from Tom Leonard
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 a long time, i hoped that if i 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 i saw, i would have 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.
BUTshe 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 di Caprio 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