Katie Cotton, who served as Apple’s communications chief for many years and monitored media access to Steve Jobs, the company’s visionary co-founder, and helped organize the launch of many of its products, died April 6 in Redwood City, California. She was 57.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Michael Mimeles, her former husband. He gave no cause, but said she had experienced complications from heart surgery she underwent a few years ago.
Ms. Cotton, who built a culture of mystery by saying relatively little or nothing to reporters, joined Apple in 1996 and began working with Mr. Jobs the following year, shortly after he returned to the company after a 12-year absence. Apple was in dire financial straits at the time, but Ms. Cotton teamed up with Mr. Jobs to make a striking turnaround.
Together they developed a tightly controlled PR strategy as the company recovered from heavy losses and launched one successful product after another, including the iMac desktop computer and innovative digital devices such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
“She was formidable and tough and very protective of both Apple’s brand and Steve, especially when he got sick,” said Walt Mossberg, a former technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, in a telephone interview, referring to Mr. Jobs. cancer in 2004. He added: “She was one of the few people he implicitly trusted. He listened to her. She could pull him back from anything he planned to do or say.
Ms. Cotton spoke curtly when reporters questioned her, but she could be helpful when speaking off-the-record or in the background.
“She was accessible, she was a point of contact, but sometimes it was hand-to-hand combat if they wanted to get a story out to the world and it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell,” John Markoff, a former technology reporter for The New York Times, said by phone.
Mrs. Cotton also chose which reporters could speak to Mr. Jobs (even though he occasionally spoke alone with journalists he knew well). In 1997, she invited a Newsweek reporter, Katie Hafner, to watch the first commercial in Apple’s new “Think Different” ad campaign with Mr. Jobs.
A tribute to “the madmen, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers,” a narrator sang as the commercial opened with a still image of Mr. Jobs holding an apple in his left hand and continued with clips of people who changed the world, among them Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, John Lennon, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Edison and Muhammad Ali.
“I looked over and Steve was crying,” Ms. Hafner, who wrote about Apple for Newsweek and later for The New York Times, said in a telephone interview. “I looked at Katie and I couldn’t tell if she was moved or feeling triumphant – I don’t know – but I was filled with admiration for her because she knew how to play this and give me access.”
Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine, said in an email that Mr. Jobs “would call me five or six times a day to tell me if I should do a story or not,” and that Ms. call right after and gently apologize or retract something he had said, adding, “She was very loyal, but she saw him in an unvarnished way.”
Kathryn Elizabeth Cotton was born on October 30, 1965 in Washington, NJ. Her father, Philip, worked for a telecommunications company. Her mother, Marie (Cuvo) Cotton, worked several jobs, including a caterer.
After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, Ms. Cotton worked at Dav-El Limousine in Los Angeles in sales, marketing and public relations before transferring to public relations firm Allison Thomas Associates. The company’s technology clients included Mr. Jobs, who then ran Next Software. But Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Jobs had a falling out before Mrs. Cotton was hired around 1994.
“She was great at what she did,” Ms. Thomas said in a telephone interview, “but it took a while for her obsessive work habits to become apparent.”
In mid-1996, when Gilbert Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the struggling company hired Ms. Cotton to help with public relations. “Katie was doing technical PR before it was the hip and cool thing to do, and Apple needed someone with her experience,” Mr. Mimeles, her ex-husband, who also worked at Apple, said in a phone interview.
In late 1996, Apple acquired Next, bringing Mr. Jobs back to Apple as a consultant. He would become the company’s interim chief executive in 1997 and chief executive three years later. That year he raised Mrs. Cotton to lead Apple’s public relations and communications, eventually appointing her vice president of global communications, a title she held for many years.
“When Steve came back, he didn’t just turn on key engineers,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, said over the phone. “He put in the right people to guide us through the company, and Katie was a big part of that.”
She stayed for Mr. Jobs, while saying little publicly about his health problems, worked until his death in 2011, then worked for Tim Cook, his successor, until she retired in 2014.
A measure of her influence was a headline in Macworld magazine: “Apple PR’s Cotton Leaves: What It Could Mean for the Press.”
Ms. Cotton has never had any other corporate job. She did some business consulting and mentoring young people at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California, where her children attended, and at the Riekes Center, a non-profit educational organization in Menlo, California.
Mrs. Cotton is survived by her mother; a daughter, Isabelle Mimeles; a son, Ethan Mimeles; her partner, Jim Wells; her sisters, Lori Ann David and Patty Stewart; and her brother Richard Cotton.
After Mr. Jobs died, the advertising agency TBWA/Media Arts Lab showed a proposed commercial for Ms. Cotton and two other Apple executives.
“It’s sad when a founder dies,” the commercial began, Tripp Mickle wrote in “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” (2022). “You wonder if you can manage without him. Should you put on your brave face for the world, or just be honest?
When it was done, Mrs. Cotton cried.
“We can’t do this,” she said. They never did.
