Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  When Craft told him that she was a writer working on a romantic novel, Ellison bragged that he knew people whom she might find interesting and told her that he might be able to find her an agent. Pushing his luck, he suggested that maybe they should get together sometime. Politely, but firmly, Craft informed him that she was engaged and very definitely not on the market.

  Unabashed, Ellison’s next move was to send his driver, Carl Olsen, back to the restaurant with a note. The letter said a little more about himself, including the information that he too was in a serious relationship, by coincidence, with another writer. Craft says, “He was trying to defuse the tension in the situation. I thought, well, this is interesting. He knows that I’m not available for dating, but he’s not going away. He’s smart and funny, and there’s no reason why I can’t get to know him. To be honest, I thought he’d be great material for me. I was writing romance novels with larger-than-life heroes. But how often does someone like me meet someone like that?” In fact, the relationship that Ellison alluded to and that put Craft at her ease wasn’t quite as serious as he’d made out: “I’d been out with this other writer a few times—but I was stretching it a bit to call it a ‘relationship.’ ”

  Craft was engaged to and living with a young man she had met seven years earlier at Oberlin College, who was her first and, until then, her only boyfriend. After college, they had spent time together in Kenya and then had moved to San Francisco when Palmer had begun a Ph.D. at the University of California. The couple were broke: he was doing a little teaching while Craft did odd jobs—cleaning houses, working as a bartender, making pastries at a bakery—to support her writing. Ellison decided that the best approach was patience. “Whenever I was going to a particularly great event, I’d invite Melanie.” One such was the premiere of the movie Toy Story, made by Steve Jobs’s “other company,” the computer animation firm Pixar Animation Studios. If meeting Jobs at a film premiere wasn’t enough to impress Craft, Ellison was soon able to top that.

  Invited to a dinner in honor of President Bill Clinton by California senator Dianne Feinstein, Ellison insisted that Craft go with him. Ellison says, “We’re in this room with the senator and about forty other people. Suddenly, without any announcement, the president appears in the entryway. All heads turn toward ‘the man,’ and everyone stops talking. Then, in this dead silent room, the president looks right at me and says, ‘Hi, Larry.’ Melanie’s eyes widen as the president walks over and starts talking to us. It was perfect. Thank you, Mr. President. So, here I am, pulling out all the stops, introducing her to the most fascinating people I know—Steve Jobs, Josh Lederberg, the president—desperately trying to make some progress with this woman. But it’s not working. I mean, she’s having a good time when we get together. She thinks my friends are interesting. She thinks I’m interesting. But she didn’t want to date me.”

  Inexperienced though Craft was, it didn’t take a genius to realize that Ellison’s interest in her went further than having someone cute on his arm to accompany him to glitzy events. But she enjoyed his company and reckoned that if she didn’t respond, he would get over it. She was also well aware that his persistent courtship didn’t mean that he wasn’t seeing other women. She says: “I looked him up on the Internet, and there was all of this awful, tabloid-style press about him. It was obvious that he wasn’t living as a monk, but he never made a move on me. I think he knew that it would be the surest way to make me disappear. I liked him, liked spending time with him, and I was trying hard to keep us out of the kind of confrontational situation that would force an end to the friendship. It’s funny, in retrospect. Knowing him now, I’d guess that my unavailability was part of what kept him interested in me. It’s just like they tell you to behave in The Rules, but I meant it.”

  Not only did Ellison continue to ask Craft out, he would even ask her fiancé as well, on one occasion inviting both Melanie and her fiancé to his annual garden party at Atherton to celebrate the cherry blossoms. At the party, Ellison introduced him to Steve Jobs. Afterwards Jobs asked, “Larry, did you say that guy was Melanie’s fiancé? What’s going on? What do you think you’re doing?” “It’s all part of the strategy,” explained Ellison. “Strategy?” said Jobs. “You call this a strategy?” Ellison says, “It became sort of a long-running joke. Every time Steve saw me, he’d ask, ‘How’s the Melanie strategy going?’ Then he’d laugh at me. He never missed an opportunity to tell someone we both knew all about it. One day I heard this raucous laughter coming from Ray Lane’s office. It sounded like there was a fraternity party going on in there. So I walk in, and there’s Steve with Ray. They take one look at me, and they both start laughing again. They had been discussing the ‘Melanie strategy.’ Steve thought it was one of the stupidest things he’d ever seen, me having a mad crush on this young girl.”

