Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  Lillian Ellison was the second wife of the considerably older Louis Ellison. A Russian Jew, Louis had come to the United States in 1905 aboard a Black Sea steamer. He is said to have escaped the Crimea’s grinding poverty on the back of a hay cart, carrying his only possessions: a brass samovar and a gold locket. Louis was a model immigrant. He changed his unpronounceable Russian name to Ellison (after Ellis Island), worked hard, married, had two children, and, during the 1920s, prospered in the Chicago real estate business, buying up properties for rental with borrowed money. Intensely patriotic toward the country that had given him his chance in life, he even had political ambitions.

  However, as happened to many others, when the Depression struck, the modest fortune he had made was largely wiped out—his tenants could no longer pay the rent, which meant that the highly leveraged Ellison defaulted on his interest payments. Under the strain, in 1929, his wife left both him and the two children, Jack and Doris. Lou Ellison managed to put his life back together, remarrying and finding respectable, if relatively poorly paid, work as an auditor for the Federal Housing Authority. His second wife, Lillian, who was childless herself, persuaded him to take Larry in.

  It seems likely that Lou, old enough to be Larry’s grandfather, was not exactly enthusiastic about the arrangement. For one thing, it would have been an additional financial burden. The family wasn’t poor, but money was sufficiently tight that they needed the additional income Lillian made as a bookkeeper. In any event, he and Larry never became close, Lou finding it difficult to display much affection to his adopted son. Looking back, Ellison has some sympathy with Lou’s predicament, but he is still resentful about being denied the paternal love and approval that he “promiscuously” showers on his own children.

  Part of the problem was that Larry and Lou had very different attitudes toward authority. Ellison says, “His worldview went way beyond Nathan Hale’s, ‘My country right or wrong.’ He believed that our country’s officials, and authority figures in general, were always right and should be obeyed without question. The governor, the mayor, the police are in their jobs for a reason, he’d say; ‘They know things you don’t.’ I thought, ‘Sure, they’re brilliant, just like my teachers.’ I understood his gratitude toward the United States, but I couldn’t accept his blind faith in authority figures. In fact, I had the opposite point of view. I questioned everything. It’s like Mark Twain says, ‘What is an expert anyway? Just some guy from out of town.’ This lack of respect for authority made it just about impossible for me to get along with my father.”

  A consequence of Ellison’s insistent questioning of authority was that his grades at school were usually poor. “I didn’t respect or like most of my teachers. I didn’t think they were very smart, and half the time they didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. They constantly made mistakes, and I enjoyed pointing them out. They didn’t like that at all, but I did.” Although he was good at mathematics and enjoyed reading, he was never prepared to submit to the rigors of uncongenial course work or accept the fact that progress at school depends on jumping through the hoops that teachers specify. When somebody told him that he would look back on his school days as being the best years of his life, he replied, “If that’s true, I’m going to kill myself right now.” He says that he never felt as if he fitted in but denies believing that he was in any sense “special.” “I was a quick-witted and aggressively glib teenager. As I got older, humor became as important an emotional defense mechanism as repression. Humor was also my primary social skill, equally useful for charming friends and attacking enemies. Because I was so quick and glib, I thought I must be reasonably smart. But underneath the bravado there was a lot of doubt and insecurity.”

  He still bitterly remembers a confrontation with his biology teacher at South Shore High School. She happened to be the mother of his best friend, Dennis Coleman, and the wife of Harold Coleman, a chemistry professor at the University of Chicago whom Ellison admired for his intellect and commitment to reason. “I was having dinner over at the Colemans’, and she says to me, ‘Ellison’—she never called me Larry—‘I’m going to flunk you in biology because you don’t attend the labs.’ True, I was cutting lab to play basketball, but what’s attendance got to do with anything? I was getting As and Bs on the exams. I knew more biology than most of the people in the class. So I said, ‘What if I get the highest grade in the final, would you still flunk me?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Let me get this straight: even if I clearly prove I know more about biology than anyone else in the class, I will be the only one in the class that flunks. Is that correct?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Okay. I understand completely. That makes a lot of sense.’

