The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

by Brennan, Chrisann

  A couple of years after Apple had started Woz asked me, through Steve, if I would help him decorate his apartment. It was a surprising request because I knew he had never really liked me. Yet it confirmed to me what everyone knows, that Woz didn’t have any malice in his heart. Steve and I went over to Woz’s place, where I gave him ideas on color and suggestions on where to place some plants. I felt awkward about it, but he was affable and considerate. I think he had asked me over because he was just becoming interested in women—or maybe a woman—and wanted to impress her with his good taste. Maybe, too, he wanted to make amends.

  That was the day he showed me his Dial-A-Joke machine. As I remember, it was just a big clunky tape machine connected to the phone to generate nerdy science-guy puns. The jokes were funny only because they were so silly. Silly punny jokes are like the verbal equivalent of slapstick—unexplainably funny. Woz has a gift for this. When he showed me the joke machine, he told me that he sometimes answered the phone and delivered the joke live, pretending he was the recording and then surprising the caller with a live response. That machine was like a prototype for online dating searches; Woz actually used it to attract his first wife, who must have been impressed by his funny, goofy guy puns. So there was real sweetness to him after all.

  * * *

  Steve told me many times, and in oblique ways, that he was terrified he would “lose his humanity in the business world.” Sometimes he would couch it in terms of his concern for Woz. “I’m so afraid Woz is going to lose himself in the business world,” he’d tell me, widening his eyes dramatically. He never got specific about how or why this might happen and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask questions about. It was too big for language.

  Steve’s relationship with time and the future—and just about everything else—was different from that of nearly anyone I ever knew. I gradually became aware that he knew his destiny in big ways and that his intuition had given him very specific information about his life way before he would live it. He knew, for example, that he would be in a relationship with Joan Baez, the folk singer and Dylan’s famous former girlfriend. He knew that he would be a multimillionaire. He told me many times that he would die in his early forties; then one day, when we were in our early forties, he changed the prediction to his mid-forties. When he had become a billionaire but hadn’t died by his mid-forties, I remember him repeating, “I am living on borrowed time,” as if the still-young shaman was angling to carve out a bit more future for himself.

  Yet as much as he knew some odd and precise details, Steve was in the dark about others. It was only later, as I was looking at our sleeping daughter in my arms, that I remembered how fearful Steve had been of losing his humanity. That’s when my understanding gelled; it wasn’t Woz who would lose his humanity, it was Steve. Woz, who had a solid, loving bond with both of his own parents, would be fine. Steve had been talking about himself and he’d known it all along. It was always like him to approach matters of personal concern in riddles. I picture him now as a blind man tapping words out with a white stick—out beyond his feet, out beyond the present—communicating between his false and real selves, wanting to confide in me, to not be alone in the mixture of the terrible fear and irrepressible joy of such a rare destiny.

  FIVE

  CROSSCURRENTS

  My name, Chrisann, comes from the flower, the chrysanthemum. It’s the symbol for transformation in many cultures, although in very different ways. In European cultures, the chrysanthemum is seen as the doorway out of this world, and so it is given at funerals. In the ancient Hindu sacred system, the 8th chakra that is above the head is a multiple petal chrysanthemumlike flower. A doorway again—this time between the physical body and the higher realms of self. Japanese and Chinese cultures place a very high value on transcending the ego and in these cultures the chrysanthemum means long life and joy, as it’s a symbol for integrating the spirit and soul into the body for true happiness in earthly life. In Japan, the Imperial Order of the Chrysanthemum is the highest Order of Chivalry and the emblem and seal of the emperor himself, wherein this symbol is no less than the full realization of the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. My name, given to me by my mother, was like a blessing in difficult circumstances. It was a bright rose window of a name. And I was going to need it.

  * * *

  I was born in 1954 in Dayton, Ohio, the first born in a new generation of the Brennan clan. I grew up with three siblings: one older half sister, Kathy, and two younger sisters, Jamie and Linda. We were a beautiful little family in Ohio, full of the promise of new beginnings. We lived in a big house at the end of a road that was bordered by a deep, wooded area. Surrounding us were grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts. You could see a cornfield from our front porch, in the middle of which was a hundred-year-old schoolhouse with its bell still hanging intact. We’d ice skate in the flooded woods in wintertime. In summer we’d make forts and pretend worlds in the trees. On Sundays we’d sit down to big family dinners, and on holidays we’d go to church. Easter was new dresses with matching bonnets. Christmas was ridiculously lush.

  When I was seven, my father was promoted and we moved away from Ohio and our extended family to Colorado Springs. My father was transferred two more times after that: to Nebraska and finally California. I was twelve when we moved to Sunnyvale, California. My parents would separate within the year. They would divorce soon after.

  My father, James Richard Brennan, had been a handsome and talented athlete in his youth: a crack diver and football star in high school, a competitive boxer in the navy, and a skier until he was sixty-nine. At eighteen he went into the service and never went on to college. But with an affable disposition and the training he received in the navy, he was able to build a successful white-collar career and provide us with a good life.

