Steve Jobs Part 14

An even more astonis.h.i.+ng 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 surrept.i.tiously 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. "I t 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sive," 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, "I t was G.o.d-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 amba.s.sador in Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sumed 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 f.u.c.ked if you do and you're f.u.c.ked if you don't."

Jobs did retain a friendly relations.h.i.+p 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. I t turned out all right, Jobs would rea.s.sure 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 s.p.u.n.ky and high-spirited and had a little of her father's defiant att.i.tude. 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 T evanian, 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," T evanian 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 b.u.t.ter. 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 atthe 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. "I t was obvious she was his daughter," she told me. "n.o.body has that jaw. I t'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 T okyo, and they stayed at the sleek and businesslike Okura Hotel. At the elegant downstairs sus.h.i.+ bar, Jobs ordered large trays of unagi sus.h.i.+, a dish he loved so much that he allowed the warm cooked eel to pa.s.s 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, "I t 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 s.p.a.ce 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 relations.h.i.+p," 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionate and p.r.o.ne 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. I t 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 elsecourse 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 relations.h.i.+p lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his spa.r.s.ely 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 h.e.l.l 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 relations.h.i.+p 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. I t would drive her crazy, she told friends. She had grown up in a volatile household, and her relations.h.i.+p 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. I t 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. "I t 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. "I t 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 relations.h.i.+p. "Though our values clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relations.h.i.+p 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.

Laurene Pow ell.

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. T ough 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 cla.s.sroom. Jobs had agreed to give one of the "View from the T op" 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 cla.s.s 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, brus.h.i.+ng 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 Sat.u.r.day?" 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. I t 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. I f 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. I t 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 beself-sufficient," she said. "I took pride in that. My relations.h.i.+p 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, I taly, 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 Sat.u.r.day. Kat Smith drove down from Berkeley and pretended to be her roommate so she could meet him as well. Their relations.h.i.+p became very pa.s.sionate. "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 pa.s.sed 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."

I t 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 embarra.s.sed 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. I t 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 a.s.sistant to pick out a place for him to escape. At first glance, he didn't like the cl.u.s.ter of spa.r.s.e thatched-roof bungalows nestled on a beach on the big island of Hawaii. I t 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 T evanian 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 T evanian and Richard Crandall, a computer science professor at Reed who had taken a leave to work at NeXT . T evanian 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. I t 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.

T evanian 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 T evanian, who was not yet used to Jobs's restaurant manners. He led them to Cafe Jacqueline in North Beach, the souffle place thathe 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. "I t was not great as bachelor parties go, but it was the best we could come up with for someone like Steve, and n.o.body else volunteered to do it," recalled T evanian. Jobs was appreciative. He decided that he wanted T evanian 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. I t's s.h.i.+t."

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. I ts best features are the views. I t 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. I t 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 T evanian. 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 s...o...b..ll 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, T erravera, 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. I t 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 s.h.i.+elding 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. I t 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 s.h.i.+ngle 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 gla.s.s when Jobs bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he replaced it with clear gla.s.s. 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. I t 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 st.u.r.dy 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?'"