A dated, profound, but very funny interview.
LAMB: Who's Steve Jobs?
ROBINSON: Steve Jobs -- that's right -- at his company ...
LAMB: Who is he?
ROBINSON: Who is Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs is the founder, in 1977, of Apple Computer Company. Steve is really one of the three or four most important people in the history of high technology. He and a couple of others virtually invented the personal computer. Apple flourished, Steve flourished and then -- 1985, I think, is the date when Steve left Apple. Maybe it had been a year or two -- in any event, in the middle 1980s, Steve Jobs left Apple. There's some dispute about whether he was pushed or jumped. It wasn't a completely happy set of circumstances, his leaving Apple. Apparently there was a feeling that they wanted to move out the entrepreneurial Steve Jobs and bring in more professional, seasoned management -- is the argument that was put forward. Steve then founded NeXT Computer Company.
LAMB: N-E-X-T?
ROBINSON: N-E-X-T. Correct.
LAMB: For those who may just have joined us, you're -- what year are we right now?
ROBINSON: We are now in 1990.
LAMB: And in 1990 you've got your Dartmouth degree, your Oxford degree and your speechwriting under your belt from both the Reagan White House and the George Bush vice presidency.
ROBINSON: Right.
LAMB: Your MBA is finished at Stanford.
ROBINSON: Just about to finish. I was still at business school. Right.
LAMB: Are you single?
ROBINSON: Single, yes, although in love -- wildly in love with a woman I since have been fortunate enough to marry. And I had to make some money because I knew I wanted to marry her -- marry Adida -- and start a family.
LAMB: And here you are with an opportunity to go see Robert Maxwell, Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch.
ROBINSON: Correct.
LAMB: What happened?
ROBINSON: You would think, wouldn't you, that there's got to be a happy ending to that story?
LAMB: Are you excited about this at this point?
ROBINSON: Thrilled. I thought the world was really coming my way. I had an interview -- in fact, two interviews with Robert Maxwell, although I thought that was over-long treatment so I didn't describe it in full in the book, but I'll crunch it down for you here. I met him in New York, and he had a suite at the top of the Helmsley Palace Hotel, which was the biggest hotel suite I have ever seen. I buzzed at the door and a little man came, opened the door, in a suit. It was a butler, a real butler, and he bowed to me from the head and said, "Good afternoon, sir." And then a huge voice from around -- "Ah, that would be Robinson. Show him in. Show him in." And this gigantic man -- Maxwell must have weighed 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce -- came padding around the corner in khaki trousers and a checked shirt and bare feet.
He motioned me in, and I was now in a room that was two stories high. A curving staircase went up to the right, and off to the left was a kind of two-story bank of windows looking out on the Manhattan skyline with a grand piano, and if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had come high-stepping down those stairs, it wouldn't have seemed out of place to me at all. Maxwell was -- I had been warned that he was abrasive, he was difficult, he liked to humiliate people. He was, in fact, during that half-hour or so, absolutely charming, wanted to know all about me, where was I from, and we just chatted. He asked me the question you had just asked, was I single? And I answered it the way I'd answered you. I said, "Yes, I am, but I'm in love." He says, "Ah, Robinson, do it the way I did it: seven children, one wife," which I thought was endearing. At the end of the conversation, he said, "Well, I would not be averse to continuing this discussion. You must come to see us in London. See so-and-so and she will make the arrangements." So ...
LAMB: By the way, how big was his company? And he died in what year?
ROBINSON: He died in 1990 -- was it 1990? Late '91? Early '92?
LAMB: So this is '90 and in '91 he ...
ROBINSON: He had just bought -- a couple of years before he had -- the answer is the company was very big. He had properties -- he had Pergamon Press in Britain, he owned media properties in France, elsewhere in Europe, and he had just bought the Macmillan Publishing Company in this country. So he was a major presence on the media scene, no doubt about that. I flew to London and I saw the other side of Robert Maxwell. I arrived and his secretary said, "Mr. Maxwell wants you to spend some time with his assistant" -- and so I did. And the assistant ...
LAMB: Name's Wilkes? Is that his real name?
ROBINSON: No, that's not his real name. I think probably ...
LAMB: Why did you change the name?
ROBINSON: Oh, I thought it would be a little unkind. Robert Maxwell was a difficult enough man to deal with, and so I felt some sympathy for this fellow. He was American and I was the one who was in need of a job, but he was trying very hard to sell me. He said, "Oh, Maxwell is -- he's a genius. This company is growing. What would you like to do here?" He just asked me what I would like to do. And then it was clear he kind of would give me any job I asked for, and it suddenly clicked that Maxwell must have told this person to hire me no matter what. As we were talking, the windows started to shake -- huge "whoop, whoop, whoop" sound -- and this fellow said to me, "Well, the helicopter's landing. He's here. We'll give him five minutes and go up and see the great man." Waited five minutes; upstairs we went in the elevator. And there -- the anteroom or hallway outside Maxwell's office was this sort of cavernous place with a huge Maxwell logo, which was a map of the world with a gigantic M imprinted on it. And I noticed in the carpet -- this logo was repeated all through the carpet, stretching off into -- sort of into the distance. And the secretary said, "He's waiting for you." So this fellow, Wilkes, as I call him in the book, opened the door. Just a gigantic room again -- tall windows looking out on the London skyline, Maxwell seated at a desk, and he stands up and he's wearing an electric blue suit, a hot pink bow tie, a bright blue shirt. He comes padding over to us. "Mr Robinson" -- shakes my hand -- "take a seat," and he motions to a kind of conference table.
LAMB: No, you missed the hair.
