APPLE OF HIS EVIL EYE
Kid’s tale of cruel Steve Ste Jo obs
STEVE Jobs would never have survived #MeToo.
The myth he built — a difficult man whose genius made him so and justified any personal failings — has finally been leveled.
“Small Fry,” the new memoir by his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, depicts a sadistic man and a horrible father: sexually inappropriate, verbally and psychologically abusive, pitiless and cheap — with his time, money, emotions, attention.
This was a man who liked to make little girls cry.
BrennanBrennan-Jobs, now 40, opens her book with a deathbed scene unlike any other. There is her father, a titan of the 20th century, emaciated and unable to walk, propped on a hospital bed in his study. She goes into the restroom and finds an expensive bottle of rosewater face mist. She spritzes herself. She is trying to make every interaction, possibly their last, perfect.
“I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies,” she writes, “But I kept coming anyway.”
After hugging her father goodbye, his bones protruding through waxy skin, he calls for her. “Lis?” “Yeah?” “You smell like a toilet.” WBrennanW HILE promoting her book, Brennan-Jobs has, poignantly, sought to excuse scenes like these. “Just to be clear: I did, in fact, smell like a toilet,” she tweeted on Aug. 15. She has expressed fear that readers might not appreciate the love she still has for her father or realize she has forgiven him. Even as a teenager, she felt guilt for wanting him around. After all, he was busy changing the world, socializing with rock stars and partying in the South of France. “I figured no one would think, ‘Hey, that guy should have been raising his daughter instead.’ ” She was right. The Jobs family has since released a statement about Brennan-Jobs’s memoir that reads, in part, “The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and fatherfath we knew.”
But her mother, Chrisann Brennan, recently told The New York Times that the memoir actually downplays her daughter’s cchildhood. Still, the book “was horrhorrendous for me to read,” said BrennaBrennan, who herself does not come off welwell. “It was very, very hard. But she got it right.”
Brennan-Jobs sspent the first three years of her life withoutw a father. Jobs denied paternity uuntil one day in late December 1980, when he rushed through a legal settlementse of $500 a month in child susupport.
Four days after that, Apple went public, making JoJobs worth more than $200 million. HHis daughter would grow up in chaos and poverty — until those moments heh would swoop in and show her his world.
And it was crecreepy. Brennan-Jobs had her first overnightov visit with Steve — never DDad — in the fourth grade. He sent hishi secretary to pick her up and depositdeposi her outside his office,fice, where she wwaited, alone, until the sun went dowdown. He barely said a word to her on the drive home, fed her a dindinner of bland salad and mmurky juice, then askasked, “Wanna take a hhot tub?”
On the drive to school the next day, he pointed out the
Hoover Tower and said, “Look. It’s a penis. It’s the penis of Palo Alto.” He talked to her of female beauty, which gave young Brennan-Jobs “a strange feeling . . . the longing in his voice when he talked of blond hair or breasts, gesturing weights in his cupped hands.”
He told young Lisa a story about Ingrid Bergman, whom Jobs lusted after and who once stayed at a friend’s house.
“It turns out Ingrid Bergman liked to sunbathe in the nude, and my friend, who was a boy then, whose bedroom looked out over the pool, was watching her. And then she was, well, she was . . . The moment it happened, the climax, she looked up at him. Right at him.”
Brennan-Jobs had no idea what he was talking about but would never forget this story — because he never stopped telling it.
AS Brennan-Jobs aged, Jobs became even more sexual in front of her. He dated a woman named Tina, a beautiful blonde who, to Brennan-Jobs, “seemed like she was a woman but also a little girl.” They would often make out in front of young Lisa; at one dinner, Jobs grabbed Tina by the head. “As they kissed, he pressed his palm against her breasts, wrinkling the fabric of her T-shirt. ‘Mmm,’ he said.”
Jobs did this not just in front of Lisa but her mother and his own sister — often — and no one told him to stop. It all confused her. Why didn’t anyone ever tell Steve no? Why would his girlfriend go along with this? Did that mean it was OK?
“I was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued,” Brennan-Jobs writes. “I guess my role was to watch and note how much he adored [Tina], even though it gave me a strange feeling to be near them when they did this.” She was 9 years old. “Try to be part of this family,” or the more sinister, “If you want to be part of this family . . .” were Jobs’ constant threats to Lisa. It allowed him to get away with unacceptable behavior: asking his daughter if she masturbated, going through all “the bases” with her, joking that her new bed would see no shortage of boys, telling her how to insert a diaphragm.
At one point, her mother learned that Jobs’ assistant gardener had been accused by his children of molestation. She begged Jobs to fire the man. He refused.
His sadism extended to her young cousin Sarah. The girls were in elementary school, and Brennan-Jobs wantedSarah to meet her father. They had dinner at a local shopping center and Sarah ordered a hamburger. This would be her undoing. “What’s wrong with you?” Jobs asked. Sarah was confused.
As Brennan-Jobs writes, her father shifted into a loud, grating voice, making sure every diner there could hear him.
“You can’t even talk,” he said to Sarah. “You can’t even eat. You’re eating s--t.”
Sarah just stared at him, trying to hold back tears.
“Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is? Please stop talking in that awful voice. I wish I wasn’t here with you. I don’t want to spend another moment of my life with you. Get yourself together . . . You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it.”
As he got up, Sarah finally dissolved, “sobbing messily, with snot and tears, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve and telling us she was fine. I was smaller than she was, shorter, slighter. But she was small too.”
“He’s a mean person,” Brennan- Jobs told Sarah. But a big part of her, even today, doesn’t want to believe it.
THESE are but a few of the many cruelties Jobs visited upon his daughter. He pushed Brennan-Jobs out of family photos. He treated her like hired help, except he didn’t pay her. He told her she’d never get anything from him and would grow up to be nothing. She heard her half-sister Eve describe her as “Daddy’s mistake.” On vacation, Jobs introduced Lisa to his friend Larry Ellison, and squeezed her tight when Ellison bragged he had just flown one woman out of town and is flying another one in, neither any wiser.
These are the gods of Silicon Valley, exacting their revenge of the nerds.
It’s a poisonous ethos, largely untrammeled, and Brennan-Jobs, intentionally or not, has written more than a memoir. It’s a revelatory depiction of tech-world hypocrisy — the belief held by these men that they, in making our lives better, are beyond rebuke.
For years, the legend of Steve Jobs has been gilded by worshipful men: In his authorized biography, Walter Isaacson depicted Brennan-Jobs as uncaring and callous. Aaron Sorkin softened Steve’s relationship with Brennan-Jobs in his facile redemption tale — the daughter a sacrificial lamb, albeit none too wounded.
There’s no finessing it: Steve Jobs was a monster.
How fitting that Brennan-Jobs’ memoir is published now, as the #MeToo movement approaches its first anniversary. Jobs deserves the same cultural re-evaluation as Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein and all the rest. The Great Man mythology itself should be done.
Brennan-Jobs alights on this simple truth, her own #MeToo coda, when expressing her gratitude for the family friends who rescued her from the Jobs home, so perfect on the outside, her father the prince of Palo Alto.
They were the only ones, she writes, who “didn’t like the idea that because my father had money and was surrounded by people who pandered to him, he could get away with being cruel to a child.”
On Wednesday, Brennan-Jobs told the “Today” show that she doesn’t hate her father — she wishes only that she had more time with him. She may have forgiven Steve Jobs, but that doesn’t mean we have to.