The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [88]
While John’s wacky spirit colored the culture, his storytelling artistry gave him a sense of authority and an ability to sweet-talk people into following him. Steve still owned Pixar, but the company really belonged to John and to Ed Catmull, who commanded the respect and the love of the Ph.D. engineers who remained so vital to the films.
“Steve is different at Pixar than anywhere else because Steve is not Steve at Pixar,” says Pam Kerwin. “Steve was an icon at Apple but he’s a banker at Pixar. It was our technology and John’s creative vision, and Steve didn’t have a hands-on role.”
Steve’s most embarrassing moment came at a meeting when he discussed the proposed design for a new corporate campus in Emeryville, a warehouse district next to Berkeley. Steve commissioned a Japanese architect, who conceived of a stark structure of poured concrete. It expressed Steve’s austere aesthetic, not John Lasseter’s playfulness or his tattered hominess. The animators said that the plans looked too grim. Then Steve dropped the real bomb: he said that there would be a single bathroom in the new complex. Only one bathroom for four hundred people. That way, it would serve as the central meeting place, the locus for informal discussions. Not the lunchroom. Not the lounge. The bathroom.
One of Pixar’s managers was a lactating mother, and she voiced her objections. It was bad enough at the current campus in Point Richmond, she said. The buildings were low and sprawling, and it took too long for her to get down the long hallway to the women’s room. Why make the situation so much worse at the new headquarters?
Pam Kerwin seconded the objection.
Steve suddenly exploded. He made put-downs about people who have to go to the bathroom frequently—especially women. His tone was acerbic and challenging.
A bitter fight broke out. Everyone else, including John, opposed his scheme.
Steve’s anger turned into sad resignation.
“Can’t I just win one thing,” he said.
The meeting adjourned, and John took Steve aside and convinced him to apologize to the rest of the group.
“It was the stupidest thing to fight over,” recalls Pam Kerwin, “but that was the only thing Steve had control over in the company: the design of this building.”
By late 1996, Steve came to grudgingly accept that he wasn’t really wanted or needed at the animation studio. He realized that he wasn’t John and he couldn’t be John.
He had to find a new outlet for his own energy, creativity, and ego.
He desperately needed something else to do.
• • •
IN NOVEMBER 1996, Steve’s sister Mona Simpson published her third novel, A Regular Guy. It was a thinly veiled portrait of Steve and the women in his life: the story of a narcissistic, workaholic tycoon who is insensitive about the emotional needs of his lover and his young daughter.
Mona’s book was eagerly anticipated by readers and critics even before they knew it would be about her famous brother. Her first two novels, Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father, had made her a literary celebrity. She was profiled in People. Granta named her one of the twenty best American writers under forty. She taught at Columbia, Bard, and NYU and received a fellowship from Princeton and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her private life had flourished as well: she married a writer for The Simpsons, gave birth to a son, and set up residences in Santa Monica and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Mona exploited her personal experiences for the material in her fiction. After publishing books about the emotional struggles of growing up with a demanding mother and an absent father, it wasn’t surprising that she would decide to write about her brother.
She wrote slowly and meticulously, and she spent the first half of the 1990s, a full five years, trying to recapture the emotional details from