The Night Steve Jobs met Andy Warhol

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It was dusk, sprinkling and windy outside.

Steve Jobs and I hurried along Manhattan's Central Park West. Jobs was carrying a large box—a birthday present for Sean Lennon, who

was turning nine. Ifhe hadn't been murdered four years earlier, John Lennon would have been turning 44. Father and son shared a birthday,

October 9. ~r We turned right onto West 72nd Street at the storied Dakota apartment building. To get into the building via the carriageway,

we passed through a gathering of 50 or 60 people, many holding lighted candles. They were singing "Give Peace a Chance," remembering

Lennon. A few had tears. We stood with them for a while before going inside. Before 1980 the Dakota had been known for its famous

residents, including the Lcnnons, Joe Namath, Boris Karloff and Lauren Bacall, and the movie filmed there, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's

Baby. Since then it has been remembered for tragedy—Lennon's murder on the sidewalk out front. A few months before Lennon died, I'd

conducted the Playboy Interview with him and Yoko Ono. It was the final in-depth interview of Lennon's life. One of the last

things he said to me was "I'm going to be 40, and life begins at 40, so they promise. And I believe it too.

I'm very excited. Like, wow, what's going to happen next?"

Jobs and I waited for the ancient elevator. "All the girls loved Paul, but John was my favorite Beatle," he said. "Lennon cut through the bullshit and told it like it was. I still can't believe they killed him. He was a genius, a beautiful genius." He said there had been a period in his teens when he listened exclusively to the Beatles, solo Lennon and Dylan.

The elevator, with gnarly gargoyles looking down on passengers, creaked slowly upward to the seventh floor. On the landing Jobs knocked on an oversize mahogany door. A man opened it and ushered us in. As instructed, we removed our shoes. Jobs found a place to store the large box on the floor, behind a collection of walking sticks.

In the evening light, out the window of the White Room—everything inside was white, including the piano on which Lennon had written "Imagine"—Central Park was a patchwork of crystal and gray. Across the park the lights of Fifth Avenue hotels and apartments glittered. The party was in full

swing. The guests included Walter Cronkite, Roberta Flack, Harry Nilsson, John Cage and artists Louise Nevelson, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. Andy Warhol arrived, refusing to take his shoes off. Sean came up, and Warhol gave him presents, including a spectacular painting of a heart-shaped candy box and a bracelet he'd made out of pennies. The last time they'd seen each other, Warhol had ripped a dollar bill in two and given half to Sean, who, after thanking Warhol, jokingly asked for the other half. Warhol reached into his pocket and handed Sean a wad of torn-in-half dollars.

Dinner was served and then a birthday cake in the shape of a grand piano. Afterward the adults talked, and Jobs asked Sean if he'd like his present. Following Sean, Jobs lugged the box he'd brought down the hallway to

Sean's bedroom, also white but with shelves of robots. Jobs opened the carton and lifted out his present.

Jobs had boyish dark hair parted on the side. He wore jeans and a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up. He sprawled on the floor in front of a computer. Called Macintosh, it was boxy, taller than it was wide, beige, the size of a bread box set on its side.

Jobs turned the computer on, and Sean, sitting on the floor near him, stared at the six-inch black-and-white built-in monitor. He watched Jobs push a cigarettc-pack-size contraption that was attached to the computer by a wire along the floor. Jobs said it was called a mouse. When he guided it along, an arrow on the screen moved too. He moved the arrow over a tiny picture of a paintbrush and clicked to launch a program called MacPaint. He looked at Sean. "You try," he said.

Sean took control of the mouse and rolled it along the floor. Jobs said, "Now hold the button down while you move it and see what

happens." Sean did, and a thin jagged black line appeared on the screen.

Sean said, "Cool!" He clicked the mouse button, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a figure he said was Boy George.

A few people entered the room and stood by Sean and Jobs, watching over their shoulders. I looked up. "Hmmm," said one, Andy Warhol. "What is this} Look at this, Keith. This is incredible'." Keith Haring nodded. The artists stared at the moving line.

Jobs continued working with Sean, with Warhol and Haring watching, and then Warhol asked, "Can I try?"

Warhol took Sean's spot in front of the computer, and Jobs showed him how to maneuver and click the mouse. Warhol

didn't get it; he lifted and waved the mouse as if it were a conductor's baton. Jobs gently explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a surface. Warhol kept lifting it until Jobs placed his hand on Warhol's and guided it along the floor. Finally Warhol began drawing, staring at the "pencil" as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was mesmerized—people who knew him know the way he tuned out everything extraneous when he was entranced by something—gliding the mouse, eyes fixed on the monitor. Haring was bent over, watching. Warhol, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Haring and said, "Look, Keith! I drew a circle!"

