The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (39 page)

After Steve and Tina broke up, he was single for a while. It was then he started to come over to my house on weekends to sleep on my couch in the middle of the day, even when Lisa wasn’t there. I thought this was odd but fine until I realized he wasn’t talking to me during these visits, just sleeping and then leaving. I didn’t like it. I said, “You know, if you are not going to talk to me when you’re here, then please don’t come over.” I felt he wanted to soak up my creativity and the warmth of my home, but didn’t value me enough to talk to me. It all pointed to something but I didn’t know what. I had a mix of impressions as I watched Steve walk out the door and down the sidewalk to his car. Peering beyond the screen door, I examined my feelings about having basically thrown him out. He looked back at me with a kind of squirrelly hurt pride, but also as if I was the loser. I didn’t feel like a loser. I also didn’t like throwing him out but I felt he was using me without acknowledgment. If he had had the manners to greet me, talk a bit, and say good-bye, I would have made space for him but he came and went like a thief and it hurt, deeply. I did a lot back then to leverage everything for the common wealth while Steve tended to the amassing of his own uncommon wealth. Beyond this, in the logic of fairy tales, it was like the taking of the rose from the garden in Beauty and the Beast—it looked like such a small thing, but it wasn’t.

*   *   *

And then Steve met Laurene Powell. Within a week of their meeting, Steve took Lisa and me out for dinner and told us he had met, in his words, “someone special.” He met her at a talk he’d given to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a talk that he had almost canceled because he was so tired. But he was unbelievably glad he had gone, he said, because he’d met this woman and it seemed like a big deal. Steve gave us the details about how she sat in the front row and then waited for him at the back of the room until after everyone had left, leaning back on a chair and looking intently at him.

“Is she pretty?” Lisa asked.

Steve laughed and threw up his hands. “I really have no idea,” he said. “I can’t tell.”

We showed our happiness for him because he was happy, but I think Lisa and I were also both a little uneasy.

What would it mean?

We would find out a couple of months later.

Lisa and I sat on the floor in the dining room—I was helping her with an art project. I like sparse furnishings and we never had tables big enough for some of our sprawling projects so we just spread out on the floors when we needed it. I loved the floors at the Rinconada house—since Steve had them redone, they were white stained, clean, and without scuffs, and with a little wiping down were like the best tables ever. At this time, I think Lisa was making maps on poster board to learn every country in the world. It was a part of the Nueva curriculum to learn all the countries and their capitals. I always helped her when it came to building things because I liked showing her how to use the right art materials and I loved thinking about content and aesthetics with her. That day we had colored pens and pencils, X-Acto blades and cutting board, tape and spray mount all over the floor as we sat legs straddled and hunched over our work. Lisa’s petite body was so cute when she was focused and working like this.

When the knock came, I shouted “Come in,” and Steve ushered Laurene into my house. She walked toward me fast and certain, as if she were a model on a runway. When she got within four feet, she struck a pose. She placed one foot in front of the other, before turning them out at gracious angles. She elongated her arms and opened her hands, turned her head to the side, and then looked down at me sitting on the floor with a slight smile on her face.

I was confused.

Why was she modeling for me? Was this what the next generation of Stanford girls was doing? I don’t remember anything about the conversation, just the pose and my getting a sense that the world had changed.
Maybe even gone backward,
I thought. This kind of finishing school presentation was precisely what my generation had rejected. Here was a different kind of woman and I was trying to understand what the behavior meant in the mix of everyone being polite at a first meeting. I think I must have looked a little like a flashbulb had gone off in front me—bewildered. Whatever her motivation, I decided that she was very sweet and courageous to present herself as she did.

