THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 12 page

Avie Tevanian, a lanky and gregarious engineer at NeXT who had become Jobs’s friend,

remembers that every now and then, when they were going out to dinner, they would stop by

Chrisann’s house to pick up Lisa. “He was very sweet to her,” Tevanian recalled. “He was a

vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn’t. He was fine with that. He suggested she order

chicken, and she did.”

Eating chicken became her little indulgence as she shuttled between two parents who were

vegetarians with a spiritual regard for natural foods. “We bought our groceries—our puntarella,

quinoa, celeriac, carob-covered nuts—in yeasty-smelling stores where the women didn’t dye their

hair,” she later wrote about her time with her mother. “But we sometimes tasted foreign treats. A

few times we bought a hot, seasoned chicken from a gourmet shop with rows and rows of

chickens turning on spits, and ate it in the car from the foil-lined paper bag with our fingers.” Her

father, whose dietary fixations came in fanatic waves, was more fastidious about what he ate. She

watched him spit out a mouthful of soup one day after learning that it contained butter. After

loosening up a bit while at Apple, he was back to being a strict vegan. Even at a young age Lisa

began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and

minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from

arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t

know: Things led to their opposites.”

In a similar way, the absence and coldness of her father made his occasional moments of

warmth so much more intensely gratifying. “I didn’t live with him, but he would stop by our

house some days, a deity among us for a few tingling moments or hours,” she recalled. Lisa soon

became interesting enough that he would take walks with her. He would also go rollerblading with

her on the quiet streets of old Palo Alto, often stopping at the houses of Joanna Hoffman and Andy

Hertzfeld. The first time he brought her around to see Hoffman, he just knocked on the door and

announced, “This is Lisa.” Hoffman knew right away. “It was obvious she was his daughter,” she

told me. “Nobody has that jaw. It’s a signature jaw.” Hoffman, who suffered from not knowing

her own divorced father until she was ten, encouraged Jobs to be a better father. He followed her

advice, and later thanked her for it.

Once he took Lisa on a business trip to Tokyo, and they stayed at the sleek and businesslike

Okura Hotel. At the elegant downstairs sushi bar, Jobs ordered large trays of unagi sushi, a dish he

loved so much that he allowed the warm cooked eel to pass muster as vegetarian. The pieces were

coated with fine salt or a thin sweet sauce, and Lisa remembered later how they dissolved in her

mouth. So, too, did the distance between them. As she later wrote, “It was the first time I’d felt,

with him, so relaxed and content, over those trays of meat; the excess, the permission and warmth

after the cold salads, meant

a once inaccessible space had opened. He was less rigid with himself, even human under the

great ceilings with the little chairs, with the meat, and me.”

But it was not always sweetness and light. Jobs was as mercurial with Lisa as he was with

almost everyone, cycling between embrace and abandonment. On one visit he would be playful;

on the next he would be cold; often he was not there at all. “She was always unsure of their

relationship,” according to Hertzfeld. “I went to a birthday party of hers, and Steve was supposed

to come, and he was very, very, late. She got extremely anxious and disappointed. But when he

finally did come, she totally lit up.”

Lisa learned to be temperamental in return. Over the years their relationship would be a roller

coaster, with each of the low points elongated by their shared stubbornness. After a falling-out,

they could go for months not speaking to each other. Neither one was good at reaching out,

apologizing, or making the effort to heal, even when he was wrestling with repeated health

problems. One day in the fall of 2010 he was wistfully going through a box of old snapshots with

me, and paused over one that showed him visiting Lisa when she was young. “I probably didn’t go

over there enough,” he said. Since he had not spoken to her all that year, I asked if he might want

to reach out to her with a call or email. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then went back to

riffling through other old photographs.

The Romantic

When it came to women, Jobs could be deeply romantic. He tended to fall in love dramatically,

share with friends every up and down of a relationship, and pine in public whenever he was away

from his current girlfriend. In the summer of 1983 he went to a small dinner party in Silicon

Valley with Joan Baez and sat next to an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania named

Jennifer Egan, who was not quite sure who he was. By then he and Baez had realized that they

weren’t destined to be forever young together, and Jobs found himself fascinated by Egan, who

was working on a San Francisco weekly during her summer vacation. He tracked her down, gave

her a call, and took her to Café Jacqueline, a little bistro near Telegraph Hill that specialized in

vegetarian soufflés.

