POWER COUPLE Part of Priscilla Chan’s Facebook page, where she updated her marriage status.
THE wedding of Mark Zuckerberg to Priscilla Chan last weekend here in the backyard of their $7 million home had all the staging of a carefully orchestrated celebrity event. A publicist for Facebook eagerly offered photos afterward of the beaming couple, who met at Harvard and have dated for much of the last nine years. Well-placed anonymous sources leaked to reporters the dinner menu, which included sushi and Mexican food, and the fact that Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong performed.
Even the date, May 19, was significant: it was a mere day after Facebook’s initial public stock offering, the culmination of Mr. Zuckerberg’s life work since founding the social network in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. But the curiosity that lingered was not just about what designer’s dress the bride chose to wear (Claire Pettibone) or how long it would take shareholders to sue Facebook for bungling its IPO (six days). Instead, people wanted to know: who was that princess bride who married Silicon Valley’s crown prince?
Indeed, to anyone who still confuses Mr. Zuckerberg with the portrayal of him in “The Social Network,” particularly the scene where his former girlfriend brushes him off (and the prospects of any future romance for young Mark seem dim), the very fact that he even had a longtime girlfriend must have come as something of a shock.
Ms. Chan, 27, unlike some of her equals in social status here (among them Mr. Zuckerberg’s colorful sister Randi), eschews the Silicon Valley limelight. Recently graduated from the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, she plans to become a pediatrician. (In that, she seems to be following in the path of other notable Silicon Valley spouses who have their own established careers, like Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs and an entrepreneur in her own right, and Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google’s Sergey Brin and a founder of 23andMe, a genetic testing firm.)
Ms. Chan guards her privacy and, so far, avoids speaking to the media unless it serves Mr. Zuckerberg’s career. Though she has an active Facebook page (where her “interests” include “No on Prop 8” and Fage yogurt), she is rarely tagged in online party shots. She declined to be interviewed for this article.
“Priscilla doesn’t need to be on the cover of a magazine,” said Heidi Roizen, a venture capitalist and longtime Valley resident. “We are in a reality-star ecosystem. But there is a spectrum to this stuff, and some people take a more thoughtful approach.”
One of the few people talking about the wedding, at least publicly, was Ms. Pettibone, thrust into the spotlight by Ms. Chan’s choice of wedding dress.
Ms. Pettibone said she realized Ms. Chan was wearing her design after the designer’s husband pointed it out in a photograph he saw of the new bride. “It’s not our top seller,” Ms. Pettibone said of the $4,700 dress, one of 40 in her bridal collection, in a phone interview. “But it’s respectable.”
All her dresses are made to order so, last week, Ms. Pettibone said she combed through her orders to see where the dress was sold. It was the Little White Dress boutique in Denver, and it was apparently bought by a third party.
Since the wedding, Ms. Pettibone said, traffic to her Web site has skyrocketed. And retailers are demanding samples to show prospective brides. “There is nothing like a celebrity bride to lift your profile,” Ms. Pettibone said.
People who know Ms. Chan and agreed to speak, albeit without using their names for fear of offending her or Mr. Zuckerberg, said she is a quiet yet forceful presence who is protective of her new husband, whom she met in line for the bathroom at a fraternity party in 2003. Of their first encounter, Ms. Chan told The New Yorker in 2010, “He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” remembering his novelty beer glasses printed with a computer programming joke.
In Palo Alto, Ms. Chan is close to a handful of friends, including Jessica Vascellaro, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and her fiancé, Sam Lessin, a Facebook product manager; Jessica and Aaron Sittig, senior Facebook employees (Mr. Zuckerberg was best man at their Palm Springs, Calif., wedding); and Brittany Morin, who is married to Dave Morin, an early Facebook employee who left to become a founder of Path, a photo-sharing site.
The couple prefers dinner at home with friends to raucous parties, say people who know them. They dote on their Puli, a herding dog named Beast, which they frequently photograph and have created a page for on Facebook. Ms. Chan likes to cook (so says her Facebook page), and she is known among friends for her lemon ricotta pizza.
