Steve Jobs Part 15

Buying appliances was also a philosophical task, not just an impulse purchase. A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that went into getting a new washing machine: I t turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better-but they take twice as long to do clothes! I t turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. "I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,"Jobs said.

The one piece of art that Jobs bought for the vaulted-ceiling living room was an Ansel Adams print of the winter sunrise in the Sierra Nevada taken from Lone Pine, California. Adams had made the huge mural print for his daughter, who later sold it. At one point Jobs's housekeeper wiped it with a wet cloth, and Jobs tracked down a person who had worked with Adams to come to the house, strip it down a layer, and restore it.

The house was so una.s.suming that Bill Gates was somewhat baffled when he visited with his wife. "Do all of you live here?" asked Gates, who was then in the process of building a 66,000-square-foot mansion near Seattle. Even when he had his second coming at Apple and was a world- famous billionaire, Jobs had no security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back door unlocked during the day.

His only security problem came, sadly and strangely, from Burrell Smith, the mop-headed, cherubic Macintosh software engineer who had been Andy Hertzfeld's sidekick. After leaving Apple, Smith descended into schizophrenia. He lived in a house down the street from Hertzfeld, and as his disorder progressed he began wandering the streets naked, at other times smashing the windows of cars and churches. He was put on strong medication, but it proved difficult to calibrate. At one point when his demons returned, he began going over to the Jobs house in the evenings, throwing rocks through the windows, leaving rambling letters, and once tossing a firecracker into the house. He was arrested, but the case was dropped when he went for more treatment. "Burrell was so funny and nave, and then one April day he suddenly snapped," Jobs recalled. "I t was the weirdest, saddest thing."

Jobs was sympathetic, and often asked Hertzfeld what more he could do to help. At one point Smith was thrown in jail and refused to identify himself. When Hertzfeld found out, three days later, he called Jobs and asked for a.s.sistance in getting him released. Jobs did help, but he surprised Hertzfeld with a question: "I f something similar happened to me, would you take as good care of me as you do Burrell?"

Jobs kept his mansion in Woodside, about ten miles up into the mountains from Palo Alto. He wanted to tear down the fourteen-bedroom 1925 Spanish colonial revival, and he had plans drawn up to replace it with an extremely simple, j.a.panese-inspired modernist home one-third the size.

But for more than twenty years he engaged in a slow-moving series of court battles with preservationists who wanted the crumbling original house to be saved. (In 2011 he finally got permission to raze the house, but by then he had no desire to build a second home.) On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its swimming pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the 1950s ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since both the main house and ranch house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art dealers when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temporarily. Once, shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry broke, Powell was making a final inspection of the furnishings and noticed that one of the paintings was missing. Worried, she asked the advance team and Secret Service what had happened. One of them pulled her aside and explained that it was a painting of a dress on a hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the Lewinsky matter they had decided to hide it. (During one of his late-night phone conversations with Jobs, Clinton asked how he should handle the Lewinsky issue. "I don't know if you did it, but if so, you've got to tell the country," Jobs told the president. There was silence on the other end of the line.)

Lisa Moves In.

In the middle of Lisa's eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were serious problems, and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother's house. So Jobs went on a walk with Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered to let her move in with him. She was a mature girl, just turning fourteen, and she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already knew which room she wanted: the one right next to her father's. When she was there once, with no one home, she had tested it out by lying down on the bare floor.

I t was a tough period. Chrisann Brennan would sometimes walk over from her own house a few blocks away and yell at them from the yard. When I asked her recently about her behavior and the allegations that led to Lisa's moving out of her house, she said that she had still not been able to process in her own mind what occurred during that period. But then she wrote me a long email that she said would help explain the situation: Do you know how Steve was able to get the city of Woodside to allow him to tear his Woodside home down? There was a community of people who wanted to preserve his Woodside house due to its historical value, but Steve wanted to tear it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that house fall into so much disrepair and decay over a number of years that there was no way to save it. The strategy he used to get what he wanted was to simply follow the line of least involvement and resistance. So by his doing nothing on the house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years, the house fell apart. Brilliant, no? ... In a similar way did Steve work to undermine my effectiveness AND my well being at the time when Lisa was 13 and 14 to get her to move into his house. He started with one strategy but then it moved to another easier one that was even more destructive to me and more problematic for Lisa. I t may not have been of the greatest integrity, but he got what he wanted.

