Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he called
back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the door when he knocked,
so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the bedroom. Jobs was
lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished room. He let Murray in and they talked until almost
dawn.
Wednesday, May 29:
Jobs finally got hold of a tape of
Patton
,
which he watched Wednesday
evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another battle. Instead he urged
Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley’s announcement of the reorganization plan. There was no
option left other than to play the good soldier rather than the renegade commander.
Like a Rolling Stone
Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the troops
the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways glances, but few people acknowledged him
and none came over to provide public displays of affection. He stared without blinking at Sculley,
who would remember “Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,”
Sculley recalled,
“like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where you’re soft and destructibly mortal.” For a
moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly
trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land.
He had been dethroned from the company he created,
Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in
disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.”
Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.
As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Gassée as the new head of a
combined Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was a small box labeled
“chairman” with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley briefly noted
that
in that role, Jobs would play the part of “global visionary.” But he didn’t acknowledge Jobs’s
presence. There was a smattering of awkward applause.
Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on, seeing only
his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing his Bob Dylan tapes, especially
“The Times They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited the second verse
the day he unveiled the
Macintosh to the Apple shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended nicely: “For the
loser now / Will be later to win. . . .”
A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night,
led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock, and then he led
them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with any furniture. With Redse’s
help, he served some vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what really happened?” Hertzfeld
asked. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”
“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.” He blamed Sculley
for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage without him. His role as
chairman,
he complained, was completely ceremonial. He was being ejected from his Bandley 3
office to a small and almost empty building he nicknamed “Siberia.” Hertzfeld turned the topic to
happier days, and they began to reminisce about the past.
Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new album,
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