They dated for a year, and Jobs often flew east to visit her. At a Boston Macworld event, he

told a large gathering how much in love he was and thus needed to rush out to catch a plane for

Philadelphia to see his girlfriend. The audience was enchanted. When he was visiting New York,

she would take the train up to stay with him at the Carlyle or at Jay Chiat’s Upper East Side

apartment, and they would eat at Café Luxembourg, visit (repeatedly) the apartment in the San

Remo he was planning to remodel, and go to movies or (once at least) the opera.

He and Egan also spoke for hours on the phone many nights. One topic they wrestled with was

his belief, which came from his Buddhist studies, that it was important to avoid attachment to

material objects. Our consumer desires are unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you

need to develop a life of nonattachment and non-materialism. He even sent her a tape of Kobun

Chino, his Zen teacher, lecturing about the problems caused by craving and obtaining things. Egan

pushed back. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, she asked, by making computers and other

products that people coveted? “He was irritated by the dichotomy, and we had exuberant debates

about it,” Egan recalled.

In the end Jobs’s pride in the objects he made overcame his sensibility that people should

eschew being attached to such possessions. When the Macintosh came out in January 1984, Egan

was staying at her mother’s apartment in San Francisco during her winter break from Penn. Her

mother’s dinner guests were astonished one night when Steve Jobs—suddenly very famous—

appeared at the door carrying a freshly boxed Macintosh and proceeded to Egan’s bedroom to set

it up.

Jobs told Egan, as he had a few other friends, about his premonition that he would not live a

long life. That was why he was driven and impatient, he confided. “He felt a sense of urgency

about all he wanted to get done,” Egan later said. Their relationship tapered off by the fall

of 1984, when Egan made it clear that she was still far too young to think of getting married.

Shortly after that, just as the turmoil with Sculley was beginning to build at Apple in early 1985,

Jobs was heading to a meeting when he stopped at the office of a guy who was working with the

Apple Foundation, which helped get computers to nonprofit organizations. Sitting in his office

was a lithe, very blond woman who combined a hippie aura of natural purity with the solid

sensibilities of a computer consultant. Her name was Tina Redse. “She was the most beautiful

woman I’d ever seen,” Jobs recalled.

He called her the next day and asked her to dinner. She said no, that she was living with a

boyfriend. A few days later he took her on a walk to a nearby park and again asked her out, and

this time she told her boyfriend that she wanted to go. She was very honest and open. After dinner

she started to cry because she knew her life was about to be disrupted. And it was. Within a few

months she had moved into the unfurnished mansion in Woodside. “She was the first person I was

truly in love with,” Jobs later said. “We had a very deep connection. I don’t know that anyone will

ever understand me better than she did.”

Redse came from a troubled family, and Jobs shared with her his own pain about being put up

for adoption. “We were both wounded from our childhood,” Redse recalled. “He said to me that

we were misfits, which is why we belonged together.” They were physically passionate and prone

to public displays of affection; their make-out sessions in the NeXT lobby are well remembered

by employees. So too were their fights, which occurred at movie theaters and in front of visitors to

Woodside. Yet he constantly praised her purity and naturalness. As the well-grounded Joanna

Hoffman pointed out when discussing Jobs’s infatuation with the otherworldly Redse, “Steve had

a tendency to look at vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.”

When he was being eased out at Apple in 1985, Redse traveled with him in Europe, where he

was salving his wounds. Standing on a bridge over the Seine one evening, they bandied about the

idea, more

romantic than serious, of just staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely.

Redse was eager, but Jobs didn’t want to. He was burned but still ambitious. “I am a reflection of

what I do,” he told her. She recalled their Paris moment in a poignant email she sent to him twenty

-five years later, after they had gone their separate ways but retained their spiritual connection:

We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast. We leaned against the smooth

stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below. Your world had cleaved and then it paused,

waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what had come

before. I tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let

something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world

and emerge, anonymous and new, in simple lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could

be together every day, like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself. I like to

think you considered it before you laughed and said “What could I do? I’ve made myself

unemployable.” I like to think that in that moment’s hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we

lived that simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages, with a brood of grandchildren

around us on a farm in the south of France, quietly going about our days, warm and complete like loaves

of fresh bread, our small world filled with the aroma of patience and familiarity.