In Warhol's diary, published after his death, he wrote about that night. "We went into Sean's bedroom—and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one,"

Warhol wrote, "but that I'd never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, 'Yeah, that was me. I'm Steve Jobs.' And he looked so young, like a college guy.... Then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they'll soon make it in color.... I felt so old and out of it with this whiz guy right there who'd helped invent it." Warhol concluded his entry, writing that he left the party that night "so blue." It had nothing to do with his frustration drawing on the computer; he was jealous of Haring. "Before I was Sean's best grown-up friend and now I think Keith is. They really hit it off. He invited Keith to his party for kids the next day and I don't think I was invited and I'm hurt."

After half an hour the artists returned to the party to hang (continued on page 182)

Steve Jobs

(continued from page 86) out with Yoko and the other guests, and Sean left for a while to do an interview with Yoko. When he returned he found Jobs, and for the rest of the evening the two were glued to the computer.

I had conducted the Playboy Interview with John and Yoko in late July and early August 1980. I met Jobs under the same circum­stances, interviewing him for playboy; the interview, conducted in late summer and early spring 1984, ran in the Febru­ary 1985 issue. Jobs was 29. It's difficult for most people to remember (if they were born then) that pre-iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac era, when the most popular personal computer consisted of a suitcase-size base, a heavy monochrome monitor and a keyboard made by what was then one of the world's most formidable companies, IBM. It ran on an operating system called MS-DOS—MS stood for Microsoft—which had 256 kilo­bytes of random-access memory. Programs and files were stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that looked like square 45s in cardboard sleeves. To work on a file— a spreadsheet, say—one had to open it by holding down the cir key while pressing o and then typing in the file name.

At the time, there were no cell phones. People listened to music on Sony Walk­mans, which played cassette tapes. They read newspapers—on paper. If you men­tioned Apple, most people would assume you were referring to the Beatles' record label—or something you ate.

Jobs was already a superstar, an idol; there has never been a businessman with as zealous a following. For many people he has become an integral, indispensable and even defining part of life. In an almost scary way he exists like a Horcrux in the heads of people who experience the world and carry on relation­ships through devices that are a reflection of his intellect and taste. It's unprecedented that so many people throughout the world were as emotional about the retirement of a CEO as they were when, in August 2011, Jobs announced he was stepping down from Apple. It's also unprecedented that so many people were so devastated by the death of a man who was, after all, an entrepreneur and a businessman. It was well known that Jobs had been ill—he had pancreatic can­cer and in 2009 had a liver transplant—but his death was still a shock. At Apple stores around the country his fans made shrines of flowers, letters and apples.

The original personal computers from the 1970s were mostly for geeks in high school computer clubs before Jobs and his part­ner, Steve Wozniak, founded Apple in 1976. Their first product, the Apple I, was a hobby­ist's toy. The following year, Apple released the Apple II, which was used in schools and, to a lesser extent, homes, where parents did accounting, word processing and recipe stor­ing, and kids did their homework and played computer games. Apple was the uncontested leader in the modest personal computer market in 1981, when IBM, at the time the preeminent manufacturer of mainframe

computers, released its PC. The Apple II never cracked the business market, which was where the big money was. To most of corporate America, Apple's computers were for kids, not Fortune 500 companies. IBM was a trusted brand, and it trounced Apple. By 1984 Apple's market share was falling.

Jobs attempted to fight back with new, more powerful models, including the Apple III and Lisa, but they were failures. In the early 1980s industry observers specu­lated that another Apple failure could sink the company, and there were even rumors that an IBM takeover of Apple was immi­nent. (Typical of Apple bravado, when I met Randy Wigginton, at the time a 22-year-old software designer, he squelched the rumor. "IBM already said they weren't for sale," he cracked.) During our interview Jobs admit­ted he was betting the store on the Macintosh. "Yeah, we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders," he said. "We knew that we had to pull the rabbit out of the hat with Macintosh or else we'd never realize the dreams we had for either the products or the company."

