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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  At that first meeting, Mona stared at Lisa and no other word can describe it better than that she drank Lisa up into her huge crystal blue eyes. I was actually a little uncomfortable with it but censored my impressions because I did not want to even consider disliking her. Instead, I imagined how many years and shifts had to have taken place for all of us to be in one room together, and what it must mean to the three of them to be meeting after all this time. That day began the literary aunt’s attentions on my daughter. I saw Steve quietly beaming and very still, like a true guardian. Mona seemed to be the aunt of all aunts and she poured her affections and gifts and sparkling thoughtfulness into my child’s life, and in this way I felt so much more supported and happy. It seemed like the good was winning.

  After this, Steve and I began looking for a house to buy for me so that Lisa and I would have appropriate stability. However, every house I found and liked, Steve would either not like or be too late to make an offer. He seemed lethargic about coming through for us. I can imagine that he may have had to deal with a lot of uncomfortable feelings whenever he acted in our behalf. There were many Steves and most every one of them took an enormous amount of effort for me to deal with. His remove could feel impossibly unending and disregarding, and I really did not know how to work with it. Indeed there are many Chrisanns who found it hard to work with him for all kinds of her own reasons. So it was in this way that we ended up following the line of least resistance and I rented a three-bedroom home in old Palo Alto from one of the parents at the Waldorf school.

  It was a house that I truly liked, there was something about it and we were very happy living there for years. Steve hired Tom Carlisle, his interior designer for NeXT and the Apple stores, to freshen the place up. Tom was excited about a peachy-rose-colored paint he had just discovered and wanted to use. He told me that it changed colors on the walls as the sun moved across the sky every day. So I said, “Let’s use it!” Amazingly, he was right, they did, and the changes gave me a new understanding of how the sun shifts color throughout the day. He also had the wood floors refinished and stained white and all the old faucets and light fixtures, plugs, and light switches traded out for new. In the end Steve said, “It’s too chichi,” and this being so, made it perfect. I was happy. This was the first time I had felt as if materialistically things were lining up in an appropriate way. Steve also hired his organic gardener and the gardener’s assistant to make the landscaping beautiful in a way that the house still benefits from today. Within a year of moving in, Steve bought me an Audi, and finally he increased the monthly support he sent us. I still remember the happiness in my body from this time of new things that made our life better. Beyond better.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TRACTION

  Things were different after the power cord between Steve and Apple had been cut, but I don’t believe much good would have taken place without Mona. And we were all the better for it. Like families everywhere we had our skirmishes and hurt feelings, but all boats rose in a tide of natural affiliations and shared goals. We were family, no more and no less than the obligations of blood. I believe that Steve, in his core, had always wanted to do the right thing; Mona helped him do it. I had an ally who did something few could: help rebalance things between Steve and me so that Lisa could thrive.

  Mona got to thinking about how to improve Lisa’s and my situation like any woman would, by addressing the obvious. I sort of remember her telling me that she was going to help, but still it surprised me as it happened.

  In the beginning there were many obvious things to be done and it all must have seemed like low-hanging fruit to Mona as she set about, one by one, to put things in order. She was thoughtful in a woman’s way and she got the details right. First she talked with me about getting Lisa into therapy with a male child psychoanalyst so that my daughter would have a long-term relationship with an emotionally mature father figure. At the time of this conversation I knew—she knew, we both knew—what kind of father Steve was and was not. Things needed to be augmented so that Lisa would have the best possible advantages in life. Mona also suggested that she would look into a therapist for me and ask Steve to pay for both of us if I wanted. What a boon! I said, “Yes!”

  Lisa was in third grade when I took her to the first appointment and that night after the session she asked with her sweet belligerence, “Well, what if I don’t want to see him again?” I told her, “Then you don’t have to. It’s your call, sweetie.” It was a moment of pure bliss for me to give her all choice in the matter. Her little face curled into satisfaction and self-ownership. She warmed to the idea after that and always loved going to see her therapist.

  It amazes me now how quickly and deeply my psyche was able to figure out whether or not I trusted this therapist with my eight-year-old. In short order, my instincts laid out a very precise map of who he was. He and I did not agree on everything, but in the balance of all things I found him to be professional, insightful, trustworthy, and a person of great kindness. Because federal law mandates that the parent of such a young child is to be included in some of the sessions, I had direct and regular contact in which I saw how he was with her. It was in this way that I discovered that they played checkers and chess, walked to the local shop to get ice cream, and didn’t actually do much of anything except play and talk. Sometimes I thought he was a little too kicked back for the money Steve was paying. But when I joined in on their sessions and witnessed firsthand how free Lisa was to be her most lively authentic self, I knew he had to be remarkable. Like many parents, I navigated by my child’s joy and so understood people by her reception of them. He was pure gold.

  As Lisa got older we endured more of Steve’s unconscionable behaviors: from not showing up for prearranged dinners and dance recitals, to being seven hours late from a trip and not calling me to let me know, to kissing Laurene in front of Lisa while telling Lisa how beautiful Laurene was, when at the same time he was telling Lisa she herself was not beautiful … this is only the tip. It was then I discovered that in addition to this therapist’s ability to free up my child for her happiest little self, he also possessed a near surgical ability to cut to the bone of truth about Steve’s behavior—without harming Lisa’s relationship to herself or with her dad.

