I looked at Lisa and then Steve and then Lisa and then Steve again. After which I was doing the equivalent of hitting my forehead thinking what a fool I’d been. Here was the world genius and the complete village idiot. Suddenly I understood that the person I was longing to save the situation didn’t have the basics of emotional intelligence, much less a real conscience. He was somehow just blank and theoretical.
As he spoke to Lisa, Steve presented himself as the big bright shiny balloon that was all too easily popped and gone because if anyone said the wrong word, Steve could just walk away. He would suffer nothing if the environment didn’t suit him. I felt so unspeakably heartbroken watching as Lisa, mute and shy, took him in with her soft eyes. She only knew a few words and had no idea who this Mr. Glad Rags was. He wasn’t looking in wonder at her and saying anything like, “Hi, little one, who are you? You’re so cute! Let me look at your sweet little hands. What is your favorite toy?” My mind spun because he was so outside of anything I knew how to help with.
Eventually, after not getting the applause he had somehow expected, he then asked if we could go outside. At the moment of the request, I understood that my living room was so lacking in beauty that Steve could not bear to hang out in it any longer. Standing in the outer yard next to his car he shared a few more hyped-up words with me and then was gone as quickly as he had come, speeding off without a care in his little black Porsche. It was shudderingly weird. I wondered if the visit was another one of Kobun’s “encouraging” ideas? Here I was living in poverty and Steve didn’t know or care about anything except that he found things unpleasant to be around and wanted to move away from them. I told Daniel about it in the weeks that followed and he would have forgotten this, too, if it weren’t for the fact that it was because of him that some version of it ended up in the made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Steve never came by again.
When I think back on all this now I wonder at Steve’s not being more invested in Lisa; I think it was because he did not provide me with enough money. Lisa and I were very valuable to him but he didn’t know it. There are many men who in a backward kind of logic seem to care only for what they pay for and invest in. As there was so little invested, he did not know to care.
TWENTY
MACHINE OF THE YEAR
I met David one Saturday morning at Peet’s Coffee in Menlo Park. I didn’t realize that he was drop-dead gorgeous, but I did notice that his eyes were full of light and honesty and the perfect amount of mischief. David was a world-class rock climber and a creative force. And though he was less complex than Steve, they both shared some kind of elemental power and a desire for the straight-up climb. I fell deeply in love with David. Lisa and I moved to Tahoe City to live with him in 1982.
David had a nice house with a short walk to the north side of the lake. The sweet-smelling pines and the clear air of the higher altitude were renewing, and David was glad to provide this to us. Lisa was three and a half when David and I met, and he welcomed her with pure delight. There was great potential for us as a little family. David had a clear passion and delight for my daughter and they bonded in many ways, but after a while I found myself uneasy about his parenting. Everybody carries their family’s unconsciousness around with them, their family patterns. Steve and I had our own complicated histories, so I wasn’t exactly judging. But things had been pressing in on me for a long time and I was worn down. Not having resolved my own history, the thought of dealing with David’s was too much to handle. I believe that David and I had the potential for a terrifically good marriage and that Lisa would have thrived. But I lacked the experience to figure it all out. When things grew uncomfortable between us I fell into fight or flight mode. After a lot of fighting, and too many impossible silences, flight won. Lisa and I left Tahoe after a year and moved back to the familiar surroundings of the Bay Area.
It was while David and I were still together that Michael Moritz of Time magazine approached me for an interview. I thought of this as an opportunity to tell the truth about what had happened with Steve. It would be my first big interview about him. And my last. Moritz was a serious guy, an intelligent writer type, bristling with ambition. (He would later become a major venture investor at Sequence Capital.) Moritz was professional and personable enough and I think we talked for about three hours. At the beginning of the interview Moritz told me he felt that there was something really off about Steve and that he intended to get to the bottom of it. Anyone who knew Steve knew that something was off, so I believed him. I told Moritz my story as his questions rolled out, and at the end of the three hours I remember him looking thoughtfully and saying, more to himself than to me, maybe I’ll call you “Charlotte Broils.” There had been some discussion of keeping my real name undisclosed for fear of Lisa being kidnapped. Moritz’s comment was a nod to this, and also to how burned I had been. Hence, charbroiled. It was clever and insulting and it gave me some idea of how others saw me.
The interview hadn’t been as glamorous as I thought it would be, more a combination of exhausting and alarming. Moritz’s questions were uninteresting to me, like a drill. There wasn’t anything creative or revelatory about our exchange. Years later I was told by another reporter from another big business magazine that the outcome of the article would affect Moritz for years, because he’d had no idea what it was to have gone up against Steve. Now that was revelatory.
In January of 1983 Time’s “Man of the Year” issue was on the newsstands. Except that “Man of the Year” was turned into “Machine of the Year.” I was in Tahoe when my father’s wife called and warned me that the article was “a bit rough.” Nothing could have prepared me for what I would read, though. I’m not sure what else may have gotten stuck in Steve’s craw, but I imagine Moritz had fired a gotcha question at him about why he’d questioned the paternity of his firstborn.
