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“I think it’s odd,” she said, “that Bill lives right next door to Gary Larson but has no idea who he is.”

“Who is he?” Steve asked guilelessly.

Larson was the famous creator of The Far Side, a humorous cartoon with a dark, twisted sensibility. It was one of the most popular features on the comic-strip pages of daily newspapers. It was the source of best-selling books and desk calendars. Larson’s work was part of the zeitgeist. It was easily recognized by much of the American population, but not by the two moguls, who remained oddly aloof from mass culture. It was even stranger for Steve not to know than for Bill, since Steve was famous for his instincts about the tastes of the masses.

Heidi, who was single and had a crush on Steve, realized that she could exploit his fascination with Bill as a way of drawing Steve into accompanying her on social occasions. At the time, Bill was in a long-distance romance with one of Heidi’s closest friends, Ann Winblad, a brilliant self-made software entrepreneur who had sold her startup company for $15 million and moved from her native Minneapolis to an Edwardian mansion in San Francisco’s fashionable Pacific Heights district. When Bill was in town, the foursome—Bill and Ann, Steve and Heidi—would meet in the city and go out for what Ann thought of as “double dates.”

Their first outing was inauspicious. It was January 1987. Macworld magazine was holding a ceremony: the first annual Eddy Awards for excellence in Macintosh software. Heidi was accepting the award for the best Mac word processor, WriteNow. Bill was the winner for best spreadsheet, with Microsoft Excel. Ann was planning to accompany them to the black-tie event at the Four Seasons Clift Hotel near San Francisco’s Union Square. Heidi invited Steve to meet them at the Redwood Room, the elegant art deco bar next to the hotel’s lobby, scheduling the rendezvous for around the time the awards presentation was supposed to end. But she purposely didn’t mention that they were coming to the city to take part in an Apple event; otherwise, he surely wouldn’t have shown up. It was eighteen months since his ouster from the company, but he was still deeply embittered.

When Steve arrived at the bar, the others weren’t there yet. He looked around, appalled. The hotel was filled with Apple people in town for the Macworld Expo. Crawling with them! This wasn’t where he wanted to be. He was annoyed at Heidi for inviting him.

The awards presentation was running late. Bill and Heidi had to stay to the end, so Ann Winblad rushed down to the bar to talk with Steve and keep him from walking out. She introduced herself, expecting to engage in a few minutes of small talk or conversational icebreakers. But then, abruptly and apropos of nothing in particular, Steve said:

“I would have married Joan Baez but she was too old to have my children.”

Ann was taken aback. Why did he feel compelled to tell this to her?

She wasn’t susceptible to his famous charisma. When they sat next to each other at dinner, she felt that he was trying to assert some kind of moral superiority by flaunting his vegetarianism.

“What do you recommend here?” asked Ann, since Steve had picked the restaurant.

“I assume that you eat meat,” he said casually but a bit condescendingly.

“I haven’t eaten meat for fifteen years,” she shot back.

Bill was upset with Heidi for plotting to arrange the date. Bill and Ann were always trying to set her up, but Bill had trouble understanding why she had a crush on Steve Jobs.

“What do you see in him?” he asked.

• • •

A FEW MONTHS LATER, Bill and Ann and Heidi were together at Bill’s house in the suburbs of Seattle. It was two in the morning. They were drunk. They were having a merry time. In a fit of inebriated exuberance, they joked that it would be fun to make a few prank phone calls. How about calling . . . Steve Jobs! Heidi knew Steve’s home phone number. She had gotten it initially because they were partners in the software business, but she had memorized it because she had that persistent crush on him. She took the phone and dialed