  In fact, even without Ellison’s genteel pursuit, Craft’s relationship was already breaking down. When the couple broke up, Ellison was there to pick up the pieces. Ellison says, “A year and a half after I met Melanie, I kissed her for the first time. We were both sitting on the couch in my living room. Right after I kissed her I told her, ‘Don’t move, I’ve got to do something.’ ” Ellison picked up the phone and Melanie watched him dial. “Steve, you know the Melanie strategy? Yeah, well—it worked.” Then he hung up.8

  Not long after, Craft moved into Ellison’s house on Isabella Avenue. Craft says, “When I first met him, I thought he was a ‘suit.’ In my value system at the time, a businessman was a big step down from an academic or an artistic type. But Larry surprised me. He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever known. The suit, I learned, is his way of giving the finger to that conformist casual dress code in Silicon Valley. Larry isn’t one for following the crowd.” One of the things about Ellison that most impressed Craft, which may surprise some people, was his honesty: “He’s very truthful. He says the things that other people are afraid to say. As a woman, I’ve learned to dissemble, but I get pretty damn tired of it sometimes. In him, I saw the personification of that quote from Shakespeare: ‘While you live, tell truth and shame the Devil.’ ”

  Six years later, the relationship is still going strong, which means that it has already outlasted all previous ones other than his first marriage. It seems to work mainly because each has found a way of allowing the other space. Ellison says of Craft, “She writes, and writing is an all-consuming, solitary task. If she’s not writing, she’s not happy. So she spends a lot of her time alone. She does, however, come out of her room for meals.” She says of him, “He needs freedom within a stable framework, but I haven’t always been able to offer him—or anyone else—either of those things. I was really young when we met, and Larry has had to push me toward adulthood at times. I didn’t always go willingly, but the end result is that our relationship has gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older and become more focused on doing a good job with my own life. It took a lot of hard work on both of our parts. It could easily have gone the other way.”

  During what she sees as that period of dependency, Craft was desperate for Ellison to marry her. She says now, “I pushed much harder than I should have. I mean, I hardly even knew Larry when I was demanding that I become his wife. It was childish of me, and quite rightly, it scared the hell out of him. At the time, I didn’t understand his history with this issue, and I was angry with him for being so cautious. He had to do a careful balancing act with me. He never said, ‘No, I don’t want to marry you.’ He’d say, ‘Yes, let’s do it in the spring, when the cherry trees are blooming.’ And then spring would come closer and closer, and I’d feel his reluctance. It was painful, because I read it as a lack of love, rather than a lack of confidence.

  “I don’t feel that reluctance in him anymore, but I know things now that I didn’t know then. I learned—the hard way—that outside of our friends and family, the world doesn’t give a fig about me, other than as Larry’s partner. When I was working lousy jobs, dreaming of someday hitting The New York Times’s best-seller lis
t, I sure didn’t foresee that the first mention of my name in print would be in Vanity Fair as Larry Ellison’s latest girlfriend, a ‘blond twenty-something in tight jeans.’ But that’s the way things work. My second book comes out in the fall, and I want to have accomplished at least that much before Larry and I go on to the next stage. I know now how easy it is to get subsumed. I don’t think that it would happen again, but I’m not as sure as I’d like to be.”