The interview scheduled, I arrived at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California and was escorted to a conference room called Picasso. A meeting with four of his chief software designers was under way. Jobs was reputed to be an unconventional CEO, and he was. During the course of our inter­view, he would talk about influences that included everything from the book Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass, to John and Yoko, to lengthy conversations he'd had with his business heroes Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, and Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony. Indeed, the Jobs I witnessed in action was unlike other corporate executives I'd met. I noted it was the first time I'd arrived at an interview with a corporate CEO and felt overdressed. Jobs was in a flannel shirt, jeans and sneakers, whereas I was dressed more like another of Jobs's visitors that day, then former (and now current) California gover­nor Jerry Brown, who wore a black suit.

Though the Mac had been extravagantly announced and 40,000 were selling a month, it wasn't bug-free, and Jobs wasn't pleased. The Apple engineers in the room, all on the Mac team, appeared exhausted. Later I learned that except for quick naps on the floor under their desks, they hadn't slept in weeks because they were furiously working to fix the software glitches. Undeterred by the presence of a journalist, Jobs laid into them, and they looked miserable. One held back tears. After berating them, however, Jobs turned his diatribe into a passionate pep talk. "We're almost at the finish line," he said. "Remember, we aren't just build­ing a product. We're making history. We're changing the world. Someday you'll tell your children you were part of this."

This wasn't the last time Jobs would claim he was not merely making software and hardware but fomenting revolution. He would go on to say as much at the announce­ment of almost every new Apple computer or other product. Over the decades since I interviewed him, I've profiled founders, CEOs and presidents of dozens of high-tech companies in California's Silicon Valley and

in Tokyo, Kyoto, Moscow, London, Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. Almost every one of them described his or her company and product as revolutionary ("Our company will change life as we know it"), even when they were doing little more than provid­ing new ways to buy books, do payroll or flirt. But it was Jobs who set the bar. When I interviewed Oracle founder Larry Ellison, he told me, "People ask how much differ­ence one person can make. Steve Jobs is the answer." Edward Tian, one of the fathers of the Chinese internet, told me that as a young boy in Beijing he became inspired by jobs's idea that computers are not just com­puting machines but tools with the inherent ability to change lives. "Steve Jobs gave the computer industry a much greater goal: to make a better world," Tian said. "The idea began to consume me." Few would dispute that the computer is transforming China, once again changing the world.

I sat across from Jobs, turned on my twin tape recorders and opened a reporter's note­book filled with dozens of pages of questions and notes, but he stopped me. He wanted to know if I wrote on a computer or was stuck in the "Neanderthal" world of typewriters.

I explained that a few years earlier I had an Apple II computer on which I'd writ­ten articles (including the John and Yoko interview), printing the final drafts on a dot matrix printer that spat out paper like a ticker tape machine. However, in 1981 I bought a first-generation IBM PC. When Jobs heard that I'd abandoned the Apple II for a PC and that it had served me well, he looked at me as if I had betrayed American secrets to the Nazis in World War II. Then he smiled. "Okay. Here's a challenge. Try a Mac. Write your article on it and compare it to the PC. We'll see what you think." It was an intriguing idea to test-drive a computer as I interviewed its creator, so I agreed. The next day a loaner showed up at my home.

The interview continued off and on over two months. There were sessions at Apple headquarters, where the central gathering area in the Mac building had video games, a Ping-Pong table and a stereo with six-foot speakers blaring the Rolling Stones. We met in conference rooms—besides Picasso, there was Da Vinci. Jobs occasion­ally grabbed fresh carrot or vegetable juice from a refrigerator in a snack room. (I learned that the juice budget for the Mac group was $100,000 a year.)

I'd been warned that Jobs liked to walk while he talked but hadn't considered that I should have gone into training to keep pace. He dashed around Apple like a power walker obsessed, making brief pit stops to talk to programmers, hardware engineers, department managers, marketers, prod­uct designers and customers meeting his sales teams. We walked during subsequent interview sessions in San Francisco, along the waterfront and through North Beach; on the Stanford campus; in the hills above Woodside, California; through redwoods in Jack London State Park in Sonoma County and along steep trails in the mountains near Aspen, Colorado. Unsurprisingly, Jobs was exceptionally bright about most subjects, but

in Aspen he stopped a passerby to ask, "What are all these trees with the white bark?"

For our meetings Jobs often showed up in a Porsche but otherwise had few of the accoutrements normally associated with wealth (though at the time he was already worth more than a quarter of a billion dol­lars). When we weren't walking we often talked over meals, usually sushi or some macrobiotic combination of lettuce, beans and rice. (A couple of years later, for a period of two weeks, he went on a grape-juice fast. The juice was hand-pressed by my brother, who for a while worked as chef and caretaker at a home Jobs had bought in Woodside.)

