This necessary distance expanded during the last few years of his life. Both of us got very sick in the mid-2000s; he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, while in 2005 I contracted endocarditis and meningitis during a trip to Central America, which put me in a near coma for fourteen days and eventually took away almost all my hearing. He knew more about my illness than I knew about his, of course. Still, he did sometimes reveal details—one time we even compared surgical scars, much like Quint (Robert Shaw) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) in the movie Jaws. He visited me in the Stanford hospital twice during the weeks when I was recovering—stopping by when coming in for regular checkups with his oncologist. He told me some awful jokes about Bill Gates, and excoriated me for having continued to smoke cigarettes despite his admonitions over the years. Steve always did love to tell people how to conduct their personal lives.
AFTER STEVE DIED, reams of armchair analysis unfurled: articles, books, movies, and television shows. Often they resurrected old myths about Steve, using stereotypes that had been created way back in the 1980s, when the press discovered the wunderkind from Cupertino. In those early years, Steve was susceptible to the flattery of the press, and he opened himself and his company to reporters. He was at his most undisciplined and most intemperate then. As much as he showed a genius for imagining breakthrough products, he also could display a disturbing meanness and indifference toward both employees and friends. So when he started limiting access, and cooperating with the press only when he needed to promote his products, the tales from those early days at Apple became the conventional wisdom about his personality and thinking. Perhaps that’s why the posthumous coverage reflected these stereotypes: Steve was a genius with a flair for design, a shaman whose storytelling power could generate something magical and maleficent called a “reality distortion field”; he was a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection; he thought he was smarter than anyone else, never listened to advice, and was an unchanging half-genius, half-asshole from birth.
None of this gibed with my experience of Steve, who always seemed more complex, more human, more sentimental, and even more intelligent than the man I read about elsewhere. A few months after his death, I started combing through the old notes, tapes, and files from my stories about him. There were all kinds of things I’d forgotten: off-the-cuff notes I’d written about him, stories he’d told me during interviews that I couldn’t use at the time for one sensitive reason or another, old chains of emails we’d exchanged, even a few tapes I’d never transcribed. There was an audiocassette he’d made for me that was a dubbed copy of one given to him by John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, with all the various versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever” recorded during its lengthy composition process. These were all stored away in my garage, and unearthing them triggered many buried memories of Steve over the years. After rustling through these personal relics from the past for a few weeks, I decided that it wasn’t enough to grumble about the one-dimensional myths about Steve that were ossifying in the public mind; I wanted to offer a fuller picture and deeper understanding of the man I had covered so intensely, in a way that hadn’t been possible when he was alive. Covering Steve had been fascinating and dramatic. His was a truly Shakespearean tale, full of arrogance, intrigue, and pride, of perceived villains and ham-handed fools, of outrageous luck, good intentions, and unimagined consequences. There were so many ups and so many downs in so short a time that it had been impossible to draw the broad trajectory of his success while he was living. Now I wanted to take the long view of the man I’d covered for so many years, the man who had called himself my friend.
THE MOST BASIC question about Steve’s career is this: How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman that he was exiled from the company he founded become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products that transformed the company into the most valuable and admired enterprise on earth and that changed the everyday lives of billions of people from all different socioeconomic strata and cultures? The answer wasn’t something Steve had ever been all that interested in discussing. While he was an introspective guy, he was not inclined to retrospection: “What’s the point in looking back,” he told me in one email. “I’d rather look forward to all the good things to come.”
A real answer would have to show how he changed, who influenced those changes, and how he applied what he’d learned to the business of making great computing devices. As I pored over my old documents, I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his “wilderness” years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. The lows aren’t as dramatic as the blowups of his first tenure at Apple, and the highs, of course, aren’t as thrilling as those he engineered in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These were muddled, complicated times, and not the stuff of easy headlines. But those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That’s when he learned most everything that made his later success possible, and that’s when he started to temper and channel his behavior. To overlook those years is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve’s last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values—the whole Pandora’s box of immaturity—were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.
By the end of that decade in the woods, despite his many missteps, Steve had, remarkably enough, salvaged both NeXT and Pixar. The legacy of the first secured his professional future, while the triumph of the second ensured his financial well-being. His experience at both companies taught him lessons that, in retrospect, determined the future of Apple and helped define the world we live in. Steve could be intransigent, and nothing was ever learned easily or superficially, but learn he did. Driven and curious even when things were tough, he was a learning machine during these years, and he took to heart all that he gleaned.
No one works in a vacuum. Getting married and beginning a family changed Steve profoundly, in ways that had an enormous positive impact on his work. I had plenty of glimpses into Steve’s personal life over the years, and several encounters with Laurene and their children. But I was not a close friend of the family. When I started to report this book, in late 2012, it seemed that I might not learn much more about his personal life. Saddened by his death and feeling burned by some of what had been published about Steve posthumously, many of his closest colleagues and friends originally refused to talk to me. But that changed over time, and those conversations with his most intimate friends and colleagues—including the only four Apple employees to attend his private burial—revealed a side of Steve that I had sensed, but had not fully understood, and that I have certainly never read about elsewhere. Steve was capable of extraordinary compartmentalization. It’s a talent that allowed him to master and keep track of the various pieces of an entity as complex as Apple upon his return. It allowed him to maintain his focus despite the cacophony of worries that came with knowing he had cancer. It also allowed him to maintain a deep and meaningful life outside the office, while revealing little of that to people who weren’t part of his close inner circle.