Lisa lived with Jobs and Powell for all four of her years at Palo Alto High School, and she began using the name Lisa Brennan-Jobs. He tried to be a good father, but there were times when he was cold and distant. When Lisa felt she had to escape, she would seek refuge with a friendly family who lived nearby. Powell tried to be supportive, and she was the one who attended most of Lisa's school events.

By the time Lisa was a senior, she seemed to be flourishing. She joined the school newspaper, The Campanile, and became the coeditor.

T ogether with her cla.s.smate Ben Hewlett, grandson of the man who gave her father his first job, she exposed secret raises that the school board had given to administrators. When it came time to go to college, she knew she wanted to go east. She applied to Harvard-forging her father's signature on the application because he was out of town-and was accepted for the cla.s.s entering in 1996.

At Harvard Lisa worked on the college newspaper, The Crimson, and then the literary magazine, The Advocate. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she took a year abroad at King's College, London. Her relationship with her father remained tumultuous throughout her college years.

When she would come home, fights over small things-what was being served for dinner, whether she was paying enough attention to her half- siblings-would blow up, and they would not speak to each other for weeks and sometimes months. The arguments occasionally got so bad that Jobs would stop supporting her, and she would borrow money from Andy Hertzfeld or others. Hertzfeld at one point lent Lisa $20,000 when she thought that her father was not going to pay her tuition. "He was mad at me for making the loan," Hertzfeld recalled, "but he called early the next morning and had his accountant wire me the money." Jobs did not go to Lisa's Harvard graduation in 2000. He said, "She didn't even invite me."

There were, however, some nice times during those years, including one summer when Lisa came back home and performed at a benefit concert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that supports access to technology. The concert took place at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which had been made famous by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. She sang Tracy Chapman's anthem "T alkin' bout a Revolution" ("Poor people are gonna rise up / And get their share") as her father stood in the back cradling his one-year-old daughter, Erin.Jobs's ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to Manhattan as a freelance writer. Their problems were exacerbated because of Jobs's frustrations with Chrisann. He had bought a $700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in Lisa's name, but Chrisann convinced her to sign it over and then sold it, using the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in Paris. Once the money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and became an artist creating "light paintings" and Buddhist mandalas. "I am a 'Connector' and a visionary contributor to the future of evolving humanity and the ascended Earth," she said on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). "I experience the forms, color, and sound frequencies of sacred vibration as I create and live with the paintings." When Chrisann needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental problem, Jobs refused to give it to her, causing Lisa again to not speak to him for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.

Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a springboard for her third novel, A Regular Guy, published in 1996. The book's t.i.tle character is based on Jobs, and to some extent it adheres to reality: I t depicts Jobs's quiet generosity to, and purchase of a special car for, a brilliant friend who had degenerative bone disease, and it accurately describes many unflattering aspects of his relationship with Lisa, including his original denial of paternity. But other parts are purely fiction; Chrisann had taught Lisa at a very early age how to drive, for example, but the book's scene of "Jane" driving a truck across the mountains alone at age five to find her father of course never happened. In addition, there are little details in the novel that, in journalist parlance, are too good to check, such as the head-snapping description of the character based on Jobs in the very first sentence: "He was a man too busy to flush toilets."

On the surface, the novel's fictional portrayal of Jobs seems harsh. Simpson describes her main character as unable "to see any need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people." His hygiene is also as dubious as that of the real Jobs. "He didn't believe in deodorant and often professed that with a proper diet and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor smell." But the novel is lyrical and intricate on many levels, and by the end there is a fuller picture of a man who loses control of the great company he had founded and learns to appreciate the daughter he had abandoned. The final scene is of him dancing with his daughter.

Jobs later said that he never read the novel. "I heard it was about me," he told me, "and if it was about me, I would have gotten really p.i.s.sed off, and I didn't want to get p.i.s.sed at my sister, so I didn't read it." However, he told the New York Times a few months after the book appeared that he had read it and saw the reflections of himself in the main character. "About 25% of it is totally me, right down to the mannerisms," he told the reporter, Steve Lohr. "And I 'm certainly not telling you which 25%." His wife said that, in fact, Jobs glanced at the book and asked her to read it for him to see what he should make of it.