ROBINSON: Oh, right. Exactly. And his hair -- I'm sensitive to this. I'm getting gray myself now. His hair was absolutely jet black -- shoe-polish black -- as were his eyebrows. And it was so black that it occurred to me -- I think it had to occur to everybody who had anything to do with him -- it absolutely had to be dyed hair. He was just a huge, bizarre, colorful figure. And my first impression was this kind of circus bear. And Maxwell turned to the fellow I had been dealing with and he said, "Well, what are we going to do with this young man?" And Wilkes said, "Well, Mr. Maxwell, Peter and I have been talking about his career" -- of course, not true. We hadn't been talking in any serious way at all. And he spins out this story about how I should start with the media group -- or the television group -- and after a year or two I could be running a chunk of the business on my own. I thought, this sounds remarkably good -- in fact, surreal. It can't be that good.
LAMB: You're how old in 1990?
ROBINSON: I was now 33 years old with not a whit of business experience. And Maxwell listens to this, and pauses for a moment and he says, "No. Wrong use to make of Robinson entirely." Then he said that I would be his personal assistant. Maxwell said, "For example, this weekend I am flying to Moscow. Mr. Wilkes will accompany me. When Robinson joins the company, he will accompany me instead. He will sit in on the meetings, take notes -- notes on the negotiations -- return to the firm, and tell you and others what actions need to be taken as a result of the decisions I have reached." This is almost exactly the way he talked. And this fellow turned ashen. Suddenly not only was I being brought into the company, I was, in effect, being made his superior.
And tried to object and Maxwell said, "No, no, no. Negotiate a starting date with Mr. Robinson and a salary. If he wants to join the firm, good, and if he doesn't," waved his hand again. And just then the secretary walked in and said it was -- Ariel Sharon was on the line for Maxwell. So he got up and walked back to his desk and I heard him say, "Eric, how is the weather in Tel Aviv?" as we then went out of the office. Now he had flown me to London and he had spoken exactly five words to me: "Robinson, take a seat," and then discussed me as though I was a kind of side of beef hanging in a shop window, and I decided that whole experience was just a little bit too bizarre.
LAMB: But what was the reaction on the part of Mr. Wilkes?
ROBINSON: Oh, Mr. Wilkes -- we got out and down the hallway we went, and he kind of called me over to an alcove and he said, "You don't want this job. You don't want this job. Why don't you say it right now: 'I don't want this job.' Go ahead, say it."
LAMB: Did he really ask you to say it?
ROBINSON: Yes, he did. He said, "Maxwell is a madman." I mean, he took back everything he had told me half an hour before. "Personal assistant -- he'll leave you on a runway in Moscow." And I had subsequently found out stories -- someone was hired for a similar position by Maxwell, given a two-year contract, and Maxwell fired her the first day, gave her two years' salary, but said he didn't want to see her again. So he was just very mercurial. That was my experience with Robert Maxwell.
LAMB: By the way, the Maxwell estate turned out to be -- what? -- bankrupt?
ROBINSON: I don't know that it's ever been decided clearly and for certain. What happened was that Maxwell -- it became clear that he was facing huge debts and it also began to become clear that he had effectively stolen about a billion dollars from his company's pension funds to pay off debts elsewhere in the corporate structure. And he retired to his huge yacht and one night -- it's still a little bit unclear, but it now seems as though he jumped into the ocean. He either fell into the sea or jumped into the sea, and that was the end of Robert Maxwell.
LAMB: Steve Jobs.
ROBINSON: Steve Jobs -- completely different kind of event. The company is in Redwood City. I drove ...
LAMB: Out here.
ROBINSON: Out here. That's right. I drove 15 minutes from the Stanford campus. And Maxwell -- everything's kind of elaborate and 1930s movie set in feel. Steve Jobs -- the NeXT company headquarters -- there's a kind of Zen cleanliness about it -- everything is quiet, well-lighted, gray carpet, beige walls.
LAMB: By the way, how old was he in 1990?
ROBINSON: Steve is a year and a half or so older than I am, so in 1990 -- I was 30 -- what was I? -- 32 or 33? He was 34 or 35 years old. He's a young man. And he met me in a black turtleneck and jeans and sneakers, and here he was, the computer titan and the founder of the company. He and I went out for dinner. Again, we had a nice conversation, very, very pleasant. He's very intense. There's an intensity about Steve, but he's, to my mind, an entirely likeable guy -- never mentioned the job. Then he arranged for me to go back to NeXT and meet some of his people. So a receptionist seated me in a conference room with a can of Pepsi and I then met a stream of Steve's senior staff, beginning with the personnel director, who told me what the job was about.
And he said, "We've been having trouble with Steve -- hard to get his attention when we need him to get to come to meetings." It was clear they were frustrated with him because he was off doing all kinds of things, and they said, "He only has a secretary. He doesn't have a chief of staff, somebody who can just manage his time and make him show up when we need him to come to a meeting." In fact, he told me the story that Ross Perot, who was a major investor in NeXT, had called the day before, asked for Steve, Steve's secretary looked in Steve's office, saw Steve eating lunch at his desk, and told Ross Perot that Steve was unavailable. And Ross Perot had then called someone else in the company and just raised Texas hell, I guess. He said, "When I call Steve Jobs and want him on the phone, he ought to get on the phone."
OK. So what happened was that I heard this story from one after another of Steve's senior staff. They loved him, they were devoted to him personally, had no doubt about the importance of this new company that they were building in the world of high technology, but were immensely frustrated in dealing with Steve. And my job was to solve their problems, give Steve to them whenever they wanted him. But from Steve's point of view, I got the feeling that my job was to keep his senior staff at bay and give him the time he needed. Well, much as I liked them all and impressed as I was by that company, it just struck me that was a job no human being could do, least of all little me, who, again, at that point in life, had no whit of business experience.
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