The relationship lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his sparsely

furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had once worked at Chez

Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made her feel like an interloper. She

would occasionally move out to an apartment of her own in Palo Alto, especially after one of her

torrential arguments with Jobs. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the

hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he

could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so selfcentered.

Caring deeply about

someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish

on anyone, she said.

They were different in so many ways. “On the spectrum of cruel to kind, they are close to the

opposite poles,” Hertzfeld later said. Redse’s kindness was manifest in ways large and small; she

always gave money to street people, she volunteered to help those who (like her father) were

afflicted with mental illness, and she took care to make Lisa and even Chrisann feel comfortable

with her. More than anyone, she helped persuade Jobs to spend more time with Lisa. But she

lacked Jobs’s ambition and drive. The ethereal quality that made her seem so spiritual to Jobs also

made it hard for them to stay on the same wavelength. “Their relationship was incredibly

tempestuous,” said Hertzfeld. “Because of both of their characters, they would have lots and lots

of fights.”

They also had a basic philosophical difference about whether aesthetic tastes were

fundamentally individual, as Redse believed, or universal and could be taught, as Jobs believed.

She accused him of being too influenced by the Bauhaus movement. “Steve believed it was our

job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” she recalled. “I don’t share

that perspective. I believe when we listen deeply, both within ourselves and to each other, we are

able to allow what’s innate and true to emerge.”

When they were together for a long stretch, things did not work out well. But when they were

apart, Jobs would pine for her. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he asked her to marry him. She

couldn’t do it. It would drive her crazy, she told friends. She had grown up in a volatile household,

and her relationship with Jobs bore too many similarities to that environment. They were

opposites who attracted, she said, but the combination was too combustible. “I could not have

been a good wife to ‘Steve Jobs,’ the icon,” she later explained. “I would have sucked at it on

many levels. In our personal interactions, I couldn’t abide his unkindness. I didn’t want to hurt

him, yet I didn’t want to stand by and watch him hurt other people either. It was painful and

exhausting.”

After they broke up, Redse helped found OpenMind, a mental health resource network in

California. She happened to read in a psychiatric

manual about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria.

“It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him

to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see,” she said. “It also explained

some of the choices he’d made about his daughter Lisa at that time. I think the issue is empathy—

the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

Redse later married, had two children, and then divorced. Every now and then Jobs would

openly pine for her, even after he was happily married. And when he began his battle with cancer,

she got in touch again to give support. She became very emotional whenever she recalled their

relationship. “Though our values clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relationship we

once hoped for,” she told me, “the care and love I felt for him decades ago has continued.”

Similarly, Jobs suddenly started to cry one afternoon as he sat in his living room reminiscing

about her. “She was one of the purest people I’ve ever known,” he said, tears rolling down his

cheeks. “There was something spiritual about her and spiritual about the connection we had.” He

said he always regretted that they could not make it work, and he knew that she had such regrets

as well. But it was not meant to be. On that they both agreed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FAMILY MAN

At Home with the Jobs Clan

With Laurene Powell, 1991

Laurene Powell

By this point, based on his dating history, a matchmaker could have put together a composite

sketch of the woman who would be right for Jobs. Smart, yet unpretentious. Tough enough to

stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise above turmoil. Well-educated and independent, yet

ready to make accommodations for him and a family. Down-to-earth, but with a touch of the

ethereal. Savvy enough to know how to manage him, but secure enough to not always need to.

And it wouldn’t hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an easygoing sense of humor who liked

organic vegetarian food. In October 1989, after his split with Tina Redse, just such a woman

walked into his life.