Simpson sent the ma.n.u.script to Lisa before it was published, but at first she didn't read more than the opening. "In the first few pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my things, my thoughts, myself in the character Jane," she noted. "And sandwiched between the truths was invention-lies to me, made more evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth." Lisa was wounded, and she wrote a piece for the Harvard Advocate explaining why. Her first draft was very bitter, then she toned it down a bit before she published it. She felt violated by Simpson's friendship. "I didn't know, for those six years, that Mona was collecting," she wrote. "I didn't know that as I sought her consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking." Eventually Lisa reconciled with Simpson. They went out to a coffee shop to discuss the book, and Lisa told her that she hadn't been able to finish it. Simpson told her she would like the ending. Over the years Lisa had an on-and-off relationship with Simpson, but it would be closer in some ways than the one she had with her father.

Children.

When Powell gave birth in 1991, a few months after her wedding to Jobs, their child was known for two weeks as "baby boy Jobs," because settling on a name was proving only slightly less difficult than choosing a washing machine. Finally, they named him Reed Paul Jobs. His middle name was that of Jobs's father, and his first name (both Jobs and Powell insist) was chosen because it sounded good rather than because it was the name of Jobs's college.

Reed turned out to be like his father in many ways: incisive and smart, with intense eyes and a mesmerizing charm. But unlike his father, he had sweet manners and a self-effacing grace. He was creative-as a kid he liked to dress in costume and stay in character-and also a great student, interested in science. He could replicate his father's stare, but he was demonstrably affectionate and seemed not to have an ounce of cruelty in his nature.

Erin Siena Jobs was born in 1995. She was a little quieter and sometimes suffered from not getting much of her father's attention. She picked up her father's interest in design and architecture, but she also learned to keep a bit of an emotional distance, so as not to be hurt by his detachment.

The youngest child, Eve, was born in 1998, and she turned into a strong-willed, funny firecracker who, neither needy nor intimidated, knew how to handle her father, negotiate with him (and sometimes win), and even make fun of him. Her father joked that she's the one who will run Apple someday, if she doesn't become president of the United States.

Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was more distant. As he would with others, he would occasionally focus on them, but just as often would completely ignore them when he had other things on his mind. "He focuses on his work, and at times he has not been there for the girls," Powell said. At one point Jobs marveled to his wife at how well their kids were turning out, "especially since we're not always there for them." This amused, and slightly annoyed, Powell, because she had given up her career when Reed turned two and she decided she wanted to have more children.

In 1995 Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison threw a fortieth-birthday party for Jobs filled with tech stars and moguls. Ellison had become a close friend, and he would often take the Jobs family out on one of his many luxurious yachts. Reed started referring to him as "our rich friend," which was amusing evidence of how his father refrained from ostentatious displays of wealth. The lesson Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched it. "Every other CEO I know has a security detail," he said. "They've even got them at their homes. I t's a nutso way to live. We just decided that's not how we wanted to raise our kids."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

TOY STORY.

Buzz and Woody to the Rescue.

Jeffrey Katzenberg.

"I t's kind of fun to do the impossible," Walt Disney once said. That was the type of att.i.tude that appealed to Jobs. He admired Disney's obsession with detail and design, and he felt that there was a natural fit between Pixar and the movie studio that Disney had founded.

The Walt Disney Company had licensed Pixar's Computer Animation Production System, and that made it the largest customer for Pixar's computers. One day Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney's film division, invited Jobs down to the Burbank studios to see the technology in operation. As the Disney folks were showing him around, Jobs turned to Katzenberg and asked, "Is Disney happy with Pixar?" With great exuberance, Katzenberg answered yes. Then Jobs asked, "Do you think we at Pixar are happy with Disney?" Katzenberg said he a.s.sumed so.

"No, we're not," Jobs said. "We want to do a film with you. That would make us happy."

Katzenberg was willing. He admired John La.s.seter's animated shorts and had tried unsuccessfully to lure him back to Disney. So Katzenberg invited the Pixar team down to discuss partnering on a film. When Catmull, Jobs, and La.s.seter got settled at the conference table, Katzenberg was forthright. "John, since you won't come work for me," he said, looking at La.s.seter, "I 'm going to make it work this way."

Just as the Disney company shared some traits with Pixar, so Katzenberg shared some with Jobs. Both were charming when they wanted to be, and aggressive (or worse) when it suited their moods or interests. Alvy Ray Smith, on the verge of quitting Pixar, was at the meeting. "Katzenberg and Jobs impressed me as a lot alike," he recalled. "Tyrants with an amazing gift of gab." Katzenberg was delightfully aware of this. "Everybody thinks I 'm a tyrant," he told the Pixar team. "I am a tyrant. But I 'm usually right." One can imagine Jobs saying the same.

