Steve Jobs - the Family man

STEVE JOBS
FAMILY MAN

At Home with the Jobs Clan

by Walter Isaacson


And it wouldn't hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an
easygoing sense of humor who liked organic vegetarian food. In
October 1989, after his split with Tina Redse, just such a woman
walked into his life.
More specifically, just such a woman walked into his classroom.
Jobs had agreed to give one of the "View from the Top" lectures
at the Stanford Business School one Thursday evening. Laurene
Powell was a new graduate student at the business school, and a
guy in her class talked her into going to the lecture. They
arrived late and all the seats were taken, so they sat in the
aisle. When an usher told them they had to move, Powell took her
friend down to the front row and commandeered two of the reserved
seats there. Jobs was led to the one next to her when he arrived.
"I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so
we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced," Jobs
recalled. They bantered a bit, and Laurene joked that she was
sitting there because she had won a raffle, and the prize was
that he got to take her to dinner. "He was so adorable," she
later said.
After the speech jobs hung around on the edge of the stage
chatting with students. He watched Powell leave, then come back
and stand at the edge of the crowd, then leave again. He bolted
out after her, brushing past the dean, who was trying to grab him
for a conversation. After catching up with her in the parking
lot, he said, "Excuse me, wasn't there something about a raffle
you won, that I'm supposed to take you to dinner?" She laughed.
"How about Saturday?" he asked. She agreed and wrote down her
number. Jobs headed to his car to drive up to the Thomas Fogarty
winery in the Santa Cruz mountains above Woodside, where the NeXT
education sales group was holding a dinner. But he suddenly
stopped and turned around. "I thought, wow, I'd rather have
dinner with her than the education group, so I ran back to her
car and said 'How about dinner tonight?'" She said yes. It was a
beautiful fall evening, and they walked into Palo Alto to a funky
vegetarian restaurant, St. Michael's Alley, and ended up staying
there for four hours. "We've been together ever since," he said.
Avie Tevanian was sitting at the winery restaurant waiting with
the rest of the NeXT education group. "Steve was sometimes
unreliable, but when I talked to him I realized that something
special had come up," he said. As soon as Powell got home, after
midnight, she called her close friend Kathryn (Kat) Smith, who
was at Berkeley, and left a message on her machine. "You will not
believe what just happened to me!" it said. "You will not believe
who I met!" Smith called back the next morning and heard the
tale. "We had known about Steve, and he was a person of interest
to us, because we were business students," she recalled.
Andy Hertzfeld and a few others later speculated that Powell had
been scheming to meet Jobs. "Laurene is nice, but she can be
calculating, and I think she targeted him from the beginning,"
Hertzfeld said. "Her college roommate told me that Laurene had
magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him. If
it's true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of
irony there." But Powell later insisted that this wasn't the
case. She went only because her friend wanted to go, and she was
slightly confused as to who they were going to see. "I knew that
Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of
Bill Gates," she recalled. "I had them mixed up. This was 1989.
He was working at NeXT, and he was not that big of a deal to me.
I wasn't that enthused, but my friend was, so we went."
"There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love
with, Tina and Laurene," Jobs later said. "I thought I was in
love with Joan Baez, but I really just liked her a lot. It was
just Tina and then Laurene."
Laurene Powell had been born in New Jersey in 1963 and learned to
be self-sufficient at an early age. Her father was a Marine Corps
pilot who died a hero in a crash in Santa Ana, California; he had
been leading a crippled plane in for a landing, and when it hit
his plane he kept flying to avoid a residential area rather than
ejecting in time to save his life. Her mother's second marriage
turned out to be a horrible situation, but she felt she couldn't
leave because she had no means to support her large family. For
ten years Laurene and her three brothers had to suffer in a tense
household, keeping a good demeanor while compartmentalizing
problems. She did well. "The lesson I learned was clear, that I
always wanted to be self-sufficient," she said. "I took pride in
that. My relationship with money is that it's a tool to be
self-sufficient, but it's not something that is part of who I
am."

