My father the very ROTTEN APPLE
Steve Jobs’s iPhone giant has become the world’s first $1trillion company. But in a blistering memoir, the daughter he rejected says he was as miserly with money as he was with his love
Lisa Brennan-Jobs was just a toddler when her father visited her at the miserable rented studio flat in Menlo Park, California, where she lived. it was 1980 and it was only the second time he had seen her.
Her mother, Chrisann Brennan, couldn’t afford to pay the heating bills and Lisa had to sleep wearing a parka. a single mother, Miss Brennan worked as a cleaner and waitress, but survived by topping up her wages with welfare benefits as she struggled on the measly $500 a month that steve Jobs — her ex-boyfriend and Lisa’s father — gave them.
For his part, Jobs was worth $200 million as the creator of apple, the technology company that has now become the first U.s. company to have a market value of $1 trillion.
Jobs had to be forced by the courts to pay anything at all to Miss Brennan, his first girlfriend, after insisting that Lisa wasn’t his child, and falsely claiming both that he was sterile and that his ex-partner slept around. a court-ordered DNa test, however, proved Jobs was the father — and yet he still insisted for years to come that Lisa was not his child.
His monstrous arrogance and narcissism was on display during their brief reunion in Menlo Park.
‘“You know who i am?” he asked,’ writes Lisa in her forthcoming memoir, small Fry. ‘He flipped his hair out of his eyes. i was three years old; i didn’t.
‘“i’m your father.” (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later, when she told me the story.) “i’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.’ Ridiculous as it sounds, he would have been entirely serious.
in an extract of the book published in Vanity Fair, Lisa piles on damning accusations against the father of the iPhone, the iMac and the iPod.
she describes how Jobs was livid when, believing her mother’ s story that the arch-perfectionist discarded his Porsches when they got so much as a scratch, she casually asked one day if she could have the one they were driving in after he was done with it.
‘For along time,i hoped that i fi played ... the beloved daughter, he would be the indulgent father,’ she writes.
‘if i had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what is aw,iwouldh ave known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.’
Even as he lay dying of cancer in 2011 and Lisa went to visit, he told her: ‘You smell like a toilet.’
in fairness, she had just sprayed herself with a face mist that was beginning to turn pungent. But it was classic Jobs — technically accurate but completely lacking in tact and warmth.
Lisa’s revelations about her cold and miserly father come just as his company’s shattering of the $1 trillion ceiling has let loose another tsunami of rhapsodising about his ‘genius’.
seven years after he died, aged 56, of pancreatic cancer, Jobs’s reputation is still being fought over by those who knew him.
Lisa, now 40, and her mother are pitted against not only apple executives who hero-worship their old boss but also Jobs’s widow, Laurene, who has battled to preserve her husband’s saint-like status.
The reclusive billionairess, who is considered to be the richest woman in the tech world, must be mortified by her step-daughter’s decision to write an unflattering memoir about her tortuous relationship with Jobs.
it’s hardly a revelation now that Jobs was not a ‘nice guy’, but coming from the daughter he refused to acknowledge for years, it carries a special potency.
Lisa’s mother Chrisann Brennan was Jobs’s high school sweetheart in Cupertino, California — meeting when both were 17 and shared a hippy world view.
They had an on-off relationship for the next five years, during which they lived with each other at various times. He got her pregnant when she was 18 and, by mutual agreement, she had an abortion.
When she became pregnant again five years later, in 1978, she kept the baby but their relationship ended.
Jobs arrived at the commune in Oregon where Lisa was born, telling everyone ‘it’s not my kid,’ she says in her book. Others who saw that the baby had Jobs’s prominent nose and black hair knew how unconvincing he sounded.
Jobs stayed just long enough to help Chrisann choose a name for the baby then left.
Lisa reveals she invested enormous importance in her mother’s assurance that Jobs named an early apple computer ‘Lisa’ after her. it was, after all, concrete evidence that she meant something to him.
HOWEVER, Jobs cruelly told her it was a mere coincidence. it wasn’t until she was 27 and — by then accepted as his daughter — holidaying with him and his new family on his yacht in the Mediterranean that she learned he had been lying to her.
They stopped for lunch at the French villa of U2’s Bono. When the singer asked if he named the computer after Lisa, Jobs paused and eventually said yes.
in Jobs’s eyes, she writes, she was a ‘blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself.’
By the time she was seven, she and her mother had had to move 13 times, sometimes living in a friend’s spare bedroom. Jobs started visiting once a month in a gleaming black convertible Porsche, and the trio would go out on roller-skates.
Jobs left a trail of leaves behind them as he casually ripped them off plants in neighbours’ gardens they passed.
Lisa admits that when she one day asked him if she might inherit his car, she already knew ‘he was not generous with money, or food, or words’ and so wasn’t surprised when he said no.
BUT she was taken aback by his ferocity. ‘You’re not getting anything,’ he told her. ‘You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.’ she realised she’d ‘made a terrible mistake’.
it isn’t the first time we’ve heard Lisa’s side of the story. she was an important character in the British director Danny Boyle’s 2015 feature film steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet. The film revealed the huge divisions in Jobs’s family.
