Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [148]
Some of the wealthier individuals made larger purchases. Alice Robertson bought condominiums and a gold-colored Mercedes which she decorated with the vanity license plates 24 CARAT. Rod Holt eventually took up ocean-racing, ordered a yacht and had a large Apple logo stitched to one of the sails. Markkula took to the skies, bought a used Learjet, had it repainted, equipped it with a stereo system, videotape player and Apple II, hangered it at San Jose airport under the company name ACM Aviation, retained a pair of pilots, and used it to gad to a weekend home on the shores of Lake Tahoe.
Jobs was at one time going to share the jet with Markkula but decided that was too ostentatious and settled for a life of expensive austerity. “You run out of things to buy real quick.” He was not sure whether to be embarrassed or coyly proud of the fact that he and Markkula had shared a $200 bottle of Sauterne at dinner one evening or that he had the means to contemplate buying (though he never did) a full-page advertisement in Le Monde to help track down a woman he had met fleetingly in Paris but who had failed to turn up for a date. He found that the wealth, and the notoriety that trailed in its wake, opened doors to a wider stage. Invitations started to arrive for dinner parties, politicians began to solicit contributions, charities with unfamiliar names mailed fund-raising letters, and when he was asked to give talks or speeches, Jobs became increasingly polished. As business started to take him about the world he found large cities like Paris and New York more diverting than Cupertino or Sunnyvale. His wardrobe also took on a worldly air. The jeans began to be replaced by elegantly cut two-piece suits furnished by the San Francisco outfitter’s Wilkes Bashford.
When the San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, with a characteristic lunge for the jugular, referred to Cupertino as Computertino, Jobs must have been part of the reason. Before Apple went public, the young master of Computertino bought a quiet home set in the hills of Los Gatos which he shared, for about three years, with a girl friend who had once worked at the Regis McKenna Agency. There he demanded the same quality of workmanship from his contractors as he did at Apple. But he was too busy to bring his full energies to the house that stayed empty of furniture and full of echoes.
After his girl friend moved out, it became the home of a lonely soul. About the only furnished room was the kitchen, decorated in French peasant style, but with knives by Henckel and a coffee maker by Braun. The master bedroom contained an Apple II, a mattress, and a dresser on top of which stood an eclectic collection of photographs: the guru Neem Karolie Baba, former California governor Jerry Brown, and Albert Einstein. A half-filled lawyer’s bookcase in another room stood guard over packets of shirts returned from the dry cleaner. Architectural plans stayed scattered on the floor of a downstairs room. There were no easy chairs or sofa.
Outside in the driveway a Mercedes replaced the succession of beat-up old cars and he would run his hands along the smooth, sleek lines, promising people that someday Apple’s computers would look equally elegant. He bought a BMW R-60 motorcycle which he sometimes rode about the hills and a painting by Maxfield Parrish. Along with Robert Friedland Jobs bought some land in the Pacific Northwest and also helped to finance SEVA, an organization devoted to eliminating blindness in Nepal.
But he was much too introspective to find the wealth comfortable. He worried about some of the consequences, asked his parents to remove the Apple bumper stickers from their cars, wondered how to give them some money without turning their