The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [11]
Gary sent over a man named Jamis MacNiven, a somewhat older hippie who was as inexperienced as a building contractor and interior designer as Steve was at being a millionaire and tycoon. MacNiven had bluffed his way into contracting, relying on his offbeat charm to distinguish himself from others who had real credentials. He was a gleeful jokester, irreverent and gregarious, which helped conceal the inconvenient fact that he didn’t know very much about his craft. Gary Atherton’s estate in Atherton had been his first job and so far his only job. “I went to fix a doorknob and stayed for three years,” he recalls.
Jamis went to call on Steve at the address in Los Gatos. He drove through a hillside development to find an old plain stucco house without architectural distinction. The yard was half dead. It was a kind of nothing house, he thought. It certainly wasn’t a showplace.
There was no furniture. Steve and Barbara had moved in with just a mattress flopped in the bedroom. Jamis saw an Apple II on the floor. Steve showed him a VisiCalc spreadsheet, demonstrating the software with great enthusiasm. So what? Jamis thought.
“How many people do you have?” Jamis asked.
“Five or six hundred.”
Jamis took the job and quickly discovered that Steve was very vulnerable emotionally. He was forced to grow up while in the public eye, like a teenage pop star. Steve found it excruciatingly hard to make decisions about spending his money and committing to statements about his personal style. He drove a Mercedes 240D, the kind of Mercedes that nobody wanted, one of the German manufacturer’s rare flops, but he kept driving it because he couldn’t pick another car. He never had a couch in the Los Gatos house. The only pieces of furniture in the living room were two enormous seventeenth-century highboy chairs. He never had a bed. He looked at many beds, but nothing ever pleased him, so he slept on a mattress. Jamis thought: He’s a millionaire and he’s still sleeping on the floor. It wasn’t that Steve didn’t try hard enough. He lavished time on decorating and remodeling, and he was willing to spend whatever was necessary to ensure the highest possible quality. Jamis took him on many expeditions to antiques stores and furniture showrooms, but the contractor constantly felt frustrated: they saw so much good stuff, but Steve just couldn’t choose. “He was a victim of over-choice,” Jamis recalls. Steve wasn’t prepared to commit to a fixed conception of his taste, his persona, his image of himself. He couldn’t articulate his aesthetic vision, which was half-formed but nonetheless uncompromising and burdensome. Unless he could have the best, most perfect things, he would have nothing. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what constituted the best.
He already had an appreciation for austere minimalism, but at times he would show a more playful side. At an antiques store he saw an authentic medieval suit of armor priced at $40,000. Steve was intrigued. He told Jamis that the people at Disney wanted to give him a set of “animatronics,” the robotics that controlled the mechanical characters in the attractions at Disneyland. Steve asked: What if we stuffed some animatronics into this suit of armor, so it could walk around the living room as if it had magically come to life?
“Great idea,” said Jamis. At last, progress! But Steve soon abandoned the notion. He suppressed his momentary lapse of gleeful exuberance for what his wealth could bring.
Steve treated his hired contractor as an equal, a personal friend and confidant. They would meet at MacNiven’s house way up beyond the ridge, on the Pacific side of the mountains, near where the Hell’s Angels congregated and where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had lived in the heyday of psychedelic drugs. They’d hike through the redwoods on the trails near Skyline Drive