The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [12]
Weeks later, Jamis mentioned to the owner that the mysterious visitor had been Steve Jobs.
“That was Steve Jobs? The one person in the world I’ve wanted to meet!”
As the remodeling began, Steve and Barbara moved back into the rickety cabin. Steve’s friendship with Jamis devolved into an acrimonious working relationship. Steve demanded a level of extraordinary craftsmanship and obsessive attention to detail that Jamis couldn’t deliver or even grasp the rationale for. There was a panel in the basement for telephone wires. Steve insisted that the wires must be laid out with meticulous neatness and the wood cabinetry built with fine detail. Jamis balked. Who was going to see a wiring box?
“I want the very best I can get!” Steve insisted.
“This house isn’t worth it,” Jamis argued. “It’s not economic.”
As the work progressed, the two men would yell at each other. They managed to put in beautiful hardwood floors and a Bösendorfer piano, but the remodeling was never done. “It was hairy,” recalls Jamis. “He had demands I just couldn’t fulfill. He really wanted an I. M. Pei but at that point he didn’t know who I. M. Pei was. So he got me.”
• • •
HIS OBSESSIVENESS was one of the reasons for his success, but it carried the potential for his self-destruction as well. His impulse for perfectionism was there even as a teenager. While they were at Reed College together, Elizabeth Holmes was deeply concerned that Steve suffered from eating disorders. “His attitude was, What I eat has to be perfect, who I am has to be perfect,” she recalls. Steve’s diets were extreme. He fasted for long periods. When he did eat, he consumed shockingly few calories. He would go through phases of eating only fruit—a “fruitarian” diet—and then only grain for a while. He would subsist on Roman Meal, the kind of grainy bread that the Romans supposedly ate, which was very popular in the 1970s counterculture. To Elizabeth, he always seemed “starving.” There was abundant food at the All-One Farm, some forty miles southwest of Portland, where their group of friends would go for weekends, holidays, and summers: Chris-Ann, Elizabeth, Dan, Steve, and his classmate Robert Friedland, an LSD proselytizer who dressed in flowing Indian robes. It was Robert’s rich Swiss uncle who owned the 220-acre farm. Elizabeth had studied with an organic gardening pioneer, so she helped to lay out the commune’s garden. The volcanic soil was spectacularly rich. They grew their own wheat, blowing on conch shells to chase away the deer that strayed near the fields. But even amidst this bounty of natural foods, Steve was intent on self-denial. Robert’s wife, Abha, the mother figure at the commune, would prepare magnificent feasts, which they called subji, the Hindi term for vegetarian dinners. They shared the great meals with an eclectic array of visiting mystics: Tibetan monks, Buddhists, swamis, healers, meditation gurus. “The meals were a big pull for the hungry Steve,” Elizabeth recalls. Steve would gorge himself on the delicious food but then induce himself to vomit it all up, acting as though he were bulimic. Abha was appalled. She thought that Steve’s actions were extremely disrespectful. Food was sacred, she believed. Moreover, she put so much hard effort into the cooking.
Such was the degree of his perfectionism. In his youth it was tempered and turned inward. His friends from his high school and college years knew him as an easygoing guy, highly intelligent but not maniacally driven. But at twenty-one when he cofounded Apple and envisioned the potential of the personal computer to change society, he was transformed by his revelation. He became motivated by a missionary zeal, a sense of his