  “It was yet more proof to me that school was just a bad joke—not that I needed any additional evidence. Anyway, her husband, Dr. Coleman, noticed the absurdity of it all and suggested that if I did indeed get the highest grade on the final that I should get a C. She eventually agreed. I was sure that I could get everything right on the final. All I had to do was study for a change. The only thing left that could go wrong was a tie. So as I left, I told her to make sure that the exam was hard; I didn’t want there to be a lot of people getting everything right. She was really pissed, and she gave us a very difficult final. I ended up earning my C by getting a 96 on the final while the second highest grade was around 60. I always thought it interesting how teachers, coaches, and other authority figures value obedience more than knowledge or skill, and effort more than results. They just love being the boss.”1

  The frustrations that Ellison experienced because of his inability to establish good relationships with people in authority would stay with him until he discovered the liberation of computer programming, a discipline in which you are judged only on your ability to solve a problem. “I was working at this Silicon Valley company as a computer programmer. The CEO called me into his office to complain about me coming to work late all the time. So I asked him, ‘Are any of my programming projects late?’ No. ‘Are anyone else’s projects on time?’ No. ‘Would you rather me come in on time and deliver late or come in late and deliver on time? Maybe you should ask the other programmers to get a little more sleep and come in later. They might be more productive.’ I couldn’t believe it. Why should the CEO care what time I come to work? He’s measuring the wrong thing. The only thing that matters is results. Shortly thereafter the board fired him, and the new CEO promoted me to VP of development. Silicon Valley usually values function over form, results over effort. I finally found my place in the world.”

  Not surprisingly, Lou Ellison concluded early on that Larry’s failure to comply with authority would be his undoing. Sadly, he could never resist any opportunity to remind his son that he would amount to nothing. Yet it would be wrong to say that as a boy Ellison was unloved. Lillian never gave him less than unconditional affection, and Doris, nineteen years older, was full of tough, wisecracking love for her wayward baby brother. Soon after Ellison learned of his adoption, his family moved to Clyde Avenue on Chicago’s South Shore to set up home in a second-floor two-bedroom apartment next to the bungalow where Doris now lived with her lawyer husband, David Linn, their nine-year-old son, Jimmy, and their daughter, Leslie. Jimmy Linn, now, like his father before him a judge in Chicago, says that he and Ellison were like brothers: “It appeared to me that he looked on my mother and father as quasi parents because of the limitations of the relationship with his own parents, especially his father. He saw my father as a role model, and he always felt very comfortable at our house. My father was very generous with his affection because Larry was there and he could see that he needed it. I think he felt a little sorry for him because he didn’t have that much encouragement in his own home.”

  For all their support, the Linns didn’t see anything in Ellison to mark him out as exceptional, just a little odd. Jimmy Linn says, “My father liked Larry but didn’t perceive him as anything particularly special. Although it’s not a word I would have used at the tim
e, I remember feeling that he was eccentric, a little bit unbridled but very bright. He was very witty, constantly wisecracking, and he would always talk in superlative terms about everything, always exaggerating about the best of this and the best of that. I used to think that Larry was kind of blowing hot air, he was full of baloney—his sense of humor was built on gross exaggeration. Now, with hindsight, I see that he was visionary at a young age. But at the time that wasn’t clear. Mainly we just played sports. He would never, ever let me win unless it was on merit. I will attribute this to him: he helped me become a better athlete, and he taught me all about competitiveness.”