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked
at Goldman Sachs as a fixed income trading strategist, dealing
with enormous sums of money that she traded for the house
account. Jon Corzine, her boss, tried to get her to stay at
Goldman, but instead she decided the work was unedifying. "You
could be really successful," she said, "but you're just
contributing to capital formation." So after three years she quit
and went to Florence, Italy, living there for eight months before
enrolling in Stanford Business School.
After their Thursday night dinner, she invited jobs over to her
Palo Alto apartment on Saturday. Kat Smith drove down from
Berkeley and pretended to be her roommate so she could meet him
as well. Their relationship became very passionate. "They would
kiss and make out," Smith said. "He was enraptured with her. He
would call me on the phone and ask, `What do you think, does she
like me?' Here I am in this bizarre position of having this
iconic person call me."
That New Year's Eve of 1989 the three went to Chez Panisse, the
famed Alice Waters restaurant in Berkeley, along with Lisa, then
eleven. Something happened at the dinner that caused jobs and
Powell to start arguing. They left separately, and Powell ended
up spending the night at Kat Smith's apartment. At nine the next
morning there was a knock at the door, and Smith opened it to
find Jobs, standing in the drizzle holding some wildflowers he
had picked. "May I come in and see Laurene?" he said. She was
still asleep, and he walked into the bedroom. A couple of hours
went by, while Smith waited in the living room, unable to go in
and get her clothes. Finally, she put a coat on over her
nightgown and went to Peet's Coffee to pick up some food. Jobs
did not emerge until after noon. "Kat, can you come here for a
minute?" he asked. They all gathered in the bedroom. "As you
know, Laurene's father passed away, and Laurene's mother isn't
here, and since you're her best friend, I'm going to ask you the
question," he said. "I'd like to marry Laurene. Will you give
your blessing?"
Smith clambered onto the bed and thought about it. "Is this okay
with you?" she asked Powell. When she nodded yes, Smith
announced, "Well, there's your answer."
It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of
focusing on something with insane intensity for a while and then,
abruptly, turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what
he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on other matters he would be
unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to
engage. In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he
and Powell would indulge in public displays of affection that
were so intense they embarrassed everyone in their presence,
including Kat Smith and Powell's mother. In the mornings at his
Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by blasting the Fine
Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy" on his tape deck. Yet at
other times he would ignore her. "Steve would fluctuate between
intense focus, where she was the center of the universe, to being
coldly distant and focused on work," said Smith. "He had the
power to focus like a laser beam, and when it came across you,
you basked in the light of his attention. When it moved to
another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was
very confusing to Laurene."
Once she had accepted his marriage proposal on the first day of
1990, he didn't mention it again for several months. Finally,
Smith confronted him while they were sitting on the edge of a
sandbox in Palo Alto. What was going on? Jobs replied that he
needed to feel sure that Powell could handle the life he lived
and the type of person he was. In September she became fed up
with waiting and moved out. The following month, he gave her a
diamond engagement ring, and she moved back in.
In December jobs took Powell to his favorite vacation spot, Kona
Village in Hawaii. He had started going there nine years earlier
when, stressed out at Apple, he had asked his assistant to pick
out a place for him to escape. At first glance, he didn't like
the cluster of sparse thatched-roof bungalows nestled on a beach
on the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with
communal eating. But within hours he had begun to view it as
paradise. There was a simplicity and spare beauty that moved him,
and he returned whenever he could. He especially enjoyed being
there that December with Powell. Their love had matured. The
night before Christmas he again declared, even more formally,
that he wanted to marry her. Soon another factor would drive that
decision. While in Hawaii, Powell got pregnant. "We know exactly
where it happened," Jobs later said with a laugh.

