GREAT EXPECTATIONS

What does it mean to give and give and give until it's almost all gone? Melinda French Gates and her daughters, Jennifer and Phoebe, in their first-ever joint interview, talk about a life's mission.

- By Chloe Schama. Portraits by Taryn Simon.

On a morning in September, Jennifer Gates Nassar, 29, arrives at a Manhattan photo studio at 9:30—the first one here, before the photography crew even, for a shoot that will take place later that day with her younger sister, Phoebe, 23, and mother, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates. This is typical, Phoebe tells me later: “She would always arrive early if she could.” When Jennifer was taken to school as a child, her mother adds, she liked to get there just after the teachers.

“I’ve gotten better with time!” says Jenn, now a pediatric resident at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai hospital. Jenn was the kind of oldest child who made PowerPoint presentations to convince her parents that the family deserved a dog. Together with Phoebe and their middle sibling, brother Rory (now an analyst in Washington, DC, where he generally keeps a lower profile), the Gates kids grew up outside Seattle, in what, from certain angles, resembled a normal family—this despite the fact that their father, Bill Gates, ran the biggest software company in the world. Jenn played the role of second mother; Phoebe tracked mud inside, left the house with her hair a mess, and told little white lies about how late she was allowed to stay out to get under Jenn’s skin. “I was obsessed with her,” Phoebe says of her big sister.

Attention swirled around the family, and Melinda thought carefully about how to insulate her children from it. By the time she married Bill, in 1994, he was already well known as the founder of Microsoft (where she herself had worked since 1987—the only woman in her hiring class). She'd sometimes travel ahead of him—quick vacations to Hawaii with Jenn before the other children came along. When he would join a few days later, “the difference in how we were treated was just night and day,” Melinda says.