More specifically, just such a woman walked into his classroom. Jobs had agreed to give one of

the “View from the Top” lectures at the Stanford Business School one Thursday evening. Laurene

Powell was a new graduate student at the business school, and a guy in her class talked her into

going to the lecture. They arrived late and all the seats were taken, so they sat in the aisle. When

an usher told them they had to move, Powell took her friend down to the front row and

commandeered two of the reserved seats there. Jobs was led to the one next to her when he

arrived. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I

was waiting to be introduced,” Jobs recalled. They bantered a bit, and Laurene joked that she was

sitting there because she had won a raffle, and the prize was that he got to take her to dinner. “He

was so adorable,” she later said.

After the speech Jobs hung around on the edge of the stage chatting with students. He watched

Powell leave, then come back and stand at the edge of the crowd, then leave again. He bolted out

after her, brushing past the dean, who was trying to grab him for a conversation. After catching up

with her in the parking lot, he said, “Excuse me, wasn’t there something about a raffle you won,

that I’m supposed to take you to dinner?” She laughed. “How about Saturday?” he asked. She

agreed and wrote down her number. Jobs headed to his car to drive up to the Thomas Fogarty

winery in the Santa Cruz mountains above Woodside, where the NeXT education sales group was

holding a dinner. But he suddenly stopped and turned around. “I thought, wow, I’d rather have

dinner with her than the education group, so I ran back to her car and said ‘How about dinner

tonight?’” She said yes. It was a beautiful fall evening, and they walked into Palo Alto to a funky

vegetarian restaurant, St. Michael’s Alley, and ended up staying there for four hours. “We’ve been

together ever since,” he said.

Avie Tevanian was sitting at the winery restaurant waiting with the rest of the NeXT education

group. “Steve was sometimes unreliable, but when I talked to him I realized that something

special had come up,” he said. As soon as Powell got home, after midnight, she

called her close friend Kathryn (Kat) Smith, who was at Berkeley, and left a message on her

machine. “You will not believe what just happened to me!” it said. “You will not believe who I

met!” Smith called back the next morning and heard the tale. “We had known about Steve, and he

was a person of interest to us, because we were business students,” she recalled.

Andy Hertzfeld and a few others later speculated that Powell had been scheming to meet Jobs.

“Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating, and I think she targeted him from the beginning,”

Hertzfeld said. “Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and

vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of

irony there.” But Powell later insisted that this wasn’t the case. She went only because her friend

wanted to go, and she was slightly confused as to who they were going to see. “I knew that Steve

Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” she recalled. “I had them

mixed up. This was 1989. He was working at NeXT, and he was not that big of a deal to me. I

wasn’t that enthused, but my friend was, so we went.”

“There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love with, Tina and Laurene,” Jobs

later said. “I thought I was in love with Joan Baez, but I really just liked her a lot. It was just Tina

and then Laurene.”

Laurene Powell had been born in New Jersey in 1963 and learned to be self-sufficient at an early

age. Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who died a hero in a crash in Santa Ana, California; he

had been leading a crippled plane in for a landing, and when it hit his plane he kept flying to avoid

a residential area rather than ejecting in time to save his life. Her mother’s second marriage turned

out to be a horrible situation, but she felt she couldn’t leave because she had no means to support

her large family. For ten years Laurene and her three brothers had to suffer in a tense household,

keeping a good demeanor while compartmentalizing problems. She did well. “The lesson I learned

was clear, that I always wanted to be self-sufficient,” she said. “I took pride in that. My

relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is part of

who I am.”

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked at Goldman Sachs as a fixed

income trading strategist, dealing with enormous sums of money that she traded for the house

account. Jon Corzine, her boss, tried to get her to stay at Goldman, but instead she decided the

work was unedifying. “You could be really successful,” she said, “but you’re just contributing to

capital formation.” So after three years she quit and went to Florence, Italy, living there for eight

months before enrolling in Stanford Business School.

After their Thursday night dinner, she invited Jobs over to her Palo Alto apartment on Saturday.

Kat Smith drove down from Berkeley and pretended to be her roommate so she could meet him as

well. Their relationship became very passionate. “They would kiss and make out,” Smith said.

“He was enraptured with her. He would call me on the phone and ask, ‘What do you think, does

she like me?’ Here I am in this bizarre position of having this iconic person call me.”