  Craft’s writing may be the savior of their relationship. Now finishing her third book, Craft rarely goes anywhere without her Apple laptop, frequently tapping away in the back of a limo or on the plane when accompanying Ellison on business. Hunched over her Mac, she seems to be proclaiming that although she’s with Ellison, she has a life and identity that are separate and distinct from his. Ellison says, “She once read to me from a book about the temperament of writers. It said that writers should never get married because they are so obsessive, self-possessed, and narcissistic. I thought, ‘Really? Me too. This just might work.’ ” Ellison dreads the kind of relationship in which two people almost merge into one: “The happier you are with your separate and independent life, the better your relationship is likely to be. Our relationship is best when her writing is going well and things are good at Oracle.”

  For all that and the age difference—of which Ellison is more aware than Craft—they are comfortable with each other. Returning with Ellison from a business trip to Washington, D.C., on board the GV, Ellison suddenly said to me, “A child is irreplaceable. You’d never trade your child for a smarter, more beautiful child. Your child is part of your family. Melanie’s part of my family now. Maybe there’s a woman out there who’s smarter or better-looking or whatever, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not looking for something better. I’m happy with what I have.” He went on to say that he had even been thinking of having children with Melanie, if that was something that she also wanted to do: “I’d love to have more children, but it’s completely her call.” Although the pressures at Oracle were building, he seemed very happy.

  Those closest to Ellison, such as Jimmy Linn and Steve Jobs, agree that Craft has been good for him, bringing a stability and constancy to his life that was alarmingly lacking before. Jobs says, “Guys can get an illness in which they believe there can always be a better girl around the next corner. Nick Hornby, in the book High Fidelity, calls it ‘death by small increments.’ It’s a disease that can get worse if you’re very successful and you have a great many options. But time takes options away. I remember chatting with Larry when he was in his dating phase and saying, ‘You’re fifty now, imagine yourself when you’re sixty doing this. Imagine yourself when you’re seventy doing this; it’s going to get really fucking weird.’ I think he gets that now, and the relationship with Melanie is what’s finally got him there.”

  But positive though friends are about Ellison’s relationship with Craft, there’s a lurking fear that marriage and children could alter something that works on its own terms. One said, “He loves Melanie, but Larry’s a very fluid guy.” Others expressed skepticism about Craft’s apparent uncertainty about whether to go to “the next stage,” as she puts it, suggesting that she might “only want to have children to solidify her standing with Larry.”9 Others, less uncharitably, are just worried about the damage that failing to sustain a fourth marriage might do to their friend.

  Ellison and Craft both know that children would change the dynamics of a successful relationship fundamentally—and that’s always scary. They wouldn’t be the first couple to decide that the risk is simply too great. That they love each other is not in doubt. But most crucially, and despite everything they both say about the need to give each other space, I think they have come to depend upon each other. There is much about the relationship that is difficult for Craft: the age difference alone is a challenge; Ellison dominates even when he doesn’t intend to, and he comes with quite a lot of personal baggage. The main reason, however, why this relationship is more likely to endure than the others is the change that has taken place within Ellison himself. As he says, “I can divide my life into two phases: the first, where I was desperately trying to be the person I thought I should be, and the second, where I finally accepted the person that I really am. The second phase has been much happier than the first.” In other words, to be capable of accepting the love of others, you first have to love yourself.

  * * *

  1. LE writes: Nancy was always willing to go the extra mile to look good.

  2. LE writes: Bob Miner once said that as long as Stanford keeps turning out good-looking twenty-two-year-olds, I’ll keep marrying them. I don’t think this is true, but I do think it’s funny.

  3. LE writes: Kathleen was slam dancing at the Hookers’ Ball—a big charity event in San Francisco—when she accidentally bumped into a six-foot-tall lady of the night. Kathleen said excuse me, but the lady was unforgiving. She retaliated by intentionally slamming right back into Kathleen. Big mistake. Kathleen bangs into her again, this time really hard. The lady goes nuts. She spins around, opens both of her hands like claws, and starts screaming wildly while charging right at Kathleen. Bigger mistake. Kathleen instantly adopts the perfect boxer’s stance, knees slightly bent, both fists raised on either side of her face, and then she fires off a beautiful right hand at the charging six-footer. It was a devastating one-punch knockout, quite similar to the punch Lennox Lewis threw at a charging Michael Grant in the first round of their recent championship fight. I have other great Kathleen stories, but I’m afraid to tell them.

