THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 13 page

marriage would turn out to be enduring, marked by loyalty and faithfulness, overcoming the ups

and downs and jangling emotional complexities it encountered.

• • •

Avie Tevanian decided Jobs needed a bachelor’s party. This was not as easy as it sounded. Jobs

did not like to party and didn’t have a gang of male buddies. He didn’t even have a best man. So

the party turned out to be just Tevanian and Richard Crandall, a computer science professor at

Reed who had taken a leave to work at NeXT. Tevanian hired a limo, and when they got to Jobs’s

house, Powell answered the door dressed in a suit and wearing a fake moustache, saying that she

wanted to come as one of the guys. It was just a joke, and soon the three bachelors, none of them

drinkers, were rolling to San Francisco to see if they could pull off their own pale version of a

bachelor party.

Tevanian had been unable to get reservations at Greens, the vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason

that Jobs liked, so he booked a very fancy restaurant at a hotel. “I don’t want to eat here,” Jobs

announced as soon as the bread was placed on the table. He made them get up and walk out, to the

horror of Tevanian, who was not yet used to Jobs’s restaurant manners. He led them to Café

Jacqueline in North Beach, the soufflé place that he loved, which was indeed a better choice.

Afterward they took the limo across the Golden Gate Bridge to a bar in Sausalito, where all three

ordered shots of tequila but only sipped them. “It was not great as bachelor parties go, but it was

the best we could come up with for someone like Steve, and nobody else volunteered to do it,”

recalled Tevanian. Jobs was appreciative. He decided that he wanted Tevanian to marry his sister

Mona Simpson. Though nothing came of it, the thought was a sign of affection.

Powell had fair warning of what she was getting into. As she was planning the wedding, the

person who was going to do the calligraphy for the invitations came by the house to show them

some options. There was no furniture for her to sit on, so she sat on the floor and laid out the

samples. Jobs looked for a few minutes, then got up and left the room. They waited for him to

come back, but he didn’t. After a while Powell went to find him in his room. “Get rid of her,” he

said. “I can’t look at her stuff. It’s shit.”

On March 18, 1991, Steven Paul Jobs, thirty-six, married Laurene Powell, twenty-seven, at the

Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile

of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts

movement, and the Park Service’s love of huge fireplaces. Its best features are the views. It has

floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Half Dome and Yosemite Falls.

About fifty people came, including Steve’s father Paul Jobs and sister Mona Simpson. She

brought her fiancé, Richard Appel, a lawyer who went on to become a television comedy writer.

(As a writer for The Simpsons, he named Homer’s mother after his wife.) Jobs insisted that they

all arrive by chartered bus; he wanted to control all aspects of the event.

The ceremony was in the solarium, with the snow coming down hard and Glacier Point just

visible in the distance. It was conducted by Jobs’s longtime Sōtō Zen teacher, Kobun Chino, who

shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted in a mumbling manner that most guests

found incomprehensible. “I thought he was drunk,” said Tevanian. He wasn’t. The wedding cake

was in the shape of Half Dome, the granite crest at the end of Yosemite Valley, but since it was

strictly vegan—devoid of eggs, milk, or any refined products—more than a few of the guests

found it inedible. Afterward they all went hiking, and Powell’s three strapping brothers launched a

snowball fight, with lots of tackling and roughhousing. “You see, Mona,” Jobs said to his sister,

“Laurene is descended from Joe Namath and we’re descended from John Muir.”

A Family Home

Powell shared her husband’s interest in natural foods. While at business school, she had worked

part time at Odwalla, the juice company, where she helped develop the first marketing plan. After

marrying Jobs, she felt that it was important to have a career, having learned from her childhood

the need to be self-sufficient. So she started her own company, Terravera, that made ready-to-eat

organic meals and delivered them to stores throughout northern California.

Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished Woodside mansion, the couple

moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in

old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary

venture capitalist John Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark

Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not

ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from view. Instead,

houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets flanked by wide sidewalks.

“We wanted to live in a neighborhood where kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.

