Return to the Little Kingdom (42 page)

Some of the wealthier individuals made larger purchases. Alice Robertson bought condominiums and a gold-colored Mercedes which she decorated with the vanity license plates 24 CARAT. Rod Holt eventually took up ocean-racing, ordered a yacht and had a large Apple logo stitched to one of the sails. Markkula took to the skies, bought a used Learjet, had it repainted, equipped it with a stereo system, videotape player and Apple II, hangered it at San Jose airport under the company name ACM Aviation, retained a pair of pilots, and used it to gad to a weekend home on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

Jobs was at one time going to share the jet with Markkula but decided that was too ostentatious and settled for a life of expensive austerity. “You run out of things to buy real quick.” He was not sure whether to be embarrassed or coyly proud of the fact that he and Markkula had shared a $200 bottle of Sauterne at dinner one evening or that he had the means to contemplate buying (though he never did) a full-page advertisement in
Le Monde
to help track down a woman he had met fleetingly in Paris but who had failed to turn up for a date. He found that the wealth, and the notoriety that trailed in its wake, opened doors to a wider stage. Invitations started to arrive for dinner parties, politicians began to solicit contributions, charities with unfamiliar names mailed fund-raising letters, and when he was asked to give talks or speeches, Jobs became increasingly polished. As business started to take him about the world he found large cities like Paris and New York more diverting than Cupertino or Sunnyvale. His wardrobe also took on a worldly air. The jeans began to be replaced by elegantly cut two-piece suits furnished by the San Francisco outfitter’s Wilkes Bashford.

When the San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, with a characteristic lunge for the jugular, referred to Cupertino as Computertino, Jobs must have been part of the reason. Before Apple went public, the young master of Computertino bought a quiet home set in the hills of Los Gatos which he shared, for about three years, with a girl friend who had once worked at the Regis McKenna Agency. There he demanded the same quality of workmanship from his contractors as he did at Apple. But he was too busy to bring his full energies to the house that stayed empty of furniture and full of echoes.

After his girl friend moved out, it became the home of a lonely soul. About the only furnished room was the kitchen, decorated in French peasant style, but with knives by Henckel and a coffee maker by Braun. The master bedroom contained an Apple II, a mattress, and a dresser on top of which stood an eclectic collection of photographs: the guru Neem Karolie Baba, former California governor Jerry Brown, and Albert Einstein. A half-filled lawyer’s bookcase in another room stood guard over packets of shirts returned from the dry cleaner. Architectural plans stayed scattered on the floor of a downstairs room. There were no easy chairs or sofa.

Outside in the driveway a Mercedes replaced the succession of beat-up old cars and he would run his hands along the smooth, sleek lines, promising people that someday Apple’s computers would look equally elegant. He bought a BMW R-60 motorcycle which he sometimes rode about the hills and a painting by Maxfield Parrish. Along with Robert Friedland Jobs bought some land in the Pacific Northwest and also helped to finance SEVA, an organization devoted to eliminating blindness in Nepal.

But he was much too introspective to find the wealth comfortable. He worried about some of the consequences, asked his parents to remove the Apple bumper stickers from their cars, wondered how to give them some money without turning their world topsyturvy, worried that women might like him just because he was wealthy, and knew that his friends expected him to use his fortune wisely. He had become—in his middle twenties—a digitized version of Scott Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr.

 

Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.

Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie,
The Warriors
. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

A few months before Apple became a public company, Wozniak took up flying, bought a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and eight weeks after the stock offering, came close to fulfilling the last half of Samuel Johnson’s adage. Wozniak embarked on a weekend flying expedition along with Candi Clark, the daughter of a California building contractor, whom he had first met during a water-gun fight at Apple and who was about to become his second wife. They were accompanied by another couple and were supposed to fly to Southern California to pick up Wozniak’s wedding rings. Before setting off from Scotts Valley airport, located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Wozniak was jittery. He complained about interference on his headsets and his companions were equally nervous. Their queasiness was justified. When the plane left the runway, it rose about fifty feet in the air, touched down again, bounced a couple of times, reared at an angle, barreled through two barbed-wire fences, careened up an embankment, and tipped on its nose about two hundred and fifty feet from a roller-skating rink crammed with teenagers. A San Francisco stockbroker who arrived on the scene switched off the plane’s ignition and found Wozniak slumped in his fiancée’s lap.

After an investigation the National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of mechanical failure. Meanwhile, doctors examined the four injured victims. They found that Wozniak had bitten through his upper lip, smashed a tooth, fractured the orbital socket around his right eye, had double vision, and was suffering from amnesia. His fiancée, meanwhile, needed plastic surgery to touch up cuts on her face. Wozniak’s accident prompted dark headlines in the local newspapers: COMPUTER EXEC IN PLANE CRASH, APPLE EXEC IN GUARDED CONDITION. In the days following the accident, Jobs rented a limousine to ferry Wozniak’s parents to and from El Camino hospital. There in his bed Wozniak became frantic, refused food, and said that the government was plotting to blow up the hospital and take all his money. Though his doctors were divided on the issue, seven days after the accident Wozniak was released and six months later he ordered a brand-new single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.

