THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 11 page

losing money. “I’d get these plans, and in the end I kept having to put in more money,” he

recalled. He would rail, but then write the check. Having been ousted at Apple and flailing at

NeXT, he couldn’t afford a third strike.

To stem the losses, he ordered a round of deep layoffs, which he executed with his typical

empathy deficiency. As Pam Kerwin put it, he had “neither the emotional nor financial runway to

be decent to people he was letting go.” Jobs insisted that the firings be done immediately, with no

severance pay. Kerwin took Jobs on a walk around the parking lot and begged that the employees

be given at least two weeks notice. “Okay,” he shot back, “but the notice is retroactive from two

weeks ago.” Catmull was in Moscow, and Kerwin put in frantic calls to him. When he returned, he

was able to institute a meager severance plan and calm things down just a bit.

At one point the members of the Pixar animation team were trying to convince Intel to let them

make some of its commercials, and Jobs became impatient. During a meeting, in the midst of

berating an Intel marketing director, he picked up the phone and called CEO Andy Grove directly.

Grove, still playing mentor, tried to teach Jobs a lesson: He supported his Intel manager. “I stuck

by my employee,” he recalled. “Steve doesn’t like to be treated like a supplier.”

Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed that Pixar give Intel suggestions on how to

improve the capacity of its processors to render 3-D graphics. When the engineers at Intel

accepted the offer, Jobs sent an email back saying Pixar would need to be paid for its advice. Intel’

s chief engineer replied, “We have not entered into any financial arrangement in exchange for

good ideas for our microprocessors in the past and have no intention for the future.” Jobs

forwarded the answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer’s response to be “extremely

arrogant, given Intel’s dismal showing in understanding computer graphics.” Grove sent Jobs a

blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is “what friendly companies and friends do for each

other.” Grove added that he had often freely shared ideas with Jobs in the past and that Jobs

should not be so mercenary. Jobs relented. “I have many faults, but one

of them is not ingratitude,” he responded. “Therefore, I have changed my position 180

degrees—we will freely help. Thanks for the clearer perspective.”

Pixar was able to create some powerful software products aimed at average consumers, or at least

those average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for designing things. Jobs still hoped that the

ability to make super-realistic 3-D images at home would become part of the desktop publishing

craze. Pixar’s Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the shadings on the 3-D objects

they created so that they could display them from various angles with appropriate shadows. Jobs

thought it was incredibly compelling, but most consumers were content to live without it. It was a

case where his passions misled him: The software had so many amazing features that it lacked the

simplicity Jobs usually demanded. Pixar couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was making

software that was less sophisticated but far less complicated and expensive.

Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product lines foundered, Jobs kept protecting the

animation group. It had become for him a little island of magical artistry that gave him deep

emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it and bet on it. In the spring of 1988 cash was

running so short that he convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When

it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing

some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking

skeptical. It would require close to $300,000 more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked

if there were any storyboards. Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and once Lasseter

started his show—displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his passion for his product—

Jobs started to warm up.

The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It was told from the perspective of a toy oneman

band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him. Escaping under the

couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes

back out to cheer him up.

Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed in what John was doing,” he later said. “It

was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only comment at the end of Lasseter’s

presentation was, “All I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”

Tin Toy went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short films, the first computergenerated

film to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his team to Greens, a vegetarian

restaurant in San Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the Oscar, which was in the center of the table, held

it aloft, and toasted Jobs by saying, “All you asked is that we make a great movie.”

The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the film

division—began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked Tin Toy, and they thought that

something more could be done with animated stories of toys that come alive and have human

emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he

could create a new world of computer-generated animation. He told Catmull, “I can go to Disney

and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.” So Disney began talking about making a

production deal with Pixar. “Lasseter’s shorts were really breathtaking both in storytelling and in

the use of technology,” recalled Katzenberg. “I tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he was loyal

to Steve and Pixar. So if you can’t beat them, join them. We decided to look for ways we could

join up with Pixar and have them make a film about toys for us.”

By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into Pixar—more than

half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he was still losing money at

NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their options as part

of his agreement to add another round of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic in

his love for what artistry and technology could do together. His belief that ordinary consumers

would love to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out to be wrong, but that was soon

replaced by an instinct that turned out to be right: that combining great art and digital technology

would transform animated films more than anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had given

life to Snow White.

Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on animation sooner

and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or software applications. On the other

hand, had he known the hardware and software would never be profitable, he would not have

taken over Pixar. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

A REGULAR GUY

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

Mona Simpson and her fiancé, Richard Appel, 1991

Joan Baez

In 1982, when he was still working on the Macintosh, Jobs met the famed folksinger Joan Baez

through her sister Mimi Fariña, who headed a charity that was trying to get donations of

computers for prisons. A few weeks later he and Baez had lunch in Cupertino. “I wasn’t expecting

a lot, but she was really smart and funny,” he recalled. At the time, he was nearing the end of his

relationship with Barbara Jasinski. They had vacationed in Hawaii, shared a house in the Santa

Cruz mountains, and even gone to one of Baez’s concerts together. As his relationship with

Jasinski flamed out, Jobs began getting more serious with Baez. He was twenty-seven and Baez

was forty-one, but for a few years they had a romance. “It turned into a serious relationship

between two accidental friends who became lovers,” Jobs recalled in a somewhat wistful tone.

Elizabeth Holmes, Jobs’s friend from Reed College, believed that one of the reasons he went

out with Baez—other than the fact that she was beautiful and funny and talented—was that she

had once been the lover of Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” she later said.

Baez and Dylan had been lovers in the early 1960s, and they toured as friends after that, including

with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. (Jobs had the bootlegs of those concerts.)

When she met Jobs, Baez had a fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, from her marriage to the

antiwar activist David Harris. At lunch she told Jobs she was trying to teach Gabe how to type.

“You mean on a typewriter?” Jobs asked. When she said yes, he replied, “But a typewriter is

antiquated.”

“If a typewriter is antiquated, what does that make me?” she asked. There was an awkward

pause. As Baez later told me, “As soon as I said it, I realized the answer was so obvious. The

question just hung in the air. I was just horrified.”

Much to the astonishment of the Macintosh team, Jobs burst into the office one day with Baez

and showed her the prototype of the Macintosh. They were dumbfounded that he would reveal the

computer to an outsider, given his obsession with secrecy, but they were even more blown away to

be in the presence of Joan Baez. He gave Gabe an Apple II, and he later gave Baez a Macintosh.

On visits Jobs would show off the features he liked. “He was sweet and patient, but he was so

advanced in his knowledge that he had trouble teaching me,” she recalled.

He was a sudden multimillionaire; she was a world-famous celebrity, but sweetly down-toearth

and not all that wealthy. She didn’t know what to make of him then, and still found him

puzzling when she talked about him almost thirty years later. At one dinner early in their

relationship, Jobs started talking about Ralph Lauren and his Polo Shop, which she admitted she

had never visited. “There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you,” he said, and

then

drove her to the store in the Stanford Mall. Baez recalled, “I said to myself, far out, terrific, I’m

with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.” When they got

to the store, Jobs bought a handful of shirts for himself and showed her the red dress. “You ought

to buy it,” he said. She was a little surprised, and told him she couldn’t really afford it. He said

nothing, and they left. “Wouldn’t you think if someone had talked like that the whole evening, that

they were going to get it for you?” she asked me, seeming genuinely puzzled about the incident.

“The mystery of the red dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.” He would give her

computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he made sure to say they were left

over from an event in the office. “He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic,” she said.

When he was working on the NeXT computer, he went to Baez’s house in Woodside to show

her how well it could produce music. “He had it play a Brahms quartet, and he told me eventually

computers would sound better than humans playing it, even get the innuendo and the cadences

better,” Baez recalled. She was revolted by the idea. “He was working himself up into a fervor of

delight while I was shrinking into a rage and thinking, How could you defile music like that?”

Jobs would confide in Debi Coleman and Joanna Hoffman about his relationship with Baez and

worry about whether he could marry someone who had a teenage son and was probably past the

point of wanting to have more children. “At times he would belittle her as being an ‘issues’ singer

and not a true ‘political’ singer like Dylan,” said Hoffman. “She was a strong woman, and he

wanted to show he was in control. Plus, he always said he wanted to have a family, and with her

he knew that he wouldn’t.”