Over half a dozen weeks, Jobs fielded hundreds of questions, including ones about his background (for the first time he talked about being adopted but said he didn't want to reveal details about his search for his bio­logical parents because he didn't want to hurt the feelings of the couple who had

raised him); his wealth (he laughed about losing $200 million in one day); the found­ing with Steve Wozniak of Apple (in a garage that by then, as I wrote, had already taken on the aura of Abraham Lincoln's log cabin); his stint at Atari, the gaming company behind Pong; a trip to Tibet during which a guru had shaved Jobs's head; his educa­tion (college and LSD); his relationship with Wozniak; the Apple 1,11,111 and Lisa com­puters; his competitors (he railed against what he viewed as the devil incarnate, IBM) and the new Mac (the future of computing and a portal into a world of unimaginable possibilities). Jobs talked as excitedly about fonts and internal storage devices as he did about politics, but he became most ani­mated when he answered questions about his inspirations and his vision of the impact of technology in the future.

The launch of the commercial inter­net and World Wide Web was more than a decade away, and yet at the time Jobs

envisioned "a nationwide communications network" linked by computers. "We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone," he said. I was skeptical and asked him to be more specific. "What kind of breakthrough are you talking about?" He answered, "I can only begin to speculate. You don't know exactly what's going to result, but you know it's something very big and very good." I pressed; I wanted more than "very big and very good." He thought for a while before responding, "A hundred years ago, if some­body had asked Alexander Graham Bell, 'What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?' he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or to call a relative on the other side of the globe."

The interview continued. More walks. One late night we trudged up the famously steep streets of San Francisco's Russian Hill. We were still walking at three in the morn­ing when I asked about his long-term vision for Apple. He answered that he thought the company could have an impact beyond its computers. "I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late 1980s and early 1990s," he said. "Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting compa­nies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone's list. Where are they now? They would be on no one's list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the peo­ple doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the prod­ucts. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

"What happens in most companies is that you don't keep great people under working environments where individual accomplish­ment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave, and you end up with mediocrity. I know because that's how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island com­pany. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were trouble­makers at other companies."

After two more weeks of interviewing, I gathered tapes and transcripts and began writing on the Macintosh. At first I found the mouse awkward (rather than pointing and clicking, I was used to pressing ctr k and i) to save a file), but I quickly got the hang of it. Yes, it was easier to use and, as Jobs described it, more "intuitive." In the interview he explained the thinking behind the mouse. "If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I'm not going to do it linguistically: 'There's a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.' If you have a spot there"—he pointed—"I'll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all

know. We've done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it's much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it's not only easier to use but more efficient."

I'd completed about three quarters of the interview when Jobs called—he was in my neighborhood. At the time I was living in Glen Ellen, a small town in Sonoma County more than an hour's drive from San Fran­cisco. Jobs came rolling up the dirt road in the Porsche. He said he wanted to clarify a few things. We sat on a porch swing and went through them. Mostly they were minor details, but just as Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the Macintosh, he obsessed about everything else he did, including our inter­view. He clarified some dates. He wanted to be sure I had the names of people who had worked on various components and soft­ware for the Mac. He said he'd thought of something he'd said and thought he could phrase it more succinctly. I explained that the interview was almost complete and it was too late to include new information, though I'd make factual corrections. He didn't care. Nor did he slow down when I told him I had to get back to work. He talked for another hour and a half. I included his comments about his hero, Polaroid founder Edwin Land, whom he called one of the "trou­blemakers." Jobs said, "He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time, but more important, he saw the inter­section of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don't under­stand why people like that can't be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a foot­ball player but this."

I'd completed a first draft by Friday before the Monday deadline. On Saturday morning I reread the piece and began editing. I was polishing a section when without warning the words on the screen vanished. I clicked the mouse, and nothing happened. I felt sick. My article—days of work—was gone. I continued to click the mouse and type on the keyboard, but everything was frozen. I was horrified. There was no backup.

Another user would have had to call Apple tech support, but I called Jobs. After all, this experiment was his idea. On the phone he walked me through a few attempts at fixing the computer. I couldn't even get it to turn off, so he instructed me to try a high-tech fix: Unplug it and then start it up again. The computer turned on, but there was no sign of my interview, even when I followed Jobs's directions, clicking the mouse, open­ing hidden files, searching where he told me to search. I was panicked, but Jobs said he knew what to do, that I should stand by.

