Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER TWENTY
A REGULAR GUY
Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word
Mona Simpson and her fiancé, Richard Appel, 1991
Joan Baez
In 1982, when he was still working on the Macintosh, Jobs met the famed folksinger Joan Baez 
through her sister Mimi Fariña, who headed a charity that was trying to get donations of 
computers for prisons. A few weeks later he and Baez had lunch in Cupertino. “I wasn’t expecting 
a lot, but she was really smart and funny,” he recalled. At the time, he was nearing the end of his 
relationship with Barbara Jasinski. They had vacationed in Hawaii, shared a house in the Santa 
Cruz mountains, and even gone to one of Baez’s concerts together. As his relationship with 
Jasinski flamed out, Jobs began getting more serious with Baez. He was twenty-seven and Baez 
was forty-one, but for a few years they had a romance. “It turned into a serious relationship 
between two accidental friends who became lovers,” Jobs recalled in a somewhat wistful tone.
Elizabeth Holmes, Jobs’s friend from Reed College, believed that one of the reasons he went 
out with Baez—other than the fact that she was beautiful and funny and talented—was that she 
had once been the lover of Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” she later said. 
Baez and Dylan had been lovers in the early 1960s, and they toured as friends after that, including 
with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. (Jobs had the bootlegs of those concerts.)
When she met Jobs, Baez had a fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, from her marriage to the 
antiwar activist David Harris. At lunch she told Jobs she was trying to teach Gabe how to type. 
“You mean on a typewriter?” Jobs asked. When she said yes, he replied, “But a typewriter is 
antiquated.”
“If a typewriter is antiquated, what does that make me?” she asked. There was an awkward 
pause. As Baez later told me, “As soon as I said it, I realized the answer was so obvious. The 
question just hung in the air. I was just horrified.”
Much to the astonishment of the Macintosh team, Jobs burst into the office one day with Baez 
and showed her the prototype of the Macintosh. They were dumbfounded that he would reveal the 
computer to an outsider, given his obsession with secrecy, but they were even more blown away to 
be in the presence of Joan Baez. He gave Gabe an Apple II, and he later gave Baez a Macintosh. 

---

On visits Jobs would show off the features he liked. “He was sweet and patient, but he was so 
advanced in his knowledge that he had trouble teaching me,” she recalled.
He was a sudden multimillionaire; she was a world-famous celebrity, but sweetly down-to-
earth and not all that wealthy. She didn’t know what to make of him then, and still found him 
puzzling when she talked about him almost thirty years later. At one dinner early in their 
relationship, Jobs started talking about Ralph Lauren and his Polo Shop, which she admitted she 
had never visited. “There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you,” he said, and 
then 
drove her to the store in the Stanford Mall. Baez recalled, “I said to myself, far out, terrific, I’m 
with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.” When they got 
to the store, Jobs bought a handful of shirts for himself and showed her the red dress. “You ought 
to buy it,” he said. She was a little surprised, and told him she couldn’t really afford it. He said 
nothing, and they left. “Wouldn’t you think if someone had talked like that the whole evening, that 
they were going to get it for you?” she asked me, seeming genuinely puzzled about the incident. 
“The mystery of the red dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.” He would give her 
computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he made sure to say they were left 
over from an event in the office. “He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic,” she said.
When he was working on the NeXT computer, he went to Baez’s house in Woodside to show 
her how well it could produce music. “He had it play a Brahms quartet, and he told me eventually 
computers would sound better than humans playing it, even get the innuendo and the cadences 
better,” Baez recalled. She was revolted by the idea. “He was working himself up into a fervor of 
delight while I was shrinking into a rage and thinking, How could you defile music like that?”
Jobs would confide in Debi Coleman and Joanna Hoffman about his relationship with Baez and 
worry about whether he could marry someone who had a teenage son and was probably past the 
point of wanting to have more children. “At times he would belittle her as being an ‘issues’ singer 
and not a true ‘political’ singer like Dylan,” said Hoffman. “She was a strong woman, and he 
wanted to show he was in control. Plus, he always said he wanted to have a family, and with her 
he knew that he wouldn’t.”
And so, after about three years, they ended their romance and drifted into becoming just 
friends. “I thought I was in love with her, but I really just liked her a lot,” he later said. “We 
weren’t destined to be together. I wanted kids, and she didn’t want any more.” In her 1989 
memoir, Baez wrote about her breakup with her husband and why she never remarried: “I 
belonged alone, which is how I have been since then, with occasional interruptions that are mostly 
picnics.” 
She did add a nice acknowledgment at the end of the book to “Steve Jobs for forcing me to use 
a word processor by putting one in my kitchen.”