Steve_Jobs_The_Exclusive_Biography

empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away. Saturday, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobs’s

house in Woodside to offer some advice: He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary, starting AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon, Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above Stanford University. They had walked there in the past, in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could work things out.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn’t show in the choice of movie he wanted to see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the neversurrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and he didn’t have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or windows, and finally gave up. The video store didn’t have a copy of Patton in stock, so in the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley

urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere “figurehead.” Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you become chairman and I’ll become president and chief executive officer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck by how earnest he seemed.

“Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has got to run the company,” he replied. “I’ve got the support and you don’t.”

On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.

Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalists—Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to Jobs’s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculley’s offer to be a product visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.

When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. “I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. “I said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt, but that’s not how you do things.”

Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.

At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée would take over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point,

even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table.

It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray’s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency. It better be important, she told the operator. “It is,” she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. “It’s over,” he said. Then he hung up.

Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he called back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the door when he knocked, so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the bedroom. Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished room. He let Murray in and they talked until almost dawn.

Wednesday, May 29: Jobs finally got hold of a tape of Patton, which he watched Wednesday evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another battle. Instead he urged Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley’s announcement of the reorganization plan. There was no option left other than to play the good soldier rather than the renegade commander.

Like a Rolling Stone

Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the troops the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways glances, but few people acknowledged him and none came over to provide public displays of affection. He stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember “Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,” Sculley recalled, “like an X-ray boring inside your

bones, down to where you’re soft and destructibly mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.” Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.

As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Gassée as the new head of a combined Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was a small box labeled “chairman” with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley briefly noted that in that role, Jobs would play the part of “global visionary.” But he didn’t acknowledge Jobs’s presence. There was a smattering of awkward applause.

Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on, seeing only his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing his Bob Dylan tapes, especially “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited the second verse the day he unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended nicely: “For the loser now / Will be later to win. . . .”

A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock, and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with any furniture. With Redse’s help, he served some vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what really happened?” Hertzfeld asked. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”

“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.” He blamed Sculley for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage without him. His role as chairman, he complained, was completely ceremonial. He was being ejected from his Bandley 3 office to a small and almost empty building he nicknamed “Siberia.” Hertzfeld turned the topic to happier days, and they began to reminisce about the past.

Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new album, Empire Burlesque, and Hertzfeld brought a copy that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The most notable track, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” with its apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate for the evening, but Jobs didn’t like it. It sounded almost disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been going downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.

Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age,” his friend and lawyer George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is.” Jobs recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe.”

Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur had been like a father to me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him

about opera, and he and his wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God, that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the best,’ and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”

Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that was their decision to make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should have separated the decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn’t think I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his feeling of betrayal, deepened.

The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an operations standpoint, there is no role either today or in the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.

Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris, where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola.

They were a calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.

The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting Washington’s approval for some of the required export licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the American embassy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates American law when it so obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”

Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered assassinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor. “You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs could identify with.

Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American embassy, and in his thank-you letter to Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs planned to pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more

vigorously in the coming year. “We are tentatively planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a moment it looked as if Sculley’s hope that Jobs would turn into a “global visionary” for the company might come to pass. But it was not to be. Something much different was in store for September.