The Wedding, March 18,1991

Powell's pregnancy did not completely settle the issue. Jobs
again began balking at the idea of marriage, even though he had
dramatically proposed to her both at the very beginning and the
very end of 1990. Furious, she moved out of his house and back to
her apartment. For a while he sulked or ignored the situation.
Then he thought he might still be in love with Tina Redse; he
sent her roses and tried to convince her to return to him, maybe
even get married. He was not sure what he wanted, and he
surprised a wide swath of friends and even acquaintances by
asking them what he should do. Who was prettier, he would ask,
Tina or Laurene? Who did they like better? Who should he marry?
In a chapter about this in Mona Simpson's novel A Regular Guy,
the jobs character "asked more than a hundred people who they
thought was more beautiful." But that was fiction; in reality, it
was probably fewer than a hundred.
He ended up making the right choice. As Redse told friends, she
never would have survived if she had gone back to Jobs, nor would
their marriage. Even though he would pine about the spiritual
nature of his connection to Redse, he had a far more solid
relationship with Powell. He liked her, he loved her, he
respected her, and he was comfortable with her. He may not have
seen her as mystical, but she was a sensible anchor for his life.
"He is the luckiest guy to have landed with Laurene, who is smart
and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his ups and
downs and tempestuous personality," said Joanna Hoffman. "Because
she's not neurotic, Steve may feel that she is not as mystical as
Tina or something. But that's silly." Andy Hertzfeld agreed.
"Laurene looks a lot like Tina, but she is totally different
because she is tougher and armor-plated. That's why the marriage
works."
Jobs understood this as well. Despite his emotional turbulence
and occasional meanness, the marriage would turn out to be
enduring, marked by loyalty and faithfulness, overcoming the ups
and downs and jangling emotional complexities it encountered.

Avie Tevanian decided jobs needed a bachelor's party. This was
not as easy as it sounded. Jobs did not like to party and didn't
have a gang of male buddies. He didn't even have a best man. So
the party turned out to be just Tevanian and Richard Crandall, a
computer science professor at Reed who had taken a leave to work
at NeXT. Tevanian hired a limo, and when they got to Jobs's
house, Powell answered the door dressed in a suit and wearing a
fake moustache, saying that she wanted to come as one of the
guys. It was just a joke, and soon the three bachelors, none of
them drinkers, were rolling to San Francisco to see if they could
pull off their own pale version of a bachelor party.
Tevanian had been unable to get reservations at Greens, the
vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason that Jobs liked, so he booked
a very fancy restaurant at a hotel. "I don't want to eat here,"
Jobs announced as soon as the bread was placed on the table. He
made them get up and walk out, to the horror of Tevanian, who was
not yet used to Jobs's restaurant manners. He led them to Cafe
Jacqueline in North Beach, the souffle place that he loved, which
was indeed a better choice. Afterward they took the limo across
the Golden Gate Bridge to a bar in Sausalito, where all three
ordered shots of tequila but only sipped them. "It was not great
as bachelor parties go, but it was the best we could come up with
for someone like Steve, and nobody else volunteered to do it,"
recalled Tevanian. Jobs was appreciative. He decided that he
wanted Tevanian to marry his sister Mona Simpson. Though nothing
came of it, the thought was a sign of affection.
Powell had fair warning of what she was getting into. As she was
planning the wedding, the person who was going to do the
calligraphy for the invitations came by the house to show them
some options. There was no furniture for her to sit on, so she
sat on the floor and laid out the samples. Jobs looked for a few
minutes, then got up and left the room. They waited for him to
come back, but he didn't. After a while Powell went to find him
in his room. "Get rid of her," he said. "I can't look at her
stuff. It's shit."
On March 18, 1991, Steven Paul Jobs, thirty-six, married Laurene
Powell, twenty-seven, at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National
Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of
stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art
Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Park Service's love
of huge fireplaces. Its best features are the views. It has
floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Half Dome and Yosemite
Falls.
About fifty people came, including Steve's father Paul jobs and
sister Mona Simpson. She brought her fiance, Richard Appel, a
lawyer who went on to become a television comedy writer. (As a
writer for The Simpsons, he named Homer's mother after his wife.)
Jobs insisted that they all arrive by chartered bus; he wanted to
control all aspects of the event.
The ceremony was in the solarium, with the snow coming down hard
and Glacier Point just visible in the distance. It was conducted
by Jobs's longtime Soto Zen teacher, Kobun Chino, who shook a
stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted in a mumbling
manner that most guests found incomprehensible. "I thought he was
drunk," said Tevanian. He wasn't. The wedding cake was in the
shape of Half Dome, the granite crest at the end of Yosemite
Valley, but since it was strictly vegan-devoid of eggs, milk, or
any refined products-more than a few of the guests found it
inedible. Afterward they all went hiking, and Powell's three
strapping brothers launched a snowball fight, with lots of
tackling and roughhousing. "You see, Mona," Jobs said to his
sister, "Laurene is descended from Joe Namath and we're descended
from John Muir."

