Overdrive, page 13
French was well aware of Gates’s womanizing, and consequently their relationship ran hot and cold. At one point, they broke up for nearly a year, reportedly because Gates refused to make any kind of commitment. When they got back together again in 1992, however, the relationship grew closer and stronger. They were often seen together at Seattle restaurants and the movies, and they vacationed in Australia, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic. But they never appeared together socially at industry functions. Gates, worried that publicity about their romance would cause French to have to leave Microsoft, had requested that computer industry writers and newspaper reporters who knew about the romance not mention her name. They didn’t.
“She has very much her own life,” said Ida Cole, a former Microsoft executive who has worked with both. “She has her own set of friends, and hasn’t been totally wrapped up with him.... It’s a fine match.”
Along with several other Microsoft employees, French served as a board member of the Village Theater in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah. She and Gates donated $100,000 toward the theater’s capital campaign. “She’s a strong woman who knows what she’s about, and makes her opinions known,” said Robb Hunter, the theater’s executive producer.
In June 1992, French looked on as President George Bush, in a ceremony in the Rose Garden, presented Gates with the National Medal of Technology. Only Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had won the award at a younger age. Later that year, at Christmas, Mary Gates asked her son when he was going to get an engagement ring for French. His mother had often expressed disappointment to friends that her only son had deferred marriage for so long. His father had even told the Wall Street Journal that he believed young Bill was in danger of defaulting on a part of life’s purpose. Philippe Kahn, Borland’s chief, had remarked that he had little to discuss with Gates socially because he, Kahn, had a rich family life, while Gates could talk only business. Gates himself was worried that he would be too old to enjoy his children if he waited much longer to marry. It had been clear for some time that he was thinking about marriage and children. The $50 million high-tech home he was building on Lake Washington included a children’s wing, complete with an extra room for a nanny. And Gates had sought reassurances from friends that he was doing the right thing in contemplating marriage. In an e-mail note to Microsoft executive Jonathan Lazarus, Gates wrote: “You seem to like married life, so that’s a good sign that independent types like you can make it work.” By early 1993, Gates had confided to close male friends that he was very much in love with French, and planned to ask her to marry him. He had finally found someone with whom he wanted to spend his life and raise a family.
The woman who would one day marry the king of software grew up with two brothers and a sister on a street called Princess in a middle-class neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. She was born there, in 1964, the daughter of Elaine and Raymond French. Her father was an engineer in the aerospace business. At St. Monica grade school, math was her favorite subject.
“I had parents who told me every step of the way, ‘You can get what you want,’ ” French would later tell a Catholic newspaper.
After St. Monica, French attended an exclusive private school, the all-girls Ursuline Academy in Dallas. Susan Bauer, French’s computer teacher at Ursuline, remembered her as one of her brightest pupils, and definitely not a high-school computer nerd. French was also a member of the Academy’s drill team.
“She was hard-working and personable,” recalled Bauer. “She was one of the best students I ever had.”
French was valedictorian of Ursuline’s class of 1982. After graduating, she was accepted into an accelerated program for computer science undergraduates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She joined the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and gave guided tours to prospective students. French, an attractive woman who usually kept her long, sandy-colored hair pulled back with barrettes, dated a few men, among them William Wrigley, the heir to the chewing-gum fortune.
She spent three years getting her undergraduate degree in computer science, and in her fourth year enrolled at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for a two-year MBA program. She graduated cum laude. Because French went into the Master’s program after her third year of college—most students spend four years working in the corporate world after graduating from college before they enter Fuqua—she was much younger than the other students in her class. Lee Junkans, director of career services and placement for the business school, said French was very mature for her age.
“She was just one of three or four students in the [fast- track] program. It can be tough when your classmates are 26, 27,28 years old. She was well respected by her classmates, and certainly by me.”
French was also one of the most “marketable” women in the class as far as attracting the attention of companies interested in recruiting Fuqua grads, Junkans said. One of those companies was Microsoft. The company interviewed her during a recruiting trip to the campus, and she went to work in Redmond as soon as she earned her MBA in 1987. This was a year after Microsoft had gone public (turning Gates into the nation’s youngest billionaire), and French received stock options that would eventually be worth more than a million dollars.
Her rise to a midlevel management position at Microsoft was steady. Even though she was soon known around the company as the chairman’s girlfriend, she received no special treatment. Early on she told Ruth Warren, a former Microsoft manager and friend, that she had two goals: to run in a marathon and to be assigned responsibility for Microsoft Word for MS-DOS. She succeeded at both goals. By 1993, she oversaw the work of about 50 people as product unit manager for Microsoft Publisher, a desktop publishing software program.
Although she was serious about her work, French also had a fun side that appealed to Gates and brought out the little boy in him. At one company party, when Gates was challenged to jump over a table—a feat that he had enjoyed performing in female company for many years—French placed a lighted candle on the table and challenged him to try again. Fie did. Another and another candle was placed on the table as Gates took longer and longer running starts.