  Ellison might have been competitive, but he was incapable of channeling it into anything useful. After graduating from South Shore High School, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign as a premed student. He found the lectures tedious and had the same problems with authority that had contributed to his poor grades at South Shore. He says, “It was unbearable. In comparative anatomy we had to memorize the names of all the bones, muscles, nerves, etc., of a dogfish shark and a cat. Why? They weren’t teaching us about the fundamental mechanisms of the evolutionary process. That would have been interesting. That’s important. That’s essential to understanding how the world works. But no. Instead, we spent all our time memorizing a bunch of Latin names of animal body parts. That’s not learning. It’s some form of medieval torture. I thought it was a total waste of time, and I couldn’t do it.”

  Ellison never got around to taking his finals at the University of Illinois. Whether he would have even if Lillian Ellison hadn’t fallen sick and died of pancreatic cancer is doubtful, but the death of his mother further destabilized him and he just upped and left. Oddly, however, he wasn’t quite ready to give up on academic study, later enrolling as a physics and math major at the University of Chicago. Despite his evident unsuitability for university life, he maintained a fantasy that one day he might be a professor like Harold Coleman. The University of Chicago was a marginally more positive experience than Illinois, but he still lasted only a couple of quarters.

  The one positive thing that came out of it was that he learned enough about computer programming to earn rather more money than in his previous job as a beach lifeguard. It gave him the confidence to quit university for a second time and, at the age of twenty, to make a break with his old life. He bought himself an almost new 1964 turquoise Ford Thunderbird and headed west. He says, “I just packed all my stuff into the car and headed for Berkeley. It seemed like a good idea.” If it occurred to him that the Linns might feel abandoned, it didn’t seem to bother him. It was as if the death of Lillian had finally jolted him into reacting to his adoption and he did so by getting as far away from his adopted family as possible. Part of the Linns’ disappointment was that Larry seemed to be proving that Lou Ellison had been right all along. Jimmy says, “There was some anger. My father thought it was another example of Larry being immature and not focused. I felt a sense of being abandoned by my big brother. I felt a sense of loss because he didn’t make any effort to stay in touch.”

  The separation from the Linns proved to be temporary. While at college, Jimmy ran into a personal jam: “I needed some help, and it was something I couldn’t go to my parents with. I hadn’t talked to Larry in a few years, but I wrote him a letter and he immediately responded, providing the help and support I needed without question. I was very relieved—both to get the help and to start up the relationship again.” David and Doris were also relieved to have Larry back in their lives, although they were still worried about the lack of direction in both his personal and professional life: he seemed to be drifting, never staying long in a job, and his marriage to Adda Quinn was falling apart. When, on the verge of his second marriage, Ellison seemed to be in need of their help, they were determined to do what they could for him.

  Jimmy says, “I’ve talked this over with Larry several times, and there’s a big difference of perception about this. I was at home with my parents when we got a call from Larry. My father had a long talk with him over the phone, and when he hung up, he said: ‘Larry’s in trouble. He wants to start a company, and he needs money.’ At that time, he’d just become a judge and his salary had dropped dramatically from what he’d been making as a lawyer, but he said, ‘I’m not going to say no to the kid.’ He went into my sister’s savings account and sent him $6,000. The feeling was, he’s calling us for help and we’ll do all we can for him.” Ellison’s version is indeed a little different: “I told them that Oracle would go public in about a year or so and that anything they invested in the stock now would increase by a factor of ten. Of course, at the time they honestly believed that they would never see any of their money ever again. In spite of that, they gave me the money. It was an act of kindness. And it turned out to be a pretty good investment too.”2

  • • •

  Ellison’s relationship with the Linns grew in importance to him, and, gratifyingly, it was no longer a one-way street in which they did most of the giving and Ellison most of the taking. As Oracle established itself and Ellison grew rich and (moderately) famous, he made sure that the Linns benefited. Before Oracle went public, he gave Jimmy and Leslie stock that would make them financially secure for life. Among other things, he also provided David with a chauffeur-driven limo to take him to court each day. Crucially, the money that Jimmy made from his Oracle shares meant that he could afford to give up his lucrative work as a defense attorney to become a judge without making the kind of financial sacrifice his father had accepted as the price that you paid for entering public service. But there was still something missing. Jimmy says, “He was successful. He was a very wealthy man, but I think he was still trying to figure out who I am in this world, where do I come from? He would have long talks with my mother, telling her that he didn’t understand his wealth and whether or not it was all a dream that he would one day wake up from. But above all, for the first time he had this curiosity about who he really was.”

