Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (30 page)

Outside, night is falling.
Big snowflakes, as fat as goose down, swirl around the streetlamps. Yellow cabs race down the street, tires whooshing in the slush. Across the street, in Central Park, kids are firing snowballs at each other. I’m flashing back to the years when I had an apartment in the San Remo, two blocks from here. I’m remembering being twenty-eight years old, newly wealthy, and going outside in a snowstorm like this with Sabrina Gould, the actress, on a night when the whole city seemed to have slowed to a halt. We walked along Central Park West, right where I am now. It was midnight and there was no sound at all, just the crunch of our boots in the snow.

“Gosh, I remember that too,” Sabrina says a few minutes later when I arrive at her apartment. She’s still living in the city, tucked away like a piece of jewelry in a posh building on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks up from our retail store. In the ten years since I saw her last she has gone through two husbands, both of them super-rich Wall Street douchebags, both of them at least twenty years her senior. Big settlements have allowed her to disappear from the world and to live like a tsarina. Her apartment takes up the top two floors of the building and is wrapped by a balcony that is itself bigger than most apartments. From where we’re sitting, in her living room, we have a view out over the East River and all the way down to the bottom of Manhattan.

“I’ve married well,” Sabrina says, “and divorced better.”

She’s never in the tabloids, never on the news. She travels wherever she wants and does whatever she pleases and is left alone by the media. She hasn’t made a movie in fifteen years and swears she has no interest in ever making one again.

“Do you have any idea what I’d have to do if I wanted to make a movie now?” she says in her Southern drawl, which sounds like honey and bourbon mixed in a glass. “The dieting, the plastic surgery. Just so I can play Batman’s girlfriend in some teenage jerkoff comic book fantasy? No thanks. Honestly I think the best thing that has ever come along in the movie business is this computer generated imagery stuff. Pretty soon y’all will just create characters with your computers and leave us poor human beings alone.”

“No computer,” I say, “will ever create a woman who looks like you.”

“True. But you know what I mean.” The great thing about Sabrina is that she knows she’s gorgeous, and she just accepts it. It’s simply a fact, like the fact that she’s tall, and that she’s half Irish, and that she grew up in Tennessee. She’s got this gorgeous curly black hair, green eyes, a little spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Age hasn’t diminished her looks; if anything she’s more beautiful than when I was dating her.

“Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m fifty-two years old, I’ve had no work done, I’m ten pounds overweight, and I’m happy. I see my old friends who are still in the business and my heart breaks for them. They’re out there in Los Angeles starving themselves for years at a time, mutilating themselves with plastic surgery. They look like monsters. Do you know why so many of them end up as activists for animal rights? It’s because they identify with the poor little minks and veal calves. They’re
projecting,
you see? They don’t dare to speak up about how the movie business treats actresses. So they join PETA and crusade for the poor little bunny rabbits in their cages. Because that’s who they are, Steve. Poor little bunnies, penned up in their mansions in the Hollywood hills, not allowed to eat. God, it’s awful.”

I tell her about my meetings in Los Angeles, about Jake Green from Poseidon murdering the homeless guy.

“That’s why I got out of the business,” she says. “I hated the people. Even more than that, I hated the person that I was becoming. I was becoming one of them.”

I tell her about my meeting with Yoko Ono, and how I just strong-armed her into letting me sell Beatles songs on iTunes. “I feel like shit,” I say.

“You should feel like shit,” she says. “That’s terrible.”

“It was awful. The look on her face. I couldn’t believe I was doing it to her. I felt like the devil.”

“Yeah.” She looks down at the glass in her hands. She rolls the ice around in it. “Honey,” she says, “you need to do some thinking.” Then she looks up and gives me this bright smile and says, “Hey, you know what? Let’s go out. There’s a place I want to take you. Are you hungry?”

It’s a hole in the wall, uptown in Spanish Harlem, where the specialty is roasted chicken and you order either half a chicken or a whole chicken and they serve it with rice and beans, a basket of tortillas, and wedges of lime. Sabrina orders a half chicken and eats all of it along with a Mexican beer. I get a plate of rice and beans, yucca and plantains. The place is crowded, noisy, lots of Spanish being spoken, Mexican music on the stereo, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera prints on the wall.

“So have you noticed?” Sabrina says, when we’re finishing our flan and coffee. I shrug. The only thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a cockroach sitting up on the counter next to the cash register, perched there like a pet. The hostess is ringing up customers and making no effort at all to chase it away.

“Nobody knows who we are,” she says. “None of the waiters, none of the customers. They’ve never heard of you. They’ve never seen my movies, or if they have, they don’t recognize me.

It’s like we’re invisible. Do you realize we’re going to have to pay for this meal? How cool is that?”

“It’s not like the old days.” Back when we were dating we would arrive at a club, or a restaurant, and they’d clear a path for us and give us some special table and we’d never get billed for anything. It was all part of Sabrina’s job—half of these places had made deals with her movie studio, or paid off her manager, so that she’d show up and stay for an hour or two and let herself be photographed going in and out.

“Do you remember when we had to have my publicist put out a statement denying that we were dating, even though we were? Because I was supposed to be dating—who was it? Someone gay. I can’t remember.”

“Jimmy Nelson,” I say. “You were in a movie with him.”

“Poor Jimmy. He’s dead. Did you know that? Killed himself.”

“I remember seeing something in the papers.”

