But here Steve was, in the early afternoon of December 11, calling me at home on the phone. “Hi, Brent, this is Steve.” Before waiting for me to respond, he immediately announced, “I really hate to have to say this but I just can’t make it next Thursday.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Steve, we have been planning on this for six months. Everybody else cleared out a whole day on their schedules so they could be here for this. Lanita said everything was all set last week. We can’t do it if you aren’t there.”
“Sure you can,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and waited for him to explain.
“I have to tell you, Brent, my health has really gone downhill. I can’t put on any weight. You know me, I’m a vegan, and I’ve even started getting chocolate milk shakes now, eating cheese, anything. But I keep wasting away. You wouldn’t want to see me like this. The others wouldn’t, either. Laurene says I can’t wait any longer. I have to deal with this. And she’s right.”
I asked him about the earlier surgery, and why he had insisted so strongly that he had been cured. Was it his pancreas still? Or was it something else? He told me it was some sort of endocrine disorder that seemed to have made it difficult for his body to digest food. “I eat something, and it goes right through me,” he said.
“Whatever it is, I have to drop everything else and figure it out now. It has to be my only priority. I owe it to my family. I haven’t even told the board or Tim and the others this yet, but I am going to have to take another medical leave. MacWorld is coming up, so I have to announce it before then, because I don’t think I can do that, either.”
Then his tone changed. “I’ve always told you what was happening with my health, because you can relate. So I’m sure you know you can’t tell anyone else about this. It’s just between you and me. That’s why I called. Because I wanted to tell you myself. I wanted you to know that I really wanted to do this with you, too. But I just can’t.”
Sitting there on the edge of the daybed in my home office, I tried to imagine what Steve must look like. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco the previous June. He had looked thin then, but he had also had a spring in his step. iPhones were flying out of the stores and the App Store was selling apps by the millions. iMacs, now pristine white rectangular slabs that floated in front of you, were selling better than ever. And the new MacBook Air—the laptop equivalent of a sleek supermodel—was the latest “it” device.
“So, what am I supposed to say to Bill and Andy and Michael?” I asked. “They’re going to want to know why you are pulling out at the very last minute. Should I tell them you aren’t feeling up to it? I won’t say anything more than that.”
At first Steve didn’t answer. Then, after a few beats, with a mordant giggle, he said, “Just tell them I’m being an asshole. That’s what they’ll probably be thinking, anyway, so why not just say it?”
I was dumbfounded. “Do you really want me to say that?” I replied, thinking that none of them would buy it for a minute. They knew that Steve wouldn’t have put me up to the whole roundtable thing, only to back out. He could be a jerk, but he wasn’t an asshole. “All I ask is that you just don’t tell them the real reason. Not yet.”
I didn’t tell Michael or Andy or Bill anything other than that Steve had to cancel because of a personal conflict that had come up. A month or so later, after Apple had announced Steve’s medical leave for “complex” health-related issues, I saw Bill at his office in Kirkland, Washington. He told me he wanted to get in touch with Steve and wasn’t sure of the best means. It had been a long time since they had spoken. I gave him Steve’s home phone number and his cellphone number, and also the email address and phone number of his assistant Lanita, but not before relating the story of the “asshole” excuse Steve had suggested. Bill loves a smart riposte as much as anyone, so we had a good laugh.
ACCORDING TO TIM COOK, he and Katie Cotton, Apple’s communications chief, first learned about Steve’s need for a liver transplant in January 2009, a few weeks after Steve and I spoke. But he had watched Steve wither away during 2008. By early 2009 Steve wasn’t coming into the office at all, and Cook would visit him at home just about every day. He started to worry that things might finally be headed in a fatal direction. “It was terrible going over there day after day and talking with him, because you could see him slipping day after day,” says Cook. Steve was starting to look alarmingly frail. He developed ascites—an accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity that caused his belly to protrude in ghastly fashion—and he just lay in bed all day, gaunt and tired and irritable.
He was on the list of people in California who were awaiting a liver transplant. This isn’t a list that can be gamed. At one of their many bedside meetings, Steve told Cook that he thought he might have a better chance at a liver transplant than others because he had a rare blood type. It wasn’t a statement that made any sense to Cook, because while there were fewer applicants on the list with Steve’s blood type, there were also fewer people of that blood type whose livers could be transplanted to him. In fact, Steve’s chances of getting a donor were not good at all.
One afternoon, Cook left the house feeling so upset that he had his own blood tested. He found out that he too had a rare blood type, and made the assumption that it might be the same as Steve’s. He started doing research, and learned that it is possible to transfer a portion of a living person’s liver to someone in need of a transplant. About six thousand living-donor transplants are performed every year in the United States, and the rate of success for both donor and recipient is high. The liver is a regenerative organ. The portion transplanted into the recipient will grow to a functional size, and the portion of the liver that the donor gives up will also grow back.
Cook decided to undergo a battery of tests that determine if someone is healthy enough to be a living donor. “I thought he was going to die,” Cook explains. He went to a hospital far from the Bay Area, since he didn’t want to be recognized. The day after he returned from the trip, he went to visit Steve. And there, sitting alone with him in the bedroom of the Palo Alto house, Tim began to offer his liver to Steve. “I really wanted him to do it,” he remembers. “He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll never let you do that. I’ll never do that!’ ”
“Somebody that’s selfish,” Cook continues, “doesn’t reply like that. I mean, here’s a guy, he’s dying, he’s very close to death because of his liver issue, and here’s someone healthy offering a way out. I said, ‘Steve, I’m perfectly healthy, I’ve been checked out. Here’s the medical report. I can do this and I’m not putting myself at risk, I’ll be fine.’ And he doesn’t even think about it. It was not, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ It was not, ‘I’ll think about it.’ It was not, ‘Oh, the condition I’m in …’ It was, ‘No, I’m not doing that!’ He kind of popped up in bed and said that. And this was during a time when things were just terrible. Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him, and this was one of them.”
“This picture of him isn’t understood,” says Cook. “I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short.” In saying this, Cook echoed the feeling of many of Steve’s close friends—in interview after interview, they complained that very little of what has been published offers any sense of why they would have worked so long and so hard for Steve. Those former employees share another common thread, too: the idea that they did the very best work of their lives for Steve.