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By Root 600 0

reluctant to take advantage of it. At Apple, he had liked to personally deliver Macintoshes to other celebrities he had long admired. That was his calling card for meeting the likes of Mick Jagger and Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. Apple had a philanthropic program, called The Kids Can’t Wait, that donated computers to public schools, but the inside joke was that Steve ran a rival program, “The Stars Can’t Wait.” He paid millions for the top two floors of one of the towers of Manhattan’s San Remo, the great art deco apartment house on Central Park West, and he made periodic pilgrimages to New York to go out with accomplished actresses, artists, and writers. On his Gotham excursions he dated Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and saw Lisa Birnbaum, the best-selling author of The Preppy Handbook. At one point a friend wanted to set him up on a blind date with a downstairs neighbor from the San Remo, a woman named Diane, so Steve called her, not even knowing her surname. They chatted amiably for a while, then Steve suggested a time and place for their rendezvous.

“Okey dokey,” she said.

The way she said it, so cheerful and flippant and charmingly goofy, was oddly familiar. It sounded a lot like . . . Annie Hall, the character from the Woody Allen movie.

“Diane, what’s your last name?” he asked.

“Keaton.”

Fame facilitated his social life but it often complicated his work. He had a love-hate relationship with his own celebrity. When he started Next, he wanted to put together a team of people who were comfortable with him, people who weren’t awed or intimidated by his presence, people who didn’t believe his mythology, people who wouldn’t treat him as an icon. When Susan Barnes invited partners from major law firms and accounting firms to visit Next and pitch for its business, Steve subjected them to a cruel, quick, calculated test. He would show up wearing a suit, as though he were a respectable businessman, sit across the conference table, and ask good-naturedly to see their client list. When they handed it over, he would hardly glance at the printout before he crudely insulted them.

“This is a lousy client list,” he would say.

In almost every case, the sycophantic pitchmen would acquiesce immediately, confessing sheepishly that Steve was right, their client list was lousy. But one accounting partner from Peat Marwick was so incensed by the arrogant, cavalier, cursory treatment that he reacted furiously, looking as though he would throw a knockout punch at Steve. That’s what Steve deserved for his impertinent behavior. And that’s exactly what he was hoping for. That was the kind of outside counsel he wanted to hire.

Susan Barnes and Dan’l Lewin, Next’s marketing executive, had worked with him at Apple. He knew from experience that they had the self-assurance to stand up to him when necessary. But even they had trouble accepting his happy conceit that he was really one of them, a peer.

For Dan’l, a telling moment came one morning soon after they moved to Deer Park Road. He arrived at the office around six, wearing blue jeans, since they all preferred casual dress for the days when they didn’t have to represent the company in outside meetings. A few hours later Steve showed up in one of his elegant Brioni suits from Wilkes Bashford, the most expensive and highly regarded men’s clothing store in San Francisco.

“Hey, we’re going to the bank today,” Steve said enthusiastically, as if he were a schoolchild opening his very first savings account. They had to drive up to the city to meet with the head of Bank of America in the hulking dark tower that dominated the skyline.

“I’ll go home and put on a suit,” Dan’l said.

“Go to my house and get one of my suits,” Steve insisted.

Dan’l knew that Steve’s clothes wouldn’t fit him. Dan’l had been a swimming star at Princeton, and he had a swimmer’s physique that required custom tailoring. He was six two and weighed 200 pounds with a broad 46-inch chest but a disproportionately slender 32-inch waist. He needed unusually large arm holes in his