The house was not the minimalist and modernist style Jobs would have designed if he had built

a home from scratch. Nor was it a large or distinctive mansion that would make people stop and

take notice as they drove down his street in Palo Alto. It was built in the 1930s by a local designer

named Carr Jones, who specialized in carefully crafted homes in the “storybook style” of English

or French country cottages.

The two-story house was made of red brick, with exposed wood beams and a shingle roof with

curved lines; it evoked a rambling Cotswold cottage, or perhaps a home where a well-to-do Hobbit

might have lived. The one Californian touch was a mission-style courtyard framed by the wings of

the house. The two-story vaulted-ceiling living room was informal, with a floor of tile and terracotta.

At one end was a large triangular window leading up to the peak of the ceiling; it had

stained glass when Jobs bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he replaced it with clear glass. The

other renovation he and Powell made was to expand the kitchen to include a wood-burning pizza

oven and room for a long wooden table that would become the family’s primary gathering place.

It was supposed to be a four-month renovation, but it took sixteen months because Jobs kept

redoing the design. They also bought the small house behind them and razed it to make a

backyard, which Powell turned into a beautiful natural garden filled with a profusion of seasonal

flowers along with vegetables and herbs.

Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and

wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had

been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden Gate

Bridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman

who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being

inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas

came from reading books in the library and Architectural Digest.”

Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare essentials: a chest of drawers

and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding chairs in what would have been a

dining room. He wanted around him only things that he could admire, and that made it hard

simply to go out and buy a lot of furniture. Now that he was living in a normal neighborhood

home with a wife and soon a child, he had to make some concessions to necessity. But it was hard.

They got beds, dressers, and a music system for the living room, but items like sofas took longer.

“We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” recalled Powell. “We spent a lot of time

asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’” Buying appliances was also a philosophical

task, not just an impulse purchase. A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that

went into getting a new washing machine:

It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much

better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter

as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t

trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much

softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we

want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we

care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about

our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We

spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. “I got more thrill out of them

than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs said.

The one piece of art that Jobs bought for the vaulted-ceiling living room was an Ansel Adams

print of the winter sunrise in the Sierra Nevada taken from Lone Pine, California. Adams had

made the huge mural print for his daughter, who later sold it. At one point Jobs’s housekeeper

wiped it with a wet cloth, and Jobs tracked down a person who had worked with Adams to come

to the house, strip it down a layer, and restore it.

The house was so unassuming that Bill Gates was somewhat baffled when he visited with his

wife. “Do all of you live here?” asked Gates, who was then in the process of building a 66,000-

square-foot mansion near Seattle. Even when he had his second coming at Apple and was a worldfamous

billionaire, Jobs had no security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back door

unlocked during the day.

His only security problem came, sadly and strangely, from Burrell Smith, the mop-headed,

cherubic Macintosh software engineer who had been Andy Hertzfeld’s sidekick. After leaving

Apple, Smith descended into schizophrenia. He lived in a house down the street from Hertzfeld,

and as his disorder progressed he began wandering the streets naked, at other times smashing the

windows of cars and churches. He was put on strong medication, but it proved difficult to

calibrate. At one point when his demons returned, he began going over to the Jobs house in the

evenings, throwing rocks through the windows, leaving rambling letters, and once tossing a

firecracker into the house. He was arrested, but the case was dropped when he went for more

treatment. “Burrell was so funny and naïve, and then one April day he suddenly snapped,” Jobs

recalled. “It was the weirdest, saddest thing.”

Jobs was sympathetic, and often asked Hertzfeld what more he could do to help. At one point

Smith was thrown in jail and refused to identify himself. When Hertzfeld found out, three days

later, he called Jobs and asked for assistance in getting him released. Jobs did help, but he

surprised Hertzfeld with a question: “If something similar happened to me, would you take as

good care of me as you do Burrell?”

Jobs kept his mansion in Woodside, about ten miles up into the mountains from Palo Alto. He

wanted to tear down the fourteen-bedroom 1925 Spanish colonial revival, and he had plans drawn

up

to replace it with an extremely simple, Japanese-inspired modernist home one-third the size.

