The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [10]
As the millions accumulated, as his wealth increased exponentially each year, his official residence was a cheap comical crash pad of a house that he shared with Dan and Chris-Ann. Dan named the property Rancho Suburbio as an ironic appreciation of its consummate shag-carpeted tract-house tackiness. He filled the spare bedroom with foam packing material and invited the neighborhood kids to jump around in it as though it were an amusement park attraction. They had picked the location because it was a short walk from Apple’s office. (Curiously, it was down the street from Steve’s alma mater, Homestead High School, where he had been something of a loner.) Steve moved in with his meditation cushion but he was rarely there. For two years he really lived in a rickety little wooden shack in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his new girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, an astonishingly attractive Eurasian who worked for Apple’s public relations firm. He didn’t even own the shack; it belonged to her. It had the Zen virtues of simplicity and modesty. Steve would occasionally drop by Rancho Suburbio to pick up a change of clothing. On his way out he would glance around and pause to remark good-naturedly: “What a dump!”
Dan had grown up in a well-off family in New York’s Westchester County, and he could enjoy the campiness of the Rancho, but Steve had grown up poorer, and he reacted against the down-market banality of the suburbs. Following the example of his role models, the older hippies, he romanticized the purity of the country, the lush damp redwood forests in the hills, but at the same time he aspired, instinctively but vaguely, to the sophisticated, refined tastes of the urban elite. His money was new but his mindset was never nouveau riche. He rejected wastefulness and ostentation. From the early days at Apple he had a fascination with design and an innate sense of the importance of aesthetics. He had wanted Apple’s computers to come in cases made from koa, a beautiful blond wood. He possessed a few koa boxes and loved their appearance. But the wood proved far too costly, and the Apple I was sold without a case. For the Apple II he was forced to settle on plastic cases but he insisted that the edges be rounded and sleek, and the computer’s appealing look was an important factor in its unprecedented commercial success.
In 1977 Apple’s headquarters was in the same building in Cupertino as the regional sales office for Sony, a company that was known for good design. The Sony suite was where Steve met Dan’l Lewin, who had recently graduated from Princeton and was working as a field salesman. Steve would come over and look with great interest at Sony’s marketing materials, its letterheads and logos and graphics, the paraphernalia of its corporate identity. He would feel the paper stock to get a sense of its weight and quality. He had an obsession with the visual and the physical, but his judgment was not yet highly developed. He had the impulse for aesthetic perfectionism, but not the unshakable self-confidence that he needed to achieve it. He had the money and the desire but not the knowledge or the skill.
He relied on ad hoc gurus for aesthetic guidance. One of his closest friends from college, Elizabeth Holmes, had minored in art history, and she had showed him a book about the artist Maxfield Parrish, whose work she admired. He decided to purchase a Parrish. It turned out that a well-known collector lived not far away in northern California, in Atherton, an exclusive old-money enclave. Gary Atherton was the scion of the family that had given its name to the town. He owned about twenty Parrish canvases, though he hadn’t expected that