later said. “It’s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is.” Jobs
recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t
breathe.”
Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur
had been like a father to
me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him about opera, and he and his
wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving into San
Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God, that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said,
‘No, it’s the best,’
and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s
eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over me. That really threw me
for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”
Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he
considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that was their decision to
make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should have separated the decision of what to
do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn’t think
I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted,
his anger at Sculley, his
feeling of betrayal, deepened.
The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant
to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an operations standpoint, there is no role
either today or
in the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.” The blunt comment
shocked
the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.
Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris, where
he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H. W. Bush.
From there he went to Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so
he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the
texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which came
from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. They were a calming bluish gray.
Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most major Apple
stores would be made of
this sandstone.
The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up
with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting Washington’s approval for some of the
required export licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the American embassy in Moscow,
Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the
Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President
Bush had encouraged him to
get computers into Russia in order to “foment revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian
restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant. “How could you suggest this
violates American law when it so obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting
Macs in the hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”
Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the
charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered assassinated by Stalin. At one
point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor. “You don’t want to talk
about Trotsky,” he said. “Our historians
have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a
great man anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak
to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs
could identify with.
Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American
embassy, and in his thank-you letter to Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs
planned to pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more vigorously in the coming year. “We are
tentatively planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a moment it looked as if Sculley’
s hope that Jobs would turn into a “global visionary” for the company might come to pass. But it
was not to be. Something much different was in store for September.