The Stanford University dormitory lounge looked like a poorly lit set for a nineteenth-century Gothic romance. Imitation-marble plinths sagged above the radiators, gilt-edged chandeliers threw yellow shadows across a ceiling painted crème de menthe. Branches of trees, thinned by fall, brushed in a drafty dusk against the windowpanes. A hundred or so freshmen, most of whom seemed to possess an earnest desire to graduate, were folded in various states of repose. A couple were fidgeting with small tape recorders. They had come to listen to Steve Jobs. The informality did not extend to the three women from the Regis McKenna Public Relations Agency who perched at the rear of the room. They had helped select the students’ invitation from among the two dozen or so requests that Jobs received every week. The youngest of the trio had not met Jobs before, but monitored him with marital familiarity and clucked to a magazine photographer, “He isn’t in a good mood. He doesn’t want photographs right now.”

For the students the chairman of Apple Computer was a welcome break from the diet of familiar college administrators and professors they had been fed on previous occasions. Jobs was dressed with formal indifference in a well-cut cotton sports coat and jeans: chest courtesy of San Francisco clothier Wilkes Bashford, legs furnished by Levi Strauss. While a student made some introductory remarks Jobs shucked his jacket, tugged off a pair of worn corduroy boots which revealed a pair of argyle socks, and took up a lotus position on a coffee table.

The students seemed a touch intimidated but the line of questions quickly showed that the subject under inspection possessed, in their eyes, the same molecular structure as Apple Computer. Jobs used the questions to give a seductive talk which, with slight variations, served as his standard speech for magazine editors, congressional committees, state commissions, business school students, electronics conventions, politicians, and visiting academics. It explained part of the reason for Apple’s popular appeal and why Jobs, some months before, had made the cover of
Time
. It was a cross between technological evangelism and corporate advertisement and Jobs busily juggled the roles of standard bearer and corporate promoter.

He told how Apple got started. “When we first started Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one.” Then he said, “We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple II which you have probably heard about.” He added, “We had a passion to do this one simple thing which was get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were.”

Suddenly the magazine photographer’s light flashed and Jobs asked, “What’s that?” and provoked a barrel of snickers. The photographer crouched near a pillar and raised her camera. Jobs paused and stared into the lens and said, “Hi!” and the questions stopped. When they resumed a student wanted to know when the company stock would rise. “I cannot talk about that,” he said demurely. He said that he hoped Apple would someday sell half a million computers a month. “It’s still kind of a pain in the ass to use a computer.” He told the students about the company’s Lisa computer, disclosed his dream of putting a computer in a book, and promised, “We won’t put garbage in a book because our competitors will do that.”

He proceeded to tell the students about his plan to give a computer away to every high school in the country. Cynics said that it was a cold marketing ploy to produce generations of Apple users, but at the start it had been a romantic gesture. The plan was formally called The Technology Education Act of 1982, but at Apple it had become known as the “Kids Can’t Wait” program and reflected Jobs’s impatience to get things done. On his first serious excursion, he had spent a couple of months lobbying congressmen, hoping to get a change in the tax law that would give companies the same relief for donating computers to schools that they received when they gave them to universities. Jobs had given senators and congressmen a standard twenty-minute pitch but the Reagan administration had been unwilling to bend the tax laws to help special cases. So when the students wanted to know what had become of the well-publicized plan, Jobs announced that Apple wasn’t willing to support the amended legislation and that “the Senate has screwed it up.”

Apple had received a warmer reception at the California legislature which had amended a local law, and Jobs said that the company would soon start distributing ten thousand computers throughout the state. “We’re in the right place at the right time with the right people to give something back. That’s kind of nice. Computers and society are out on their first date so wouldn’t it be great if we could make the date go great and blossom.” He added, “The race is on to improve the productivity of the knowledge worker. The personal computer can generate—at a crude level—free intellectual energy but the computer will dwarf the petrochemical revolution.”

In answer to some more questions he told the students, “The company that will most affect how we do is not IBM. It’s Apple. If we do what we know how to do well, we’ll leave everyone else in the dust.” After a student asked what it was like to run an empire Jobs replied, “We don’t think of it as an empire. We hire people to tell us what to do.” He dismissed the Japanese quest for a new generation of computer as having “a very high bullshit content. They don’t really know what they’re talking about.” He complained about the Japanese and the evils of protectionism. He also said it was no longer possible to start a computer company in a garage but suggested the students might still have a shot with a software company.

As the questions died down Jobs conducted his own informal poll. He asked what part of the country students came from and what they were studying. Most seemed to be enrolled in computer science. “How many of you are virgins?” he asked. There were a few giggles, but no hands were raised. “How many of you have taken LSD?” There were some flushes of embarrassment and one or two hands rose slowly. “What do you want to do?” he asked, and a student blurted, “Make babies.”

There wasn’t much hint that Jobs had acted through the script dozens of times, or had casually talked with friends about the possibility of running as an independent candidate for president. Jobs knew all the punch lines. It was the work of a corporate sorcerer with an actor’s sense of timing. After Jobs’s questions he was badgered again. A couple of students tugged at his cuffs. One just wanted to introduce himself as the owner of an Apple II, another wanted Jobs’s autograph on one of the Apple annual reports that were spilling out of a couple of cardboard boxes. A tall junior wondered whether he could get a tour of an Apple factory. Most of the students seemed pleased with the evening. “Well, at least he’s not a jerk,” one brown-haired coed said as she, in her Lacoste shirt, carefully pressed jeans, topsiders, and companion made for the door.