On Sunday morning Jobs's solution arrived in the person of Randy Wiggin-ton, whom I'd briefly met at Apple; he was one of the authors of Mac Write, the

program I'd used. Wigginton, with blond hair, was wearing a Lacoste shirt and (of course) jeans. Hired at 14, he was Apple's sixth employee.

I led Wigginton to my office and the dead Mac. He worked on it for a couple of hours, during which Jobs called to check in. I asked Wigginton how it was going, and he shook his head. He continued work­ing, and I decided to start over—from scratch—writing on the IBM. If you've ever lost something on a computer and had no backup, you understand the desolate feel­ing of staring at a blank screen and starting over again.

Wigginton was more haggard than when I'd last seen him at Apple, but he didn't take a break. I was beginning to write on the PC when Wigginton came in to find me. After four hours he'd found the lost and corrupted file somewhere inside some recess of the computer's memory, and he'd recon­structed it.

I went back to work.

Later Wigginton told me that he almost fell asleep at the wheel as he drove home. He made it to his couch, where he passed out from exhaustion. Minutes later Jobs called, waking him, telling him he was needed in the office. Wigginton rushed in. "Steve was out to change the world," Wigginton says, "but to be honest, a lot of us never bought into that. Like many of us at Apple, espe­cially on the Mac team, I worked 22 hours a day for one reason—to please Steve. That's what he demanded of us, and that's what we cared about. If he criticized us, we were crushed, but we lived for his praise."

I'd flown to New York and was working in the magazine's office there when Jobs called. He happened to be in New York too; he'd bought an apartment in the two-towered 1929 San Remo building and was meet­ing with the architectural firm of I.M. Pei about renovating it. Pei rarely worked on personal residences, but as Wigginton had implied, people didn't say no to Jobs, who was nothing if not persuasive. John Sculley learned this too. As Jobs described in the interview, a couple of years earlier he had recruited Sculley, then president of Pepsi, to join Apple and help him run the company. Sculley was balking at the offer when Jobs famously challenged him: "Are you going to keep selling sugar water to children when you could be changing the world?" Sculley joined Apple.

I had plans the evening Jobs called me in New York. I was attending Sean Lennon's birthday party at the Dakota and phoned to ask Yoko if I could bring Jobs along. She said she'd enjoy meeting him. I called him back and invited him. He said it sounded fun.

Afterward Jobs and I left the Dakota. A few dozen people were still outside with can­dles. Someone plaintively strummed a guitar, and a girl sang "Across the Universe."

Jobs and I walked down 72nd Street. It was raining harder. We talked about the sad­dest moment at the party. Harry Nilsson had led everyone in a song for Sean, a rousing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Sean said, "If my dad were here, we'd sing, 'For they're jolly good fellows.'"

We walked in silence for a while, and then I mentioned the party again and what seemed to be an extraordinary moment: Warhol thrilled to have drawn a circle. Jobs seemed less interested in the famous art­ist drawing on the Mac than in Sean. He explained, "It's that older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but a child asks, 'What can I do with it?'"

At one point during the interview, Jobs had said, "I'll always stay connected with Apple." Of course it was prescient and particularly ironic, because he would soon be fired by Sculley and the Apple board. Jobs continued, "I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back." He did. Sculley left, Apple was again in trouble, and Jobs—who during his break from Apple founded NeXT, another computer company, and acquired the fledgling animation studio Pixar from George Lucas—returned. He con­tinued, "And that's what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I'm still a student. I'm still in boot camp. If any­one is reading any of my thoughts, I'd keep that in mind. Don't take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take what­ever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those

values. That is why it's hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times artists have to go, 'Bye, I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here.' And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they reemerge a little differently."

The evening of the party, Jobs and I turned on Columbus Avenue and talked more about the long-term promise of tech­nology. I asked Jobs what was coming down the road—way down the road, how technol­ogy would change life and if he would be at the forefront of whatever it was. "That's for the next generation," he said. "I think an interesting challenge in this area of intellec­tual inquiry is to grow obsolete gracefully, in the sense that things are changing so fast that certainly by the end of the 1980s we really want to turn over the reins to the next generation, whose fundamental per­ceptions are state-of-the-art perceptions, so that they can go on, stand on our shoulders and go much further. It's a very interesting challenge, isn't it? How to grow obsolete with grace."

I asked what he might do if he were to retire from Apple. With a few hundred million dollars, he could do anything he wanted. He took a moment to answer, and when he did, he said, "Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and...." He stopped. "My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time."