  It’s not for me to share the details of those sessions, but suffice it to say they bolstered Lisa’s self-assurance because her therapist’s anger was clean, quick, and discerning. He presented a fiery cleansing flash to the full Steve Jobs catastrophe. In my whole life, I will never forget the times I witnessed the therapist addressing Steve’s contemptuous, smarmy betrayals with an immediacy that seemed to slice through the air like Blue Angels. His words were the technology of excellence in the future of war: strikes so precise that there could and would be no collateral damage. The sheer severity of his insights sucked the air out of my lungs and gave me wild wonder into what it is to speak the most precise, searing truths without doing harm. Because I would look at Lisa’s expression in the midst of his comments and to my utter delight and relief she would sit serenely, in all consideration, protected. The truth was so good to hear that I felt blessed, blessed, and blessed again.

  * * *

  As we were beginning to feel stable and thrive, a sense of urgency moved through me and I started to think I could go to a four-year college. It was such a happy exciting feeling, like a thousand Christmases all at once. Oh my God, I thought, I can. I can lead a fulfilling life. I can make money. I can be part of the world through my true gifts.

  The year before, I had brought my portfolio to a group of children’s game designers in Palo Alto, called Grey Bridge, to see if they might be interested in hiring me. The cofounder and head designer told me that I had the nicest portfolio anyone had brought in a long time. I wondered if he said that to everyone. My portfolio consisted almost entirely of some illustrations I had done for Art Canfil’s book Taipan. It was a computer game in the context of a novel about the opium trade during the English occupation in China.
I did about eight highly rendered pencil and ink drawings to illustrate this horrific, yet fascinating, history. I had other images in my portfolio: a painting of a Persian rug that turned into a bee hive that turned into a computer circuit board with bees buzzing all over the surfaces and honey pooling in the circuits; a woman falling, in multiple sequences, naked, Eve thrown out of the garden with ethereal fall lines. The cofounder and I talked about how the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, was the best commercial school in the country. It’s where he went. At the time I thought, Oh, God, I wish I could go to Art Center.

  So it was from this and the fact that the circumstances had so improved for Lisa and me that I decided to apply to the Art Center. I drove with Lisa down to Pasadena to interview and showed them my portfolio. I was accepted two months later. A diploma from the Art Center was carte blanche for an interview and quite possibly a great job with any number of the top design groups in the country. Steve was giving me about $2,500 a month, and with the addition of a student loan, I figured I could make it work. I could finally get some traction going in my life.

  But Steve begged me not to move so far away. He said, “Please don’t take Lisa away from me. I’d really like to see her on a regular basis.” He wasn’t dramatic, just persistent. He made sure to bring it up each and every time we saw one other. Eventually, between his clear, repeated requests and the fact that the school had warned me that I would have to work an eighty-hour week, I came down to earth. There was no way I could put my daughter through that much hardship.

  I had always given Lisa a lot of attention. She thrived with it. I don’t know if she was high maintenance or if all kids need as much as she needed, but I knew it wasn’t right to leave her with babysitters or in school too long. She wasn’t on my schedule. I was on hers. Back then people talked about having “quality time” with your kids as a way of managing two-parent careers, but I never felt Lisa and I shared quality time without a large quantity of time. Maybe others could, but I couldn’t. As Lisa’s welfare was by far the most important thing for me—and this included Steve’s having easy access to her—I put my own requirements on hold, once again.

  In the end, I was accepted into the California College of Arts and Crafts, an art college in Oakland. I transferred my credits from Foothill College, so this put me into my junior year. Though clearly this school would never give me the training, financial advantages, and cachet of Art Center, I felt peaceful and thrilled to have a plan that could work for everyone while I built into the next stages of my life. When I asked Steve if he would be willing to pay my tuition, he gave me a happy yes. Steve was making things easy now and I loved him for it. And it seemed to me that helping in this way put a hop in his step, too.

  It was during the first year after moving into the Rinconada house that I wanted Lisa to go to The Nueva School, a private school in Hillsborough. It was about forty minutes round trip from Palo Alto. I kept pushing for it, until one day Steve and I had a big argument over how wrong he felt it was for me to keep changing Lisa’s schools. Whoa, I thought, he is actually concerned about her in the right ways. Duly noted! But she wasn’t thriving at the local public school and I couldn’t leave it that way.

  A majority of people believe that the most important time to be paying for private education is in the older grades, such as high school and college. But I feel that if you have to choose, early childhood is the time and place to put the resources to work. That’s when children’s hearts and minds are wide open, when they’re creating pathways of meaning for the rest of their lives. (I’ve also wondered if people regard higher education as being the more valuable place for resources because, historically, it is the time when the men take over the teaching.)

  My impression of the environment at the public school was that it was structured to dumb down the children and the teachers. Not just intellectually, but also emotionally. For example, I observed that the children and teachers were rarely willing to meet one another’s eyes, which was in marked contrast to the Waldorf school, where the first order of the day was to greet each child with a little handshake and direct, loving eye contact. Lisa was starting to harden and think like everyone. I was extremely uncomfortable about it.