I imagined that Steve’s response was vicious and contemptuous: “28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” But actually I don’t know whether he said it in hatred or if he was cool and collected. What I do know, however, is that applying a number like “28%” to such a question is exactly how Steve worked. Steve had long before figured out that numerical detail fascinates the mind. And he was like a magician: good at creating distractions.
In that article Steve had also said that he had named the Lisa computer after an old girlfriend. This of course was a fabrication. He had no old girlfriends named Lisa. It was typical of Steve. He had taken poetic license over the edge. Now he was just lying. Before the article was published I’d been living in some kind of an illusion, telling myself that Steve appreciated all the work and love I brought to raising Lisa. She was almost four when the issue came out, and despite all evidence to the contrary, I still believed in Steve’s basic goodness. My daughter had this effect on me.
After I read the Time article I was hit so hard that three days went by where I was hardly able to speak or focus. To have been treated dishonorably by Steve in a national publication was so incomprehensible to me that I just went blank. I must have retreated to some place inside myself to work it all out. I don’t really know how I got through it, only that after three days I came back with all the love and laughter for Lisa and David I had before.
* * *
Steve had the deepest impulse to refine everything he touched, as if the act of refining was in and of the total law of his being. So it should be no surprise that, along with all else, Steve refined hatred into the coldest and most controlled inhuman indifference. Steve’s ruthlessness was so stunning that people often endured repetitions of his cruelty in order to understand what was happening so that they could figure out how to get out of the way. Also, I suspect that he used people’s suffering as an energy source for himself.
In the days after I recovered from the Time article I realized that I was frightened not because I was afraid of him—but that I was afraid for him. And it made me frightened about the world, too. How on earth, I
wondered, could he not know what was important? How could he not know what was real? He seemed to have become a binary automaton of left-brain thinking: yes-no, one-zero, black-white, love-hate. Nuance was gone. Emotional reflection, complexity, and context were gone. What did he care about?
Some years after the Time article came out Steve was voted one of the “Top 10 Worst Bosses” in the United States. A great weight was lifted off me when I learned this. I mean I floated for a few days in wonder. I had always thought that I was alone in what I had endured. More to the point, I kept forgetting that I wasn’t alone because being in the sights of Steve’s hatred was so disorienting, I crumpled under the weight of it unable to think or remember anything. But here was evidence that many other people had seen it.
Despite his genius, Steve made a huge miscalculation his whole life: he believed that hatred was a legitimate force in the world. And because it gave him such unassailable power, he used it and didn’t doubt it. Moreover I think he mistook power for love because it made him feel bigger and better. To my great disappointment, he died before figuring out the mistake.
* * *
Later I confronted Steve. “Why did you say twenty-eight percent of the male population could be Lisa’s father?” I asked. “And that I would name my child after one of your old girlfriends?” “Moritz lied,” he said, unblinking.
If Moritz had lied, what had he lied about? It took me a couple of weeks to realize that it was Steve who was lying. I had spent just a little time with Michael Moritz, yet I knew telling the truth was a big part of his professional legitimacy. The magazine’s, too. I came to think that even if Moritz had misquoted Steve, or lied in some way, it would not have been on those statements. Besides this, Steve did have a sense of decency when he was in the right, and if he had been misquoted he would have called me the moment the magazine issue came out to apologize. He would have done something about it, too. But this did not happen, because Steve had lied. And he’d lied because he didn’t want people to see who he really was.
There was another aspect of that Time article that shocked me, too. It was winter when I was sitting on our warm waterbed in Tahoe City poring over it for the first time. I looked at the beautiful pictures with some wonder as well as alarm to see Steve in his big Saratoga house with his Japanese meditation pillow. There’s one image in which Steve is sitting in an upright posture with a small Japanese cup in his beautiful hands. The room is sparsely furnished and luminous, lit by a Tiffany lamp. It was materialism so sublime that it looked holy. The images sent shock waves through me. Steve was building and promoting a commercial image of himself that implied the sacred. And this alerted me to the fact that he wasn’t connected to it.
It’s a brilliant marketing strategy to imply the sacred in a product. For sophisticated buyers, the sacred dimension enfolds sex—and a lot more besides. Take, for example, the name “Oracle” for a business. It’s a name that taps into the message from an elevated level, the divine feminine, the illuminated truth, the higher calling, the riddle of the ancient mariner’s song, and the longed-for mystical connection. When the sacred is used to promote material goods (or an idea or person, for that matter), an alchemical flash point is created that gets rerouted into image, exquisite design, cool products, and buyable beauty. And all that taps into the cachet of exclusivity. In this way the idea of the sacred is used to promote image-based identity, and though no real connection has been made with the soul, for a moment the aura of mystique wafts into our lives like the cool winds of heaven—until we need more. And we always need more.
