The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [29]
Bob invited Steve and Barbara to his wedding in 1980, but Steve didn’t RSVP either way. Bob and his fiancée, Robyn, had no idea whether Steve was going to show up. He knew that Steve was always oddly noncommittal about coming to public events.
As Steve and Barbara made their unexpected entrance at the little white church in Woodside, the crowd was instantly captivated by the celebrity among them and his companion. “When Steve showed up with such a really gorgeous woman, devastatingly attractive, it was almost like Robyn and I were irrelevant,” Bob would recall two decades later. “To this day, people say, ’Yeah, I remember your wedding. Steve Jobs was there!’”
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STEVE AND BARBARA were a brilliant couple, but their romance was frustrated by Steve’s nearly messianic sense of mission. Their contractor, Jamis MacNiven, recalls the couple’s interaction as “stormy.” Steve would call his confidant Elizabeth Holmes, one of his closest friends from Reed College, and talk about the relationship. “Barbara was first of all beautiful, physically striking, very intelligent,” Elizabeth recalls. “She had this steel spine. You could push her so far and no further. I think she was a bit bewildered by Steve. She was genuinely in love with Steve, and she liked the life, but Steve was so driven in those years. He was just focused on what he was doing, and he had a sense of destiny.”
Elizabeth herself was in the mold of Steve’s girlfriends, a bright, creative woman, fascinated by the counterculture, who had a striking appearance (five ten and slender, with beautiful blond hair). They were never involved romantically: she was Dan Kottke’s girlfriend in college and for a while after. But Steve had a kind of brotherly affection for her, and they often talked about life. Over the years, one of Steve’s favorite topics of conversation was the importance of finding the right woman. Elizabeth wasn’t convinced that he was ready for the “wear and tear” of an intense relationship. She suspected that it would be easier for Steve to fall for women who were in awe of his renown. Instead, it turned out that Steve was the one who was in awe of other celebrities.
In the early 1980s, Steve and Barbara went together to a Joan Baez concert on a lawn of the Stanford campus, where they picnicked with Dan Kottke and Elizabeth Holmes. Before long, Steve would abruptly end his relationship with Barbara and begin an affair with the charismatic singer-activist. Then came Steve’s period of courting New York women. In late 1984 he told Business Week that he liked “young, superintelligent, artistic women.” He added: “I think they’re in New York rather than Silicon Valley.”
But soon afterward he did meet a Silicon Valley woman and began a relationship that would last, on and off, tempestuously, for five years. Christina Redse was a graphic designer who had worked for computer makers such as Osborne and Hewlett-Packard. People often said that she looked like a young Daryl Hannah, a Hollywood starlet of the day, but they added that Tina was even prettier. She was strangely beautiful in an utterly unpretentious, earthy way. She didn’t wear makeup and she almost always dressed in blue jeans and a simple black T-shirt that contrasted starkly with her fair skin and her extremely blond hair. Her friends remember the one time she wore a dress, for a company dinner, and how awkward she looked that night, as if her natural beauty was somehow diminished or corrupted by the formality. She dressed almost like a twin to Steve, who had taken to the bohemian artists’ uniform of Levi’s and turtlenecks. And the sexual chemistry between the two of them was intense and palpable. Many years later, Next veterans would still recall the couple’s passionate “make-out sessions” in the Deer Creek lobby. At what other company would the chief executive