  David Linn was able to help. By pulling some strings, he was able to track down the original adoption papers and other records that made it relatively easy for the ex-FBI agent they hired to find Florence Spellman. For the Linns, there was the anxiety that another family would replace them in Ellison’s affections, but for Ellison it was a risk that he could no longer avoid. Forty years earlier, Lillian had taken Larry on a trip to New York to meet his “cousins”—Florence and her young family. “I did all the things you do when you’re a kid visiting New York. I remember going to the top of the Empire State Building and going up the Statue of Liberty. I had a great time, but my mother didn’t. She never took me back.” Jimmy Linn confirms that Lillian feared she might lose Larry if it were repeated.

  After Ellison had located Florence Spellman in New Haven, Connecticut, he decided one day just to call her out of the blue. Ellison says, “I felt a little apprehensive, but calling on the phone seemed like a better idea than just knocking on the door.”

  When he made the call, he had almost no idea what he was going to say, not even what he was going to call her. “I didn’t call her anything. I said, ‘Hi. My name is Larry Ellison, and, uh, this is a bit awkward but, uh, you and I are related.’ Florence’s reaction was predictable surprise: “Oh my God! The son I gave up for adoption!” Ellison says that he tried to describe himself very slowly, “like a telemarketer giving a detailed description of a product unfamiliar to the person on the other end of the line.” When Florence asked her son what he did, Ellison just replied that he worked in the computer industry on the West Coast as a software executive. Suddenly the questions and answers started pouring out on both sides—“it was tense and exciting,” Ellison admits. “She kept on saying ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ ” Ellison learned that she had married, had two children (both grown up), and was now divorced. He told her that he would soon be in New York and suggested that he fly up to nearby New Haven and just “drop by to meet and talk.” Ellison recalls, “She was agitated, crying
a bit, but happy. She told me that she had often wondered about me—how I was getting on. She was most interested to know if Lou and Lillian had treated me well. And she asked me to forgive her for giving me up for adoption.”

  He found her living in a house he describes as “modest but not poor.” His half brother, Steve, was in his early forties and was a helicopter pilot who had recently left the army, while his half sister Anne, several years younger, was at loose ends after a spell in the air force. There was some slightly forced hugging and lots of looking at old photographs as Florence explained to Larry why she had had to give him up to her aunt for adoption. Ellison says, “She felt guilty and wanted my forgiveness, but I didn’t think there was anything to forgive—she had tried her best and had done what she thought was the best thing for me. In fact, I’m quite certain it was the best thing for me.”

  But if Ellison had been expecting an emotionally cathartic experience on his side, he didn’t find it. “It just didn’t feel like she was my mother or even a part of my family. There was no emotional attachment, no bond, no connection. But in that meeting I did finally discover the identity of my real family; it was now clear to me that the family that had raised me, the family that I had known all along, that was my real family.” For all that, he felt in some way responsible for these people he couldn’t bring himself to accept as family. He found that all three were eager to move to California, and he bought a house for Florence and Anne in Redwood Shores, a stone’s throw away from Oracle. He put Anne through college, where she earned a teaching degree. Steve, having been in one too many helicopter crashes in the army, wanted to work in the computing industry. Without ever revealing the identity of his brother, Steve Janicki went to work at Oracle, married, had children, and rose on his own merits to be second in command of Oracle’s data center. Ellison says, “Steve’s been very careful never to take advantage of our relationship. I’ve hardly helped him at all. He worked his way up the organization entirely on his own. He has done an extraordinarily good job for Oracle. I’m thrilled to be related to such a hardworking, wonderful guy.”