It didn’t hurt, of course, that Lasseter’s team was earning greater and greater awards. When Lasseter had gone to Steve to get approval for the budget on the short called Tin Toy, Steve’s response had been “Just make it great.” The one-and-a-half-minute-long piece, featuring a wind-up mechanical tin drummer who lives in fear of a slobbering infant who likes to throw toys around, turned out to be great indeed: at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on March 29, 1989, Tin Toy won the Oscar for Best Short Animated Film. Shortly afterward, Steve took everyone who had worked on Tin Toy to dinner at Greens, a famous vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco.

“He was so proud,” Lasseter said. “I remember grabbing the Oscar and putting it right in front of him. ‘You asked me to make it great,’ I told him. ‘There you go.’ That was the dinner where Nancy and I met Laurene—she and Steve had started dating a few months earlier. We just loved being with the two of them that night, because Steve was so clearly in love. He had his arm around Laurene all night and … he was so happy, so giddily happy, so full of that feeling like everything is champagne bubbles in your life, just effervescent. He was so excited. He had won an Oscar, and here was this marvelous woman.”

LOOKING BACK, 1989 stands out as the year when the confusion of Steve’s mad, youthful rush started to clear, even though his business problems wouldn’t evaporate anytime soon. Having Pixar win that Oscar was something legitimate he could brag about in his work life. But the main bounce came from meeting his wife-to-be. Steve first saw Laurene during a lecture he gave at the Stanford Business School, where she was getting her MBA. “She was right there in the front row in the lecture hall, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her,” he told me not long afterward. “I kept losing my train of thought, and started feeling a little giddy.” He tracked her down in the parking lot, and asked her to dinner. They went out that very night. And with the exception of Steve’s rare business trips, they were together pretty much every day of the rest of his life.

They were a good match from the start. Laurene’s father had died when she was quite young. Like Steve, she was raised in the middle class, in her case in the town of West Milford, New Jersey, where, like Steve, she learned to fend for herself. Laurene got herself into first-rate schools: the University of Pennsylvania, and later, Stanford’s b-school. She was intelligent and well-spoken and very athletic; an avid reader with eclectic interests in literature and the arts, nutrition, politics, and philosophy; and unlike Steve, she followed professional sports. After college she had tried the world of high finance in Manhattan, but it didn’t interest her enough; she left Goldman Sachs after a couple of years and entered business school as a way of figuring out what she would do next.

Steve had had serious relationships with several girlfriends by then, including the singer Joan Baez and Chrisann Brennan. But Laurene, who was willowy with a California girl’s blond hair and piercing eyes, had a depth of character that touched him in a whole new way. Some of the women he had dated came to seem needy over time; Laurene wasn’t that way. She brought as much self-sufficiency to the relationship as he did. And she wasn’t interested in his wealth, or in the kind of dazzling social life that was available to him if he wanted it. They both accepted the value of hard work, which made it easier for Laurene to handle Steve’s long hours. And their middle-class connection would become increasingly important: when they eventually had a family, Steve and Laurene would do everything in their power to raise their kids with as normal values as they could, despite their growing wealth.

Their relationship burned intensely from the beginning, as you might expect from the pairing of two such strong-willed individuals. But eventually Steve got over his bachelor’s anxiety and proposed to Laurene on New Year’s Day of 1990, clutching “a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers,” as she would say at his memorial service, just twenty-one years later. She took Steve seriously, that morning and in the years to come, when she learned about Buddhism, reading the books that influenced Steve as a young spiritual seeker. Indeed, Kobun Chino Otogawa, the Zen Buddhist monk who served as Steve’s guru for many years, would preside at their wedding. They got married at the Ahwahnee lodge, in Yosemite National Park, on March 18, 1991. She was pregnant with their first child, Reed, who was born that September.

IT TURNED OUT that Mickey Mantle was right: Lasseter didn’t have to worry about his own division. Steve was indeed, to use Lasseter’s word, “bit.” So when Steve decided to cut his losses at Pixar, he didn’t abandon the company completely. Instead, he unloaded the company’s hardware division for $2 million, and decided to focus on software and animation instead. By early 1991, Steve had cut the staff from 120 people down to 42—laying off all those sales folks he had insisted on hiring, and retrenching back to almost exactly the number of people who were working there when he first acquired the outfit in 1986.

It was a wrenching, difficult period. Steve’s continued funding came at a price, as he bought back employees’ restricted stock grants for very little money, robbing the employees who were left of their primary long-term financial incentive. Steve later tried to paint this period as a glorious turning point, a moment where passion won out over the dreary reality of Pixar’s dismal computer sales. “I got everybody together,” he told me, “and I said, ‘At our heart, we really are a content company. Let’s transition out of everything else. Let’s go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let’s go for it. It’s a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it’s where our hearts are.’ ” The pep talk did occur, but while some employees felt inspired, most saw that his words glossed over the reality of what had happened, and what was required to turn the company around. Catmull, who like Lasseter was stripped of most of his equity stake in the company, told me that this period was anything but exhilarating: “It was one of the hardest things in my life.” By this time, Steve had invested close to $50 million in Pixar.

Slashed by two-thirds, the company was now dependent on three sources of revenue: the CAPS image management system it licensed to Disney; RenderMan, which was now offered in a new version that would allow Macs to create 3-D images; and advertising, a new revenue stream that the animation team had introduced. Pixar was able to sign up a few clients on Madison Avenue, like Listerine, Trident, Tropicana, and Volkswagen. As dreamed up by Lasseter and other animators like Andrew Stanton (who would eventually direct A Bug’s Life), Pixar’s ads for these clients were kooky and lively. They showed off the company’s unique ability to anthropomorphize objects like a dancing stick of gum or a bouncing orange, and they forced the animators to adhere to budgets and deadlines, “a discipline that we needed to develop,” says Catmull. Combined with Lasseter’s increasingly sophisticated short films, they showed that the company was getting closer to having the technical and storytelling chops to realize its dream of producing a full-length film. But Pixar still had nowhere near the revenue it needed to sustain itself.

And then, just around this time, Peter Schneider, the president of Walt Disney Features Animation, came calling on John Lasseter. For the third time in three years, he tried to hire Lasseter away from Pixar. Lasseter wouldn’t go. “I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area,” he remembers. “I was inventing new stuff. I figured I’d just stay on here. I’d had a pretty miserable experience at Disney.” He told Schneider that there was only one way that he’d consider working with Disney—the studio would have to make a movie with Pixar.