It is part of the CEO’s job description to manage such distractions, and Steve was not particularly good at this even when he was healthy. He had always been impatient. But the cancer was exhausting him and bringing the kind of wearing pain he had never before experienced. Not surprisingly, Steve bollixed up things that he might have handled with ease under different, healthier circumstances.
For instance, reasonable people can disagree on the subject of whether Steve had a fiduciary responsibility to disclose his cancer earlier than he did, and to then keep the public informed of its progress. Steve felt, and perhaps naively wished, that this was a private matter, and so he skirted the truth about his disease again and again. But calling Nocera a “slime bucket” when the Times columnist called to address the issue did little for the reputation of Apple or its CEO. Similarly, Steve’s public comments about Apple’s response to the controversy that was set off when a spate of suicides occurred at the Chinese campuses of Foxconn, its leading assembler of iPhones, did more to hurt Apple than help it, in a situation where its record was actually fairly good for a big global corporation.
As Apple built up a supply chain that delivered more and more iPhones, iPods, iTouches, Nanos, and the like, it annually audited working conditions at the factories of its suppliers, and even of its suppliers’ subcontractors. But problems slipped past these audits. That’s not unusual; not surprisingly, the conditions of Asian manufacturing plants have been worrisome for decades. That’s unlikely to change. In a system set up purely to secure the lowest costs for U.S. and European manufacturers, workers are unlikely to be paid or treated particularly well. When Apple learned of the suicides, it actually responded quickly, pulling together a noteworthy task force to investigate Fox-conn’s factories, and taking other actions that some observers have deemed forward-looking. Again, reasonable people can disagree about the quality of Apple’s response. But what everyone can agree on is that Steve didn’t help matters with some of his public responses to the crisis, including the moment at a tech conference when he said, “Oh, we’re all over this one.” He sounded glib, in the way of any corporate CEO trying to smooth over an inconvenient truth.
Steve had come a long way in moderating some of the behaviors that had made the young man at the Garden of Allah such a volatile, difficult presence. Some of his old foibles hung on with persistence. Others had been tamed. And at the moment when the pressures of his job would have benefited most from his evolution, his illness added to the complexity of his task.
Heroic narratives aren’t supposed to have chapters like this. In the typical Pixar movie, or in the Disney animations that started getting better and better toward the end of Steve’s life, true emotions are unfrozen, reconciliations are wholly achieved. But Steve’s life wasn’t a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.
Chapter 17
“Just Tell Them I’m Being an Asshole”
In early December 2008, Steve called me at my home office in Foster City, California. He said he had something important to tell me.
For several months, I had been working to set up a joint interview of Steve, Andy Grove, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell. The confab was supposed to kick off the reporting for a book I had in mind. I had what I thought was a snappy title—Founders Keepers—and a plan to describe how a handful of geeky entrepreneurs had evolved into captains of industry; how self-absorbed inventors morphed into self-taught empire builders; how shaggy-haired idealists managed to stay in the saddle even as the companies they created grew rapidly by orders of magnitude, and as their own wealth and influence over the world itself became far more than the stuff of dreams.
I had intended to get started on the book in 2005. But while traveling on a road trip to Nicaragua for what was supposed to be a long vacation, I became very sick. Endocarditis lodged on the artificial heart valve that had been implanted in my aorta eight years before, and it had spread from there throughout my body. In my spinal column the infection gestated into meningitis, and from there entered the lining of my brain. Other infections landed in a lung, in my intestines, and elsewhere throughout my body. Doctors in a Managua hospital saved my life, but only by inducing a coma and blasting me with antibiotics that, while quelling the infection, caused me to lose 65 percent of my hearing, including going completely deaf in one ear. My employer, Time Inc., had me medevacced by jet back to Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, where I endured three weeks in the intensive care unit. The doctors there were puzzled by what exactly was keeping me so sick.
During this time, Steve came to visit me in the hospital a couple of times. I was so addled with sedatives and painkillers and my own delirious hallucinations that during one visit I expressed my sincerest regrets at not being able to play saxophone in a Beatles retrospective show he was planning to put on in Las Vegas with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Somehow I had thought he had taken up guitar in order to play the part of John Lennon himself, and he had asked me to be part of the backup band. Unfortunately, I explained to Steve, with my new hearing-loss problem, I’d never be able to pull it off. Apparently, Steve and my wife, Lorna, had a good laugh. At least that’s what she told me later when I had regained my senses. She also said that before leaving, he said, “I’ve told them to give you the VIP treatment here. Call me if you need anything.”
We stayed in touch off and on by email over the coming few years, as I slowly recovered in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I managed to write one last cover story for Fortune by turning a series of four interviews with Pixar’s John Lasseter into his own first-person narrative. Steve didn’t make time for photographs or even a short interview for the story, despite his closeness to Lasseter. It turns out that he had decided not to work with me on magazine stories anymore. Perhaps my zany behavior during the hospital visits had convinced him that I would never be able to tell Apple’s (or Pixar’s) stories with the same level of sophistication I had applied in the past, or perhaps it was something else. I never did learn his reason.
Despite having no interest in working with me on magazine articles, Steve seemed genuinely curious about the book idea. He and I had discussed the project a few times, and in the spring of 2008 I told him I wanted to set up a roundtable discussion of around eight founders, as the centerpiece of my reporting. “That’s way too many people,” he snorted. “Everybody will want their camera time, and nobody will say much of anything honest or real.” Instead, he suggested, “Focus your book on the emergence of the PC. There are four of us, really. Me, Bill, Andy [Grove], and Michael [Dell]. Get us together and we’ll have a good discussion. It will be more focused. We know each other’s weaknesses and strengths. It will make a much better story for you to tell, and we’ll all have to be more honest.”
He even offered to help me wrangle the other three, although I told him I didn’t think that was necessary. Just being able to tell them that Steve wanted to do it was enough to get them to readily buy in to the idea. Announcing Steve’s involvement was like waving a magic wand. I got immediate responses from the other three, despite their very tight schedules. After some back and forth, we set a date for converging at the offices of Andy Grove’s family foundation in downtown Los Altos, California, on Thursday, December 18. All four committed to spend lunch and the entire afternoon together. Andy’s longtime admin, Terri Murphy, arranged for the food after I had consulted with Lanita Burkhead, Steve’s administrative assistant, about what would work for her notoriously finicky boss—sushi, perhaps a salad, and herbal tea.