And so, after about three years, they ended their romance and drifted into becoming just

friends. “I thought I was in love with her, but I really just liked her a lot,” he later said. “We

weren’t destined to be together. I wanted kids, and she didn’t want any more.” In her 1989

memoir, Baez wrote about her breakup with her husband and why she never remarried: “I

belonged alone, which is how I have been since then, with occasional interruptions that are mostly

picnics.”

She did add a nice acknowledgment at the end of the book to “Steve Jobs for forcing me to use

a word processor by putting one in my kitchen.”

Finding Joanne and Mona

When Jobs was thirty-one, a year after his ouster from Apple, his mother Clara, who was a

smoker, was stricken with lung cancer. He spent time by her deathbed, talking to her in ways he

had rarely done in the past and asking some questions he had refrained from raising before.

“When you and Dad got married, were you a virgin?” he asked. It was hard for her to talk, but she

forced a smile. That’s when she told him that she had been married before, to a man who never

made it back from the war. She also filled in some of the details of how she and Paul Jobs had

come to adopt him.

Soon after that, Jobs succeeded in tracking down the woman who had put him up for adoption.

His quiet quest to find her had begun in the early 1980s, when he hired a detective who had failed

to come up with anything. Then Jobs noticed the name of a San Francisco doctor on his birth

certificate. “He was in the phone book, so I gave him a call,” Jobs recalled. The doctor was no

help. He claimed that his records had been destroyed in a fire. That was not true. In fact, right after

Jobs called, the doctor wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on it, “To be delivered to

Steve Jobs on my death.” When he died a short time later, his widow sent the letter to Jobs. In it,

the doctor explained that his mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin

named Joanne Schieble.

It took another few weeks and the work of another detective to track her down. After giving

him up, Joanne had married his biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, and they had

another child, Mona. Jandali abandoned them five years later, and Joanne married a colorful iceskating

instructor, George Simpson. That marriage didn’t last long either, and in 1970 she began a

meandering journey that took her and Mona (both of them now using the last name Simpson) to

Los Angeles.

Jobs had been reluctant to let Paul and Clara, whom he considered his real parents, know about

his search for his birth mother. With a sensitivity that was unusual for him, and which showed the

deep affection he felt for his parents, he worried that they might be offended. So he never

contacted Joanne Simpson until after Clara Jobs died in early 1986. “I never wanted them to feel

like I didn’t consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents,” he recalled. “I

loved them so much that I never wanted them to know of my search, and I even had reporters keep

it quiet when any of them found out.” When Clara died, he decided to tell Paul Jobs, who was

perfectly comfortable and said he didn’t mind at all if Steve made contact with his biological

mother.

So one day Jobs called Joanne Simpson, said who he was, and arranged to come down to Los

Angeles to meet her. He later claimed it was mainly out of curiosity. “I believe in environment

more than heredity in determining your traits, but still you have to wonder a little about your

biological roots,” he said. He also wanted to reassure Joanne that what she had done was all right.

“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her, because I’

m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have

me.”

Joanne was overcome with emotion when Jobs arrived at her Los Angeles house. She knew he

was famous and rich, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. She immediately began to pour out her

emotions. She had been pressured to sign the papers putting him up for adoption, she said, and did

so only when told that he was happy in the house of his new parents. She had always missed him

and suffered about what she had done. She apologized over and over, even as Jobs kept reassuring

her that he understood, and that things had turned out just fine.

Once she calmed down, she told Jobs that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, who was then an

aspiring novelist in Manhattan. She had never told Mona that she had a brother, and that day she

broke the news, or at least part of it, by telephone. “You have a brother, and he’s wonderful, and

he’s famous, and I’m going to bring him to New York so you can meet him,” she said. Mona was

in the throes of finishing a novel about her mother and their peregrination from Wisconsin to Los

Angeles, Anywhere but Here. Those who’ve read it will not be surprised that Joanne was

somewhat quirky in the way she imparted to Mona the news about her brother. She refused to say

who he was—only that he had been poor, had gotten rich, was good-looking and famous, had long

dark hair, and lived in California. Mona then worked at the Paris Review, George Plimpton’s

literary journal housed on the ground floor of his townhouse near Manhattan’s East River. She and

her coworkers began a guessing game on who her brother might be. John Travolta? That was one

of the favorite guesses. Other actors were also hot prospects. At one point someone did toss out a

guess that “maybe it’s one of those guys who started Apple computer,” but no one could recall

their names.

