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It soon became clear that Apple – a company that rarely gives interviews – was not going to take part in the film. Neither would Jobs’s sister, novelist Mona Simpson, or even his official biographer Walter Isaacson.
But other key figures were happy to throw light on Jobs’s life, from his days as a hippy taking LSD in 1970s California to his final years at the helm of a corporation that was briefly the most valuable in the world. Many of the insights that follow did not make the final film.
One of those who were happy to talk was Steve Wozniak, the computer wizard who founded Apple with Jobs in 1976, and left fulltime employment there in the mid 1980s. Perhaps rightly he was not overly modest, telling us, “Steve and I, we were like a Lennon-McCartney partnership.” But interestingly he didn’t leave it at that.
As if to balance some of the recent reporting which implied Jobs was Apple, Wozniak made it clear which Beatle he preferred to be seen as: “People always attributed me with Lennon because I had this technical brilliance and really built and designed the machines. And then Steve knew how to take it to the public. But he had his own type of brilliance too.” The last time they spoke, Jobs had just wanted to check Wozniak wasn’t coming back to Apple, as a newspaper report had suggested.
John Sculley was another important player who took the chance to lay some history to rest. Yes, he told us the now legendary story of how Jobs persuaded him to leave Pepsi and become Apple’s CEO in 1983, challenging him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
But more extraordinary was his mea culpa over his role in Jobs’s departure from Apple in 1985, when Sculley had him sacked from the struggling Macintosh division. “In hindsight that was a terrible decision ... I didn't appreciate what it meant to be the visionary of the business, that he saw a world that was far bigger than I could understand in those days.”
Jobs never forgave Sculley. “We never really made it up. The separation was such a bitter impact with Steve. There were people who tried to get us back together and Steve basically had no interest in that.”
Jobs had few close friends, and fewer still who will talk. But we did speak to Avie Tevanian, who worked with him for two decades, most recently as head of software at Apple until 2006. Tevanian organised Jobs’s stag party in 1991, but struggled to persuade other friends to join them.
“They kept saying, 'nah, I don't think it's appropriate that I go', or 'no I'm too busy, I can't make it'. Everybody had a reason not to come.”
Jobs, Tevanian and one other friend went to a bar, where they had a tequila shot each. “Steve looks at it and kind of sniffs it, and [is] like, 'what am I supposed to do with it?' So we demonstrated the proper technique, and we said, 'now you try Steve', and he wouldn't do it. He just sat there the whole night, sipping his shot of tequila.” Jobs later sent Tevanian an email saying he'd had a great time with his true friends.
Jobs spent his life going against conventional thinking. When he discovered he had cancer of the pancreas in 2004, Jobs turned to alternative remedies and a vegan diet. “Many of us around him, myself included, his wife included, were saying 'Steve, maybe you should just have some surgery and get it over with',” recalls Tevanian. Jobs refused.
“He was the kind of person that could convince himself of things that weren't necessarily true,” says Tevanian. “That always worked with him for designing products, where he could go to people and ask them to do something that they thought was impossible. And I think he truly thought that through some unconventional means he could cure himself.” Nine months after his diagnosis, Jobs embraced conventional medicine wholeheartedly. By then the cancer had spread.