But for more than twenty years he engaged in a slow-moving series of court battles with

preservationists who wanted the crumbling original house to be saved. (In 2011 he finally got

permission to raze the house, but by then he had no desire to build a second home.)

On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its swimming

pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the

1950s ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since

both the main house and ranch house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art

dealers when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temporarily. Once,

shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry broke, Powell was making a final inspection of the

furnishings and noticed that one of the paintings was missing. Worried, she asked the advance

team and Secret Service what had happened. One of them pulled her aside and explained that it

was a painting of a dress on a hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the Lewinsky matter

they had decided to hide it. (During one of his late-night phone conversations with Jobs, Clinton

asked how he should handle the Lewinsky issue. “I don’t know if you did it, but if so, you’ve got

to tell the country,” Jobs told the president. There was silence on the other end of the line.)

Lisa Moves In

In the middle of Lisa’s eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were serious problems,

and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother’s house. So Jobs went on a walk with

Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered to let her move in with him. She was a mature girl, just

turning fourteen, and she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already knew

which room she wanted: the one right next to her father’s. When she was there once, with no one

home, she had tested it out by lying down on the bare floor.

It was a tough period. Chrisann Brennan would sometimes walk over from her own house a few

blocks away and yell at them from the yard. When I asked her recently about her behavior and the

allegations that led to Lisa’s moving out of her house, she said that she had still not been able to

process in her own mind what occurred during that period. But then she wrote me a long email

that she said would help explain the situation:

Do you know how Steve was able to get the city of Woodside to allow him to tear his Woodside home

down? There was a community of people who wanted to preserve his Woodside house due to its

historical value, but Steve wanted to tear it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that house

fall into so much disrepair and decay over a number of years that there was no way to save it. The

strategy he used to get what he wanted was to simply follow the line of least involvement and

resistance. So by his doing nothing on the house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years,

the house fell apart. Brilliant, no? . . . In a similar way did Steve work to undermine my effectiveness

AND my well being at the time when Lisa was 13 and 14 to get her to move into his house. He started

with one strategy but then it moved to another easier one that was even more destructive to me and more

problematic for Lisa. It may not have been of the greatest integrity, but he got what he wanted.

Lisa lived with Jobs and Powell for all four of her years at Palo Alto High School, and she began

using the name Lisa Brennan-Jobs. He tried to be a good father, but there were times when he was

cold and distant. When Lisa felt she had to escape, she would seek refuge with a friendly family

who lived nearby. Powell tried to be supportive, and she was the one who attended most of Lisa’s

school events.

By the time Lisa was a senior, she seemed to be flourishing. She joined the school newspaper,

The Campanile, and became the coeditor. Together with her classmate Ben Hewlett, grandson of

the man who gave her father his first job, she exposed secret raises that the school board had given

to administrators. When it came time to go to college,

she knew she wanted to go east. She applied to Harvard—forging her father’s signature on the

application because he was out of town—and was accepted for the class entering in 1996.

At Harvard Lisa worked on the college newspaper, The Crimson, and then the literary

magazine, The Advocate. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she took a year abroad at King’s

College, London. Her relationship with her father remained tumultuous throughout her college

years. When she would come home, fights over small things—what was being served for dinner,

whether she was paying enough attention to her half-siblings—would blow up, and they would not

speak to each other for weeks and sometimes months. The arguments occasionally got so bad that

Jobs would stop supporting her, and she would borrow money from Andy Hertzfeld or others.

Hertzfeld at one point lent Lisa $20,000 when she thought that her father was not going to pay her

tuition. “He was mad at me for making the loan,” Hertzfeld recalled, “but he called early the next

morning and had his accountant wire me the money.” Jobs did not go to Lisa’s Harvard graduation

in 2000. He said, “She didn’t even invite me.”

There were, however, some nice times during those years, including one summer when Lisa

came back home and performed at a benefit concert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an

advocacy group that supports access to technology. The concert took place at the Fillmore

Auditorium in San Francisco, which had been made famous by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson

Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. She sang Tracy Chapman’s anthem “Talkin’ bout a Revolution”

(“Poor people are gonna rise up / And get their share”) as her father stood in the back cradling his

one-year-old daughter, Erin.