I kept that issue of Time for many years, but after this I didn’t pay much attention to Steve’s career again. Once we started to cooperate for Lisa’s benefit, I learned to self-censor my interaction with the public side of Steve because it could set off a chain reaction between us that could produce nothing but harm and destruction. I hung back and assumed a role of silence: Lisa was my priority and so was my own sanity. If Daniel Kottke called to tell me that this or that reporter might like to talk to me, or if an article, a TV show, a magazine, a newspaper, or a book with Steve’s face on it happened to be in front of me, or if someone who had no idea of my connection to him mentioned his name, I would consider it like the I Ching—purposeful chance where I’d take note in a precise, but mild way. Mainly and with few exceptions, I felt that the world and the worldly did not care about love or kindness, just more toys. And if I did happen to want to test the water and talk to a reporter (they usually ended up giving me as much information as I ever shared with them), I would sometimes mention that I thought Steve was going to wake up at some point again. Well, at that point the reporter would look at me as if I was just plain stupid. How could anyone be so naïve?
* * *
The last of the chain reaction set off from that interview with Moritz came by way of Lisa. When she was nine and in the fifth grade, Lisa was a petite and extremely coordinated little sprite of a girl with a very bright and good nature. One day, for no apparent reason, she scrambled up the built-in bookcase in our house and snagged the copy of Time that I had kept on the top shelf.
“Where did you get that?” I asked, when I saw it lying on the couch.
“I found it!” she said, then added, “and I read all of it!”
She announced this in short fast high notes that told me she was proud of herself and that she was nervous and out of her depth, too. She got super speedy and alert because of how intensely I questioned her.
“I climbed and got it up there,” she added, pointing to the upper shelving, like a confident little elf.
Lisa wasn’t a mischievous child. It isn’t a trait anyone would associate with her, though I liked it in her on the rare occassion I saw it. Incredulous, I suddenly realized then that she was such a good reader that she now had access to her father’s world. I just stood there blinking and thinking How was that possible? Was she an intuitive like him? That magazine was placed so high up and away among my collection of about four hundred books and magazines with only its slim, worn, and stapled spine facing out that even I could barely reach it. My mind spun and I beat myself up wondering if I should have thrown it away. She was too young for such things. And I had no idea how to talk with her about it either.
TWENTY-ONE
FAMILY TIES
In the spring of 1983, I was inspired to send Steve a photograph of our four-year-old wearing a huge pair of black glasses with a big plastic nose attached. Lisa was funny and cute—they made her look like Steve—so I photographed her and sent a print to him with a note saying, “I definitely think she takes after you.” It must have made him laugh because two weeks later he sent me an extra $500.
I used the money to move back to Menlo Park and rent a room in the house of a friend. A month after that, Steve came by to take us to see his new house in Woodside. This was about a year before he was kicked out of Apple, when things were not going so well for him professionally. He was kinder. We drove in his road-hugging Porsche to downtown Woodside, and turned left onto Mountain Home Road. From there we took a sharp right and drove through an ancient stone gate onto the long driveway of Steve’s new property. Altogether it was classically picturesque in an enchanted way, as if we were entering Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête.
The Spanish-style mansion, situated on seven acres, came with the rich history of old-moneyed Woodside. Steve walked us through and showed us everything: one musty room after another, including one that held the biggest concert organ on the West Coast. He stood near the door and watched as Lisa and I sat at the organ to play some music and then peek behind the false paneling to see the hundreds of pipes that mounted the wall and produced the sound. The pipes were identical, but scaled to size (from miniscule peeping to massive booming) and as perfectly intricate as insect bodies. The dining room was next, then the living room—an enormous ballroom space with huge gaping Citizen Kane fireplaces. It was magnificent elegance from another time and place, fantastic in the current one. The ceiling
s were about twenty feet high and the echo of our steps was weirdly poignant. I could feel the strange gravity of the large hollow interior spaces press on my senses. And I saw that day that his mansion had an etheric overlay of Steve’s plain and empty warehouse sadness. He was still the same Steve.
Eventually we walked out to the side yard to look at the swimming pool, a cool oblong of aqua surrounded by a lip of uneven cement. It seemed to float without rhyme or reason in the middle of a sea of dense green crabgrass, with no delineating fence or pathway. The three of us arrived at the pool’s edge to look in—it’s a natural impulse—and there we saw a thick carpet of dead worms at the bottom of the pool. It was so completely awful and fascinating, this mass grave. We couldn’t help but look. Subdued and sort of sad, Steve said, “Well, I’ve just bought it and so I haven’t had time to clean it.”
Which meant get it cleaned.
The next morning when Lisa woke up, she shouted that she’d had a dream. “Mommy! I saw all the worms in Steve’s pool turn into dragons and fly up into the sky!” “Wow!” I said as I marveled at her. I was so impressed and I told her so. “That’s amazing, sweetie.” And I meant it. Lisa’s young psyche had picked up on something in Steve. I wondered what it must be like to have a sense like this about your own father. Lisa and I had left town when she was three. Now that she was almost five and more her own person, she knew things. She could tell me about them, too. I smiled into her eyes, and as I petted her hair, I thought: Yes, sweetie, your daddy can turn dead worms into dragons that whooooooosh up into the sky. He is not very nice, but he is special, and he is yours.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 26
