Behind the steel curtain

Of all the dramatic episodes in Silicon Valley pioneer Tom Perkins’ memorable life, his 17 months inside a certain Washington Street mansion stand alone.

Bruce Kelley

Larger-than-life VC Tom Perkins took Genentech and Google public, built the world’s biggest yacht, and beat a manslaughter rap in France. So what’s the most compelling chapter in his rambunctious and juicy new memoir, Valley Boy? The one devoted to his late-1990s run as Danielle Steel’s husband number five. He paints a fond, full picture of Steel as a determined, funny, and frankly nutty “empath” possessed by her kids, career, causes, and staff (25 of them, including six nannies), and he concludes that living amid the chaos inside what Perkins believes is the largest house west of the Mississippi was “a bit like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant of emotion.” On this page: some of the key elements of Steel’s
private universe, as experienced by her friend and ex during his tenure there.

The Kids

“Very literally the most important part of her life…nine of them, including two stepsons, and not counting kids who have been informally adopted and live with her. There are a couple of those.”

The Dogs

“Four or five small dogs…yap constantly. Every time, and I mean every time, the butler opened the door to bring something to the [dinner] table, all the dogs went nuts.”

The bodyguard

“Her muscular Algerian bodyguard stroked Kitty [the family cat] sitting in his chair, looking just like the villain from a James Bond movie.”

The closed door

Each of Steel’s annual book-writing binges lasted for two weeks of 20-hour days and produced two completed novels. “No breaks of any type, no phone calls, no social interactions…Food trays are left outside.”

The voice

“Like Mozart, she says that she literally ‘hears’ the book, and she types as fast as she possibly can to get it down on paper while the voice is speaking.”

Ollie
The “decades-old Olympia typewriter” wrote 100 finished pages a day. “Danielle has the belief that, somehow, only Ollie can do the books.”

Ollie’s repairman
“Ollie has been rebuilt numerous times by an old man…who flies out from New York and cannibalizes parts from the dozen Ollie duplicates stored in the basement vault.”

The ghost
Her bipolar son, Nick Traina, “loved Danielle with an intensity rare even between mother and son.” Writes Perkins, “He told me one night at the hospital that he understood that if he killed himself, it would destroy her. He pledged to me that it would never happen…. At that instant he really did mean it.” Traina committed suicide shortly afterward.

The line you didn’t cross
“The occasional bad apple [on her staff]…sues her…. She always fights; on principle, every suit is fought until thrown out by the court or there is a nominal settlement.”

The karma
Between the death threats, lawsuits, stalkers, freak accidents, and Traina’s death, “I sometimes teased her by asking what had she done in a previous life. Had she been, maybe, Lucrezia Borgia?”