Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I realized for the first time in four months that I couldn’t say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left the apartment and walked back across the park to the Carlyle.
Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management retreat at Pajaro Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in Greenwich, he was still having trouble adjusting to the casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to impose an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion descended into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.
At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,” someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you get a product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one would have challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for the beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone else shouted that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way. “The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what was to come,” Sculley later wrote.
One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the floor rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it was similar to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment” early in his own career.
Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”
Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early months of their relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who will understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out: