Pixar was able to create some powerful software products aimed at average consumers, or at least those average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for designing things. Jobs still hoped that the ability to make super-realistic 3-D images at home would become part of the desktop publishing craze. Pixar’s Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the shadings on the 3-D objects they created so that they
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could display them from various angles with appropriate shadows. Jobs thought it was incredibly compelling, but most consumers were content to live without it. It was a case where his passions misled him: The software had so many amazing features that it lacked the simplicity Jobs usually demanded. Pixar couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was making software that was less sophisticated but far less complicated and expensive.
Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product lines foundered, Jobs kept protecting the animation group. It had become for him a little island of magical artistry that gave him deep emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it and bet on it. In the spring of 1988 cash was running so short that he convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking skeptical. It would require close to $300,000 more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were any storyboards. Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and once Lasseter started his show—
displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his passion for his product—Jobs started to warm up.
The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It was told from the perspective of a toy one-man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him. Escaping under the couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up.
Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed in what John was doing,” he later said. “It was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only comment at the end of Lasseter’s presentation was, “All
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I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”
Tin Toy went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short films, the first computer-generated film to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his team to Greens, a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the Oscar, which was in the center of the table, held it aloft, and toasted Jobs by saying, “All you asked is that we make a great movie.”
The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO
and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the film division—began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked Tin Toy, and they thought that something more could be done with animated stories of toys that come alive and have human emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he could create a new world of computer-generated animation.
He told Catmull, “I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.” So Disney began talking about making a production deal with Pixar.
“Lasseter’s shorts were really breathtaking both in storytelling and in the use of technology,” recalled Katzenberg. “I tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he was loyal to Steve and Pixar. So if you can’t beat them, join them. We decided to look for ways we could join up with Pixar and have them make a film about toys for us.”
By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into Pixar—more than half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he was still losing money at NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their options as part of his agreement to add another round of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic in his love for what artistry and technology could do together. His belief that ordinary consumers would love to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out to be wrong, but that was soon replaced by an instinct that
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turned out to be right: that combining great art and digital technology would transform animated films more than anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had given life to Snow White.
Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on animation sooner and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or software applications. On the other hand, had he known the hardware and software would never be profitable, he would not have taken over Pixar. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY
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A REGULAR GUY
Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word
Joan Baez
In 1982, when he was still working on the Macintosh, Jobs met the famed folksinger Joan Baez through her sister Mimi Fariña, who headed a charity that was trying to get donations of computers for prisons. A few weeks later he and Baez had lunch in Cupertino. “I wasn’t expecting a lot, but she was really smart and funny,” he recalled. At the time, he was nearing the end of his relationship with Barbara Jasinski. They had vacationed in Hawaii, shared a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, and even gone to one of Baez’s concerts together. As his relationship with Jasinski flamed out, Jobs began getting more serious with Baez. He was twenty-seven and Baez was forty-one, but for a few years they had a romance. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” Jobs recalled in a somewhat wistful tone.
Elizabeth Holmes, Jobs’s friend from Reed College, believed that one of the reasons he went out with Baez—other than the fact that she was beautiful and funny and talented—was that she had once been the lover of Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” she later said. Baez and Dylan had been lovers in the early 1960s, and they toured as friends after that, including with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.
(Jobs had the bootlegs of those concerts.) When she met Jobs, Baez had a fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, from her marriage to the antiwar activist David Harris. At lunch she told Jobs she was trying to
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teach Gabe how to type. “You mean on a typewriter?”
Jobs asked. When she said yes, he replied, “But a typewriter is antiquated.”
“If a typewriter is antiquated, what does that make me?” she asked. There was an awkward pause. As Baez later told me, “As soon as I said it, I realized the answer was so obvious. The question just hung in the air. I was just horrified.”
Much to the astonishment of the Macintosh team, Jobs burst into the office one day with Baez and showed her the prototype of the Macintosh. They were dumbfounded that he would reveal the computer to an outsider, given his obsession with secrecy, but they were even more blown away to be in the presence of Joan Baez. He gave Gabe an Apple II, and he later gave Baez a Macintosh. On visits Jobs would show off the features he liked. “He was sweet and patient, but he was so advanced in his knowledge that he had trouble teaching me,” she recalled.
He was a sudden multimillionaire; she was a world-famous celebrity, but sweetly down-to-earth and not all that wealthy. She didn’t know what to make of him then, and still found him puzzling when she talked about him almost thirty years later. At one dinner early in their relationship, Jobs started talking about Ralph Lauren and his Polo Shop, which she admitted she had never visited. “There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you,” he said, and then drove her to the store in the Stanford Mall. Baez recalled, “I said to myself, far out, terrific, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.”
When they got to the store, Jobs bought a handful of shirts for himself and showed her the red dress. “You ought to buy it,” he said. She was a little surprised, and told him she couldn’t really afford it. He said nothing, and they left. “Wouldn’t you think if someone had talked
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like that the whole evening, that they were going to get it for you?” she asked me, seeming genuinely puzzled about the incident. “The mystery of the red dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.” He would give her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he made sure to say they were left over from an event in the office. “He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic,” she said.
When he was working on the NeXT computer, he went to Baez’s house in Woodside to show her how well it could produce music. “He had it play a Brahms quartet, and he told me eventually computers would sound better than humans playing it, even get the innuendo and the cadences better,” Baez recalled. She was revolted by the idea. “He was working himself up into a fervor of delight while I was shrinking into a rage and thinking, How could you defile music like that?”
Jobs would confide in Debi Coleman and Joanna Hoffman about his relationship with Baez and worry about whether he could marry someone who had a teenage son and was probably past the point of wanting to have more children. “At times he would belittle her as being an ‘issues’ singer and not a true
‘political’ singer like Dylan,” said Hoffman. “She was a strong woman, and he wanted to show he was in control. Plus, he always said he wanted to have a family, and with her he knew that he wouldn’t.”
And so, after about three years, they ended their romance and drifted into becoming just friends. “I thought I was in love with her, but I really just liked her a lot,” he later said. “We weren’t destined to be together. I wanted kids, and she didn’t want any more.” In her 1989 memoir, Baez wrote about her breakup with her husband and why she never remarried: “I belonged alone, which is how I have been since then, with occasional interruptions that are mostly picnics.” She
