HOWZAT

Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, was once simply the Santa Clara Valley, a land of orchards. Now it’s a land of smart, rich people who eat breakfast daily suffused with the conviction that today is the day they will make billions and change the world. It was in here, in the town of Mountain View, that Jobs spent his childhood. He was born to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali in San Francisco. They were young and unmarried and, as a result, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. They seem to have provided a good home, but everybody is convinced that the mere fact of the adoption did much to form Jobs’s character. Michael Maccoby thinks the key might be the idea of the absent or lost father.

“The very striking thing about productive narcissists, particularly men, is that they grow up in families where there is an absent or weak father figure. You can see this in narcissistic presidents like Obama, Clinton, Reagan and Nixon. They struggle with their identity and view of the world. So they tend to come up with a very original view of things and are then driven to find followers.”

Later, Jobs dropped out of college. Again, this seems to have been crucial. Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, says his lack of a proper education in a world of highly educated people left him permanently insecure, especially in matters of taste. “I think his choice of a minimalist aesthetic comes from his fear of making the wrong aesthetic choice. He was someone who had great wealth from his early twenties. He was worried about not being seen as a brilliant sophisticate, so he had gurus to help him. There was this anxiety about being judged, combined with a natural instinct about the tremendous importance of design.”

There was another sense in which Jobs seemed to miss out. Deutschman says he “lagged the zeitgeist”. He was too young — 12 in 1967 — to enjoy the full hippie, summer-of-love experience. Yet he seemed to want to catch up, travelling, like the Beatles, to India to find enlightenment, and returning, unlike the Beatles, a Buddhist.

His first business persona was that of counter-cultural guerrilla, a silicon Che Guevara. The Mac was launched with the most famous TV ad ever made, a tour de force of ad-art directed by Ridley Scott. It portrayed IBM as George Orwell’s Big Brother and Apple as a blonde, athletic Californian-type freedom fighter, smashing Big Brother’s screen with a sledgehammer.

Finally, he even dated Joan Baez, the folk-singing goddess of the counterculture. Some said it was because she had been the lover of Bob Dylan, and Jobs is crazy about Bob. According to Deutschman’s book, he later said gracelessly:

“I would have married Joan Baez but she was too old to have my children.”

Which brings me to the matter of Jobs and women. This has been a rocky road. When his first serious girlfriend, Chris-Ann, became pregnant, he refused to accept it was anything to do with him. Lisa, his daughter, was born in a commune in Oregon in 1978. They have since been reconciled. That would be that but for the fact that, in the early 1980s, Jobs rediscovered his biological parents. They had married and had a daughter, Mona Simpson, his sister. She was a highly regarded novelist, who in 1996 published A Regular Guy, about a driven, narcissistic superstar business man and his relations with the daughter he had abandoned. At every turn, Jobs’s story seems to grow into fiction and then myth.

Jobs seems to go for the blonde, athletic Californian look of the girl in the Mac ad. It may be one more aspect of his pursuit of belonging in the pampered groves of the Valley. In 1991, at a Zen Buddhist ceremony, he married a woman — Laurene Powell — with precisely that look. They are still together and have three children.

His eviction from Apple in 1985 was a death and he did not go gently into that good night. One day he called Andrea Cunningham to the Jackling House to talk about his new company. She found him in the almost entirely unfurnished house haranguing journalists about the iniquities of his usurper, John Sculley. “He was pretty much ranting. I was quite shocked that someone of his abilities and intelligence and all of that would attempt what he was trying to attempt. It was just amazing.”

Then came the wilderness years. Apple lost its way, and by the mid-1990s it was on the verge of collapse. Its computers were dull and the Apple operating system was buggy and awful. I reluctantly abandoned them at this point. Jobs’s new company, NeXT, meanwhile, went nowhere. It made beautiful-looking computers for education. But they were expensive and impossible to sell.

In 1986 he bought — from the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas — a strange commune of brilliant men who were convinced that movies could be made on computers. It was called Pixar. They were inventing the technology as they went along. That, too, seemed to be going nowhere.

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