A Family Home

Powell shared her husband's interest in natural foods. While at
business school, she had worked part time at Odwalla, the juice
company, where she helped develop the first marketing plan. After
marrying jobs, she felt that it was important to have a career,
having learned from her childhood the need to be self-sufficient.
So she started her own company, Terravera, that made ready-to-eat
organic meals and delivered them to stores throughout northern
California.
Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished
Woodside mansion, the couple moved into a charming and
unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood
in old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm-neighbors would
eventually include the visionary venture capitalist John Doerr,
Google's founder Larry Page, and Facebook's founder Mark
Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman-but the
homes were not ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or
long drives shielding them from view. Instead, houses were
nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets
flanked by wide sidewalks. "We wanted to live in a neighborhood
where kids could walk to see friends," Jobs later said.
The house was not the minimalist and modernist style Jobs would
have designed if he had built a home from scratch. Nor was it a
large or distinctive mansion that would make people stop and take
notice as they drove down his street in Palo Alto. It was built
in the 1930s by a local designer named Carr Jones, who
specialized in carefully crafted homes in the "storybook style"
of English or French country cottages.
The two-story house was made of red brick, with exposed wood
beams and a shingle roof with curved lines; it evoked a rambling
Cotswold cottage, or perhaps a home where a well-to-do Hobbit
might have lived. The one Californian touch was a mission-style
courtyard framed by the wings of the house. The two-story
vaulted-ceiling living room was informal, with a floor of tile
and terra-cotta. At one end was a large triangular window leading
up to the peak of the ceiling; it had stained glass when Jobs
bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he replaced it with clear
glass. The other renovation he and Powell made was to expand the
kitchen to include a wood-burning pizza oven and room for a long
wooden table that would become the family's primary gathering
place. It was supposed to be a four-month renovation, but it took
sixteen months because Jobs kept redoing the design. They also
bought the small house behind them and razed it to make a
backyard, which Powell turned into a beautiful natural garden
filled with a profusion of seasonal flowers along with vegetables
and herbs.
Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old
material, including used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to
provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen
had been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of
the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction when the
house was built. "He was a careful craftsman who was
self-taught," Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details.
"He cared more about being inventive than about making money, and
he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas came from
reading books in the library and Architectural Digest."
Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare
essentials: a chest of drawers and a mattress in his bedroom, a
card table and some folding chairs in what would have been a
dining room. He wanted around him only things that he could
admire, and that made it hard simply to go out and buy a lot of
furniture. Now that he was living in a normal neighborhood home
with a wife and soon a child, he had to make some concessions to
necessity. But it was hard. They got beds, dressers, and a music
system for the living room, but items like sofas took longer. "We
spoke about furniture in theory for eight years," recalled
Powell. "We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, 'What is the
purpose of a sofa?'" Buying appliances was also a philosophical
task, not just an impulse purchase. A few years later, jobs
described to Wired the process that went into getting a new
washing machine:

It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all
wrong. The Europeans make them much better-but they take
twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash
them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end
up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they
don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot
less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and
they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family
talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended
up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of
our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in
an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about
our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we
care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two
weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany.
"I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of
high tech in years," Jobs said.