Jobs’s ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to Manhattan as a freelance writer.

Their problems were exacerbated because of Jobs’s frustrations with Chrisann. He had bought a

$700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in Lisa’s name, but Chrisann convinced her to sign

it over and then sold it, using the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in Paris. Once

the money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and became an artist creating “light paintings”

and Buddhist mandalas. “I am a ‘Connector’ and a visionary contributor to the future of evolving

humanity and the ascended Earth,”

she said on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). “I experience the forms, color,

and sound frequencies of sacred vibration as I create and live with the paintings.” When Chrisann

needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental problem, Jobs refused to give it to her, causing

Lisa again to not speak to him for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.

Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a springboard for her third novel, A

Regular Guy, published in 1996. The book’s title character is based on Jobs, and to some extent it

adheres to reality: It depicts Jobs’s quiet generosity to, and purchase of a special car for, a brilliant

friend who had degenerative bone disease, and it accurately describes many unflattering aspects of

his relationship with Lisa, including his original denial of paternity. But other parts are purely

fiction; Chrisann had taught Lisa at a very early age how to drive, for example, but the book’s

scene of “Jane” driving a truck across the mountains alone at age five to find her father of course

never happened. In addition, there are little details in the novel that, in journalist parlance, are too

good to check, such as the head-snapping description of the character based on Jobs in the very

first sentence: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.”

On the surface, the novel’s fictional portrayal of Jobs seems harsh. Simpson describes her main

character as unable “to see any need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people.” His

hygiene is also as dubious as that of the real Jobs. “He didn’t believe in deodorant and often

professed that with a proper diet and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor

smell.” But the novel is lyrical and intricate on many levels, and by the end there is a fuller picture

of a man who loses control of the great company he had founded and learns to appreciate the

daughter he had abandoned. The final scene is of him dancing with his daughter.

Jobs later said that he never read the novel. “I heard it was about me,” he told me, “and if it was

about me, I would have gotten really pissed off, and I didn’t want to get pissed at my sister, so I

didn’t read it.” However, he told the New York Times a few months after the book appeared that he

had read it and saw the reflections of himself in

the main character. “About 25% of it is totally me, right down to the mannerisms,” he told the

reporter, Steve Lohr. “And I’m certainly not telling you which 25%.” His wife said that, in fact,

Jobs glanced at the book and asked her to read it for him to see what he should make of it.

Simpson sent the manuscript to Lisa before it was published, but at first she didn’t read more

than the opening. “In the first few pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my

things, my thoughts, myself in the character Jane,” she noted. “And sandwiched between the truths

was invention—lies to me, made more evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth.”

Lisa was wounded, and she wrote a piece for the Harvard Advocate explaining why. Her first draft

was very bitter, then she toned it down a bit before she published it. She felt violated by Simpson’

s friendship. “I didn’t know, for those six years, that Mona was collecting,” she wrote. “I didn’t

know that as I sought her consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking.” Eventually Lisa

reconciled with Simpson. They went out to a coffee shop to discuss the book, and Lisa told her

that she hadn’t been able to finish it. Simpson told her she would like the ending. Over the years

Lisa had an on-and-off relationship with Simpson, but it would be closer in some ways than the

one she had with her father.

Children

When Powell gave birth in 1991, a few months after her wedding to Jobs, their child was known

for two weeks as “baby boy Jobs,” because settling on a name was proving only slightly less

difficult than choosing a washing machine. Finally, they named him Reed Paul Jobs. His middle

name was that of Jobs’s father, and his first name (both Jobs and Powell insist) was chosen

because it sounded good rather than because it was the name of Jobs’s college.

Reed turned out to be like his father in many ways: incisive and smart, with intense eyes and a

mesmerizing charm. But unlike his father, he had sweet manners and a self-effacing grace. He was

creative—as a kid he liked to dress in costume and stay in character—and also a great student,

interested in science. He could replicate his father’s stare, but he was demonstrably affectionate

and seemed not to have an ounce of cruelty in his nature.