“Even though Bill’s mother had urged him to marry Melinda, he was not going to be pressured, even by his mother, until he was sure she was the one,” said a Gates family friend. “Bill and Melinda talked often about how being married would change her life. She was very concerned about being in the public spotlight. She and Bill came to an agreement that once they were married, her life would stay private. He would never talk about her to the press or discuss their relationship. That was the agreement, that she stay private.”
Gates finally proposed over the weekend of March 20, 1993. As a surprise he had cooked up with his pal Warren Buffett, Gates and French boarded a private jet and flew to Omaha, where on Sunday morning, Buffett had arranged to open Borsheim’s, the famous jewelry store owned by Berkshire Hathaway, so that French could pick out her engagement ring. Buffett had joked to Gates that when he first got engaged, he spent 6 percent of his net worth on the ring and that Gates should do the same as a sign of true love. (Gates never publicly said how much the ring cost, but the diamond was so big that French would place one hand over the ring to hide it at public speaking outings after the engagement. On one occasion when she was talking to a reporter, French placed a coffee cup on her hand to hide the ring.)
News of their engagement quickly spread through Microsoft after the couple returned to work on Monday morning, March 21. Gates told a friend about the engagement, and French sent an e-mail message to an associate, who in turn sent the message to a friend. This became the hottest e-mail ever at Microsoft. By the end of the day, electronic messages being sent around the company by employees contained little jokes: Did French do Windows? What about offspring—would they name their kids Bill 2.3, Melinda 3.1, and so on? Around Microsoft’s campus, French quickly became known as the “E-Mail Bride.” Word of the engagement even went to e-mail systems outside the company.
On Tuesday, Microsoft’s public relations department notified the media that Gates was engaged to be married. It became front-page news in papers around the world, from London to Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed that the engagement was a “Marriage Made at Microsoft.”
Gates took French to a professional basketball game that Tuesday night. The Portland Trail Blazers, owned by Paul Allen, were in town to play the Seattle SuperSonics. Gates and French had front-row seats. Photographers from both Seattle newspapers assigned to cover the game spotted the happy couple sitting side by side, clapping their hands and urging the local team on, and took their pictures, which ran on the front page of both papers the next day. Soon, newspaper editors from around the world were calling the two Seattle papers, asking to buy the pictures of Gates and French. Most hungry for the photos were the British papers on Fleet Street.
The same night as the basketball game, Gates was part of Jay Leno’s monologue on the Tonight Show.
“What’s Bill Gates like after sex?” asked Leno of his live studio audience.
“Micro soft,” came his answer.
The joke was an old one in the industry, but it got a good laugh from the Tonight Show audience, and probably from millions of others watching on television. Gates’s fame had transcended the computer industry. He was now a favorite subject of jokes on late-night talk shows, elevated to the status usually reserved for movie stars, the president, and the royal family. Newspaper columnists around the country had fun with the news, too. Some suggested wedding gifts: How about gold-plated pocket protectors? Instead of a Nintendo game, what about Nintendo itself? Mary Ann Calvin, managing editor of Modern Bride, told one newspaper columnist she thought an appropriate wedding gift would be either a Waterford crystal computer or arranging with Dan Rather to document Gates’s final two days as a bachelor on 48 Hours.
Friends were very much in favor of the engagement, and thought it good, and inevitable, that Gates chose a “Microsoftie” for a walk down the aisle.
“Melinda is a very good companion for Bill,” said Vern Raburn, a longtime friend of Gates and former Microsoft executive who now manages Paul Allen’s multimedia empire. “She’s funny, very engaging in conversation, intelligent, and super-intense.”
Raburn visited with Gates in Seattle the day after the engagement story broke. Gates appeared happier than Raburn had seen him in a long time. Other than the normal prewedding trepidation, Gates appeared ready for that walk down the aisle. “I think Bill sees this as a great step in his life; in some sense, simplifying his life,” said Raburn. “Now there is just one person, instead of dozens. In many ways, it was almost inevitable he would end up marrying someone at Microsoft. If you are going to be Bill Gates’s wife, you are going to be part of Microsoft, or you are only going to participate in a very small segment of his life.”
Old flame Winblad was happy for the man she, too, had wanted to marry. “This is not just a serendipitous choice,” she said. “A relationship with Bill early on is a test. Are you smart enough? Do you have enough common sense? Can you make the grade? Are you athletic enough? Melinda is Bill’s pick. He could have chosen any woman as a wife for life. He has chosen her, and that means she is an exceptional woman.”
Microsoft officials would not say whether the couple had signed a prenuptial agreement. Friends said Gates is, despite his pragmatism, too much of a romantic to ask his bride to sign such an agreement limiting her claims to his fortune should they divorce. More than a year before the engagement, Gates had told an industry journalist he would never ask a future spouse to sign a prenuptial agreement. “It would not be necessary,” he said.
“I don’t think Bill views marriage as a legal agreement,” said Winblad. “He views it as more of a long-term commitment of love.”
