At 34, Marissa Mayer is possibly the world's most poised and powerful information guru. Sally Singer searches for what makes this woman click.
Before I meet Marissa Mayer, the 34-year-old megamillionaire, Oscar de la Renta–obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons, San Francisco, I of course Google her. Virtually, Mayer—pronounced not like the musician John but the hot dog Oscar—is an agglomeration of podcasts (she has a wonderful Kathleen Turner voice), red-carpet images, and text snippets about the physics of data, the future of news, and atomic units of consumption.
In actuality, Mayer is just as resistant to the kinds of unitary categories that the regular three-dimensional world insists on. It’s not only that she demolishes old-fashioned oppositions of beauty and brains, or women and science, or chic and geek. It’s that she’s elusive in person (meeting her, as I do in New York and San Francisco and Mountain View, California, is all about fragments of time, as her busyness is quasi-presidential); that she works for a company that makes billions in the transparency business but is opaque with regard to its internal doings; and, most definitively, that she is so extreme and multipolar in her accomplishments that one fumbles to bundle it all up into the linear narrative so beloved by humans since the Bible. So why not go with the flow? Why not search for her as she has taught us to search for pretty much everything else?
“MARISSA MAYER” + STUFF: On her thirty-fourth birthday, a Saturday in May, Mayer is at the Googleplex in Mountain View, interviewing applicants for the associate-product-manager program. (“This could have been the worst birthday ever, but it’s something to see that collection of talent. At five o’clock I was so energized.” Then she goes home to San Francisco and, wearing turquoise-fringed Manolos and an Alberta Ferretti dress “in every color of the rainbow,” throws a party organized by her regular party planner, Robert Fountain.) She asks the interviewees to name something cool and an object that makes them happy. When we dine at the Google cafeteria a few days later (chicken curry, rice, naan bread; yes, she eats carbs, but see below), I ask her the same questions. Objects that make Mayer happy include her Oscar de la Renta cashmere cardigan with three-quarter sleeves and pointelle detailing and enamel buttons. (She owns four—off-white, oatmeal, navy, black—and bought 20 more as Christmas gifts for her girlfriends. “They were on sale at the end of the season.” De la Renta says, “She’s one of my biggest customers.”) There’s her watch, an Omega De Ville, 18K-gold face with a stainless-steel band, bought in Zurich in 2002. (“The watch really connects me to that summer. Also, it was a good deal. I paid in Swiss francs, and the currency moved a lot that summer. It represents Switzerland and my cleverness with the currency switch.”) There’s the Pixar film Up (“Loved it”) and SK-II skin care (“I tried it because of Cate Blanchett’s endorsement—very cool that it is a by-product of sake”). There’s Twitter Search, and Huggable Hangers (found by Mom in Wisconsin, they “almost allow there to be space between my clothes”), and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Olafur Eliasson’s show at SFMOMA (“How can a geek not love geodesic domes?”).