Walter Isaacson interview

Steve Jobs's biographer describes a man who was cold, rude, ruthless, obsessive, insensitive and a genius.

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As with anything Steve Jobs had a hand in designing, the packaging is part of the deal. No surprise, then, that the cover of the 630-page hardback biography of him, released worldwide this week, looks distinctly Apple-ish. The cover is stark – featuring nothing but a picture of Jobs against a white background. In a font that could have come off the case of a new iPod – and probably does – the cover simply says, “Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson”.

It looks so simple, but getting to that point was not. Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple, first approached Isaacson in 2004, after the writer, who had been managing editor of Time and chairman of CNN, had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin and while he was working on one of Albert Einstein. What Isaacson did not know, because it was secret, was that when Jobs made the approach he was about to go into hospital to have his first operation for pancreatic cancer. At the time, Isaacson deflected the idea of a book, although the pair continued to have intermittent contact. Then in 2009, Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell, said to Isaacson, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now.” The deal was that Jobs would co-operate with interviews, and would ask other people to allow themselves to be interviewed by Isaacson, but Jobs would have no control over the book’s content.

“I don’t know why he did it,” Isaacson says simply on the phone from New York. “He asked me at my very last meeting with him, ‘There’ll be things in this book I don’t like, right?’, and I said, ‘Yuh,’ and he said, ‘Good, then it won’t feel like some authorised in-house book. It will have credibility and I hope you at least explain what my accomplishments were.’

“And I sure did that. I describe him as the greatest genius of our time.”

Others dispute the claim that Jobs, who died on October 5, was a genius, but what is undisputed is that he could be immensely difficult to work with. Isaacson found that out for himself when, earlier this year, just months before his death, Jobs rang because he had seen an image of the planned biography in a catalogue, and he hated the cover design.

“That really stinks,” Jobs told Isaacson, although Isaacson says “stinks” wasn’t the word Jobs used. Jobs went on. “He said, ‘I’m not going to co-operate any more because that’s such bad taste and it truly stinks,’ and finally, after yelling at me for a while, he said, ‘The only way I’ll co-operate any more is if you let me have some input into the cover design.’

“That took me a second or two,” says Isaacson, “then I said, ‘Sure.’ I mean, he has the greatest design eye of our time.” So Jobs took over the cover while Isaacson continued working on the text. Jobs’s output is typically pared down, but Isaacson’s product is a richly researched and compelling story of a complex man who was so neurotic about perfection in some things, and so unwilling to compromise on them that, despite becoming a billionaire, he lived much of his adult life in houses with almost no furniture because he could not find any that suited his taste and standards. Jobs’s obsession with the design of products made by Apple, which began in his parents’ California garage, is legendary.

From the first Macintosh computer to the latest iPhone and iPad, Apple products have always had a sophisticated design aesthetic, included not at the expense of their performance, but as part of it. But Jobs’s never-ending quest for perfection and his sheer determination about getting his own way were often a source of great aggravation to those he worked with, and it was like that from the beginning of Apple. Mike Scott was hired in 1977 to try to manage Jobs, who was then just 22 and already creating all sorts of tension as he obsessed over the design of the case for the Apple II computer, the first big commercial success story for the fledgling company. In the book, Isaacson writes about working with Jobs.

“The Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colours for its plastic, had more than 2000 shades of beige. ‘None of them were good enough for Steve,’ Scott marvelled. ‘He wanted to create a different shade, and I had to stop him.’

“When the time came to tweak the design of the case, Jobs spent days agonising over just how rounded the corners should be. ‘I didn’t care how rounded they were,’ said Scott, ‘I just wanted it decided.’” At least those arguments over aesthetics were worth having, because Apple was unlikely to have become the most valuable company in the world without that attention to detail.

But Jobs would also burn up the goodwill of those around him on far pettier matters. Isaacson describes in the book how Jobs went to New York in January 1985 for the launch of the Macintosh XL, a relatively unsuccessful product. A PR woman, Andy Cunningham, was on hand to assist Jobs with press interviews at the Carlyle hotel.

“When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10pm and the meetings were to begin the next day,” Isaacson writes. “The piano was not in the right place, the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. ‘We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is,’ Cunningham recalled. ‘I know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was “stupid” because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.’ So Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the lilies he wanted.

“By the time they got the room re-arranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. ‘That suit’s disgusting,’ he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. ‘Look, I know you’re angry, and I know how you feel,’ she said. ‘You have no f—ing idea how I feel,’ he shot back, ‘no f—ing idea what it’s like to be me.’”

So what was it like to be Steve Jobs? That might take psychologists a long time to unravel, but it seems inescapable that some of his persona was shaped by his adoption. His adoptive parents, Clara and Paul Jobs, were devoted to him and raised him with the knowledge he had been adopted as a baby, but growing up he had sparse details about his biological mother, and none about his father. In fact, his biological mother, Joanne Schieble, had been 23 when she became pregnant to her Syrian boyfriend, Abdulfattah Jandali.

The pair were unmarried, and early in 1955 Schieble went to California to give birth and have the baby adopted, with the stipulation that he go to the home of college graduates. However, when the lawyer and his wife who were due to adopt the baby discovered it was a boy, they declined. The infant instead went to Clara and Paul Jobs. Paul was uneducated but skilled at fixing and making almost anything, with a great pride in craftsmanship of whatever he did, and also with a particular love of stylish cars. His young son spent many hours in the family garage with him, picking up his father’s interest in design, and in products being well-made. At school, Jobs showed a precocious intellect but, perhaps in a sign of things to come, had social difficulties.

