John Lennon was in a movie theater, crying.

The image of Paul, singing from the rooftop in the final 10 minutes, had set him off. Jann Wenner shifted in his seat. In the darkness of a tiny movie house in San Francisco, the Beatle, Wenner’s hero, whose iconic spectacles and nose adorned the first issue of his rock ‘n’ roll newspaper, Rolling Stone, had tears running down his cheeks as light flickered off his glasses. And next to him was Yoko Ono, the bête noire of Beatledom, raven hair shrouding her porcelain face, also weeping.

It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, and John and Yoko and Jann and his wife, Jane Wenner, were watching the final scenes of Let It Be, the documentary about the Beatles’ acrimonious recording session for their last album. John and Yoko were deep into primal-scream therapy, their emotions raw and close to the surface, and the image of a bearded Paul McCartney singing from the rooftop of Apple Records, against a cold London wind, was too much to bear.

For Wenner, the 24-year-old boy wonder of the new rock press, who worshipped the Beatles as passionately as any kid in America, this was a dream, sitting here in the dark, wiping away his own tears at the twilight of the greatest band of all time, elbow-to-elbow with “the most famous person in the world, for God’s sake. And it’s just the four of us in the center of an empty theater,” marveled Wenner, “all kind of huddled together, and John is crying his eyes out.”

Lennon and Ono had driven up from Los Angeles to meet the San Francisco fanboy who had bottled the counterculture and now commanded 200,000 readers. Wenner received the couple like visiting royalty to Rolling Stone’s spanking-new offices on Third Street, the clatter of typewriters going silent as they walked through the cubbies of writers and editors, bushy-haired men in ties and Levi’s who paused from parsing Captain Beefheart and Pete Townshend to gawk. Wenner’s unabashed idol worship had so often embarrassed them—star-fucker, they grumbled behind his back—but now here he was with an actual Beatle. And Yoko! Who could deny this? The hirsute supercouple were smaller than anybody imagined, but John Lennon still towered over Jann Wenner, who at five six so often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire.

“I mean, it’s everything you ever worshipped or cherished from afar,” said Wenner. “You try and be as natural as possible because I don’t think people want the worship and the ‘gee whiz.’ And you’re just mainly curious and fascinated and hanging on to every word but also trying to be sociable, entertaining, and good company and not be groupie-ish and slavish.”

Wenner guided them to his office in the back, past the plastic marijuana plant and the picture of Mickey Mouse shooting heroin, laboring to project the air of a self-possessed press baron inured to celebrity. He looked every bit the modish publisher, plump in his button-down oxford and blue jeans, shoulder-length hair fashionably styled, a True cigarette smoking in his fingers. Wenner personally moved the couple from the Hilton to the more upscale Huntington Hotel, in Nob Hill, and then took them sightseeing in Wenner’s convertible Porsche, hoping to impress. “People like John Lennon,” Wenner would say, “want to feel they are dealing with somebody important.”

Top, Wenner at work with wife Jane, 1968; Bottom, Wenner at the magazine, 1969. Photos by Baron Wolman.

It worked, but maybe not for the reason he imagined: Yoko Ono’s memory of the weekend would be Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, a chicly dressed waif with sculpted cheekbones and an insolent gaze. “I thought, How lucky is this man!” said Ono. “What did he do to get her?”

Over lunch, Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him. “People would come up and ask him for an autograph, and he would just snarl, ‘Go away!’” Wenner said.