Ellison says of her, “Adda was very bright and exceptionally pretty. Our problems stemmed from the fact that, unlike me, she took life seriously and worked hard at it. She’d get home from her full-time job, make a gourmet dinner, clean up, and then start to wallpaper one of the bedrooms in our house. She wanted me to help her. Perfectly reasonable request, but I didn’t want to wallpaper the bedroom. I wanted to go for a bike ride. I didn’t want a full-time job either, so I did just enough contract programming to pay my part of the monthly bills. Most of my time was spent backpacking in Yosemite and kayaking in the Sierras.”
To bring in money, Ellison frequently worked nights and weekends doing routine software maintenance on IBM mainframes in data centers. While he thought the money he earned was best spent on having fun, Adda wanted to use it for home building. Whereas he never had the slightest idea how much money they had, she kept all their accounts in neat notebooks—“It was like the early days at Oracle. I never looked at the numbers!” He says, “We responded differently to not having any money while growing up. I was irresponsible and careless about money, while she was cautious and disciplined to the point of being obsessive.” While Adda would save up for cheap pieces of furniture and would even change the oil in Ellison’s car as an economy measure, Ellison was perfectly happy to go and make a down payment on a thirty-four-foot yacht even before selling his smaller boat. He confesses, “I was awful. She said that buying that boat put her into therapy. Here she was carefully managing our finances while I was spending money we didn’t have on a sailboat.”
Another strain on the marriage was that in an effort to establish some sort of “detente” with Lou Ellison, Larry and Adda asked his now-widowed father to come and live with them. Not surprisingly, most of the burden fell on Adda, and Larry started finding excuses not to come home. Although Ellison was unfaithful to Adda, the main reason she eventually decided to leave him was her conviction that unless she escaped, he would drive her mad. She had found him extraordinarily stimulating and never dull, but the combination of constantly worrying about money and their entirely separate agendas for the relationship was literally making her ill. Luckily, there were no children (“I certainly wasn’t ready for that!’) and precious few assets to complicate the divorce.
Ellison felt liberated from a relationship that he clearly wasn’t ready for. But the fact that Adda, whom he remained very fond of, had taken the step of leaving him was hard to come to terms with. The rejection revived all the feelings of emotional insecurity stemming from his adoption that he normally repressed. It seemed to support Lou’s contention that he would never amount to anything. He says, “I thought I was reasonably smart, but I was going nowhere. I was a very good programmer, but I didn’t have the discipline to work on problems that couldn’t be solved in a few days. I had no endurance. I doubted I ever would.” Ellison was thirty, and his father’s jaundiced prediction seemed to be coming true. He maintains now that it was a turning point in his life.
However, after Adda left, he carried on pretty much as he had been: hiking in Yosemite whenever possible, dating a succession of girls, and earning reasonable money as a quick and skilled programmer who could usually be relied upon to solve problems. But something had changed. Slowly Ellison began to have a growing conviction that he was at least as capable as most of the people who were running the businesses that employed him. He also eventually wearied of the sexual freedom that the return to bachelorhood had brought—a pattern that was to repeat itself over the years. He says, “I doubt that anybody really enjoys a steady diet of dating different people. Nobody in their right mind trades in a working long-term relationship for an endless series of fantasies and adventures.” Whether it was the shock of Adda’s departure or something else, Ellison was beginning to realize two things about himself: the first was that he was ready in his professional life to be more than the equivalent of a hired gun; the second was that he needed the support of a stable relationship more than he thought.
That said, Ellison met his second wife, Nancy Wheeler, when he was looking for a car, not a partner. “I’m writing a check for this classic Mercedes convertible, and out of the blue the woman who’s selling the car says, ‘I’ve got just the perfect girl for you.’ Yeah, right. I just kind of ignored her and tried to change the subject.” What got his attention was when she described Nancy as the best-looking girl she’d seen in her life and her husband agreed. “It was a brief but compelling description.” Armed with her telephone number, it didn’t take him long to find her. More than a decade younger than Ellison and from a well-to-do Louisville, Kentucky, family, Nancy Wheeler had recently transferred to Stanford University.