At university, Jobs picked up an enduring interest in Eastern religions, asceticism and diets. He usually ate a vegan diet but also went through periods of eating only fruit, or other stringent regimes. However, his interest in meditation and Buddhism did not spill over to calm in his working life. And he thought rules did not apply to him.

“Even in small everyday rebellions such as not putting a licence plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him,” Isaacson writes. “Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorising things. People were either ‘enlightened’ or ‘an asshole’. Their work was either ‘the best’ or ‘totally shitty’.” Also, people could move from one category to the other, depending on his whim.

Walter Isaacson, photo Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

Throughout Isaacson’s book, it is Jobs’s way of dealing with people that stands out. This resulted in his being ousted from Apple in 1985. He returned 11 years later and saved the company from imminent bankruptcy. He was brutal on “bozos” but also sometimes on people who thought they were his close friends. The case of Daniel Kottke is illustrative. The pair had been soulmates at Reed College, gone to India together and been flatmates. Kottke worked for Apple when it was operating out of Jobs’s parents’ garage and was still working there when the company went public in 1981, but he was cut out of stock options. In the book, Isaacson describes the event. “Finally, almost six months after the IPO, Kottke worked up the courage to march into Jobs’s office and try to hash out the issue. But when he got to see him, Jobs was so cold that Kottke froze. ‘I just choked up and began to cry and just couldn’t talk to him,’ Kottke recalled. ‘Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad.’

Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power supply [for the Apple II] was getting a lot of options and tried to turn Jobs around. ‘We have to do something for your buddy Daniel,’ he said, and he suggested they each give him some of their own options. ‘Whatever you give him, I will match it,’ said Holt. Replied Jobs, ‘Okay. I will give him zero.’ ”

But Jobs also had a capacity to build great loyalty, especially from people who shared his ethos and enthusiasm for the Apple company. This talent on the one hand for finding and inspiring brilliant and creative people was a huge strength, but the ability to cut old friends dead, to be less than generous and to simply abuse people was, Isaacson tells the Listener, “all part and parcel of the intensity.

“Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in writing it, but I hope it’s clear that the intensity and passion for perfection, and not to tolerate bozos, as he put it, comes as part of his personality, which also really does create a shockingly good and very loyal team around him. There are people who are much more velvety in dealing with people they work with, but they don’t tend to make a dent in the universe and I can’t think of any leader who had more loyal top colleagues. So I tried to make it clear that it was all part and parcel of him being an inspiring leader, but then again, he took it to extremes sometimes.”

Isaacson says he was surprised by the outpouring of grief and adulation when Jobs died. “People felt they had an emotional connection with him. I think if you’re emotionally connected to his products and think that they sing to you, it’s like a musician or artist who you feel sings to you and you get emotionally attached. But it took me by surprise.” Was people’s grief partly because they thought the line of wonderful products might now end?

“I don’t think it’s just a matter of thinking Apple’s going to quit making really good phones. I think there was something emotional that people felt he connected with them.”

If Isaacson is right, and someone who owned an iPhone and iPad in New Zealand, say, felt emotionally connected to Jobs, it would be ironic, because those to whom he should have been closest did not always feel they came before Apple, or Pixar, the animation studios he bought in 1986, in his affection and attention.

As an adult, Jobs traced his biological mother and discovered that after he had been put up for adoption, she and Jandali had married and had a daughter, Mona, who was therefore Jobs’s full biological sister. Jobs maintained contact with his mother and sister but never wanted to meet his father, even though, by amazing coincidence, it turned out Jandali had owned a restaurant in California that Jobs used to frequent, and the pair had met without realising their relationship.

But in a case of history repeating, Jobs also fathered a child, with his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, when she was 23. Brennan kept the baby, Lisa, but Jobs did not live with Brennan and paid his daughter scant attention until she moved into his house when she was at high school. But their relationship was always stormy and punctuated by long periods when they did not see or speak to each other. In the meantime, Jobs met Powell; they married and had three children: a son, Reed, now 20, and two girls, Erin, 16, and Eve, 13.

Despite the stability of the Jobs family’s life, Isaacson suggests all four children paid a heavy price for their father’s unshakeable dedication to Apple. But if they paid a price that way, they certainly will end up rich in a monetary sense. Isaacson writes that Jobs liked to create the impression that he worked for love, “but he also wanted to have huge stock grants bestowed upon him. Jangling inside him were the counterculture rebel turned business entrepreneur, someone who wanted to believe he had turned on and tuned in without having sold out and cashed in.”

Jobs’s wealth at the time he died has been estimated at more than US$6.7 billion (NZ$8.5 billion) but the terms of his will are not known. He was not, publicly at least, a great philanthropist, and Isaacson admits “it’s one of the things I didn’t get to the bottom of”. He says Powell is philanthropic, “but I’ve been active in education non-profits, including the Aspen Institute [where he is CEO] and I think those of us in the non-profit world will never do one-tenth as much to reform education as the invention of the iPad will do. So, as much as we may say he should have done more philanthropy and non-profit work, he may actually have done more than any of us. The money? Well, he didn’t take it with him.”

Isaacson had hoped the book would be published when Jobs was still alive, although the intense public interest created by his death may well have made the market for it far wider. “There’s a bittersweet quality to that. I would give up all of that if he could still be around to read it and, frankly, yell at me about parts of it.”

STEVE JOBS, by Walter Isaacson (Little, Brown, $59.99).