“His agent dropped him. He couldn’t get work. Poor guy. He didn’t want to be a has-been.”

“Who does?”

“You know what? It’s great being a has-been. The whole thing about being famous, whatever that means, well, the price you pay for that, the chunks it takes out of you, it’s just not worth it. People don’t appreciate anonymity. It’s great, honestly. You should consider it.”

“As a matter of fact,” I say, “I am.”

I explain my situation with the feds. She claims she hasn’t heard anything about it. I find that hard to believe. She says she never reads the newspaper. Maybe she’s just being polite. I tell her about Francis X. Doyle, and about Tom Bowditch and his crazy plan to zip me out of the country and off to someplace in the South Pacific.

“That sounds marvelous,” she says.

“You think? I’m afraid I’ll go nuts if I stop working.”

“Life is short. You’ve done plenty.”

Outside, my car is waiting. We ride downtown in silence. At her building she asks if I want to come inside. I know what this offer means. And I’ll admit, I think about it. I really do. But in the end I tell her I’d better not. Truth is, I’ve never been a big lady killer type. Even when I was single, I wasn’t all that interested in getting laid. Larry used to call me “Gandhi” because I wouldn’t go out and chase pussy with him. Now he’s on his fourth marriage and he’s still the biggest gash hound I’ve ever known. It’s like a disease. In my case it’s not that I’m some nice guy. It’s just that I never found other people all that interesting. At least not enough to be worth putting that much effort into. I’ve had feelings for people, sure. But not love, really. The only person I’ve ever felt that for was myself.

“You’re a sweetie,” she says, and kisses me on the cheek. I wait at the curb and watch her go into the building. At the glass doors she stops and turns and waves to me. It occurs to me that given our ages and the infrequency of our get-togethers, it’s almost certain that we will never see each other again in this lifetime. A chill runs through me. I imagine myself as Sabrina must see me—an old man, small and gray-haired, weary, bespectacled, bundled in a heavy black coat in the back of a big black car, obscured by foggy glass and falling snow, a small face growing smaller as the car surges into the street and disappears into the traffic.

Back in the Valley,
things are rocking. Every day we’re blowing through our sales projections. Our biggest challenge is finding extra capacity at our manufacturing plants in China so we can keep up with demand—and all I can think about is those poor kids who now are going to have to work even longer hours. On the bright side, our stock price keeps ticking up, and even as it does the Wall Street analysts keep recommending it more. One of these guys is quoted in the
Wall Street Journal
calling us “the Sony of the twenty-first century” and saying we’re “the one stock that everyone should own and hold and keep in a box. It’ll put your kids through college.” I don’t celebrate Christmas, because I don’t believe in Christianity, but if I did this would be the best present I could ever hope to get.

Naturally this run of good luck is all too good to be true. On Christmas Day, while the Jobs clan is sitting around the house non-celebrating, I get a call from Tom Bowditch informing me that good old Charlie Sampson has found even more bad news— it’s like Chinese water torture, I swear—and the board will be meeting the next day to get a full report.

When I arrive, a half hour late, Sampson is already sitting in my spot at the head of the conference table.

“I thought you were done,” I say.

“Funny,” he says, “I was just about to say the same to you.”

Nobody laughs. Sampson points to an empty chair down at the far end of the table. Whatever. He’s trying to annoy me. I won’t give him the satisfaction. The whole management team is here, as well as the whole board of directors, including Al Gore, who has actually made an appearance in person. Everyone looks super pissed because they’re all supposed to be hanging out with their families at Vail or Aspen or Hawaii or whatever, and I’m like, “Hey, don’t be mad at me, I’m not the one who called a meeting during the holidays.”

Sampson launches into his presentation. His team has put together a report to send to the SEC. They’ve found all sorts of misdeeds and shenanigans, the worst of which is that a few years ago Sonya and some other lawyers on her team signed some documents saying that the board had held a meeting to vote on some backdated shares when in fact no such meeting occurred. This last bit has been leaked to some obscure legal magazine, which is threatening to run a story saying we engaged in forgery.

“Forgery?” I say. “I mean, isn’t that just a wee bit overdramatic? I mean, just because someone signs someone else’s name to a document, I don’t think that’s forgery.”

“Actually,” Sampson says, “that’s pretty much the definition of forgery.”

“So if I give my wife my credit card in a restaurant and she signs my name, that’s a crime?”

“It’s a crime,” he says, “if there is an intent to deceive. You created the impression that a board meeting had occurred and that a vote had taken place, when in fact this didn’t happen. That misled shareholders.”

“They were going to vote for it anyway. Why drag everyone out here and make them waste an entire day just so they can raise their hands and say yes?” I turn to Al Gore. “It would be a waste of fuel, right? Isn’t that what we say here, that we were trying to save the planet from global warming, and we’re cutting back on travel and doing some of our meetings in virtual space? We can give it a name, like GreenMeet. Or iGreen. The iGreen Initiative.”

“You lied to shareholders,” Sampson says. “That’s against the law.”

“The laws suck. The laws need to be rewritten.”

“Enough,” Tom says. “Right now we’ve got to think about the story that’s going to hit. Ross?”

Ross Ziehm says his guys have managed to stall the reporter by swearing to him that he’s got it wrong and he’s going to look like an idiot if he publishes this, which of course is every egomaniac reporter’s worst nightmare. But Ross is not sure how long they can hold the guy off.