As befitted two men of equal pa.s.sion, the negotiations between Katzenberg and Jobs took months. Katzenberg insisted that Disney be given the rights to Pixar's proprietary technology for making 3-D animation. Jobs refused, and he ended up winning that engagement. Jobs had his own demand: Pixar would have part ownership of the film and its characters, sharing control of both video rights and sequels. "I f that's what you want,"

Katzenberg said, "we can just quit talking and you can leave now." Jobs stayed, conceding that point.

La.s.seter was riveted as he watched the two wiry and tightly wound princ.i.p.als parry and thrust. "Just to see Steve and Jeffrey go at it, I was in awe," he recalled. "I t was like a fencing match. They were both masters." But Katzenberg went into the match with a saber, Jobs with a mere foil.

Pixar was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed a deal with Disney far more than Disney needed a deal with Pixar. Plus, Disney could afford to finance the whole enterprise, and Pixar couldn't. The result was a deal, struck in May 1991, by which Disney would own the picture and its characters outright, have creative control, and pay Pixar about 12.5% of the ticket revenues. I t had the option (but not the obligation) to do Pixar's next two films and the right to make (with or without Pixar) sequels using the characters in the film. Disney could also kill the film at any time with only a small penalty.

The idea that John La.s.seter pitched was called "T oy Story." I t sprang from a belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. I f the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a gla.s.s, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys. So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it, especially when the action revolved around the toys' being separated from their kid. The original treatment began, "Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy's point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with by children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. I t is the emotional foundation of their existence."

The two main characters went through many iterations before they ended up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, La.s.seter and his team would put together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney. In early screen tests, Pixar showed off its amazing technology by, for example, producing a scene of Woody rustling around on top of a dresser while the light rippling in through a Venetian blind cast shadows on his plaid shirt-an effect that would have been almost impossible to render by hand. Impressing Disney with the plot, however, was more difficult. At each presentation by Pixar, Katzenberg would tear much of it up, barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure every suggestion and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.

Katzenberg's big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. I t may be an animated movie called Toy Story, he said, but it should not be aimed only at children. "At first there was no drama, no real story, and no conflict," Katzenberg recalled. He suggested that La.s.seter watch some cla.s.sic buddy movies, such as The Defiant Ones and 48 Hours, in which two characters with different att.i.tudes are thrown together and have to bond. In addition, he kept pushing for what he called "edge," and that meant making Woody's character more jealous, mean, and belligerent toward Buzz, the new interloper in the toy box. "I t's a toy-eat-toy world," Woody says at one point, after pushing Buzz out of a window.

After many rounds of notes from Katzenberg and other Disney execs, Woody had been stripped of almost all charm. In one scene he throws the other toys off the bed and orders Slinky to come help. When Slinky hesitates, Woody barks, "Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?" Slinky then asks a question that the Pixar team members would soon be asking themselves: "Why is the cowboy so scary?" As T om Hanks, who had signed up to be Woody's voice, exclaimed at one point, "This guy's a real jerk!"

Cut!

La.s.seter and his Pixar team had the first half of the movie ready to screen by November 1993, so they brought it down to Burbank to show to Katzenberg and other Disney executives. Peter Schneider, the head of feature animation, had never been enamored of Katzenberg's idea of having outsiders make animation for Disney, and he declared it a mess and ordered that production be stopped. Katzenberg agreed. "Why is this so terrible?" he asked a colleague, T om Schumacher. "Because it's not their movie anymore," Schumacher bluntly replied. He later explained, "They were following Katzenberg's notes, and the project had been driven completely off-track."

La.s.seter realized that Schumacher was right. "I sat there and I was pretty much embarra.s.sed with what was on the screen," he recalled. "I t was astory filled with the most unhappy, mean characters that I 've ever seen." He asked Disney for the chance to retreat back to Pixar and rework the script. Katzenberg was supportive.

