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Some of the neighbors refused to let their teenage daughters baby-sit for the Jobs children, since they thought that Steve’s wealth and celebrity made the family a potential target for kidnappers or crazed fans. Still, Steve had no security and he almost always left the front door unlocked. What the neighbors did approve of was his beautiful garden, which they thought was the most beautiful in Old Palo Alto. He paid $1 million to buy the cottage next door and tear it down so he could expand his garden, where he grew some of his own vegetables and herbs.

Many of Steve’s old friends, loyal or estranged, lived within a few blocks of the Jobs house: Andy Hertzfeld, the Macintosh’s original software designer, lived next door to his best friend, Burrell Smith, the Mac’s hardware designer, who lived next door to Tina Redse, who had married and had two children and separated from her husband.

Steve’s relationship with Andy Hertzfeld was like a bizarre soap opera. Steve liked Andy and had great respect for his creative and technical abilities. In the late 1980s, Andy had started going out with a woman named Joyce. Steve didn’t think that Joyce was good enough for Andy. He told Andy so, and he even tried to set up Andy with another woman.

Joyce was enraged by the episode. Andy felt so guilty that he continued supporting Joyce financially even after they broke up. He gave her around $250,000 worth of stock in his new company, General Magic.

In 1997, Andy became engaged to marry Linda Stone, a brilliant executive at Microsoft and a close friend of John Lasseter, who was trying to recruit her to Pixar.

Linda loved Andy, but she told him that he had to stop supporting his ex. Joyce wasn’t the only one in Andy’s care. Andy also provided financial support to two of Steve’s ex-girlfriends, Tina and Chris-Ann. “It’s Andy’s ’Aid to Dependent Women’ program, his harem of Steve’s exes,” says one of Andy’s friends. “He feels powerful when he’s supporting these women.” Andy also served as a kind of big brother to Burrell Smith, who had become more lucid now that he was taking medication for his manic depression.

Linda broke off the engagement, and Andy married Joyce instead.

Now that Steve was interim CEO of Apple, he wanted to hire Andy again. Andy was fascinated by the drama around Steve. When they had worked together in the 1980s, Andy had felt a sense of exhilaration. He believed that Steve had inspired him to accomplish more than he otherwise could have, even though Steve sometimes humiliated him as well.

Now Steve was trying to lure Andy back to Apple, but Joyce wouldn’t allow it.

Steve talked about the tangled situation when he ran into one of Andy’s friends at a wedding. “It’s too bad that Andy has fucked up,” Steve said.

• • •

AS THE CHRISTMAS season arrived, Good Steve played Santa while Bad Steve acted like the Grinch. As a present to the staffers of Pixar, Good Steve wanted to throw a big party, but Pixar’s earlier celebrations were hard to top, especially the Halloween bashes with killer costumes that the artists labored over. Steve announced his “Holiday Waltz,” a formal dinner-dance with old-world élan. He held ballroom dancing lessons in the weeks before the event. He rented the main hall of the ornate Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He hired musicians from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and provided a lavish spread of food.

Steve liked playing the role of Good Steve, but there was something about his best friend Larry Ellison that brought out the Bad Steve, as if they were mischievous boys trying to impress each other. As the two moguls were socializing on December 23, they came up with a practical joke to play on an utterly naive and innocent person, though the joke would ultimately make the newspapers and hurt their own reputations.

Their victim was Michael Murdock, a small-time computer consultant in the valley. Michael had worked for six years on Pixar’s technical support staff, where he was the resident Mac expert and fix-it guy. He had never gone to college but