Ellison doted on her, and they were married soon after meeting in late 1976. Nancy could not have been more different from the practical, responsible Adda. “Nancy was gorgeous. She had this sexy southern accent and a wicked sense of humor. She had a rare combination of athletic grace and feminine charm. My male friends simply adored her. My female friends thought she was a self-centered, superficial, materialistic vamp. What’s wrong with that? She did have a couple of quirks, though.” Ellison recalls that the first time they spent a night together he was disconcerted by her complete stillness while sleeping. “She slept on her back with her arms at her sides—kind of like a vampire in a coffin. She didn’t move all night.” Her explanation was that she had taught herself to do it since coming to Stanford: she hated getting up early, but this way she could put on all her makeup and fix her hair the night before and leap out of an undisturbed bed at the last moment and go straight in to class.1
While Adda had counted every penny, Ellison noticed that Nancy never bothered filling in the stubs in her checkbook. She couldn’t see the point of it. “I said, ‘Nancy, what if you write a check for more money than we have in the account?’ She asked, ‘Is that possible?’ I answered, ‘It is now.’ ” Ellison claims that Nancy had been inside a grocery store only once before they met, let alone learned to cook.
On another occasion, the couple had decided to go backpacking in Yosemite. Ellison recalls, “I was wearing normal hiking clothes: khaki shorts, tan army surplus shirt, old leather boots with wool socks. Nancy’s dressed for a game of tennis at the country club: white hot pants, white tennis shoes, and a skintight red-orange tank top that’s perfectly color-coordinated with her lip gloss. I’m carrying this huge fifty-pound pack with all our stuff in it. All she’s carrying is extra lip gloss. Anyway, we begin hiking from the valley floor to our campsite, about eight thousand feet up. An hour and a half into the climb, I ask her if she wants to stop and rest. She says she’s not tired and wants to keep going. I notice there is not a single bead of sweat on her. She’s standing there looking like a cover girl from Seventeen magazine. Very annoying. I’m sweating so much I look like I’ve been hiking under a waterfall. It’s a hot summer day and I need a break, so I say, ‘Hey, I’m the one carrying the pack. I want to stop for a minute, okay?’ She just smirks at me for a moment, and then she offers to carry the pack for a while. I’m thinking, no way can she carry this pack up this mountain. But I’d dearly love to see her try. So I say, ‘Fine, honey, you carry the fucking pack.’ I adjust the pack’s shoulder straps and belt and latch this huge thing onto her. The pack begins below her butt and ends a foot over her head. I figure she won’t last a hundred yards before she falls on her face, but off we go. We’d taken no more than ten steps before we see these three guys descending the trail. Then they see us. And what they see is this cover girl in hot pants and a tank top carrying this huge backpack up a very steep trail. Not a bead of sweat on her. They see me soaked with sweat—carrying nothing all. They just stared at us mouths agape. They didn’t say a word, but as they passed us they turned around and stumbled backward still staring. I thought they were going to fall over the trailside cliff. When they disappeared around the bend, I took the pack back and carried it the rest of the way.”
When Nancy walked out on him after little more than eighteen month
s of marriage, returning to a former boyfriend just back from Harvard Business School whom she subsequently married, Ellison was devastated. This time, it wasn’t Ellison’s lack of seriousness or infidelities that ended the marriage. More likely, it was the stresses and financial problems associated with founding Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Without money coming in from late-paying customers, Ellison was not only failing to meet the bills of the contractor who was building the couple’s new home in Orinda, he was also being threatened with foreclosure on the couple’s house in Woodside. Ellison says, “Starting a company and a marriage at the same time is a very bad idea. I was working insanely long hours and getting home around ten o’clock every night. Nancy was going to graduate school at Stanford. We had different schedules, different friends, different priorities, and different lives.”