Jobs did not insert himself much into the creative process. Given his proclivity to be in control, especially on matters of taste and design, this self- restraint was a testament to his respect for La.s.seter and the other artists at Pixar-as well as for the ability of La.s.seter and Catmull to keep him at bay. He did, however, help manage the relationship with Disney, and the Pixar team appreciated that. When Katzenberg and Schneider halted production on Toy Story, Jobs kept the work going with his own personal funding. And he took their side against Katzenberg. "He had Toy Story all messed up," Jobs later said. "He wanted Woody to be a bad guy, and when he shut us down we kind of kicked him out and said, 'This isn't what we want,' and did it the way we always wanted."

The Pixar team came back with a new script three months later. The character of Woody morphed from being a tyrannical boss of Andy's other toys to being their wise leader. His jealousy after the arrival of Buzz Lightyear was portrayed more sympathetically, and it was set to the strains of a Randy Newman song, "Strange Things." The scene in which Woody pushed Buzz out of the window was rewritten to make Buzz's fall the result of an accident triggered by a little trick Woody initiated involving a Luxo lamp. Katzenberg & Co. approved the new approach, and by February 1994 the film was back in production.

Katzenberg had been impressed with Jobs's focus on keeping costs under control. "Even in the early budgeting process, Steve was very eager to do it as efficiently as possible," he said. But the $17 million production budget was proving inadequate, especially given the major revision that was necessary after Katzenberg had pushed them to make Woody too edgy. So Jobs demanded more in order to complete the film right. "Listen, we made a deal," Katzenberg told him. "We gave you business control, and you agreed to do it for the amount we offered." Jobs was furious. He would call Katzenberg by phone or fly down to visit him and be, in Katzenberg's words, "as wildly relentless as only Steve can be." Jobs insisted that Disney was liable for the cost overruns because Katzenberg had so badly mangled the original concept that it required extra work to restore things.

"Wait a minute!" Katzenberg shot back. "We were helping you. You got the benefit of our creative help, and now you want us to pay you for that." I t was a case of two control freaks arguing about who was doing the other a favor.

Ed Catmull, more diplomatic than Jobs, was able to reach a compromise new budget. "I had a much more positive view of Jeffrey than some of the folks working on the film did," he said. But the incident did prompt Jobs to start plotting about how to have more leverage with Disney in the future. He did not like being a mere contractor; he liked being in control. That meant Pixar would have to bring its own funding to projects in the future, and it would need a new deal with Disney.

As the film progressed, Jobs became ever more excited about it. He had been talking to various companies, ranging from Hallmark to Microsoft, about selling Pixar, but watching Woody and Buzz come to life made him realize that he might be on the verge of transforming the movie industry.

As scenes from the movie were finished, he watched them repeatedly and had friends come by his home to share his new pa.s.sion. "I can't tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I saw before it came out," said Larry Ellison. "I t eventually became a form of torture. I 'd go over there and see the latest 10% improvement. Steve is obsessed with getting it right-both the story and the technology-and isn't satisfied with anything less than perfection."

Jobs's sense that his investments in Pixar might actually pay off was reinforced when Disney invited him to attend a gala press preview of scenes from Pocahontas in January 1995 in a tent in Manhattan's Central Park. At the event, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that Pocahontas would have its premiere in front of 100,000 people on eighty-foot-high screens on the Great Lawn of Central Park. Jobs was a master showman who knew how to stage great premieres, but even he was astounded by this plan. Buzz Lightyear's great exhortation-"T o infinity and beyond!"-suddenly seemed worth heeding.

Jobs decided that the release of Toy Story that November would be the occasion to take Pixar public. Even the usually eager investment bankers were dubious and said it couldn't happen. Pixar had spent five years hemorrhaging money. But Jobs was determined. "I was nervous and argued that we should wait until after our second movie," La.s.seter recalled. "Steve overruled me and said we needed the cash so we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney deal."

To Infinity!

There were two premieres of Toy Story in November 1995. Disney organized one at El Capitan, a grand old theater in Los Angeles, and built a fun house next door featuring the characters. Pixar was given a handful of pa.s.ses, but the evening and its celebrity guest list was very much a Disney production; Jobs did not even attend. Instead, the next night he rented the Regency, a similar theater in San Francisco, and held his own premiere.

Instead of T om Hanks and Steve Martin, the guests were Silicon Valley celebrities, such as Larry Ellison and Andy Grove. This was clearly Jobs's show; he, not La.s.seter, took the stage to introduce the movie.