The one piece of art that jobs bought for the vaulted-ceiling
living room was an Ansel Adams print of the winter sunrise in the
Sierra Nevada taken from Lone Pine, California. Adams had made
the huge mural print for his daughter, who later sold it. At one
point Jobs's housekeeper wiped it with a wet cloth, and Jobs
tracked down a person who had worked with Adams to come to the
house, strip it down a layer, and restore it.
The house was so unassuming that Bill Gates was somewhat baffled
when he visited with his wife. "Do all of you live here?" asked
Gates, who was then in the process of building a 66,000 -
square-foot mansion near Seattle. Even when he had his second
coming at Apple and was a world-famous billionaire, Jobs had no
security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back
door unlocked during the day.
His only security problem came, sadly and strangely, from Burrell
Smith, the mop-headed, cherubic Macintosh software engineer who
had been Andy Hertzfeld's sidekick. After leaving Apple, Smith
descended into schizophrenia. He lived in a house down the street
from Hertzfeld, and as his disorder progressed he began wandering
the streets naked, at other times smashing the windows of cars
and churches. He was put on strong medication, but it proved
difficult to calibrate. At one point when his demons returned, he
began going over to the Jobs house in the evenings, throwing
rocks through the windows, leaving rambling letters, and once
tossing a firecracker into the house. He was arrested, but the
case was dropped when he went for more treatment. "Burrell was so
funny and naive, and then one April day he suddenly snapped,"
Jobs recalled. "It was the weirdest, saddest thing."
Jobs was sympathetic, and often asked Hertzfeld what more he
could do to help. At one point Smith was thrown in jail and
refused to identify himself. When Hertzfeld found out, three days
later, he called Jobs and asked for assistance in getting him
released. Jobs did help, but he surprised Hertzfeld with a
question: "If something similar happened to me, would you take as
good care of me as you do Burrell?"
Jobs kept his mansion in Woodside, about ten miles up into the
mountains from Palo Alto. He wanted to tear down the
fourteenbedroom 1925 Spanish colonial revival, and he had plans
drawn up to replace it with an extremely simple,
Japanese-inspired modernist home one-third the size. But for more
than twenty years he engaged in a slow-moving series of court
battles with preservationists who wanted the crumbling original
house to be saved. (In 2011 he finally got permission to raze the
house, but by then he had no desire to build a second home.)
On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home,
especially its swimming pool, for family parties. When Bill
Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the 1950s
ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter,
who was at Stanford. Since both the main house and ranch house
were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art dealers
when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses
temporarily. Once, shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry
broke, Powell was making a final inspection of the furnishings
and noticed that one of the paintings was missing. Worried, she
asked the advance team and Secret Service what had happened. One
of them pulled her aside and explained that it was a painting of
a dress on a hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the
Lewinsky matter they had decided to hide it. (During one of his
late-night phone conversations with Jobs, Clinton asked how he
should handle the Lewinsky issue. "I don't know if you did it,
but if so, you've got to tell the country," Jobs told the
president. There was silence on the other end of the line.)

Lisa Moves In

In the middle of Lisa's eighth-grade year, her teachers called
Jobs. There were serious problems, and it was probably best for
her to move out of her mother's house. So Jobs went on a walk
with Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered to let her move
in with him. She was a mature girl, just turning fourteen, and
she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already
knew which room she wanted: the one right next to her father's.
When she was there once, with no one home, she had tested it out
by lying down on the bare floor.

It was a tough period. Chrisann Brennan would sometimes walk over
from her own house a few blocks away and yell at them from the
yard. When I asked her recently about her behavior and the
allegations that led to Lisa's moving out of her house, she said
that she had still not been able to process in her own mind what
occurred during that period. But then she wrote me a long email
that she said would help explain the situation:

Do you know how Steve was able to get the city of Woodside
to allow him to tear his Woodside home down? There was a
community of people who wanted to preserve his Woodside
house due to its historical value, but Steve wanted to tear
it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that
house fall into so much disrepair and decay over a number of
years that there was no way to save it. The strategy he used
to get what he wanted was to simply follow the line of least
involvement and resistance. So by his doing nothing on the
house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years,
the house fell apart. Brilliant, no? ... In a similar way
did Steve work to undermine my effectiveness AND my well
being at the time when Lisa was 13 and 14 to get her to move
into his house. He started with one strategy but then it
moved to another easier one that was even more destructive
to me and more problematic for Lisa. It may not have been of
the greatest integrity, but he got what he wanted.