  In his youth my father looked like Marlon Brando, with mystical eyes, a powerful jaw, and a face as open as a big full moon. In older age, he had white hair and laugh lines communicating a sensitive nature that belied a broken nose never reset after a navy boxing match. My father had grown up in a rough neighborhood at a rough time and carried pent-up alarm under the surface of his muscular frame. He was kind, yet extremely defensive, and he set high value on being polite and considerate. That’s probably why he was ever mindful to keep his real thoughts and feelings to himself. Though my father could be emotionally distant, he also had a refreshing appreciation of life and a love for his daughters and grandchildren that grew as he aged.

  My father was conventional. He had a strong sense of right and wrong and always played by the rules. As was often the case in the fifties, he left the emotional responsibility for the family to our mother, while he built his career. As a result, he was wholly unprepared for the shock as he witnessed his beautiful wife’s devolution into mental illness and the impact of the sixties revolution on his four daughters. When Steve and my father met, as my father would later recall, Steve presented himself as the arrogant, self-absorbed eternal boy. He told my father that he planned to grow up to be a bum. Two worlds collided. The last thing my father needed or wanted was for his daughter to be smitten with such an immature fellow.

  * * *

  My mother, Virginia Lavern Rickey, was an extremely bright and attractive woman. In the home movies of her early twenties, she appears as a petite, pretty girl who had a soft feminine look and a somewhat disconcerting sense of her own sexuality. She had a childish mouth, like Elizabeth Taylor, an unremarkable nose, and deep gray eyes with a caught-in-the-headlights look. Years later, when I was in my thirties and saw my first original Georgia O’Keeffe painting, all I could think of was my mother’s hands.

  My mother wasn’t a particularly nice woman. She saw herself as superior to most people. My mother had been a latchkey child in the thirties while my grandmother had worked full time as a cook for the VA, supporting her daughter and her then-husband through the Depression. After the Depression, when her father was no longer around, my moth
er adapted to years of long, lonely afternoons. She read a lot of books and drank small bottles of Coca-Cola from a time, as she later told us, “when Coke was good!”

  My mother lived in fear most of her life. Her father had molested her when she was very young, and in an unusual move in any era, my grandmother had thrown him out of the house because of it. When my mother was nine, her father committed suicide. My grandmother remarried four times and one of her later husbands also molested my mother—this time when she was fourteen. She carried damage from those experiences with her for life.

  As a teenager in the forties my mother had modeled herself on the hard-bitten femme fatale so popular in the movies of the time. Donning a tough attitude that contrasted with her fragility, she would peer down over her reading glasses, take a big drag on her cigarette, and tell us, “Sincerity and a dime will get you a cup of coffee, kid.” Such was the root of her humor.

  My mother made sure our homes were clean and beautiful. She took her job as homemaker seriously, in a conventional Midwestern fashion. This expressed itself in an insistence that we play outside every day, watch limited hours of TV, go to bed early, and attend good schools. My mother was a fabulous cook with a repertoire that embraced world cuisines. Much of her creativity expressed itself in the dinners she cooked for us. (She made mixed-seafood scampi so well I’m still searching for a restaurant that comes even halfway close to hers.) I remember my mother sitting at the supper table in the late afternoons in Ohio, Colorado, Nebraska, and California, one leg curled up under her, reading and smoking while the dinner simmered. Cooking while reading, reading while cooking. We didn’t have much in the way of literary dinner conversation, but our meals were still filled with authors like Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Melville, Stegner, and Capote.

  All her life my mother read good literature. She had a huge capacity for abstract thought, and I believe her greatest joy in life came from thinking and talking about expansive ideas. She had the kind of mind for bold, tide-turning thoughts, and would say things like, “Everyone in the world is going to have to deal with the fact of Nazi Germany in themselves.” I processed this phrase for years in an attempt to understand what that meant about my own life.

  She was definitely brilliant in her own way, and I think she may also have been slightly autistic. She was angry that she’d had so many children and it often seemed that her main goal was to get away from us. We bored her. In later years, as her mental illness increased, my mother gained a great deal of weight and had a defensive disquietude about her. Her laugh was all-knowing and disdainful, and she would criticize everyone and everything, exhibiting a callous and distinctly ungenerous attitude.

  At our house, there were never discussions about what the rest of us thought about things; my mother concentrated on her own thoughts and judgments. It was the time of feminism and she dove into her own search for meaning and identity. As a result there were big holes in my upbringing. I never had a desk for homework or a drafting table, much less an easel and art supplies. On the contrary, in areas where I showed talent and interest, my mother would either ignore or ridicule me. My mother wasn’t tuned in to her three younger daughters. She made meals and supervised us while we cleaned the house and mowed the lawn on Saturdays, but after that she clocked out to attend to her own world. She often worked to play all four of us against each other, comparing our talents and IQ scores. In truth, my mother nurtured only my oldest sister’s education, providing her with special foods, years of violin lessons, and long conversations about literature. She detested my father by the time we had moved to California, and chose my older sister Kathy as her intellectual partner. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Considering her state, this kind of benign neglect wasn’t such a bad thing.

