Steve Jobs

they like better? Who should he marry? In a chapter about this in Mona Simpson’s novel
A Regular Guy
, the Jobs character “asked more than a hundred people who they thought was more beautiful.” But that was fiction; in reality, it was probably fewer than a hundred.
    He ended up making the right choice. As Redse told friends, she never would have survived if she had gone back to Jobs, nor would their marriage. Even though he would pine about the spiritual nature of his connection to Redse, he had a far more solid relationship with Powell. He liked her, he loved her, he respected her, and he was comfortable with her. He may not have seen her as mystical, but she was a sensible anchor for his life. “He is the luckiest guy to have landed with Laurene, who is smart and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his ups and downs and tempestuous personality,” said Joanna Hoffman. “Because she’s not neurotic, Steve may feel that she is not as mystical as Tina or something. But that’s silly.” Andy Hertzfeld agreed. “Laurene looks a lot like Tina, but she is totally different because she is tougher and armor-plated. That’s why the marriage works.”
    Jobs understood this as well. Despite his emotional turbulence and occasional meanness, the marriage would turn out to be enduring, marked by loyalty and faithfulness, overcoming the ups and downs and jangling emotional complexities it encountered.
    •   •   •
     
    Avie Tevanian decided Jobs needed a bachelor’s party. This was not as easy as it sounded. Jobs did not like to party and didn’t have a gang of male buddies. He didn’t even have a best man. So the party turned out to be just Tevanian and Richard Crandall, a computer science professor at Reed who had taken a leave to work at NeXT. Tevanian hired a limo, and when they got to Jobs’s house, Powell answered the door dressed in a suit and wearing a fake moustache, saying that she wanted to come as one of the guys. It was just a joke, and soon the three bachelors, none of them drinkers, were rolling to San Francisco to see if they could pull off their own pale version of a bachelor party.
    Tevanian had been unable to get reservations at Greens, the vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason that Jobs liked, so he booked a very fancy restaurant at a hotel. “I don’t want to eat here,” Jobs announced as soon as the bread was placed on the table. He made them get up and walk out, to the horror of Tevanian, who was not yet used to Jobs’s restaurant manners. He led them to Café Jacqueline in North Beach, the soufflé place that he loved, which was indeed a better choice. Afterward they took the limo across the Golden Gate Bridge to a bar in Sausalito, where all three ordered shots of tequila but only sipped them. “It was not great as bachelor parties go, but it was the best we could come up with for someone like Steve, and nobody else volunteered to do it,” recalled Tevanian. Jobs was appreciative. He decided that he wanted Tevanian to marry his sister Mona Simpson. Though nothing came of it, the thought was a sign of affection.
    Powell had fair warning of what she was getting into. As she was planning the wedding, the person who was going to do the calligraphy for the invitations came by the house to show them some options. There was no furniture for her to sit on, so she sat on the floor and laid out the samples. Jobs looked for a few minutes, then got up and left the room. They waited for him to come back, but he didn’t. After a while Powell went to find him in his room. “Get rid of her,” he said. “I can’t look at her stuff. It’s shit.”
    On March 18, 1991, Steven Paul Jobs, thirty-six, married Laurene Powell, twenty-seven, at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Park Service’s love of huge fireplaces. Its best features are the views. It has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Half Dome and Yosemite Falls.
    About fifty people came, including Steve’s father Paul Jobs and sister Mona Simpson. She brought her fiancé, Richard Appel, a lawyer who went on to become a television comedy writer. (As a writer for
The
Simpsons
, he named Homer’s mother after his wife.) Jobs insisted that they all arrive by chartered bus; he wanted to control all aspects of the event.
    The ceremony was in the