After that I saw their relationship grow and I came to feel that Steve had met his match. She was ambitious and tough enough for him. I remembered them stopping by right after they had raced in their two cars down the freeway. They were laughing and full of vigor. She’d won, and oh did I love to hear this! Later I found myself very impressed by Laurene’s cool-mindedness and negotiation skills when Steve had a run-in with a surly waitress. It was right after their son, Reed, had been born and all five of us, Lisa, Reed, Laurene and Steve, and me had gone to Il Fornaio in Palo Alto for breakfast. Things got off on the wrong foot and Steve was in a power struggle with this older big-boned waitress who wasn’t going to let him boss her around. The waitress was in the wrong but Steve was being vicious. The whole thing was ridiculous. Laurene was very cool and narrated what the misunderstanding as it was happening. Her reasoning seemed to help tone down the tension. Right before they became engaged, someone in the group—Mona or Fin Taylor, Tina’s cousin—eventually named it. In sharp and utter contrast to all of us, Steve especially, Laurene had no quirks.

*   *   *

There are stories that Laurene had arranged for or anticipated (I am not sure how it came together) Steve’s talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business so she could set up that seemingly fateful meeting. I only found out about this years after the fact. And Laurene claims that they are untrue. But when I first heard about there being a question it was by way of two different people, both women, independent of one another, who sought me out to tell me that there was some kind of setup. One was at the event and the other had a close friend at the event.

Once I was told this I sat with the knowledge deep inside me for a couple of years. I couldn’t grasp why this woman who wanted to marry Steve shouldn’t marry him—especially since he came to want to marry her. And why had my friends who attended the event been so incensed? Eventually, in 2005 I decided to call on my friend Michael, to ask him what it meant.

Through the years I have called on Michael for his perspective on many things. More often than not, I am relieved and enlivened by what he says, and to have his wisdom and great aerial view of human life. When I told him about what Laurene had allegedly done in order to meet and marry Steve, he laughed with a low and long-drawn-out chuckle. Slowly he said, “Well, you see, love is something we commonly believe is given to us, a gift from something bigger than ourselves, providence or from God, if you will. But if such a thing is manipulated from the level of worldly ambition, it is of a different order.” I would think on this for a long time. I liked that he had framed love as being outside the worldly spheres of ambition.

Throughout history, there have certainly been many different kinds of marriages. And you could argue that if Steve wasn’t going to be more reflective about how he treated people (and if he wanted to be married), then he was very lucky that Laurene walked in. Moreover, if she chose herself for him in the way that some people have indicated that she did, it all points to her being a match for Steve. I assume that he eventually heard about all of this and I always wondered what he made of it.

Laurene knew how to take care of herself. Though, by her own admission, she was not a warm person, I saw in her a capacity for self-interest that I consider to have aspects that are admirable and ahead of their time in terms of women’s empowerment. I came to feel that she was uniquely suited for Steve. Her thick bones, goal-oriented focus, and levelheadedness all told me she could handle what he could mete out. I didn’t
not
like her. In fact, I found it easy to care about her. Not long after they married, she came to my house unexpectedly and sat with me on my porch and told me why she loved him. I believed her, but wondered why she was telling me.

I now understand that it might have been strategic. On another day, she followed Steve through my living room enthusiastically telling him, “What a good father you are!” Steve was a pretty poor father, anyone could see that. And anyone could see that he wanted to hear good things about himself even if they weren’t true. Laurene was willing to do that for him.

Within about five months of their going out, Steve asked me if I would have them over for dinner so I could get to know them together. It was to be a sort of welcoming dinner. But the request bothered me and I hung back. Parenting, especially single parenting, is exhausting. I didn’t have the extra money and I was often very tired by evening, after a full day, doing my own work, driving Lisa forty miles to school, and cooking, having dinner, getting her into bed with stories and conversations. I was usually done in by 8:30. Why couldn’t he just take the three of us out for dinner so we could talk and not have me work so much? Slowly it dawned on me. Steve was attempting to recast the roles to fit his newest narrative. This time it was with me as his mother, which would have made Laurene into my daughter-in-law. In that scenario, my having them for dinner made sense.

I felt insulted and thunder rolled inside me.

Was everything going to be a big awful lie again?

