Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Estée Lauder, and Charles Lindbergh suffered from the same mental illness.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces the debut of a new iPad on Jan. 27, 2010, in San Francisco.
Photo by Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images
The man could not stand dirt. When he built his company’s first
factory in Fremont, Calif., in 1984, he frequently got down on his hands
and knees and looked for specks of dust on the floor as well as on all
the equipment. For Steve Jobs, who was rolling out the Macintosh
computer, these extreme measures were a necessity. “If we didn’t have
the discipline to keep that place spotless,” the Apple co-founder later
recalled, “then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all
these machines running.” This perfectionist also hated typos. As Pam
Kerwin, the marketing director at Pixar during Jobs’ hiatus from Apple,
told me, “He would carefully go over every document a million times and
would pick up on punctuation errors such as misplaced commas.” And if
anything wasn’t just right, Jobs could throw a fit. He was a difficult
and argumentative boss who had trouble relating to others. But Jobs
could focus intensely on exactly what he wanted—which was to design
“insanely great products”—and he doggedly pursued this obsession until
the day died. Hard work and intelligence can take you only so far. To be
super successful like Jobs, you also need that X-factor, that maniacal
overdrive—which often comes from being a tad mad.
For decades, scholars have made the case that mental illness can be an asset for writers and artists. In her landmark work Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,
Johns Hopkins psychologist Kay Jamison documented the “fine madness”
that gripped dozens of prominent novelists, poets, painters, and
composers. As Lord Byron wrote of his fellow bards, “We of the craft are
all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all
are more or less touched.” For the author of Don Juan,
as for many of the other artsy types profiled by Jamison, the disease
in question is manic depression (or bipolar disorder), but depression is
also common. Sylvia Plath’s signature works—The Bell Jar and Daddy—hinge
on her suicidal despair. But while most Americans now acknowledge that
many famous writers were unbalanced, few realize that the movers and
shakers who have built this country—CEOs like Steve Jobs—also struggled
with psychiatric maladies. This misunderstanding motivated me to write
my latest book, America’s Obsessives.
After discussing Jobs and other contemporary figures in the prologue, I
cover seven icons, including Thomas Jefferson, marketing genius Henry J
Heinz, librarian Melvil Dewey, aviator Charles Lindbergh, beauty tycoon
Estée Lauder, and baseball slugger Ted Williams. (Like Jobs, the Red
Sox Hall of Famer was a neatness nut who used to quiz the clubhouse
attendant about why he used Tide on the team’s laundry.) By picking
trailblazers who toiled in different arenas—from business and politics
to information technology and sports—I wanted to show how a touch of
madness is perhaps the secret to rising to the top in just about any
line of work.
These men and women of action did have occasional bouts with
depression, but they primarily suffered (or benefited) from another form
of mental illness: obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The key
features of this superachiever’s disease include a love of order, lists,
rules, schedules, details, and cleanliness; people with OCPD are
addicted to work, and they are control freaks who must do everything
“their way.” OCPD is not to be confused with its cousin,
obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those with OCD are paralyzed by thoughts
that just won’t go away, while people with OCPD are inspired by them.
Steve Jobs couldn’t stop designing products—when hospitalized in the
ICU, he once ripped off his oxygen mask, insisting that his doctors
improve its design on the double. Estée Lauder couldn’t stop touching
other women’s faces. Perfect strangers would do, including those she
might bump into on an elevator or a street corner. Without her beauty
biz as an alibi, she might have been arrested for assault with deadly
lipstick or face powder. These dynamos are hard-pressed to carve out
time for anything else but their compulsions. Spouses and children
typically endure long stretches of neglect. In the early 1950s, with two
boys at home (today both are billionaire philanthropists), Lauder was
riding the rails all over the country half the year, hawking her wares.
Obsessives hate nothing so much as taking a break to relax or
reflect, and they typically do so only when felled by illness. “Home.
Not well. Busy about house. Always plenty to do. Cannot well be idle and
believe will rather wear out than rust out,” wrote the 35-year-old
Henry Heinz in his diary in 1880, four years after starting his
eponymous processed food company. Heinz’s compulsions included measuring
everything in sight—he never left home without his steel tape measure,
which he used on many an unsuspecting doorway—and keeping track of
meaningless numbers. When traveling across the Atlantic on a steamer in
1886, he jotted down in his diary its precise dimensions as well as the
number of passengers who rode in steerage class. But this love of
pseudo-quantification would produce in the early 1890s one of the
sturdiest slogans in American advertising history—“57 Varieties.” At the
time, his company actually produced more than 60 products, but this
number fetishist felt that there was something magical about sevens. By
his early 50s, Heinz had already driven himself close to a complete
nervous collapse on numerous occasions, and he reluctantly passed the
reins of the company to his heirs. For the last two decades of his life,
his children insisted that the overbearing paterfamilias chill out in a
German sanatorium every summer, either at Dr. Carl von Dapper’s outfit
in Bad Kissingen or Dr. Franz Dengler’s in Baden-Baden.
Melvil Dewey, whose childhood fixation with the number 10 led him to
devise the Dewey Decimal Classification system, also was forced into an
early retirement by his feverish pace. Dewey published the first edition
of his search engine—the Google of its day, which is still in use in
libraries in nearly 150 countries—in 1876, when he was only 24. For the
next quarter of a century, Dewey took on a series of demanding jobs,
typically juggling two or three at a time, as a librarian, businessman,
and editor. He became the head of the world’s first library school, at
Columbia University in 1884. According to a running joke, Dewey had a
habit of dictating notes to two stenographers at the same time. In the
end, it was his sexual compulsions that did him in. He was a serial
sexual harasser and in 1905 was ostracized from the American Library
Association, the organization that he had helped found a generation
earlier, when four prominent female members of the guild filed
complaints against him.
The aviator Charles Lindbergh also was an order aficionado whose
oversized libido created a mess. This demanding dad saw his five
children only a couple of months a year. He ruled over them and his
wife, the best-selling author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, not with an iron
fist but with ironclad lists. He kept track of each child’s infractions,
which included such innocuous activities as gum-chewing. And he
insisted that Anne track all her household expenditures, including every
15 cents spent for rubber bands, in copious account books. After
Lindbergh turned 50, feeding his sex addiction became his full-time job;
for the rest of his life, he was constantly flying around the world to
visit his three German “wives,” longtime mistresses with whom he
fathered seven children, and to hook up with various other flings.
Remarkably, though these obsessive icons were all awash in neurotic
tics, there has been no shortage of hagiographers who idealize their
every move. Of Heinz’s penchant for collecting seemingly random numbers,
one biographer has observed that he “enthusiastically wrote down in his
diary the statistics that one must know and record on such an
occasion.” Another saw in Heinz’s factoid-finding a reason to compare
him to “a scientist such as Thomas Edison.” The author of the first
biography of Dewey made the laughable claim that “there was no
psycho-neurosis in [him].” Even today, some still agree with what New
York Gov. Al Smith said about Lindbergh soon after his legendary flight
to Paris: “He represents to us … all that we wish—a young American at
his best.” We Americans like our heroes and do not easily let them go.
By pointing out the character flaws in our superachievers, I do not
intend to diminish the greatness of their achievements. Instead I aim to
show exactly how they managed to pull them off. And more often than
not, it was with a touch of madness.
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