While Lisa — who had remained publicly silent about her father until he was dead — spent many hours talking to the film’s screenwriter, aaron sorkin, Jobs’s widow had a strong desire not to have the movie made. according to Hollywood sources, she rang Leonardo diCaprio and Christian Bale — both of whom had been approached to play Jobs — and begged them not to get involved.
Laurene, who married Jobs in 1991, also reportedly lobbied each major film studio to not finance the project. apple chief executive Tim Cook also reportedly tried to hinder the filmmakers. ‘They haven’t helped,’ said director Danny Boyle. ‘There’s been some tough moments. i’m not going to go into them.’
in the event, the film could have been far harder on Jobs. it portrayed
him as a driven genius who admitted that having been adopted as a child instilled a feeling of powerlessness that made him determined to bend others to his will. His teenage sweetheart Chrisann Brennan wasn’t spared — described by her daughter Lisa in the film as ‘troubled’, she has to admit to Jobs on screen that she spent $1,500 of his money having her house blessed.
Laurene and Apple executives also refused to co-operate with a 2015 documentary film, Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine. It was far more critical of him and was influenced by Miss Brennan’s own withering memoir, published two years earlier.
In it, she claimed she had been ‘an object of his cruelty’, which increased after Apple took off and, she claimed, he became too grand even to do the washing up.
She also described the moment she had told him she was pregnant with Lisa. ‘Steve’s jaw clenched and there was this searing anger,’ she said. ‘He runs out the
kind of like a teenager, and slams it.’
He subsequently showed he was willing to ‘drag me through court with the little baby to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby’.
Miss Brennan admits Jobs later apologised to her and Lisa for his behaviour.
He gradually increased his financial support, eventually giving them $4,000 a month, and bought her a $400,000 house and two cars.
However, Chrisann complained that getting it out of him was ‘like pulling teeth’, and that his generosity could be withdrawn instantly, such as when he stopped paying for Lisa to attend Harvard University after they had a row. Miss Brennan — now working as a painter — was struggling financially, as she had all her adult life, when she wrote to Jobs in 2005 and again in 2009. She said she would abandon writing a memoir in return for $25 million ‘net’ to her, and $5 million to their daughter Lisa in compensation for their suffering.
‘All the years that I have lost, as a sort of theft, from dishonourable behaviour can heal and be forgiven,’ she wrote. Their hardship, she added, was ‘all the more confusing and difficult because you had so much money’.
Of her memoirs, she wrote: ‘No one is going to be impressed with either of us in this book, and it will hurt Lisa, who never deserved any of this. The choice is yours.’
Jobs wrote back after the 2009 letter saying: ‘I don’t react well to blackmail. I will have no part in any of this.’
Given that much of what Lisa knows about her father was filtered through her mother, it’s entirely possible that if Jobs had paid up, he might have been spared both Chrisann’s memoir and the forthcoming one from Lisa.
It’s also not unreasonable to conclude Chrisann’s resentment was sharpened by the very different fate of the woman who became Mrs Jobs.
JOBS met Laurene Powell — eight years his junior — in 1989 when he gave a lecture at Stanford Business School in California, where the pretty blonde was a student.
In her memoir, Chrisann cited rumours that Laurene went out to snare Jobs. She said Jobs told her how Laurene ‘sat in the front row [of the lecture] and then waited for him until after everyone had left, leaning back on a chair and looking intently at him’. They had dinner together that night.
Jobs married Laurene a year and a half after they met and they had three children together — Reed, Erin and Eve.
An authorised 2011 biography of Jobs suggested he wasn’t exactly a great father to them either.
‘Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was more distant,’ it said. ‘He would often completely ignore them when he had other things on his mind.’ All three offspring, now in their 20s, have kept a low profile although his daughter Eve is a successful international equestrian.
Like their mother, none of them has so far risked rocking the Apple boat by criticising their father. But, then, they have rather more to lose. Laurene, 54, was the main beneficiary in his will. She and her children are estimated to be worth $21.4 billion in Forbes magazine’s annual list.
She remains a reclusive figure,
and although she will promote some worthy liberal cause or other on Twitter, she hides her charity donations by setting up her main philanthropic organisation as a private company so it doesn’t have to report its finances publicly.
However, she’s been unable to hide when cruising the world in Venus — the $100 million, 256ft yacht her husband designed, but never lived to enjoy. Paparazzi shots of her on board revealed she has a boyfriend, Adrian Fenty, an ex-mayor of Washington DC who is seven years her junior.
In his will, Jobs left nothing to his former lover Chrisann Brennan, although he gave a ‘multimillion-dollar’ settlement (the precise figure is unclear) to their daughter Lisa.
In a move that would hardly have endeared her to his grieving widow, Chrisann wrote an essay in Rolling Stone magazine, within days of Jobs’ death, in which she described the ‘all-too-often despotic jerk Steve turned into as he rose to meet the world’.
With her daughter Lisa now firing off a new broadside against the tech king, it seems the toxic family legacy of Steve Jobs’s early life will continue to cast a shadow over his trilliondollar Apple behemoth.