The divorce was friendly. Ellison agreed to pay a small amount of maintenance and got to keep the houses. Nancy also gave him the truck they owned and agreed to sell him her stock in SDL for $500. Ellison remarks, “She didn’t care about the stock at all, but she was pretty upset about losing the truck. Years later she called me to joke about the value of ‘her half’ of the stock—then worth about half a billion dollars.”
Ellison used work as an escape from his feelings of emotional emptiness and failure after Nancy’s departure. “I started working sixteen-hour days. That helped, but I remember some long nights and longer weekends fighting with feelings of despair.” It wasn’t very long, however, before he found someone new to take Nancy’s place. Ellison says: “I know I have this reputation as a playboy. But the truth is, I find dating lots of women very confusing. My memories become blurred together. I’ll be talking about a movie and suddenly I’ll realize I saw it with somebody else. Life is a series of shared experiences and memories. If you can’t remember something, it’s like you never lived it. You’ve lost part of yourself. If you date too many people, your life gets broken into little tiny pieces—disconnected bits of experience and memory that are easily lost. It’s like you’re dividing yourself up into all the people you spend time with.”
• • •
Barbara Boothe was a twenty-three-year-old Stanford graduate who came to work as a receptionist at Oracle in early 1981, when it was still called RSI: she was the company’s tenth employee. Ellison had a policy of hiring bright, overqualified young women for administrative roles because he didn’t want a two-tier company of highly educated male engineers and lesser females. As the company was growing fast, it wouldn’t be long before they could be promoted to a job that would better suit their abilities. Besides, Ellison had a weakness for good-looking grads fresh out of Stanford.2
Barbara broke up with her boyfriend soon after joining RSI and needed to find a place where she and her two Irish setters could live. It didn’t take Ellison long to offer her accommodation in the guest house at his new home in Woodside: It was a short step from there to suggesting that she move into the main house with him. Ellison was getting enthusiastic at the idea of having children. Having grown up with a father who was already old, Ellison didn’t want to have a similarly distant relationship with his own children. “I was getting to the age [midthirties] where I wanted children. I didn’t want to wait until I was too old to shoot baskets and go hiking with them.” Although much younger, Barbara was ready to have children too, and a few months after moving in with Ellison she was pregnant. Engagement followed, but plans to get married were shelved after Barbara miscarried: an indication that becoming a father was more important to Ellison than the relationship itself.
Barbara became pregnant again and gave birth to David (named after Ellison’s brother-in-law, David Linn) in January 1983, but it was another eleven months before the couple married, and from the beginning, the prospects for the marriage were dim. After David’s birth, Barbara gave Ellison the ultimatum that if they were not wed by the end of the year, she would go home to Oregon, taking David with her. Ellison says, “We had a number of problems in our relationship. Barb thought the problems were caused by the fact that we weren’t married. I didn’t think so. But despite my doubts I decided to get married—again. I had one really good reason: a baby boy I didn’t want to lose.”
However, Ellison admits that he was far from certain that he wanted to go through with the marriage: “It was the most traumatic period in my life.” Ellison thought that he had to get married in order to establish legal rights of access to David if things didn’t work out with Barbara, but he was terrified that by getting married to someone with whom he had a failing relationship, he risked losing control of Oracle if it ended in divorce. With the company’s growing success and the prospect of a lucrative initial public offering only a couple of years away, he calculated that he wouldn’t get off as lightly this time as he had when Nancy had left him.