  4. LE writes: It took me a while, but I finally figured out what it was: the woman was pure evil.

  5. LE writes: It is no longer considered an acceptable legal risk for a male doctor to examine a female patient without a female nurse being present. If the doctor gets accused of inappropriate behavior, it’s the nurse’s testimony that keeps it from being a case of his word against hers. That’s what Judge Linn was most afraid of—that this case was going to come down to my word against Lee’s. Fortunately, we had hard evidence that Lee was lying.

  6. LE writes: The accusation of my wrongdoing was a sensational story, so it got front-page coverage. Me being proven innocent was a much less interesting story, so it got a lot less coverage. Besides, it contradicted all the earlier stories. That’s just how the news business works: the sensational stuff goes on page one. To be fair, one publication, Elle magazine, did run a cover story called “Sex, Lies and Email in Silicon Valley” after the trial was over.

  7. LE writes: Josh would usually stay at my house when he was in town. I always looked forward to these visits. We’d spend the late evenings eating oatmeal cookies and discussing politics, molecular biology, and the Internet.

  8. LE writes: I can’t believe I immediately called Steve. But I did. I felt like I had been drafted in the first round by the Lakers, and I wanted to tell my best friend.

  9. LE writes: Clearly this anonymous critic has Melanie confused with a character in a Tom Wolfe novel.

  21

  LARRYLAND

  “Hey, Ellison! You’re out of fucking control!” The familiar voice of Scott McNealy, the feisty, faux-blue-collar boss of Sun Microsystems, rang out across the lake. It was April 13, 2002, and Larry Ellison was holding his annual cherry blossom party for about fifty of his closest friends. Although the parties were famous in Silicon Valley for the exclusiveness of the guest list and their restrained elegance, this year’s was something special. Instead of holding it in the pretty grounds of his house in Atherton, Ellison had decided to throw open Sanbashi (Three Bridges), his lakeside Japanese village inspired by the houses and gardens of imperial Kyoto, to his friends for the first time. He had been building this home, at first in his imagination and then in the Woodside hills, for more than ten years.

  I was the first to arrive because Ellison had promised me a tour of the six houses, based on originals built between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. I’d been over the place several times in the
previous eighteen months, but this was the first time I’d been there since the water had gone into the five-acre lake that lay at the heart of the forty-acre site. As Ellison had promised, the water didn’t just provide a focal point, it seemed almost magically to shrink the houses. When I had first seen them, protected by scaffolding and cladding, standing proud above the twelve-foot-deep concrete lakebed, they had seemed substantial, even imposing, structures. But now they withdrew into the artfully designed landscape scenery, dwarfed by the giant redwoods behind them.

  From a distance, they seemed so polite and unassuming that it was difficult to comprehend either the ambition or the expense—at well over $100 million, probably the costliest American home built for a private individual since William Randolph Hearst’s grandiloquent San Simeon. Although far more human in scale than San Simeon or Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great house at Newport, Rhode Island, The Breakers, it was just as fantastic.

  Yet McNealy’s idea that Ellison was out of control was precisely wrong. Just as Ellison at times appeared determined to use the centralizing power of Oracle’s computer technology to control every lever of a giant company, it seemed that the beautiful park he had created was all about control, too. Ellison had spent years learning about the Japanese aesthetic and thinking about the kind of environment that would most soothe his senses and calm his soul. Nothing was more controlling than the Japanese approach to landscape design in which nature was distilled to its sublime essence. At its heart was a supreme paradox: heightened naturalness is the result of hugely disciplined contrivance.