The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [108]
In Steve’s role as interim CEO of Apple, he would only give a fifteen-minute interview to each beat reporter every three months, usually right after one of his public speeches to thousands of people. Onstage Steve would be utterly charming and charismatic. But only moments later, backstage, Steve would usually be in a foul mood with the press.
Steve would see the reporters in the order of the perceived importance of their publications. Although the Times always got to go first, John Markoff chafed at being limited to fifteen minutes. The Wall Street Journal would come next, then down the line.
Steve treated the reporters as if they were his captive audience rather than his interrogators. He would spend the entire fifteen minutes pitching his latest product. The journalists were forewarned not to ask about anything else, or Steve might shut them off. Personal questions were strictly forbidden. When an MSNBC correspondent dared to ask why Steve persisted in calling himself the interim CEO, Steve stormed out of the room.
Jon Swartz, who covered Apple for the San Francisco Chronicle, felt that he would occasionally get a fleeting insight into Steve’s mind, as if a venetian blind were opening for an instant and then closing shut. One of those moments came when Steve said his great passion was to make movies that would be loved for many decades, like Disney’s Fantasia, rather than making a computer that would only be good for a year or two.
Mostly, though, the fifteen-minute interviews were incredibly frustrating. Once, Jon Swartz asked whether Pixar would limit itself to making G-rated films. Steve treated him to a sanctimonious diatribe. He even impugned Jon’s own parenting skills. Would Jon let his kids see an R-rated movie?
“Steve is the most difficult of all the CEOs, the scariest and most intimidating to interview,” Jon says. “You feel uneasy, as if you’re transported into a Shakespearean scene but you don’t know what your role is. A lot of us who cover him just want to break through once, or to say, ’I’m tired of your bullshit.’”
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, TNT aired the debut of Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made-for-cable movie about the early careers of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Steve was played by Noah Wyle, who was well known for his role on NBC’s ER.
Over the years, Steve’s friends had speculated about who would play him in the movie version of his life. Ralph Guggenheim, the producer of Toy Story, had told Steve that he thought Tom Cruise would be perfect for the role. Steve was pleased with the notion, since he thought that Tom Cruise was very handsome. Ralph didn’t say that another reason for casting Cruise was the star’s talent for creating characters who were charismatic but dangerously narcissistic.
Cruise was too expensive for a TV movie, but Noah Wyle was perfect. The actor looked very much like the young Steve, and it was uncanny how he captured Steve’s mannerisms.
Louise Kehoe from the Financial Times watched the movie along with her teenage daughter as Pirates portrayed scenes of Steve in his hippie mode from the 1970s.
“Why was Steve trying to be a hippie?” Louise’s daughter asked her. “Wasn’t he too late to be a hippie?”
She was right. Steve had been several years out of sync with the flower-child generation. By the time Steve was a teenager, his idol Bob Dylan was already old news. By the time Steve tried LSD, suburban housewives were reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Steve lagged the zeitgeist because he was always trying to act as if he were older than he was. He emulated the tastes and interests of the kids who were a few years ahead of him.
Steve caught up quickly, and by the late 1970s he had become a cultural leader, a member of the vanguard, the creator of trends that would take off in the following years. He latched onto computers and made them cool. He latched onto business and helped make it