My dying father said I ‘smelled like toilet’, says Jobs’ daughter
STEVE JOBS told his daughter she “smelled like a toilet” on his deathbed, according to a new memoir detailing their troubled relationship.
The Apple founder made the comments during a visit by his daughter to his home when he picked up on the smell of a facial mist that had soured.
In an excerpt from her memoir Small Fry, published in Vanity Fair magazine, Lisa Brennan-jobs – who Jobs denied was his daughter after her birth and during a court child-support battle when she was two – chronicles how her father had to be sued for maintenance payments, and claimed he was sterile in a deposition to the court and therefore could not be her father. He later lied to her about naming one of the first Apple computers after her, only to confirm he had when he was asked by Bono, the Irish rock star.
The 40-year-old recalls how Chrisann Brennan, her mother, who had a five year on-off relationship with Jobs, had to supplement her income by cleaning and waitressing. “My father didn’t help,” she writes. “For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent. Our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak.”
When she was born in 1978 the microcomputer pioneer initially denied Brennan-jobs was his daughter. In 1980 he was sued by the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, for child-support payments and ordered to pay $385 (£295) per month, which Jobs increased to $500 (£385).
Days after the case was finalised, “Apple went public and overnight my father was worth more than $200million,” says Brennan-jobs.
She recalls how her father remarked she “smelled like a toilet” during one of their final meetings at his home in Palo Alto, California, three months before his death in October 2011 from complications of pancreatic cancer. Before walking into his bedroom she had sprayed some expensive rose facial mist she had found in one of her father’s bathrooms on herself.
The spray had lost much of its perfume, so much so that, on her way out, Jobs said to her: “Lis? You smell like a toilet.”