  * * *

  Like a crosscurrent, it was when the first of her four daughters hit adolescence that my mother’s mental illness would surface without retreat. After that, one by one, as we all came of age, she fell further into abusive behaviors toward us. My mother had experienced a terrible shattering of her childhood, and I imagine that our burgeoning sexuality with its promise of womanhood triggered a great panic and a sense of loss in her. She had protected us from it until she couldn’t anymore. Then her pain moved up through the seams of our homes, starting in Colorado, and began covering everything with dark layers of unspeakable outrage and sadness.

  My mother was checked out. I think the newly evolving feminist movement spoke volumes to her and provided an escape route to abandon her family. My mother exchanged her family wholesale for an inspired identity as a feminist intellectual. Aloft and deluded, she went to college, eventually earning a degree with a double major in psychology and literature. She would retreat to her bedroom for hours to write papers at a big white desk that she’d painted and antiqued for herself. She put a bumper sticker on her car that said “Another Student for Peace,” choosing it over one that said, “Another Mother for Peace.” While she didn’t value herself as a mother, she also never challenged herself outside of school by developing a professional life. The line between her mental illness and what seemed like bad character wasn’t clear to me. As a teen, I just saw her as fraudulent.

  My mother had such a deeply confusing combination of traits for me to understand; I felt bad about myself around her. She hated my creativity, my blooming sexuality, my friends, and my budding philosophies. She talked about adolescence in the most derisive tone, as if I should be embarrassed and even shamed by the fact that I was going through it. Every tender thing that was good about that age brought her ridicule and hatred into sharper focus. All of this took place in the midst of cooking wonderful, well-rounded dinners that she planned for and made every day, giving us a better life than she herself had ever known.

  I had experienced the cozy safety and wonder of early childhood in a strong family context, but my teen years were a war zone. In my early twenties, when I was struggling with so much, Cindy, my best friend from the sixth grade, laid it on the line because she had been around our family enough to have seen everything. “I am really sorry to tell you but your mother had it out for you.” I wasn’t sentimental about a mother’s love; obviously I knew even more than she did about how awful my own mother had been. Yet what Cindy was saying with such sincerity confirmed what I knew, and I adored her for her courage to speak up with so much careful kindness. What I didn’t know then—and what she did know—was how good a mother could be.

  The situation was clear to many. By the time I’d gotten together with Steve my mother’s eyes met mine with pure hatred. A friend from this time told me that she saw me as tough and sparkling, fragile and soulfully earnest. Some of my teachers at Homestead knew I had trouble at home but no one really understood mental illness then. I think they chalked it up to mother/daughter issues. After my father moved to another house and my older sister went off to college, my younger sisters and I lived a growing nightmare. Without those two at home there was no mitigating the cruelty and so my mother got worse.

  My mother and Steve’s first meeting was disturbing. She began by sitting on the floor with us and acting like a teenager, flirting and competing with him over whose literary acumen was more developed, his or hers. It went downhill from there. Steve burrowed into himself and used words sparingly as he moved to hold his position. Soon after arriving, he left the house bristling with anger, and I was left dizzy and disoriented and wondering if I had lost him.

  * * *

  I don’t blame my mother. As far back as I can remember my heart has been moved by the way her fragile immaturity and wobbly sense of personal identity combined with her great love of life. Prior to the availability of birth control a lot of women had children before they were ready. Ultimately, I valued the importance she always placed on truth and her exquisite, refined curiosity. I felt she was like an Olympic runner who handed us the dazzling torch of all her work before she was felled from the exhaustion of her cruelty. Yet back then, when she held the power in our home, she
was brittle with brutality and self-hatred that she projected outward onto us. There was nothing we could do but escape.

  I was in my mid-twenties when my mother was diagnosed with a hodgepodge of mental diseases that included paranoid schizophrenia, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder with episodes of psychosis. I don’t think anyone even knew the extent of it, and I wonder if it ever mattered what they’d called it, except that by naming such things it seems easier to have compassion. It would take me years to understand exactly how such terms might be translated into the behaviors we’d endured.

  As the full cataclysm of my mother’s illness unfolded I worried that I would end up like her and this propelled my interest in all things healthy and alternative. And so it was at twenty-two that I made a plan for handling my own mental illness, should I see signs of it. Number one: I would be responsible for my own health. That became my first priority. Number two: I would not eat meat. Numbers three, four, and five: I would meditate, practice yoga, and work to stay connected to my ideals. I also thought—number six—that developing my own creativity was crucial for my health. I saw that my mother only read and critiqued, but never created anything outside of food, and even then she followed recipes. I understood that people who didn’t develop themselves through their creativity would end up redirecting that energy adversely.