That New Year’s Eve of 1989 the three went to Chez Panisse, the famed Alice Waters

restaurant in Berkeley, along with Lisa, then eleven. Something happened at the dinner that caused

Jobs and Powell to start arguing. They left separately, and Powell ended up spending the night at

Kat Smith’s apartment. At nine the next morning there was a knock at the door, and Smith opened

it to find Jobs, standing in the drizzle holding some wildflowers he had picked. “May I come in

and see Laurene?” he said. She was still asleep, and he walked into the bedroom. A couple of

hours went by, while Smith waited in the living room, unable to go in and get her clothes. Finally,

she put a coat on over her nightgown and went to Peet’s Coffee to pick up some food. Jobs did not

emerge until after noon. “Kat, can you come here for a minute?” he asked. They all gathered in the

bedroom. “As you know, Laurene’s father passed away, and Laurene’s mother isn’t here, and

since you’re her best friend, I’m going to ask you the question,” he said. “I’d like to marry

Laurene. Will you give your blessing?”

Smith clambered onto the bed and thought about it. “Is this okay with you?” she asked Powell.

When she nodded yes, Smith announced, “Well, there’s your answer.”

It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of focusing on something with insane

intensity for a while and then, abruptly,

turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and

on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to engage.

In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he and Powell would indulge in public displays

of affection that were so intense they embarrassed everyone in their presence, including Kat Smith

and Powell’s mother. In the mornings at his Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by

blasting the Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” on his tape deck. Yet at other times he

would ignore her. “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the

universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work,” said Smith. “He had the power to focus

like a laser beam, and when it came across you, you basked in the light of his attention. When it

moved to another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was very confusing to Laurene.”

Once she had accepted his marriage proposal on the first day of 1990, he didn’t mention it

again for several months. Finally, Smith confronted him while they were sitting on the edge of a

sandbox in Palo Alto. What was going on? Jobs replied that he needed to feel sure that Powell

could handle the life he lived and the type of person he was. In September she became fed up with

waiting and moved out. The following month, he gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she

moved back in.

In December Jobs took Powell to his favorite vacation spot, Kona Village in Hawaii. He had

started going there nine years earlier when, stressed out at Apple, he had asked his assistant to

pick out a place for him to escape. At first glance, he didn’t like the cluster of sparse thatched-roof

bungalows nestled on a beach on the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with communal

eating. But within hours he had begun to view it as paradise. There was a simplicity and spare

beauty that moved him, and he returned whenever he could. He especially enjoyed being there that

December with Powell. Their love had matured. The night before Christmas he again declared,

even more formally, that he wanted to marry her. Soon another factor would drive that decision.

While in Hawaii, Powell got pregnant. “We know exactly where it happened,” Jobs later said with

a laugh.

The Wedding, March 18, 1991

Powell’s pregnancy did not completely settle the issue. Jobs again began balking at the idea of

marriage, even though he had dramatically proposed to her both at the very beginning and the very

end of 1990. Furious, she moved out of his house and back to her apartment. For a while he sulked

or ignored the situation. Then he thought he might still be in love with Tina Redse; he sent her

roses and tried to convince her to return to him, maybe even get married. He was not sure what he

wanted, and he surprised a wide swath of friends and even acquaintances by asking them what he

should do. Who was prettier, he would ask, Tina or Laurene? Who did they like better? Who

should he marry? In a chapter about this in Mona Simpson’s novel A Regular Guy, the Jobs

character “asked more than a hundred people who they thought was more beautiful.” But that was

fiction; in reality, it was probably fewer than a hundred.

He ended up making the right choice. As Redse told friends, she never would have survived if

she had gone back to Jobs, nor would their marriage. Even though he would pine about the

spiritual nature of his connection to Redse, he had a far more solid relationship with Powell. He

liked her, he loved her, he respected her, and he was comfortable with her. He may not have seen

her as mystical, but she was a sensible anchor for his life. “He is the luckiest guy to have landed

with Laurene, who is smart and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his ups and downs

and tempestuous personality,” said Joanna Hoffman. “Because she’s not neurotic, Steve may feel

that she is not as mystical as Tina or something. But that’s silly.” Andy Hertzfeld agreed.

“Laurene looks a lot like Tina, but she is totally different because she is tougher and armor-plated.

That’s why the marriage works.”

Jobs understood this as well. Despite his emotional turbulence and occasional meanness, the

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