Steve Jobs - Regular Guy

I was not going to give any more from the book "Steve Jobs" by Isaacson, but to be fair I need to give some of the human side of Steve that made him a regular guy in many ways.
There will be very few of the next generation that will ever read about Steve Jobs, certainly a few of the few will ever go to the trouble of locating the book "Steve Jobs" by Isaacson and reading all 571 pages of the book on this gifted and in many ways "brilliant" minded man.

STEVE JOBS - A REGULAR GUY

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word


In 1982, when he was still working on the Macintosh, Jobs met the
famed folksinger Joan Baez through her sister Mimi Farina, 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 11, 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 strongwilled. 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 cafe 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 cafe, 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 accord ing to Simpson, "It was God-awful and we never used
it.") She also tracked down various members of the Jandali
family, in Horns 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
Ange les 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 Cafe
Jacqueline, a little bistro near Telegraph Hill that specialized
in vegetarian souffles.
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 Cafe 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 nonmaterialism. 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 psy-
chiatric 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.
..........