I didn’t have them over for dinner nor did Steve and I talk about it. I didn’t even try to bring it up because I knew better than to try and manage that conversation with him. It would have amounted to nothing but another horrible argument so I just let the whole thing drop, incomplete as per our usual.

Through the years Steve and many of his promotional people, including marketers, attorneys, and biographers, and the collection of people he had around him, worked in a number of ways at different times to publicly define me as an inconsequential person who was a hanger-on and a whack job, who got pregnant so that I would have access to Steve’s wealth. But I am not motivated to deceive. In fact, intentional deception absolutely terrifies me. I make for a very poor trickster and I am far from having the glossy finish of a player. The law of my being is that I only derive strength after achieving transparency into the truth. And so how strange then is it that I have been publicly vilified for exactly what I would not do and what Laurene successfully did do to become his wife? Steve respected power and Laurene had earned her place next to him by doing exactly as she had.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE WATCHTOWER

In 1998, Andy Herzfeld of the original Mac team, with his wife, Joyce McClure, invited me to join them for a Bob Dylan concert at Shoreline. I jumped at the chance to see “Grampa Dylan” as Joyce affectionately referred to him. It was one of the most powerful performances I’ve ever witnessed. The sound that amplified out of Dylan’s four-man band was impossibly huge. It blew my mind. And when they played “All Along the Watchtower,” it seemed to gather the winds to whip up a storm out of nowhere. It was music as invocation with Dylan in the role of shaman. The memory of that night and that song has stayed with me all these years for one simple reason: Steve lived inside each and every song-temple Dylan ever wrote—perhaps that one most of all.

That evening we sat in Woz’s box with around twenty other people. Woz! I hadn’t seen him since before Lisa was born. At intermission when he found out that I was present, he turned around and looked at me from the front of the box, stunned. We stared at each other for a very, very long time. I remember all these happy people trying to get me to go up and talk to him, “Come on up, come up here. Sit next to Woz and talk to him.” But I pressed back against my chair at the farthest corner of the box. It was the weirdest scene: Woz’s stare was so intense that I just couldn’t move or speak. It had been nearly twenty years of world-changing history since we had been in the other’s company, but from the way he was looking at me, I felt that he had some idea of what I had been through.

Much later, in 2006, I heard Woz on NPR’s
City Arts and Lectures.
Among many things, he told his personal story leading up to the founding of Apple. I found it touching and also very interesting to hear how his personality and creativity wove through Apple’s history. I always knew that Steve expected to be famous, but I never thought about what it all meant to Woz. In the vacuum of any real knowledge I had assumed many things, yet as I listened to the interview that day I heard a surprising story and felt a puzzle piece click into place. Woz said that as a child he wanted to be an engineer like his dad. He didn’t have aspirations of fame and fortune. He just loved his dad and wanted to be like him.

When Woz designed the first personal computer prototype Steve said something like, “Hey! We can sell this.” But from that interview I understood that Woz was reticent about being a founder of Apple and that Steve actually had to talk him into going into business with him. Steve needed Woz because even though Steve was proficient with technology, Woz was the technological genius. The way I see it, if Woz had made a different choice—as he almost did—Steve would have found another Woz. Because above all else, Steve was driven to move ahead, to become famous, and to make his mark. (As to that other creative genius, I believe that Steve was somehow informed by Dylan’s love of playing with amplification. Steve was certainly an amplifying genius.)

Back to that 2006 interview. It was by way of Woz’s careful discretion that I understood even more of what went on when the interviewer mentioned a line in Woz’s book. It was something about how he (Woz) would rather be the guy who laughed than the guy who controlled things. The interviewer asked if he was referring to Steve. “No,” Woz said. It was just a “general philosophy.”

*   *   *

Sometimes people don’t say things because they understand too much. Sometimes they stay quiet because they don’t understand enough. Sometimes people speak before they really understand. And sometimes they don’t because they know no one is listening. But it’s all part of history, this speaking and not speaking.