By this point, based on his dating history, a matchmaker could have put together a composite sketch of the woman who would be right for Jobs. Smart, yet unpretentious. Tough enough to stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise above turmoil. Well-educated and independent, yet ready to make accommodations for him and a family. Down-to-earth, but with a touch of the ethereal. Savvy enough to know how to manage him, but secure enough to not always need to. And it wouldn’t hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an easygoing sense of humor who liked organic vegetarian food. In October 1989, after his split with Tina Redse, just such a woman walked into his life.
More specifically, just such a woman walked into his classroom. Jobs had agreed to give one of the “View from the Top” lectures at the Stanford Business School one Thursday evening. Laurene Powell was a new graduate student at the business school, and a guy in her class talked her into going to the lecture. They arrived late and all the seats were taken, so they sat in the aisle. When an usher told them they had to move, Powell took her friend down to the front row and commandeered two of the reserved seats there. Jobs was led to the one next to her when he arrived. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced,” Jobs recalled. They bantered a bit, and Laurene joked that she was sitting there because she had won a raffle, and the prize was that he got to take her to dinner. “He was so adorable,” she later said.
After the speech Jobs hung around on the edge of the stage chatting with students. He watched Powell leave, then come back and stand at the edge of the crowd, then leave again. He bolted out after her, brushing past the dean, who was trying to grab him for a conversation. After catching up with her in the parking lot, he said, “Excuse me, wasn’t there something about a raffle you won, that I’m supposed to take you to dinner?” She laughed. “How about Saturday?” he asked. She agreed and wrote down her number. Jobs headed to his car to drive up to the Thomas Fogarty winery in the Santa Cruz mountains above Woodside, where the NeXT education sales group was holding a dinner. But he suddenly stopped and turned around. “I thought, wow, I’d rather have dinner with her than the education group, so I ran back to her car and said ‘How about dinner
Avie Tevanian was sitting at the winery restaurant waiting with the rest of the NeXT education group. “Steve was sometimes unreliable, but when I talked to him I realized that something special had come up,” he said. As soon as Powell got home, after midnight, she called her close friend Kathryn (Kat) Smith, who was at Berkeley, and left a message on her machine. “You will not believe what just happened to me!” it said. “You will not believe who I met!” Smith called back the next morning and heard the tale. “We had known about Steve, and he was a person of interest to us, because we were business students,” she recalled.
Andy Hertzfeld and a few others later speculated that Powell had been scheming to meet Jobs. “Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating, and I think she targeted him from the beginning,” Hertzfeld said. “Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of irony there.” But Powell later insisted that this wasn’t the case. She went only because her friend wanted to go, and she was slightly confused as to who they were going to see. “I knew that Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” she recalled. “I had them mixed up. This was 1989. He was working at NeXT, and he was not that big of a deal to me. I wasn’t that enthused, but my friend was, so we went.”
“There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love with, Tina and Laurene,” Jobs later said. “I thought I was in love with Joan Baez, but I really just liked her a lot. It was just Tina and then Laurene.”
Laurene Powell had been born in New Jersey in 1963 and learned to be self-sufficient at an early age. Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who died a hero in a crash in Santa Ana, California; he had been leading a crippled plane in for a landing, and when it hit his plane he kept flying to avoid a residential area rather than ejecting in time to save his life. Her mother’s second marriage turned out to be a horrible situation, but she felt she couldn’t leave because she had no means to support her large family. For ten years Laurene and her three brothers had to suffer in a tense household, keeping a good demeanor while compartmentalizing problems. She did well. “The lesson I learned was clear, that I always wanted to be self-sufficient,” she said. “I took pride in that. My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is part of who I am.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked at Goldman Sachs as a fixed income trading strategist, dealing with enormous sums of money that she traded for the house account. Jon Corzine, her boss, tried to get her to stay at Goldman, but instead she decided the work was unedifying. “You could be really successful,” she said, “but you’re just contributing to capital formation.” So after three years she quit and went to Florence, Italy, living there for eight months before enrolling in Stanford Business School.
After their Thursday night dinner, she invited Jobs over to her Palo Alto apartment on Saturday. Kat Smith drove down from Berkeley and pretended to be her roommate so she could meet him as well. Their relationship became very passionate. “They would kiss and make out,” Smith said. “He was enraptured with her. He would call me on the phone and ask, ‘What do you think, does she like me?’ Here I am in this bizarre position of having this iconic person call me.”
That New Year’s Eve of 1989 the three went to Chez Panisse, the famed Alice Waters restaurant in Berkeley, along with Lisa, then eleven. Something happened at the dinner that caused Jobs and Powell to start arguing. They left separately, and Powell ended up spending the night at Kat Smith’s apartment. At nine the next morning there was a knock at the door, and Smith opened it to find Jobs, standing in the drizzle holding some wildflowers he had picked. “May I come in and see Laurene?” he said. She was still asleep, and he walked into the bedroom. A couple of hours went by, while Smith waited in the living room, unable to go in and get her clothes. Finally, she put a coat on over her nightgown and went to Peet’s Coffee to pick up some food. Jobs did not emerge until after noon. “Kat, can you come here for a minute?” he asked. They all gathered in the bedroom. “As you know, Laurene’s father passed away, and Laurene’s mother isn’t here, and since you’re her best friend, I’m going to ask you the question,” he said. “I’d like to marry Laurene. Will you give your blessing?”
Smith clambered onto the bed and thought about it. “Is this okay with you?” she asked Powell. When she nodded yes, Smith announced, “Well, there’s your answer.”
It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of focusing on something with insane intensity for a while and then, abruptly, turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to engage. In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he and Powell would indulge in public displays of affection that were so intense they embarrassed everyone in their presence, including Kat Smith and Powell’s mother. In the mornings at his Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by blasting the Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” on his tape deck. Yet at other times he would ignore her. “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work,” said Smith. “He had the power to focus like a laser beam, and when it came across you, you basked in the light of his attention. When it moved to another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was very confusing to Laurene.”
Once she had accepted his marriage proposal on the first day of 1990, he didn’t mention it again for several months. Finally, Smith confronted him while they were sitting on the edge of a sandbox in Palo Alto. What was going on? Jobs replied that he needed to feel sure that Powell could handle the life he lived and the type of person he was. In September she became fed up with waiting and moved out. The following month, he gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she moved back in.
In December Jobs took Powell to his favorite vacation spot, Kona Village in Hawaii. He had started going there nine years earlier when, stressed out at Apple, he had asked his assistant to pick out a place for him to escape. At first glance, he didn’t like the cluster of sparse thatched-roof bungalows nestled on a beach on the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with communal eating. But within hours he had begun to view it as