  I wanted a school that addressed each child’s individuality. Knowing the great influence Lisa’s childhood environment would inevitably have on her long-term personal relationships and work life, I kept hammering Steve for a change. I needed the money to pay for it and I saw his buy-in as the direct route to my goal. I knew Steve and I shared many of the same creative and educational values for Lisa. I had every hope and intention of turning it around.

  Eventually Steve saw what I saw.

  Alarmed and exasperated after Lisa spent a year and a half in a public school, he called one day and demanded, “What is happening to her?” indicating that he had, at long last, understood that Lisa was being disconnected from herself. I jumped with a rush of joy. “This is what I’ve been telling you! And this is why I’ve been asking you to help me get her into Nueva.”

  Bingo! Steve heard me and got it together to speak with Bill Atkinson about the school. Bill was on the original Mac team and had a child at Nueva. Bill raved about the education there and so it was in this way that we placed our daughter into a top private elementary school in the Bay Area.

  Nueva’s approach to education was to take care of the children’s growing hearts and minds in delightful and challenging ways. The subjects were so well conceived and presented that all the children were met with excellence, as well as deep regard. Addressing each student’s uniqueness meant that every child received the admiration of their teachers and peers for their own giftedness, and in this way learned to truly appreciate the gifts of others. This was my idea of a good environment, school and otherwise.

  I felt Lisa and I were upheld every day by this school. I am happy to say that long after Lisa graduated from college, she called me from the various homes she was living in all over the world, to tell me, “Mom, Nueva was my Hogwarts! I do not know how to thank you enough.”

  * * *

  So it was in 1988 that Lisa was going to Nueva and I was going to art school in Oakland and both of us were in therapy. We had a nice home and a new car, a gardener and a house cleaner. Steve had also generously paid off the student loans that had been following me around for years. It was a completely appropriate turnaround and everyone was happier. I was enjoying Steve, too.

  It was also during this time that Mona had a conversation with Steve about just giving me a financial lump settlement. But this is where it stopped. “No way,” he said. Mona and I rolled our eyes when she told me and we discussed that Steve’s withholding this eminently right action was a way of remaining too attached to me. It further implied that there was something that he was not explaining. Understandably, Steve was a man with attachment disorder. His withholding was a form of intimacy through control, which fit the history. I also suspect that I was caught in the crosshairs of some very pernicious negative female projections, which confused me because I took it to mean I was at fault.

  With so much in order, Mona suggested that I move everything out of my bedroom and turn it into an art studio, and get to my real work. Our home had three bedrooms; the master bedroom, the largest, was at the back end of the house, away from everything. Having my own working space was top on my hierarchy of needs and Mona was completely right to have suggested it. But the master bedroom didn’t have good ventilation, and it had been freshly painted and newly carpeted. I loved that she was thinking in my behalf and appreciated her goodwill toward what might be my professional life. But I couldn’t quite see converting that bedroom into working space. Oil painting is toxic and unavoidably messy; the notion of turning it into an art studio felt as impossible as jumping on furniture with muddy boots.

  Within the year, however, I set myself to the task of clearing out the detached garage, which was loaded with wood debris the owners had left behind. I had it sheetrocked
and my father and I patched the roof. I put up track lighting and my friend Avi, a house painter, kindly painted it for me. Twenty steps away from the house, plenty of room to make a mess, big enough to hold classes, a wide garage door to keep the place aired out from the toxic materials, and close enough to hover for Lisa’s sense of Mom being nearby, I had the best working space imaginable.

  It was also at this time that my father gave me small amounts of money on an irregular basis, money I was to use to hire an attorney to force a financial settlement with Steve. I think two things happened for my father to step in this way. First, it may have been that because of Mona’s involvement to get things right, he woke up. My father was sort of a follower. But it wasn’t just that. I was more stable and in a stronger position, so perhaps my father perceived me as finally being able to confront Steve. My father had always wanted to do something about the situation with Steve, but while Steve was at Apple, he was untouchable. Once I had that cash, I started interviewing attorneys in San Jose, but nothing ever worked out because after Steve had gotten kicked out of Apple, he made sure to give me more child support than was required at the time. Long story short, I never found an attorney who had the creative power or interest to establish new legal precedents for my situation with Steve.

  It seems my whole life was about moving toward what I felt was right before my mind understood the whys and whats of how everything worked. I didn’t think, I didn’t analyze, I didn’t strategize, I did not manipulate. I was a person who operated out of emotional impressions that drew me into action. I picked my battles with Steve and I now think I should have picked more of them. I should have leveraged my not going to the Art Center into a cash settlement. With so much in place I was finally able to care for Lisa and myself in ways I saw fit. Both of us stable and safe. Lisa thriving in her new school. I let it be. I was thirty-five years old and just catching my balance from the earlier years. And I must have I figured I had more magic beans at the bottom of my pockets since I still didn’t know enough to think and plan and negotiate for my financial future.