The meeting occurred in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel. “He was totally straightforward and

lovely, just a normal and sweet guy,” Mona recalled. They all sat and talked for a few minutes,

then he took his sister for a long walk, just the two of them. Jobs was thrilled to find that he had a

sibling who was so similar to him. They were both intense in their artistry, observant of their

surroundings, and sensitive yet strong-willed. When they went to dinner together, they noticed the

same architectural details and talked about them excitedly afterward. “My sister’s a writer!” he

exulted to colleagues at Apple when he found out.

When Plimpton threw a party for Anywhere but Here in late 1986, Jobs flew to New York to

accompany Mona to it. They grew increasingly close, though their friendship had the complexities

that might be expected, considering who they were and how they had come together. “Mona was

not completely thrilled at first to have me in her life and have her mother so emotionally

affectionate toward me,” he later said. “As we got to know each other, we became really good

friends, and she is my family. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I can’t imagine a better sister.

My adopted sister, Patty, and I were never close.” Mona likewise developed a deep affection for

him, and at times could be very protective, although she would later write an edgy novel about

him, A Regular Guy, that described his quirks with discomforting accuracy.

One of the few things they would argue about was her clothes. She dressed like a struggling

novelist, and he would berate her for not wearing clothes that were “fetching enough.” At one

point his comments

so annoyed her that she wrote him a letter: “I am a young writer, and this is my life, and I’m not

trying to be a model anyway.” He didn’t answer. But shortly after, a box arrived from the store of

Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer whose stark and technology-influenced style made

him one of Jobs’s favorites. “He’d gone shopping for me,” she later said, “and he’d picked out

great things, exactly my size, in flattering colors.” There was one pantsuit that he had particularly

liked, and the shipment included three of them, all identical. “I still remember those first suits I

sent Mona,” he said. “They were linen pants and tops in a pale grayish green that looked beautiful

with her reddish hair.”

The Lost Father

In the meantime, Mona Simpson had been trying to track down their father, who had wandered off

when she was five. Through Ken Auletta and Nick Pileggi, prominent Manhattan writers, she was

introduced to a retired New York cop who had formed his own detective agency. “I paid him what

little money I had,” Simpson recalled, but the search was unsuccessful. Then she met another

private eye in California, who was able to find an address for Abdulfattah Jandali in Sacramento

through a Department of Motor Vehicles search. Simpson told her brother and flew out from New

York to see the man who was apparently their father.

Jobs had no interest in meeting him. “He didn’t treat me well,” he later explained. “I don’t hold

anything against him—I’m happy to be alive. But what bothers me most is that he didn’t treat

Mona well. He abandoned her.” Jobs himself had abandoned his own illegitimate daughter, Lisa,

and now was trying to restore their relationship, but that complexity did not soften his feelings

toward Jandali. Simpson went to Sacramento alone.

“It was very intense,” Simpson recalled. She found her father working in a small restaurant. He

seemed happy to see her, yet oddly passive about the entire situation. They talked for a few hours,

and he recounted that, after he left Wisconsin, he had drifted away from teaching and gotten into

the restaurant business.

Jobs had asked Simpson not to mention him, so she didn’t. But at one point her father casually

remarked that he and her mother had had another baby, a boy, before she had been born. “What

happened to him?” she asked. He replied, “We’ll never see that baby again. That baby’s gone.”

Simpson recoiled but said nothing.

An even more astonishing revelation occurred when Jandali was describing the previous

restaurants that he had run. There had been some nice ones, he insisted, fancier than the

Sacramento joint they were then sitting in. He told her, somewhat emotionally, that he wished she

could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That

was a wonderful place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there.

Even Steve Jobs.” Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy,

and a big tipper,” her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, Steve Jobs is your

son!

