -- Jann and Jane seemed genuinely emotionally intertwined with each other, in ways too mysterious for their friends and co-workers to unravel.

Finally, in 1995, came Jann's own Monica-like outing. Through a tortuous process some said Jann himself had instigated (only to then try to suppress), Jann's homosexuality went public. He and his 20-something love, Matt Nye, a clothing designer, were outed, and the press revealed that his long marriage with co-founder Jane Schindleheim Wenner was over.

The Wall Street Journal chose this occasion to present a highly unusual Page 1 report, complete with salacious details not normally presumed to be of major interest to the business and financial communities, in order to speculate that Jane and Jann's breakup would throw the future of the magazine empire into doubt.

Wrong. The empire survived the marriage, '60s-style.

As an empire builder, Jann actually has a mixed record. To his credit, once he got Rolling Stone's formula right, he was smart enough to not try to alter it too much. Instead, he experimented with his rapidly expanding cash reserves by starting or taking over other magazines -- more than a dozen over the years. Most of those soon failed, as is the nature of the business, or were sold off. Today just two others remain -- Us, which he says he plans to take weekly sometime over the next year to compete head-on with People; and Men's Journal, the adventure magazine that duplicates Rolling Stone's aesthetic in content aimed at the athletic baby boom male who has the time (and money) to pursue outdoor adventures.

Wenner's restless energy over the years has yielded more failed experiments than almost anybody else in the business, yet he's never gambled anywhere near large enough a portion of the capital available to him to put his essential project at risk. At the same time, one striking thing about Jann's career is that, apart from Rolling Stone, his success at recognizing other great innovative business concepts has been negligible. When Bob Pittman showed up to tell Jann about his bright new idea for a cable TV show called MTV, Jann dismissed his vision as something that would "never" work. MTV, of course, became far bigger than Rolling Stone could ever hope to be, and in the process breathed life back into the moribund music business in many ways that benefited Jann and his magazine enormously. But Jann himself had missed an opportunity.

Later, when Marc Andreessen came by to describe his brand new World Wide Web idea -- a browser and a company called Netscape -- and to ask Wenner to invest, Jann once again was dismissive. "I didn't want to be the one to lose a bundle on that," he remembers, perhaps slightly chagrined now that Andreessen's net worth far exceeds his own.

Many others came to pay homage as well over the years. Wenner particularly liked Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired, but he figured Rossetto would never succeed as a magazine publisher because he favored design elements that obscured the text and refused to include "service-type stories that would help people figure out how to use all this tech stuff." Rossetto, of course, went on to create one of the most important magazines of the '90s, Wired, before being dismissed by investors in favor of an editorial team that has made the magazine more accessible and user-friendly.

There's more than a little irony in the fact that most of today's media pioneers, all of whom would probably identify Rolling Stone as a model for building their companies, operate out of the same brick-walled warehouses South of Market where Jann birthed Rolling Stone, in the city Jann dismissed from his rearview mirror as a "backwater" more than 20 years ago. Today, by contrast, the "new media" entrepreneurs are creating wealth Jann could only dream of.

Of course, at 53, Jann is not young or hungry anymore. These days, off to one side in his office, on a small display table, sits a shrine to his three sons, ages 13, 12 and 8. In a drawer are more shots -- pictures of their vacations together, photos of them climbing all over him, one big Jann and three little Janns.

Now here is something radically different from the old Jann, something fragile. Lines creep into his expression when he talks about his children, of his concerns about how they may think of his sexual orientation as they approach their own adolescence. All of a sudden he's a little vulnerable, not so sure of himself, maybe even a little scared.

But to get something, you have to give something up. To fall in love with someone much younger, to leave the security of his long marriage, no matter how unconventional it may have been, this had to take a toll on Jann. He's suffered a loss, and this has made him, finally, just maybe, start to do what everybody else in his generation did -- grow up.

He allows that this love of these children, this "unconditional love," is the very best thing in his life. This is his tender spot.

Things with Jane, he says, are "well" now, and that's all he'll say about that subject. Jane has always owned about half of the company, but it is perfectly obvious that the three smiling boys in these pictures are the glue that now holds this particular family media empire together.

Talent comes, talent goes. The choreographer remains. The director. The man who calls the shots. Jann has so completely and successfully lived out his own story, complete with dramas of every kind, that he's almost graduated to the stuff of legend. Abandoned by his own parents, he became a pseudo-parent to his staffers. He'd take us to the best clothing stores to dress us for media tours, frown over our haircuts and stuff extra money into our pockets. If something bad happened, Jann was reliably compassionate. News of someone's sick relative, or an accident, would send him into tears, even while his hand reached for his checkbook. When Howard Kohn suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm several years ago, and his health insurance policy had lapsed, Wenner wrote out a very large check, no questions asked, to help pay for the surgery that saved Kohn's life.

But just as savagely, Jann could always turn on any of us, and eventually he usually did. Once he'd driven everyone out of the company except himself, and had achieved complete domination, he somehow seemed to stay suspended in time. Lost in the '60s. All of the rest of us trailed away, little pieces of narrative, scenes really, from the earlier parts of his movie, on to our own life stories.

Back here in Midtown, he's the man. Producer, director, actor, writer, editor, cameraman, casting, set, distribution house, financier, publicist, everything. Owner of the franchise.

Jann's world. Dig it.

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