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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-
to-earth 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 ice-skating 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!”
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 self-centered. 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
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