Steve Jobs

Dylan had been going downhill since
Blood on the Tracks
. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.
    Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age,” his friend and lawyer George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is.” Jobs recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe.”
    Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur had been like a father to me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him about opera, and he and his wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God, that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the best,’ and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”
    Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that was their decision to make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should have separated the decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn’t think I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his feeling of betrayal, deepened.
    The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an operations standpoint, there is no role either today orin the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.
    Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris, where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. They were a calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.
    The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting Washington’s approval for some of the required export licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the American embassy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates American law when it so obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”
    Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered assassinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor. “You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by