CHILDHOOD
Abandoned and Chosen
The Adoption
When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn't his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.
Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn't know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.
Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.
Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul's parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.
Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a "repo man," picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn't paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.
There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.
Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter's relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.
Ames had just lost a boardroom battle to have his corporation's AOL division improve its own fledgling music download service. "When I did a digital download using AOL, I could never find the song on my shitty computer," he recalled. So when Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the iTunes Store, Ames was impressed. "Yes, yes, that's exactly what we've been waiting for," he said. He agreed that Warner Music would sign up, and he offered to help enlist other music companies.
Jobs flew east to show the service to other Time Warner execs. "He sat in front of a Mac like a kid with a toy," Vidich recalled. "Unlike any other CEO, he was totally engaged with the product." Ames and Jobs began to hammer out the details of the iTunes Store, including the number of times a track could be put on different devices and how the copy-protection system would work. They soon were in agreement and set out to corral other music labels.
Herding Cats
The key player to enlist was Doug Morris, head of the Universal Music Group. His domain included must-have artists such as U2, Eminem, and Mariah Carey, as well as powerful labels such as Motown and Interscope-Geffen-A&M. Morris was eager to talk. More than any other mogul, he was upset about piracy and fed up with the caliber of the technology people at the music companies. "It was like the Wild West," Morris recalled. "No one was selling digital music, and it was awash with piracy. Everything we tried at the record companies was a failure. The difference in skill sets between the music folks and technologists is just huge."
As Ames walked with Jobs to Morris's office on Broadway he briefed Jobs on what to say. It worked. What impressed Morris was that Jobs tied everything together in a way that made things easy for the consumer and also safe for the record companies. "Steve did something brilliant," said Morris. "He proposed this complete system: the iTunes Store, the music-management software, the iPod itself. It was so smooth. He had the whole package."
Morris was convinced that Jobs had the technical vision that was lacking at the music companies. "Of course we have to rely on Steve Jobs to do this," he told his own tech vice president, "because we don't have anyone at Universal who knows anything about technology." That did not make Universal's technologists eager to work with Jobs, and Morris had to keep ordering them to surrender their objections and make a deal quickly. They were able to add a few more restrictions to FairPlay, the Apple system of digital rights management, so that a purchased song could not be spread to too many devices. But in general, they went along with the concept of the iTunes Store that Jobs had worked out with Ames and his Warner colleagues.
Morris was so smitten with Jobs that he called Jimmy Iovine, the fast-talking and brash chief of Interscope-Geffen-A&M. Iovine and Morris were best friends who had spoken every day for the past thirty years. "When I met Steve, I thought he was our savior, so I immediately brought Jimmy in to get his impression," Morris recalled.
Jobs could be extraordinarily charming when he wanted to be, and he turned it on when Iovine flew out to Cupertino for a demo. "See how simple it is?" he asked Iovine. "Your tech folks are never going to do this. There's no one at the music companies who can make it simple enough."
Iovine called Morris right away. "This guy is unique!" he said. "You're right. He's got a turnkey solution." They complained about how they had spent two years working with Sony, and it hadn't gone anywhere. "Sony's never going to figure things out," he told Morris. They agreed to quit dealing with Sony and join with Apple instead. "How Sony missed this is completely mind-boggling to me, a historic fuckup," Iovine said. "Steve would fire people if the divisions didn't work together, but Sony's divisions were at war with one another."
Indeed Sony provided a clear counterexample to Apple. It had a consumer electronics division that made sleek products and a music division with beloved artists (including Bob Dylan). But because each division tried to protect its own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an end-to-end service.
Andy Lack, the new head of Sony music, had the unenviable task of negotiating with Jobs about whether Sony would sell its music in the iTunes Store. The irrepressible and savvy Lack had just come from a distinguished career in television journalism -- a producer at CBS News and president of NBC -- and he knew how to size people up and keep his sense of humor. He realized that, for Sony, selling its songs in the iTunes Store was both insane and necessary -- which seemed to be the case with a lot of decisions in the music business. Apple would make out like a bandit, not just from its cut on song sales, but from driving the sale of iPods. Lack believed that since the music companies would be responsible for the success of the iPod, they should get a royalty from each device sold.
ROUND THREE
The Twilight Struggle
Family Ties
Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son's graduation from high school in June 2010. "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009," he said. As a senior, Reed looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes, and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and painfully sensitive empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate and eager to please. Whenever his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.
Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where I was staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an intensely earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.
After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In one experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. "One of the very few silver linings about me getting sick is that Reed's gotten to spend a lot of time studying with some very good doctors," Jobs said. "His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age."
Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at Crystal Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. "I fantasize about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as a doctor at Stanford," Jobs said afterward.
I do not know that I would touch on all these subjects, but they provide an idea of the opportunities. The protagonist would be Dick summers, old Dick Summers finally, with no right home in the universe, because he and his kind had destroyed it unwittingly.