The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [62]
The layoffs hit in February 1991. The finance department was cut from ten people to only one. Steve kept the brilliant animation team, which at least was bringing in some money by making TV commercials. And he retained the brain trust of engineering geniuses, thinking that maybe he could somehow merge their operation into Next.
And then he told Pam Kerwin to sell off the company’s assets, the software programs it had developed. When Pam was done, she’d be out of a job, too, and the company would shut down. By that point, she recalls, “Steve kind of lost heart with everything.”
• • •
STRUGGLING TO KEEP his two companies alive, he confronted a crisis in his private life.
Laurene was pregnant, and she wanted him to marry her. He refused.
She was so angered by his rejection that she moved out of his house.
Her departure was brutally wounding to him. When he came to the office, Steve seemed “crazy,” recalls a Next colleague. His emotional state was volatile and fragile. His executives tried to stay away from him as much as they possibly could.
Steve’s friends wondered whether he had fully gotten over his love for Tina Redse, who had spurned his marriage proposal less than two years earlier. They thought it odd that Steve had maintained such a close friendship with Tina all through his courtship of Laurene, which he discussed openly. “He would call Tina and they would talk, and then Steve would say, ’I have to go because I’m going out with Laurene,’” recalls a mutual friend.
Now Laurene was carrying his child.
It was as if he were being tested: he was nearly thirty-six, and he was confronted with the same moral issue that he had faced at twenty-two, when Chris-Ann was pregnant with Lisa.
At twenty-two he had been young and immature, obsessed with his work and his sense of destiny. Had he changed in fourteen years? In that time he had come to know his natural mother and sister, he had buried the adoptive mother who had loved him, he had gradually learned how to be a caring father to his daughter. He was still maniacally driven in his career, but he had already made his mark in the world and just as quickly been relegated to its margins.
He relented.
He agreed to marry Laurene.
• • •
THEY SET A WEDDING DATE for only a few weeks away, March 18, before her pregnancy would become particularly noticeable. Steve made the arrangements rapidly but with his relentless aesthetic perfectionism and maniacal attention to detail. He chartered a bus to take the wedding party on the four-hour drive from Palo Alto across California to Yosemite National Park. Then the entourage would enter the Ahwahnee Hotel, a romantic old lodge of wood and stone at the foot of a spectacular cliff of gorgeous blue-gray granite.
The ceremony was held in a small room. There were only a few guests: Laurene’s family. Lisa. Mona Simpson. Bill Fernandez, Steve’s best friend from high school.
The audience sat in chairs facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass panels, which reflected a magnificent outdoor tableau. They could see the expanse of the Yosemite Valley covered by dense evergreen forests and framed by the snow-covered peaks of the Sierras.
A virtuoso was playing classical guitar. During his flurry of planning, Steve had asked around to find who was considered the best classical guitarist in northern California. People told him about a Stanford professor with a superb reputation. Steve tried to hire the accomplished musician, who turned down the offer, saying that he didn’t want to leave his family. So Steve arranged for the man’s family to come along for a vacation at Yosemite.
Between interludes of guitar music, the ceremony was conducted by Kobin Chino, a Zen Buddhist monk who had been Steve’s guru and friend since Steve was in his late teens. Kobin was a lovable, poetic, romantic personality who was known for speaking very slowly (even in his native Japanese) and giving unintelligible lectures. Like the other Japanese