According to knowledgeable sources, however, Gates did, in fact, sign a prenuptial agreement with French. Gates could not ask French himself, so he talked his pal Ballmer into convincing her to sign. Ballmer, according to those sources, explained to French that the agreement was for the good of the company.
Another of Gates’s old loves, Bennett, wondered about French’s expectations of married life with the hard-driving Gates. “It’s going to be hard for her,” Bennett predicted. “There are expectations when you finally get married. And I think there might be some expectation that he won’t work as hard.”
That certainly was the hope, at least, of Microsoft’s competitors. “If the rest of the industry is lucky,” Pete Peterson, former executive vice president of WordPerfect Corporation, said upon hearing the news that Gates was engaged, “he’ll have a couple of kids soon.” But Gates himself had told Raburn during their meeting in Seattle that he would now be more focused than ever since the matter of his marital status was no longer something that would consume his time or his thoughts. “If anybody thinks being married is going to lessen my intensity,” Gates told his old friend, “they are in for a surprise!”
Although she was now engaged to the chairman, French continued her job as a Microsoft manager. She told her bosses that she wanted no special treatment. But there was no way she could prevent it. Microsoft employees who worked for her said they were always very much aware that she was going to be the wife of Bill Gates. They wondered if what they said to her helped or hurt them. One Microsoft manager recalled being in a department meeting with French when someone told a not- so-nice story about Gates. French kept her cool and her professionalism. She said nothing about the joke, but directed the talk away from Gates and back to the subject.
There was one significant change in French after the engagement. She became almost obsessive about her privacy. She wrote to her former neighbors in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood, asking them not to talk about her to the press. Her family contacted the Ursuline Academy and requested that no one at the school give any further interviews about their daughter. The school complied. Residents of the Dallas neighborhood where French grew up were also asked by the family to say nothing about French. When reporters called her mother or father, they were told to call Microsoft’s public relations department.
One of those Dallas residents contacted by the family said she was told that Melinda was worried not only about her privacy but also about her safety. “After all, she was going to marry one of the richest men in the world, and there are a lot of crazy people out there.”
Long before the engagement, security had been beefed up at French’s $350,000 home in Leschi, and a Microsoft security officer would occasionally park on the street and watch the house. Gates, too, was concerned about his future wife’s safety. He would later talk about it in a court deposition for a lawsuit brought by a television news reporter who was arrested for trespassing when he tried to cover Gates’s wedding.
“The visibility that I’ve had, including the visibility of wealth, does create a situation where sometimes security is necessary; and a few years [ago] my mother was kidnapped, and our seriousness about security increased because of that,” Gates said in the sealed deposition. “I’ve had problems where people ... a guy came up to me and pulled a hunting knife. People have made various threats from time to time.”
Although it was never publicly reported, there was an “incident” involving Gates’s younger sister Libby when she was in college in the late 1980s, around the same time that Gates was beginning to garner considerable attention in the national press. No one knows what the incident was. No police report was ever filed, and the family kept the matter quiet, even from friends. The kidnapping of Gates’s mother occurred in December 1984, when she was accosted by a man outside her Laurelhurst home. The masked man had jumped out of the shadows of her carport and demanded her keys as she parked her car. She agreed to give the man her keys if he let her go. But the man told her, “I want you.” After he grabbed her, Mary Gates broke free and ran across the street to a neighbor’s house, where she banged repeatedly on the door until she was let in. The man fled and was never caught. A few months later, Mary Gates happened to mention the incident to friend John Akers, then chief executive of IBM. Akers arranged for IBM’s corporate security experts to contact Microsoft, and a new high-tech security system was soon in place at the homes of several Microsoft executives, including Gates, who lived in the same Laurelhurst neighborhood as his parents.
Gates was living in Laurelhurst for much of the time he was dating French, but after they became engaged, he bought a home less than a half mile away from his $50 million high-tech dream home that was under construction. This temporary home had been owned by Jack Sikma, an all-star basketball center who had played for the Seattle SuperSonics. Sikma had paid $2 million for the four-bedroom, 6,000-square-foot waterfront home in 1986. Although the property was assessed at $4.3 million, Gates paid $8 million for it in July 1993. Gates told friends he wanted to be closer to the construction of his mansion, which was already a couple of years behind schedule and falling further behind, in part because French had taken over supervision of the project and was demanding many architectural changes before she was willing to live there.
In August, five months after their engagement, French and Gates took a three-week vacation in Africa with 10 friends, including Winblad and her pal Heidi Roizen, another computer industry executive and a “Friend of Bill.” It was a milestone for the hard-working Gates, who had never before taken more than one week’s vacation at a time. During the photo safari, the group traveled by Land Rover through Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire, sleeping in tents around roaring campfires as guards patrolled the perimeter to keep wild animals away from the computer industry’s most vicious predator and his party.
When they returned from vacation, Gates and French began finalizing their marriage plans. There was a growing sense of urgency because Mary Gates was by now seriously ill with breast cancer, and her doctors had told the family they did not expect her to live more than a year. But what kind of wedding? Gates was not religious, but French was a devout Roman Catholic.
