Chapter 66 Joan Baez

When Jobs was still developing the Macintosh in 1982, he met her sister, the famous folk singer Joan Baez, through Mimi Farina, the head of a charity fund that donated computers to prisons.A few weeks later, he and Baez had lunch in Cupertino. "I didn't expect too much, and she turned out to be so witty and funny," he recalls.At the time, his relationship with Barbara Yasinski was drawing to a close.Jasinski was a beautiful Polynesian-Polish beauty who worked for Regis McKenna.They've vacationed together in Hawaii, lived together in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and even attended Baez concerts together.As the passion between Jobs and Yasinski faded, he became more serious with Baze.He was 27 at the time and Baez was 41, but their romance lasted several years. "The two met by chance, developed from friends to lovers, and had a serious relationship." Jobs recalled sadly.

Elizabeth Holmes, who was a good friend of Jobs at Reed College, believes that one of the reasons Jobs hooked up with Bates—besides her beauty, wit, and natural beauty—was that she was once Bob Dylan’s friend. lover. "Steve loved the association with Dylan," she said later.Baez and Dylan fell in love in the early 1960s, and they toured together as friends, including the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. (Jobs also has illegal recordings from these concerts.) By the time she met Jobs, Bates already had a 14-year-old son, Gabriel, with her ex-husband, antiwar activist David Harris.At lunch, she told Jobs that she was teaching Gabe how to type. "You mean typing on a typewriter?" Jobs asked.She said yes, and he added, "But typewriters are old."

"The typewriter is old, what about me?" she asked.There was an awkward silence.“When I said that, I realized how obvious the answer was. The question just hung in the air. I was terrified,” Baez later told me. Much to the surprise of the Macintosh team, Jobs stormed into the office one day with Baez and showed her a prototype of the Macintosh.He was so concerned about secrecy that he would expose this computer to an outsider, which stunned them, but what surprised them even more was that this person turned out to be Joan Baez.He gave Gabe an Apple II computer, and later Bates a Macintosh.Jobs would go to Bates' house to show off the features he liked. "He was very kind and patient, but his knowledge was too advanced to teach me," she recalled.

He is a multimillionaire who suddenly became rich, and she is a world celebrity but lives a down-to-earth life and is not that rich.She couldn't understand him then, and she still finds him puzzling when she talks about him thirty years later.At a dinner early in their relationship, Jobs talked about Ralph Lauren and his polo clothing store, which she admitted she had never been to. "There's a beautiful red dress over there that would suit you perfectly," he said, and drove her straight to the store in Stanford Mall.Baez recalled: "I said to myself, this is so good, I follow the richest man in the world, and he wants me to have a beautiful dress." At the specialty store, Jobs bought himself a lot of shirts , showed her the red dress and said she would look great in it.She agrees. "You should buy it," he said.A little surprised, she told him she couldn't afford it.He didn't say anything, and they left. "Don't you think, if a guy talks like that all night, he must be going to buy it for you?" she asked me, looking genuinely bewildered by the incident. "I leave the secret of the red dress to you to decipher. I think it's a little strange." He would give her the computer but not the dress; when he gave her flowers, he would say it was an office event leftover. "He was both romantic and terrified of romance," she said.

During the development of the NeXT computer, Jobs visited Baez at his Woodside home to show her the powerful musical capabilities of the NeXT. “He had it play a Brahms quartet, and he told me that the computer would eventually be able to play it better than a human, even better in terms of mood and rhythm,” recalls Baez, who repelled the idea. , "The more he talked, the more excited he became, but the more I listened, the more angry I became. I was thinking: How can you be so profane about music?" Jobs would confide in Debbie Coleman and Joanna Hoffman about his relationship with Baez, and he was a little concerned about the possibility of marrying her: she already had a teenage son and might have passed. The stage of wanting to have more children. "Sometimes he would say she was just an event singer, not really a 'political' singer like Dylan," Hoffman said. "She was a woman with a strong personality, and he wanted to show that he was in control. Plus, he always said he wanted to have children, and he knew he wouldn't have one with her."

In this way, after about 3 years, they ended their relationship and slowly became friends. "I thought I loved her, but I just liked her very much," he later said. "We were destined not to be together. I wanted children and she didn't want any more." In his 1989 memoir, Bates wrote, On her split from her husband, and why she didn't remarry: "I belonged to myself, so I've been alone since then, with occasional hiccups and mostly picnics." Acknowledgments at the end of the book In it, she wrote such a warm sentence: "Thanks to Steve Jobs, in order to force me to use a word processor, he insisted on putting one in my kitchen."