Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.
At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée would take over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table.
It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray’s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency. It better be important, she told the operator. “It is,” she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. “It’s over,” he said. Then he hung up.
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, Empire Burlesque, and Hertzfeld brought a copy that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The most notable track, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” with its apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate for the evening, but Jobs didn’t like it. It sounded almost disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been going downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.
Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age,” his friend and lawyer George Riley 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.”