Erin Siena Jobs was born in 1995. She was a little quieter and sometimes suffered from not

getting much of her father’s attention. She picked up her father’s interest in design and

architecture, but she also learned to keep a bit of an emotional distance, so as not to be hurt by his

detachment.

The youngest child, Eve, was born in 1998, and she turned into a strong-willed, funny

firecracker who, neither needy nor intimidated, knew how to handle her father, negotiate with him

(and sometimes win), and even make fun of him. Her father joked that she’s the one who will run

Apple someday, if she doesn’t become president of the United States.

Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was more distant. As

he would with others, he would occasionally focus on them, but just as often would completely

ignore them when he had other things on his mind. “He focuses on his work, and at times he has

not been there for the girls,” Powell said. At one point Jobs marveled to his wife at how well their

kids were turning out, “especially since we’re not always there for them.” This amused, and

slightly annoyed, Powell, because she had given up her career when Reed turned two and she

decided she wanted to have more children.

In 1995 Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison threw a fortieth-birthday party for Jobs filled with tech

stars and moguls. Ellison had become a close friend, and he would often take the Jobs family out

on one of his many luxurious yachts. Reed started referring to him as “our rich friend,” which was

amusing evidence of how his father refrained from ostentatious displays of wealth. The lesson

Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered life rather than

enriched it. “Every other CEO I know has a security detail,” he said. “They’ve even got them at

their homes. It’s a nutso way to live. We just decided that’s not how we wanted to raise our kids.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TOY STORY

Buzz and Woody to the Rescue

Jeffrey Katzenberg

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Walt Disney once said. That was the type of attitude that

appealed to Jobs. He admired Disney’s obsession with detail and design, and he felt that there was

a natural fit between Pixar and the movie studio that Disney had founded.

The Walt Disney Company had licensed Pixar’s Computer Animation Production System, and

that made it the largest customer for Pixar’s computers. One day Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of

Disney’s film division, invited Jobs down to the Burbank studios to see the technology in

operation. As the Disney folks were showing him around, Jobs turned to Katzenberg and asked,

“Is Disney happy with Pixar?” With great exuberance, Katzenberg answered yes. Then Jobs

asked, “Do you think we at Pixar are happy with Disney?” Katzenberg said he assumed so. “No,

we’re not,” Jobs said. “We want to do a film with you. That would make us happy.”

Katzenberg was willing. He admired John Lasseter’s animated shorts and had tried

unsuccessfully to lure him back to Disney. So Katzenberg invited the Pixar team down to discuss

partnering on a film. When Catmull, Jobs, and Lasseter got settled at the conference table,

Katzenberg was forthright. “John, since you won’t come work for me,” he said, looking at

Lasseter, “I’m going to make it work this way.”

Just as the Disney company shared some traits with Pixar, so Katzenberg shared some with

Jobs. Both were charming when they wanted to be, and aggressive (or worse) when it suited their

moods or interests. Alvy Ray Smith, on the verge of quitting Pixar, was at the meeting.

“Katzenberg and Jobs impressed me as a lot alike,” he recalled. “Tyrants with an amazing gift of

gab.” Katzenberg was delightfully aware of this. “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant,” he told the

Pixar team. “I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right.” One can imagine Jobs saying the same.

As befitted two men of equal passion, the negotiations between Katzenberg and Jobs took

months. Katzenberg insisted that Disney be given the rights to Pixar’s proprietary technology for

making 3-D animation. Jobs refused, and he ended up winning that engagement. Jobs had his own

demand: Pixar would have part ownership of the film and its characters, sharing control of both

video rights and sequels. “If that’s what you want,” Katzenberg said, “we can just quit talking and

you can leave now.” Jobs stayed, conceding that point.

Lasseter was riveted as he watched the two wiry and tightly wound principals parry and thrust.

“Just to see Steve and Jeffrey go at it, I was in awe,” he recalled. “It was like a fencing match.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 543