When the visit was over, she called Jobs surreptitiously from the pay phone at the restaurant

and arranged to meet him at the Espresso Roma café in Berkeley. Adding to the personal and

family drama, he brought along Lisa, now in grade school, who lived with her mother, Chrisann.

When they all arrived at the café, it was close to 10 p.m., and Simpson poured forth the tale. Jobs

was understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He could recall

being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father. “It was amazing,” he later

said of the revelation. “I had been to that restaurant a few times, and I remember meeting the

owner. He was Syrian. Balding. We shook hands.”

Nevertheless Jobs still had no desire to see him. “I was a wealthy man by then, and I didn’t

trust him not to try to blackmail me or go to the press about it,” he recalled. “I asked Mona not to

tell him about me.”

She never did, but years later Jandali saw his relationship to Jobs mentioned online. (A blogger

noticed that Simpson had listed Jandali as her father in a reference book and figured out he must

be Jobs’s father as well.) By then Jandali was married for a fourth time and working as a food and

beverage manager at the Boomtown Resort and Casino just west of Reno, Nevada. When he

brought his new wife, Roscille, to visit

Simpson in 2006, he raised the topic. “What is this thing about Steve Jobs?” he asked. She

confirmed the story, but added that she thought Jobs had no interest in meeting him. Jandali

seemed to accept that. “My father is thoughtful and a beautiful storyteller, but he is very, very

passive,” Simpson said. “He never contacted Steve.”

Simpson turned her search for Jandali into a basis for her second novel, The Lost Father,

published in 1992. (Jobs convinced Paul Rand, the designer who did the NeXT logo, to design the

cover, but according to Simpson, “It was God-awful and we never used it.”) She also tracked

down various members of the Jandali family, in Homs and in America, and in 2011 was writing a

novel about her Syrian roots. The Syrian ambassador in Washington threw a dinner for her that

included a cousin and his wife who then lived in Florida and had flown up for the occasion.

Simpson assumed that Jobs would eventually meet Jandali, but as time went on he showed even

less interest. In 2010, when Jobs and his son, Reed, went to a birthday dinner for Simpson at her

Los Angeles house, Reed spent some time looking at pictures of his biological grandfather, but

Jobs ignored them. Nor did he seem to care about his Syrian heritage. When the Middle East

would come up in conversation, the topic did not engage him or evoke his typical strong opinions,

even after Syria was swept up in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “I don’t think anybody really

knows what we should be doing over there,” he said when I asked whether the Obama

administration should be intervening more in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. “You’re fucked if you do

and you’re fucked if you don’t.”

Jobs did retain a friendly relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Simpson. Over the

years she and Mona would often spend Christmas at Jobs’s house. The visits could be sweet, but

also emotionally draining. Joanne would sometimes break into tears, say how much she had loved

him, and apologize for giving him up. It turned out all right, Jobs would reassure her. As he told

her one Christmas, “Don’t worry. I had a great childhood. I turned out okay.”

Lisa

Lisa Brennan, however, did not have a great childhood. When she was young, her father almost

never came to see her. “I didn’t want to be a father, so I wasn’t,” Jobs later said, with only a touch

of remorse in his voice. Yet occasionally he felt the tug. One day, when Lisa was three, Jobs was

driving near the house he had bought for her and Chrisann, and he decided to stop. Lisa didn’t

know who he was. He sat on the doorstep, not venturing inside, and talked to Chrisann. The scene

was repeated once or twice a year. Jobs would come by unannounced, talk a little bit about Lisa’s

school options or other issues, then drive off in his Mercedes.

But by the time Lisa turned eight, in 1986, the visits were occurring more frequently. Jobs was

no longer immersed in the grueling push to create the Macintosh or in the subsequent power

struggles with Sculley. He was at NeXT, which was calmer, friendlier, and headquartered in Palo

Alto, near where Chrisann and Lisa lived. In addition, by the time she was in third grade, it was

clear that Lisa was a smart and artistic kid, who had already been singled out by her teachers for

her writing ability. She was spunky and high-spirited and had a little of her father’s defiant

attitude. She also looked a bit like him, with arched eyebrows and a faintly Middle Eastern

angularity. One day, to the surprise of his colleagues, he brought her by the office. As she turned

cartwheels in the corridor, she squealed, “Look at me!”

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