The new, improved Steve Jobs

Even if he did try to stop publication of a biography about him, there's a lot to admire about the Apple CEO, says author Alan Deutschman.

By Janelle Brown

Oct 11, 2000 | The first thing you should know about Alan Deutschman's delicious new Steve Jobs biography, "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs," is that it is not a "hatchet job." The phrase is relevant because Jobs himself has apparently been repeating it up and down Silicon Valley for almost a year now -- achieving the no-doubt unintended effect of raising the book's prepublication buzz to a near-deafening din.

But "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" is hardly some cut-and-pasted piece of character assassination -- it's more of a psychological profile with a fruit-flavored iMac punchline. Starting where most other Jobs biographies leave off -- at the moment of his ouster from Apple Computer by John Sculley -- Deutschman tracks Jobs' career through the dismal failure of Next Computer and documents his triumphant return to the limelight via his successes with Pixar and Apple.

Deutschman, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair (and frequent contributor to Salon), has been reporting on Silicon Valley for almost a decade. Wielding a Rolodex that reads like a who's who of the computer industry, Deutschman collected an impressive number of colorful anecdotes and tidbits ranging from Jobs' profligate spending at Next to his revolving group of girlfriends to his monomaniacal obsession with the veggie lifestyle.

The book is a pleasure to read; but not surprisingly, Jobs wishes you wouldn't. Over coffee, Deutschman revealed the story behind the book, including the mysterious chain of events that derailed both the book's original cover and an excerpt scheduled to run in Vanity Fair. Coincidence ... or Jobs' meddling hand?

Several biographies of Steve Jobs have already been written in the last 20 years. What made you decide to write about him, too?

Of all the CEOs and entrepreneurs I've written about over the past decade, Jobs is by far the most charismatic and the most fascinating. He just has that hypnotic presence and this complex personality.

At the time [that I began talking to Broadway Books about the book], the iMac had made its debut in the summer of 1998 and it was an immediate sensation. And then in January 1999, at Macworld, Jobs unveiled the four additional fruit-flavored colors of the iMac, and thousands of people at Macworld just went wild. Bill Gates later obtained a videotape of Steve Jobs' speech and couldn't understand why thousands of people were going crazy over colors; he was like, "Colors? What's the big deal?"

Steve's incredible personal resurgence with the turnaround of Apple ... really captured the themes of Silicon Valley of the '90s. Here's someone who's passionate about technology, but whose success was largely based not on engineering prowess but on marketing and image-making and public relations. Jobs is someone who is an incredible elitist who yet yearns for the patronage of the masses, for millions of people to buy his product -- even though his own personal tastes are incredibly austere and minimalistic, and he is removed from the popular culture.

It's pretty difficult to imagine a strawberry plastic iMac in the middle of Steve Jobs' house.

Steve's house is Asian rugs and black-and-white Ansel Adams photographs and very spare, minimalist design. This is a man who wears black nearly every day.

What was Steve Jobs like when you first met him?

I met him at the end of 1992. Fortune had sent me from New York to move to San Francisco to be its Silicon Valley correspondent. I was new in town, new on the techno beat. Steve's company at the time, Next Computer, invited me for a get-to-know-you session with Steve. I went down to Next's office and Steve was just mesmerizing. First of all, he had been one of my childhood heroes -- when I was a teenager I had two Apple computers, an Apple IIc and an Apple IIe, and in high school I was reading cover stories about Steve Jobs in places like Time magazine.

He uses your first name very often. He looks directly in your eyes with that laser-like stare. He has these movie-star eyes that are very hypnotic. But what really gets you is the way he talks -- there's something about the rhythm of his speech and the incredible enthusiasm he conveys for whatever it is he's talking about that is just infectious.

At the end of my interview with him, I said to myself, "I have to write an article about this guy just to be around him more -- it's so much fun!" When Steve wants to be charming and seductive, no one is more charming.

That's the "Good Steve," as opposed to the "Bad Steve," as you describe the two sides of his personality in your book. He refused to cooperate with you as you worked on your book, though, even though you told him it would be about his comeback. Have you had any contact with him as you've been working on it?

I've had no direct communication with Steve since I started on the book. However, as I was doing interviews, people would say things like, "Last week I ran into Steve and told him that I was going to do an interview for the book." And in those situations Steve would roll his eyes and say, "Oh, that guy is just doing a hatchet job."

Next Page: Did Jobs really try to kill "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs"?

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