His answer to the dilemma pretty much destroyed whatever small chances of success the marriage might have had. A few hours before the wedding at Ellison’s home in December 1983, he presented Barbara with a prenuptial agreement that she would have to sign if the wedding was to go ahead. It detailed Ellison’s assets and included an optimistic (though as it turned, not unrealistic) valuation of his 2.2 million Oracle shares (about 40 percent of the company) in the event of either a trade sale or an IPO—up to $16.5 million if the former were to occur but as much as $44 million in the event of the latter. It then set out the terms of any divorce settlement: 25,000 Oracle shares would be used to establish a trust fund for David, while Barbara would get $100,000 for each year the couple had been married and a $250,000 home in Portland. Any additional support payments mandated by court order would be based on her needs rather than Ellison’s ability to pay.
To Barbara, it was a bolt from the blue. Ellison may or may not have mentioned the possibility of a prenuptial some weeks earlier, but he certainly hadn’t pursued it. “As the wedding date got closer, I panicked. I had visions of Barbara leaving and me losing my family and my company on the same day. So I had this prenuptial prepared—several weeks before the wedding, actually. But I chickened out of showing it to Barbara until the very last moment. What a disaster.” As usual, Ellison’s desire to avoid emotional confrontation was just a way of storing up future trouble.
Ellison knows that springing the prenuptial on Barbara (as the flowers and food for the wedding were being brought into the house) was not his finest hour, but he explains it as an act of desperation. Given the hurt and damage caused by the document, it’s ironic that it was of almost no legal value to Ellison. The final drafting of the agreement was left to the two lawyers who happened to be staying at the Woodside house for the wedding: Barbara’s father and David Linn. Ellison says, “It was my idea; my worst ever probably.” Ellison now says that according to California law, you can’t spring a prenuptial agreement on someone at such a late stage that they’re almost forced to sign: “It was legally useless, and the emotional damage it caused was irreversible.”
Even more ironic was Ellison’s discovery later on that under California law his rights as a father were little altered by marriage. The only legal advice Ellison had sought on the prenuptial was from his corporate lawyers. He says, “They didn’t have a clue about this area of the law. They never should have advised me. The prenuptial thing was completely unnecessary. If they hadn’t been so ignorant—or I hadn’t been so insecure—the whole terrible experience could have been avoided.” Ellison also maintains that he didn’t even need the prenuptial to hold on to his stock. He claims that because he had owned the stock before his marriage, Barbara could have no claim on it.
When the marriage inevitably ended in divorce a little over two years later and after the birth of a daughter, Megan, Barbara’s lawyer took a different view, arguing that most of the value in the shares had been created during the period of the marriage and that Barbara was therefore due half of Ellison’s estate. After months of wrangling, they settled out of court on terms far more generous than those laid out in the ill-fated prenuptial
. Ellison says, “I offered more than what’s required under California law for the simple reason that I wanted her and the kids to be able to afford to live in Woodside and have all the things they wanted. Barb was pretty happy with the settlement. She once described her divorce as better than most of her friends’ marriages.”
Once relieved of the burden of living with each other, Ellison and his former wife became good and dependable friends. Barbara has never remarried, preferring a life devoted to her children and horses. Ellison claims that he was determined to provide “unqualified” emotional and financial support for his family and that he worked hard to rebuild the relationship. Ellison’s closest friend, Steve Jobs, gives him high marks for his handling of the situation once the marriage was over. Jobs says, “Larry’s my best friend, and I have a lot of feelings for him. But I’m proudest of him for the way that he has worked at the relationship with his children. I know that situation from my own life; it’s really easy not to have a relationship with the child when you’re not close to the mother or don’t want to be. But Larry has put a lot of energy into being a father, and he’s done a really good job.”
• • •
While Ellison didn’t lose his taste for dating young, pretty Stanford graduates who were doing a stint on Oracle’s reception desk, the idea of trying his hand at marriage again had lost all attraction. Although Ellison preferred serial monogamy (or something like it) to multiple casual relationships, he thought he knew enough about himself by now to know that he would always find fidelity a struggle over the long term. “I was never happy with what I had. If I had a stable family life, I’d miss the adventure of dating. If I was dating, I’d miss the love and comfort of a family. I was always afraid I was missing something.”
Softwar Page 48