The dueling premieres highlighted a festering issue: Was Toy Story a Disney or a Pixar movie? Was Pixar merely an animation contractor helping Disney make movies? Or was Disney merely a distributor and marketer helping Pixar roll out its movies? The answer was somewhere in between. The question would be whether the egos involved, mainly those of Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs, could get to such a partnership.

The stakes were raised when Toy Story opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. I t recouped its cost the first weekend, with a domestic opening of $30 million, and it went on to become the top-grossing film of the year, beating Batman Forever and Apollo 13, with $192 million in receipts domestically and a total of $362 million worldwide. According to the review aggregator Rotten T omatoes, 100% of the seventy- three critics surveyed gave it a positive review. Time's Richard Corliss called it "the year's most inventive comedy," David Ansen of New sw eek p.r.o.nounced it a "marvel," and Janet Maslin of the New York Times recommended it both for children and adults as "a work of incredible cleverness in the best two-tiered Disney tradition."

The only rub for Jobs was that reviewers such as Maslin wrote of the "Disney tradition," not the emergence of Pixar. After reading her review, he decided he had to go on the offensive to raise Pixar's profile. When he and La.s.seter went on the Charlie Rose show, Jobs emphasized that Toy Story was a Pixar movie, and he even tried to highlight the historic nature of a new studio being born. "Since Snow White was released, every major studio has tried to break into the animation business, and until now Disney was the only studio that had ever made a feature animated film that was a blockbuster," he told Rose. "Pixar has now become the second studio to do that."

Jobs made a point of casting Disney as merely the distributor of a Pixar film. "He kept saying, 'We at Pixar are the real thing and you Disney guys are s.h.i.t,'" recalled Michael Eisner. "But we were the ones who made Toy Story work. We helped shape the movie, and we pulled together all of our divisions, from our consumer marketers to the Disney Channel, to make it a hit." Jobs came to the conclusion that the fundamental issue- Whose movie was it?-would have to be settled contractually rather than by a war of words. "After Toy Story's success," he said, "I realized that we needed to cut a new deal with Disney if we were ever to build a studio and not just be a work-for-hire place." But in order to sit down with Disney on an equal basis, Pixar had to bring money to the table. That required a successful IPO.The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story's opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the company more money if the offering was a success. I t was, beyond even his wildest hopes. I t exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. I t then went up even further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39.

Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained-80% of the company-were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he'd made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that the money did not mean much to him. "There's no yacht in my future," he said. "I 've never done this for the money."

The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies. That was just the leverage Jobs wanted. "Because we could now fund half the cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits," he recalled. "But more important, I wanted co- branding. These were to be Pixar as well as Disney movies."

Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They had a three-picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Each side had its own nuclear weapons. After an acrimonious split with Eisner, Katzenberg had left Disney and become a cofounder, with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, of DreamWorks SKG. I f Eisner didn't agree to a new deal with Pixar, Jobs said, then Pixar would go to another studio, such as Katzenberg's, once the three-picture deal was done. In Eisner's hand was the threat that Disney could, if that happened, make its own sequels to Toy Story, using Woody and Buzz and all of the characters that La.s.seter had created. "That would have been like molesting our children," Jobs later recalled. "John started crying when he considered that possibility."

So they hammered out a new arrangement. Eisner agreed to let Pixar put up half the money for future films and in return take half of the profits.

"He didn't think we could have many hits, so he thought he was saving himself some money," said Jobs. "Ultimately that was great for us, because Pixar would have ten blockbusters in a row." They also agreed on co-branding, though that took a lot of haggling to define. "I took the position that it's a Disney movie, but eventually I relented," Eisner recalled. "We start negotiating how big the letters in 'Disney' are going to be, how big is 'Pixar'

going to be, just like four-year-olds." But by the beginning of 1997 they had a deal, for five films over the course of ten years, and even parted as friends, at least for the time being. "Eisner was reasonable and fair to me then," Jobs later said. "But eventually, over the course of a decade, I came to the conclusion that he was a dark man."

In a letter to Pixar shareholders, Jobs explained that winning the right to have equal branding with Disney on all the movies, as well as advertising and toys, was the most important aspect of the deal. "We want Pixar to grow into a brand that embodies the same level of trust as the Disney brand," he wrote. "But in order for Pixar to earn this trust, consumers must know that Pixar is creating the films." Jobs was known during his career for creating great products. But just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And he created two of the best of his era: Apple and Pixar.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

THE SECOND COMING.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last ...

Things Fall Apart.