Lisa lived with Jobs and Powell for all four of her years at Palo
Alto High School, and she began using the name Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
He tried to be a good father, but there were times when he was
cold and distant. When Lisa felt she had to escape, she would
seek refuge with a friendly family who lived nearby. Powell tried
to be supportive, and she was the one who attended most of Lisa's
school events.

By the time Lisa was a senior, she seemed to be flourishing. She
joined the school newspaper, The Campanile, and became the
coeditor. Together with her classmate Ben Hewlett, grandson of
the man who gave her father his first job, she exposed secret
raises that the school board had given to administrators. When it
came time to go to college, she knew she wanted to go east. She
applied to Harvard-forging her father's signature on the
application because he was out of town-and was accepted for the
class entering in 1996.
At Harvard Lisa worked on the college newspaper, The Crimson, and
then the literary magazine, The Advocate. After breaking up with
her boyfriend, she took a year abroad at King's College, London.
Her relationship with her father remained tumultuous throughout
her college years. When she would come home, fights over small
things-what was being served for dinner, whether she was paying
enough attention to her half-siblings-would blow up, and they
would not speak to each other for weeks and sometimes months. The
arguments occasionally got so bad that Jobs would stop supporting
her, and she would borrow money from Andy Hertzfeld or others.
Hertzfeld at one point lent Lisa $20,000 when she thought that
her father was not going to pay her tuition. "He was mad at me
for making the loan," Hertzfeld recalled, "but he called early
the next morning and had his accountant wire me the money." Jobs
did not go to Lisa's Harvard graduation in 2000. He said, "She
didn't even invite me."
There were, however, some nice times during those years,
including one summer when Lisa came back home and performed at a
benefit concert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an
advocacy group that supports access to technology. The concert
took place at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which had
been made famous by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and
Jimi Hendrix. She sang Tracy Chapman's anthem "Talkin' bout a
Revolution" ("Poor people are gonna rise up / And get their
share") as her father stood in the back cradling his one-year-old
daughter, Erin.

Jobs's ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to
Manhattan as a freelance writer. Their problems were exacerbated
because of Jobs's frustrations with Chrisann. He had bought a
$700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in Lisa's name, but
Chrisann convinced her to sign it over and then sold it, using
the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in
Paris. Once the money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and
became an artist creating "light paintings" and Buddhist
mandalas. "I am a `Connector' and a visionary contributor to the
future of evolving humanity and the ascended Earth," she
said on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). "I
experience the forms, color, and sound frequencies of sacred
vibration as I create and live with the paintings." When Chrisann
needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental problem, Jobs
refused to give it to her, causing Lisa again to not speak to him
for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.

Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a
springboard for her third novel, A Regular Guy, published in
1996. The book's title character is based on Jobs, and to some
extent it adheres to reality: It depicts Jobs's quiet generosity
to, and purchase of a special car for, a brilliant friend who had
degenerative bone disease, and it accurately describes many
unflattering aspects of his relationship with Lisa, including his
original denial of paternity. But other parts are purely fiction;
Chrisann had taught Lisa at a very early age how to drive, for
example, but the book's scene of "Jane" driving a truck across
the mountains alone at age five to find her father of course
never happened. In addition, there are little details in the
novel that, in journalist parlance, are too good to check, such
as the head-snapping description of the character based on Jobs
in the very first sentence: "He was a man too busy to flush
toilets."
On the surface, the novel's fictional portrayal of Jobs seems
harsh. Simpson describes her main character as unable "to see any
need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people." His
hygiene is also as dubious as that of the real Jobs. "He didn't
believe in deodorant and often professed that with a proper diet
and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor
smell." But the novel is lyrical and intricate on many levels,
and by the end there is a fuller picture of a man who loses
control of the great company he had founded and learns to
appreciate the daughter he had abandoned. The final scene is of
him dancing with his daughter.
Jobs later said that he never read the novel. "I heard it was
about me," he told me, "and if it was about me, I would have
gotten really pissed off, and I didn't want to get pissed at my
sister, so I didn't read it." However, he told the New York Times
a few months after the book appeared that he had read it and saw
the reflections of himself in the main character. "About 25% of
it is totally me, right down to the mannerisms," he told the
reporter, Steve Lohr. "And I'm certainly not telling you which
25%." His wife said that, in fact, Jobs glanced at the book and
asked her to read it for him to see what he should make of it.
Simpson sent the manuscript to Lisa before it was published, but
at first she didn't read more than the opening. "In the first few
pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my things,
my thoughts, myself in the character Jane," she noted. "And
sandwiched between the truths was invention-lies to me, made more
evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth." Lisa
was wounded, and she wrote a piece for the Harvard Advocate
explaining why. Her first draft was very bitter, then she toned
it down a bit before she published it. She felt violated by
Simpson's friendship. "I didn't know, for those six years, that
Mona was collecting," she wrote. "I didn't know that as I sought
her consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking."
Eventually Lisa reconciled with Simpson. They went out to a
coffee shop to discuss the book, and Lisa told her that she
hadn't been able to finish it. Simpson told her she would like
the ending. Over the years Lisa had an on-and-off relationship
with Simpson, but it would be closer in some ways than the one
she had with her father.

Children

When Powell gave birth in 1991, a few months after her wedding to
Jobs, their child was known for two weeks as "baby boy jobs,"
because settling on a name was proving only slightly less
difficult than choosing a washing machine. Finally, they named
him Reed Paul Jobs. His middle name was that of Jobs's father,
and his first name (both jobs and Powell insist) was chosen
because it sounded good rather than because it was the name of
Jobs's college.
Reed turned out to be like his father in many ways: incisive and
smart, with intense eyes and a mesmerizing charm. But unlike his
father, he had sweet manners and a self-effacing grace. He was
creative as a kid he liked to dress in costume and stay in
character-and also a great student, interested in science. He
could replicate his father's stare, but he was demonstrably
affectionate and seemed not to have an ounce of cruelty in his
nature.
Erin Siena jobs was born in 1995. She was a little quieter and
sometimes suffered from not getting much of her father's
attention. She picked up her father's interest in design and
architecture, but she also learned to keep a bit of an emotional
distance, so as not to be hurt by his detachment.
The youngest child, Eve, was born in 1998, and she turned into a
strong-willed, funny firecracker who, neither needy nor
intimidated, knew how to handle her father, negotiate with him
(and sometimes win), and even make fun of him. Her father joked
that she's the one who will run Apple someday, if she doesn't
become president of the United States.
Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his
daughters he was more distant. As he would with others, he would
occasionally focus on them, but just as often would completely
ignore them when he had other things on his mind. "He focuses on
his work, and at times he has not been there for the girls,"
Powell said. At one point jobs marveled to his wife at how well
their kids were turning out, "especially since we're not always
there for them." This amused, and slightly annoyed, Powell,
because she had given up her career when Reed turned two and she
decided she wanted to have more children.

In 1995 Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison threw a fortieth-birthday
party for Jobs filled with tech stars and moguls. Ellison had
become a close friend, and he would often take the jobs family
out on one of his many luxurious yachts. Reed started referring
to him as "our rich friend," which was amusing evidence of how
his father refrained from ostentatious displays of wealth. The
lesson Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material
possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched it. "Every
other CEO I know has a security detail," he said. "They've even
got them at their homes. It's a nutso way to live. We just
decided that's not how we wanted to raise our kids."

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